MY FRIEND RAJ

What the ____ is a cobweb?  That’s the first thing that came to mind when I decided to “blow the cobwebs off” this blog.  The cob part likely derives from a Middle English word “coppe” which simply means spider.  Cobweb means different things to different people.  For some it is a spider web, for others a spider web fat with dust, for others a spider web with dust and some broken strands giving it a disheveled look, some ruggedness.  My cobwebs are rugged.  Sure the classic geometrically fascinating spider web is a wonder of nature, but a proper cobweb looks like it’s been around a while, had some hard knocks.  The black widow spider makes helter- skelter disorganized webs without the aid of wind, dirt, or time.  It is just her nature to make a jumbled web.  I can relate.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is blowing the cobwebs off popular activism that has been hanging around collecting dust since the first half of the 1970’s.  Sure we can debate, compare and contrast the Occupy Wall Street bunch and the hippies, and there are probably more differences than similarities when you break down motivations, economic backgrounds, and the like.  The hippies were a product of several years of economic prosperity that, after World War II, made the American middle class and gave definition to “the American dream”.  Hell, in 1971 you could walk out of Haight-Ashbury, sober up, get a haircut, and get a job.  Now you can’t afford a haircut and you can’t get a job. You probably can’t afford a haircut even if you have a job.  I don’t know if it is ironic or just sad that 1973 was end of the Golden Era, the last year in which the working class American made real gains.  It was the year I got married.  It was another 20 years before I discovered how blatantly we were getting screwed.  Ignorance is bliss.

What the Occupy Wall Streeters and the hippies have in common is a desperate feeling of disenfranchisement, a knowledge that the forces driving their lives and their futures are totally beyond their control.  They give voice to the sentiments of Howard Beale in the movie Network: “All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.  You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

This was 1976, before we even knew the good times were over.  I can’t even imagine how pissed Howard would be today.

I read an article in Newsweek the other day.  It was about a guy named Raj Rajartnam who was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading.  His story was article worthy because he didn’t take a plea deal like all the other guys caught in the same scandal.  I kept expecting to read that it was due to some higher sense of honor, or maybe contrition, no chance; it was because he had been to some soothsayer/witch doctor who told him he would be A-Okay.  Whatever.

I wondered why this was the first I had heard of this guy.  I probably had heard of him, but didn’t pay any attention.  There are some crime stories we pay attention to because they are shocking; a guy blows up his family with a meth lab in the garage, or some woman buries her kids in her suburban backyard.  Rich-on-rich crime is like water off a duck.  We know that Raj was just screwing other one-percenters and we could give a rat’s ass.  It is like gang related crime.  If a bunch of the baggy pants-sideways hat-wife beater shirted-tattooed ding dongs want to shoot one another at a wedding, so be it.  If rich guy gets richer by robbing some other rich guys, who cares?

We normally pay attention only when the gangs actually come to our neighborhoods, or when the crooked traders tap our piddly little retirement accounts.    Lock the doors and buy gold buddy!  It might get real interesting in the next few years.  Time to blow the cobwebs off some dusty old social activism.  Hooray for the hippies!