House of Eratosthenes

Yesterday I took a walk down to the oldest part of New York City, where the Dutch landed and planted their flag near the current location of the Staten Island Ferry, where George Washington stood his officers rounds at Fraunces Tavern, now filled with Wall Street types, and where a bunch of smelly hippies stirred by an anti-Semitic Canadian magazine decided to squat a park in order to make a statement about their own need for attention.

Zuccotti Park has returned to its original function as a place where secretaries, construction workers and off-duty cops go to eat quick lunches bought from local fast food places or disease-ridden Halal Mafia food carts. The few plants wave in a breeze that blows between the narrow lanes of the financial district, which has some of the oldest and narrowest streets in the city. An information desk for OWS is the only sign of the occupation, with cardboard signs denouncing the NYPD and sarcastically informing the Indian and Russian tourists taking snapshots of the under-construction Freedom Tower; “And to think these ‘People’ are the ‘Heroes’ of ’911′… Right.”

Occupy Wall Street has gone east, one block east. It no longer occupies Wall Street, instead it has transformed into Occupy Trinity Church. The media, which served as the unofficial PR corps for OWS, is not too enthusiastic about reporting that a movement which they hailed is busy trying to seize land from a historic Episcopalian church that dates back to 1697, in whose cemetery lie several signers of the Declaration of Independence and several delegates to the Continental Congress, not to mention several Revolutionary War generals and a fellow by the name of Alexander Hamilton.

Trinity was also an enthusiastic supporter of Occupy Wall Street, providing them with bathrooms and private conference rooms, but turning over Duarte Square was asking too much. After being evicted from Zuccotti Park, the OWS crowd assumed that they could bully Trinity into giving them the land with the “fact of their occupation.” Instead Duarte Square, named after Juan Pablo Duarte, a founder of the Dominican Republic, has become OWS’s Waterloo.

Despite several attempts to occupy Duarte Square, Trinity Church has held firm. After half a year, OWS has made less impact fighting Trinity than it has fighting Wall Street.

When I passed by, the sad remnant of Occupy Trinity Church was down to three people, one of them sitting with a plastic bucket designated for the “OWS Laundry Fund” and another with a sleeping bag marked “Occupied.” A cardboard sign proclaimed that Trinity Church had stolen Duarte Square from the Indians and should give it back to OWS, as representatives of the native peoples.

One sign accused Trinity Church of greedily sitting on 200 million dollars while refusing the homeless trustafarians of Occupy Wall Street a small measly strip of land for their campsite. On its websites, OWS has blasted Trinity for being aligned with the “1 percent” and spun conspiracy theories about its parish vestry, which they allege holds over 10 billion dollars in real estate assets.

More on the Occupy Trinity Church movement…

Yesterday, demonstrators marched outside Trinity Church with signs reading, “Who would Jesus prosecute?” and “Trinity Church: Real Estate Company or Church?” in reference to the business practices that critics, and exiting board members, say have eclipsed the religious organization’s holy mission. One demonstrator, Jack Boyle, “has been on a hunger strike since May 23 and has denied himself his HIV medication since May 19, trying to appeal to Trinity’s sense of humanity, demanding the charges be dropped,” according to an organizer.

Yes, by all means let’s dismantle our existing economic system and replace it with a new anarchy, in which people demand things and appeal to the “sense of humanity” of others…threatening not to stop hitting themselves in the head with a hammer until they get what they want. Food, shelter, water, gasoline, oh and don’t forget the Starbucks Caramel Macchiatto.

Actually, the analogy doesn’t hold; a guy hitting himself in the head with a hammer doesn’t pose a threat to anybody else, but an HIV patient refusing to take his medication…

Curious posting in the comments —

I totally supported OWS, but if it was my lot I wouldn’t want them there, either.

Um, what?

Actually I think that sums it all up; that’s why the movement is no longer around. We have these people who are not in it, who “totally support” it from without…I’m reading that as, they are part of the middle class, maybe even upper class, people of property who support the effort to dismantle our system of property rights and property exchange. But only for others, not for themselves.

Occupy was not a movement, it was a manifestation. As a “movement” it hasn’t really gone anywhere. It remains among us, in the hearts and minds of those who think it’s possible to find a halfway compromise between order and anarchy. Maybe we can have a quasi-socialist system, kind of a halfway-capitalist utopia.

Their credo, although they will not admit it, is to honor and respect the right to accumulate and own property as long as it’s about me, me, me, me, me…and then, for everybody else, we have to put some system in place inimical to the property-rights thing, that distributes all the goods equally, therefore all the misery. But keep me, me, me out of it because I’ve got mine, mine, mine.

