The Angry Drunk

It pisses me the fuck off. Whenever there is the slight­est chance for an actual pop­ulist move­ment to arise in this coun­try and have a hope in hell of con­nect­ing with the masses the bas­tions of “lib­eral” ide­o­log­i­cal purity rear up and do their fuck­ing best to drive peo­ple away from it. Case in point, this idi­otic piece of dri­vel from Greg Laden.

For those who don’t know him, Laden is “…an anthro­pol­o­gist and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor who can never decide which is more impor­tant: nuance or con­text.” Greg is also a fuck­ing igno­ra­mus who is fun­da­men­tally inca­pable of admit­ting when he is wrong. In the afore-linked post on Laden’s blog, hosted on freethoughtblogs.com Laden takes excep­tion at a photo of a woman attend­ing one of the OccupyINSERTCITYHERE events. I can’t find any attri­bu­tion infor­ma­tion on the pic­ture on Laden’s blog so I’m not going to re-post it here — but the pic­ture (which, in the inter­ests of nuance, Laden has titled “fuckedupwhitelady.jpg”) depicts a woman of inde­ter­mi­nate age and means, hold­ing an infant and a sign. The sign reads:

• Not a hippy
• Not a freak
• Not an anarchist
• Not a mob
• Not a punk
• Not vague
• Not a left-wing nutjob

Just a mom here for a bet­ter world for my kids

Now, most ratio­nal peo­ple would read that and see it for what it almost cer­tainly is — a rebuke of the ass­holes in the main­stream media who have done every­thing in their power to dis­miss the Occupy/99% move­ment as noth­ing more than the vague win­ing of a mob of left-wing hippy anar­chist punk freaks. But Laden, oh mighty com­mu­ni­ca­tor of sci­ence, sees though this devil-woman’s ruse. The ass­hat writeth:

Mon Dieu what amaz­ing pow­ers of intu­ition Laden has. To dis­cern all that from a sim­ple photo. Of course, Laden claims that he can make such bold claims based on the few insignif­i­cant things that the woman claims not to be. I’ve just tried about a dozen ways of writ­ing exactly how stu­pid and exclu­sion­ary that claim is but my fin­gers cramp every time I attempt it.

What really infu­ri­ates me about this piece of shit though is not Laden’s woe­ful attempt at men­tal­ism, nor is it the way that he and his army of syco­phants refuse to even con­sider the pos­si­bil­ity that they’re mis­taken. No, what sends me into a boil­ing rage is Laden and company’s pre­sump­tion to dic­tate the proper mem­ber­ship of the Occupy/99% movement.

Let’s be gen­er­ous and assume for a moment that Laden is absolutely cor­rect in his assump­tions. Let’s go with this woman being the very pic­ture of so-called middle-America. She’s an SUV dri­ving, Wal-Mart shop­ping, fag­got hat­ing, Midwesterner. Fuck, let’s even say she’s a Mormon.

So the fuck what?

Last time I checked, the ethos of the 99% move­ment was con­tained in its fuck­ing name. It’s the 99% of us being crushed under the boot-heel of the 1% that con­trol our finan­cial sys­tem. It’s not the 99%-as-long-as-you-conform-to-our-oh-so-liberal-criteria. As much as I per­son­ally dis­like the hypo­thet­i­cal woman I made up in the pre­vi­ous para­graph, I would wel­come her with open arms into the 99% move­ment if it could help her see that the real enemy isn’t the fags, dark­ies and god­less but the ass­holes hoard­ing the money.

So I’m sorry Greg, you don’t get to set the cri­te­ria here. You can take your offense at some­one choos­ing to par­tic­i­pate who doesn’t self-identify in the way that you want her to and shove it up your fuck­ing ass. You’re a pox on lib­er­al­ism and a wretched moron to boot.