For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs

…is a thing that is happening……although because the demonstrations have not been covered nearly as much as they–and Occupy Wall Street, and all the Occupy movements–ought to be by various media outlets, I figured I should go down to the Federal Reserve and check it out for myself. So before I taught this afternoon at Roosevelt, I went to LaSalle Street and donated some of the items the protesters had listed on their website as being supplies they needed. The protesters I talked to…

…were educated, eloquent, passionate and organized, and lots of cars were honking in support as they passed by and read the signs and heard the demonstrators drumming and chanting, “This is what democracy looks like:”At DePaul, my Literature and Identity class has been reading Edith Wharton, and the chanting made me think of the introduction to House of Mirth by Martha Banta, where she writes of Paul Bourget who did the preface to the 1908 French edition: “Bourget observes that Americans like to think theirs is a classless society, one based on principles of complete equality for all citizens. But this is not the case. Masked by the look of democracy, the United States consists of two worlds in conflict: that of the aristocrats of great wealth and that of the general populace which labours without guarantees of economic or social equality.” The Occupy movement keeps getting slammed for not having a “clear message,” but one of their many worthwhile points seems to be that the United States should not have a society that is merely masked by the “look of democracy,” but rather one which really does strive to be compassionate and egalitarian–that that should be what democracy looks like.

Anyway, after I visited the protesters, I headed to my creative nonfiction workshop where about half of the students didn’t even know the Occupy movement was going on, but they wanted to know, and were excited to hear about it. We talked about Gramsci, and hegemony, and how “the ruling class maintain[s] its domination by the consent of the mass of the people and only use[s] its coercive apparatuses, the forces of law and order, as a last resort.” And then the protest marched by right outside the classroom window…

…and class was over. But the movement was not.