Ah! The pleasures of The Great Will’s (TGW) manufactured hysterical proclamation about the dirty hippies of Occupy Wall Street, barely contained by the demands of a nearly coherent rhetoric: garnished by score settling political asides about Solyndra, and the corruption of the Obama Administration, while conveniently forgetting its beginning in the Bush Administration. The demands of ideologically inflected politics must be served. All this follows his praise of the successes of the Koch brothers financed and Eric Cantor coordinated Tea Party. Is this a surprise? Effective propaganda is based not in ascertainable fact but on the carefully shaped language of a necessary expediency. In this TGW succeeds, at least with the internal coherence of his broadside. The assertion that Occupy Wall Street has modeled itself on the Tea Party is the first proof that TGW is in the province of unadulterated propaganda. And no essay of his would be complete without the appearance of his Neo-Burkian personae as a means to put the upstarts in their place: a tiresome reminder that TGW fancies himself a natural aristocrat, in every sense of the term. And, please, don’t forget that carefully woven into this essay is another of the many hobbyhorses that TGW loves to ride: that the idea and practice of governance is a corruption, a grounding principle of modern Conservatism via Thatcher and Reagan, that is the issue of the Free Market Ideology.
But the heart of this diatribe is two paragraphs of historical revisionism that can truly be labeled as the cartoonish musings of a right wing political hack:
“Imitation is the sincerest form of progressivism because nostalgia motivates progressives, not conservatives. Tea Party Envy is leavened by Woodstock Envy — note the drum circles at the Manhattan site — which is a facet of Sixties Envy. Hence, conservatives should be rejoicing.
From 1965 through 1968, the left found its voice and style in consciousness-raising demonstrations and disruptions. In November 1968, the nation, its consciousness raised, elected Richard Nixon president and gave 56.9 percent of the popular vote to Nixon or George Wallace. Republicans won four of the next five presidential elections.”
TGW will fight the battle for the soul of America, circa 1968, and declare the victory of the utterly corrupt lout Richard Nixon, at the drop of a hat, and here he remains true to form, with a venomous brio. The “68” share the qualities that our writer most deplores in the OWS demonstrators, a destructive political nihilism and an inability to see the joy and wonder that the Free Market can bring. Mr. Will seeks to change the subject: the citizens of the Lost Generation are not really listening as their futures fades before it has even begun.
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