Next! Occupation?

Fifty years ago there were spongers and scroungers; people who never did a day’s work and scraped by on the dole, a bit of thievery, fencing and the odd job on the side. They were almost universally reviled and sneered at, but they were few and the rest were striving for a better life on the straight and narrow.

Forty years ago the population continued to climb while overseas industries became more competitive. The unions in their pomp, perfectly legitimately fighting for better standards for the workers, were inevitably putting some of their members on the dole as factories closed and production moved to countries where a sustained and reliable living could still be made.

By thirty years ago the principle of living from cradle-to-grave on the state was becoming established – in some areas whole communities suffered the loss of their livelihoods and the working classes became the claiming classes through no immediate fault of their own. The unyielding unions repeated their tired old battle cries but never thought to ‘do the maths’. Once you price people out of a job and make them idle, how do you think they’re going to spend their time? Exactly… now we've got millions of the fuckers.

Into the fray steps Occupy. Occupy wants to change the world. (Yay, hooray! Who doesn’t?) With no perceived irony at all they want to change the world so that it’s how they think it should be, to which end they have scribbled out a manifesto in the back of one of their school exercise books during prep. (They still have prep at the schools Occutards attend.)

Their manifesto contains such earth-shaking objectives as an end to poverty, jelly-babies for all, no more homework and calls for everybody to be happy all of the time. Well it might as well do, for it is a list of 'demands' with no plausible method for their achievement.

Occupy is a global movement, they say, all three hundred and fifty of them - occasionally joined by the regular rent-a-mob who love to turn a peaceful demonstration into a punch-up with the police - and they insist that: 

“The current crisis is not a natural accident; it was caused by the greed of those who would bring the world down, with the help of an economics that is no longer about management of the common good, but has become an ideology at the service of financial power.”

Of course, of course, the global conspiracy. Have you ever heard, Occupy, of Mr Occam and his marvellously infallible shaving device? Man is no more capable of the level of complex sustained cooperation that this would imply than he is of, say, not forgetting the wife’s birthday.

Occupy go on to say “To achieve these objectives, we believe that the economy should be run democratically at all levels, from local to global. People must get democratic control over financial institutions, transnational corporations and their lobbies. To this end, we demand:"

Demand? Demand? There's that word again. Right on, man! What they, in effect, demand is a radical overhaul of human nature itself. And to that end, now the rain has stopped, they've been out to play again, assembling at St Paul's then going on to protest at The City. On a Saturday. D’oh! It would have been far more apt - and funnier - I'd have thought, to have started from St Jude's, surely? (Go on Google St Jude + Patron)

  

In their silly little masks, with their trite, silly little slogans, these silly little children have had no contact with the pointy end of real human nature. 

If you want to know how low it’s possible to go (Rapping, see? Piss-easy!) I can heartily recommend TheodoreDalrymple.

Occupy – the joke that keeps on joking.