Help those people who don’t have anything…but not with my wallet, just tax those other people over there, and get it done. So I can claim credit for having supported it even though it’s somebody else’s money that was given to those poor people. Oh, and hire some government bureaucrats to do this dirty-work of robbing & giving, so that if it all turns to crap I can claim non-involvement. Decades ago it was joked that a democrat is someone who’s nice enough to give you the shirt off someone else’s back — it never was a joke, and it never changed, it surfaced from a murky ocean, via Occupy like a vile and detestable sea serpent so we could catch a glimpse of how well it does not work.

It is false, cosmetic charity. It is vanity. It is a big fancy bundle of all sorts of strain of human sin. It is modern liberalism. Things will improve when we reject it, society-wide, and continue to deteriorate as long as we tolerate it.

They are too a movement… as in “bowel”…
- Daniel | 07/11/2012 @ 16:43
Help those people who don’t have anything…but not with my wallet, just tax those other people over there, and get it done.

Full disclosure: I’m not any kind of religious believer, let alone a Christian. But I still think we, as a nation, would benefit from a vigorous knuckle-rapping from a dour old battleaxe of an Irish nun. They used to cane the Seven Deadlies out of you in Catholic school; we need to try that again.

Whenever I read up on OWS…. or a Mother Jones editorial…. or an MSNBC “news” piece… or a Kos diary… or an Obama speech, all I can hear is ENVY. Call it liberalism, progressivism, Marxism, “social justice,” Obamanomics, what have you, it’s all just systematized and rationalized envy. They don’t even really care about the “Help those people who don’t have anything” part; it’s the “just tax those other people over there, and get it done” part that really revs them up. As I think Fred Reed put it: it’s not about helping the downtrodden, it’s about downtreading the uptrodden.

“They” have more. More what? Doesn’t matter. As long as there’s some X which “They” have more of, the progressives will never be satisfied. Which is why they always blather on about “access.” Note how this always slipped into the ObamaCare debates. It’s not that “the poor” didn’t have “healthcare” — they have a shitload of healthcare already, and on the taxpayer dime. It’s that they lack “access” to healthcare. And if you can’t give everyone “access” to $500-a-pill chemo and Viagra by the truckload and the latest plastic surgery techniques — and, of course, you can’t — then nobody is allowed access to them.

That’s the point of Obamacare. That’s the point of all “progressive” policies, and always has been.

Where’s Sister Bridget when you need her?
- Severian | 07/12/2012 @ 05:52
Would they understand the irony if I shit in their collection bucket?

More importantly, can I get a grant for that as performance art?
- chunt31854 | 07/12/2012 @ 10:59
…that’s why the movement is no longer around. We have these people who are not in it, who “totally support” it from without…

Unlike…say… the “invisable hand” or “animal spirit” of the so-called (organic?)Tea Party?

I’m pretty sure chunt31854 is on to something here.
- CaptDMO | 07/13/2012 @ 05:31
Yeah, I know he is. I was thinking the same thing when I read the words “plastic bucket” in an article about the Occupy movement my first thought was, ewwww…second thought, So that’s your laundry fund? Hmmm.
- mkfreeberg | 07/13/2012 @ 07:34
I always thought it odd that a bunch of wannabe-communist hippies adopted the “occupy” label in the first place.

Occupying is something done by armies (which in turn are made up of armed soldiers), usually after a battle has been fought to claim a city or larger piece of territory. Germany occupied France for four years during World War II. The US and its allies later occupied Germany and Japan. It went on to occupy Iraq in 2003. And so on. All those occupations happened because some army fought a series of battles and either muscled their way in by brute force, or the previous owners decided that continued resistance was impossible/pointless and surrendered. (AQI was able to harass and kill American troops in Iraq, but not able to eject them from the country entirely or even ‘liberate’ any Iraqi cities.)

Are they really comfortable with that kind of reference? Occupation by definition is done by force, and you can’t argue that the capital-O Occupy movement has done any such thing, other than the fisticuffs with police and random vandalism. Let’s not kid ourselves – Occupy has “occupied” Zucotti Park and other locations because someone in authority believed the First Amendment or some other law required that they be left alone. As a matter of physical might, there was no question that the police could eject Occupy from any location that they care to do so. There’s no question that Occupy was able to occupy anything simply as a matter of being in this place or that one because there was nobody else strong enough to throw them out.
- cylarz | 07/14/2012 @ 00:16

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Whatever Happened to Occupy?Wednesday, July 11th, 2012

Whatever Happened to Occupy?
Wednesday, July 11th, 2012