Free Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Page B

televised presidential debates. For the one thing the Tea Party appears to want more than the destruction of government is to elect Tea Party members to positions within it.
    The impatient rush to judgment of the Tea Party movement is only as unnerving as the perpetually patient deliberation of its counterpart present shock movement, Occupy Wall Street. Opposite reactions to collapse of political narrative, the Tea Party yearns for finality while the Occupy movement attempts to sustain indeterminacy.
    Inspired by the social-media-influenced revolutions of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street began as a one-day campaign to call attention to the inequities inherent in a bank-run, quarterly-focused, debt-driven economy. It morphed into something of a permanent revolution, however, dedicated to producing new models of political and economic activity by its very example. Tea Partiers mean to wipe out the chaotic confusion of a world without definitive stories; the Occupiers mean to embed themselves within it so that new forms may emerge. It’s not an easy sell. The Tea Party’s high-profile candidates and caustic rhetoric are as perfectly matched for the quick-cut and argument-driven programming of the cable news networks as the Occupiers are incompatible. Though both movements are reactions to the collapse of compelling and believable narratives, the Tea Party has succumbed to and even embraced the crisis mentality, while Occupy Wall Street attempts to transcend it.
    This is at least part of why mainstream television news reporters appeared so determined to cast Occupy Wall Street as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. As if defending against the coming obsolescence of their own truncated news formats, television journalists reported that the movement’s inability to articulate its agenda in ten seconds or less meant there was no agenda at all. In a segment titled “Seriously?!” CNN business anchor Erin Burnett ridiculed the goings-on at Zuccotti Park. “What are they protesting?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know.” Like
The Tonight Show
host Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American history, Burnett’s main objective was to prove that the protesters didn’t know that the US government had been reimbursed for the bank bailouts. More predictably, perhaps, a Fox News reporter appeared flummoxed when the Occupier he interviewed refused to explain how he wanted the protests to end. Attempting to transcend the standard political narrative, the protester explained, “As far as seeing it end, I wouldn’t like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue.” 29
    In this sense, regardless of whether its economic agenda is grounded in reality, Occupy Wall Street does constitute the first truly postnarrative political movement. Unlike the civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign, it does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, it does not express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals, nor does it understand itself as having a particular endpoint. The Occupiers’ lack of a specific goal makes it hard for them to maintain focus and cohesion. The movement may be attempting to embrace too wide an array of complaints, demands, and goals: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity, and so on. But these many issues are connected: different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system—and they believe they are all experiencing symptoms of the same core problem. But for journalists or politicians to pretend they have no idea what the movement wants is disingenuous and really just another form of present shock. What upsets banking’s defenders and traditional Democrats alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.
    That’s because, unlike a