Forty Years Old and Living in My Mom’s Garage

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Watching the older members of the Occupy movement always puts me in mind of this Austin Lounge Lizard song. I can’t find a complete online rendition but you can listen to the second stanza.

I think the last stanza sums up the emotional lives of these people. They are all convinced they are special somehow and that the greatest proof of the current world’s inherent injustice is that they don’t get the income, status and regard they innately deserve. They really do believe they’re better than the business people who actually provide all the material benefits of modern life. They chafe that mere executives, bankers and inventors get the money and status that should rightly go to them.

They dress all their rage up as concern for the poor and victimized but they’re really only upset about how the world treats them individually. Their “concern” is really thinly discussed selfishness.

That selfishness is the base reason why all their policies always hurt more than help the nominal targets of their concern. Their selfishness means that any policy or programs must first and foremost advance their interest. Any program that doesn’t do that is violently resisted regardless of its potential or proven ability to help those who need help.

All this rage, rioting and posturing is really just a thinly disquised shout of, “me, me, me!”

7 thoughts on “Forty Years Old and Living in My Mom’s Garage”

  4. I guess they should look forward to getting married and having their “man cave” in the garage because that’s the only place their wife will let them alone.

    As in my case.

    Fight the Oppressor!

  6. A very effective thumbnail sketch of a big part of the attitude we are seeing more and more as these “occupy” campouts continue.

    I would only add that, mixed in with the “meism” that you have noted, there is also a very distinct class disdain, but the classism is not as the occupiers allege, but just the opposite.

    The flavor is not a simple lower to upper class antagonism, although that is the guise the occupiers attempt to adopt.

    What is really on display is their intense disappointment and anger that they are not included in the “new aristocracy” that you have so often dissected, i.e., those who belong to the articulate elite.

    The contempt for those who are merely “in trade”, and the anger that such menials are doing so well, while the artists and intellectuals populating these camps are struggling, just oozes out of every angry, sneering diatribe.

    It is a very strong echo of the older, aristocratic European’s contempt for those engaged in commerce instead of living off the rents from estates granted by the king to his nobility for services rendered.

    It is very clear that these folks truly believe they should be members of the “new nobility” of well regarded, and well paid, cadres who control society for the mythical benefit of all.

    The fact that such a system would be, first and foremost, to their benefit is just a coincidence, don’t ya know.

    Uh huh, yup, no hidden agenda here at all.

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