Tea Party and / or Occupy?
[ by Charles Cameron — parallels, opppositions, analysis, games, coincidentia oppositorum ]
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My friend Cath Styles, who has been developing an iPad playable version of my HipBone Games under the name Sembl for the National Museum of Australia, made a point I’ve been trying to make for a while now, with sweet lucidity, in a recent blog post:
A general principle can be distilled from this. Perhaps: In the very moment we identify a similarity between two objects, we recognise their difference. In other words, the process of drawing two things together creates an equal opposite force that draws attention to their natural distance. So the act of seeking resemblance – consistency, or patterns – simultaneously renders visible the inconsistencies, the structures and textures of our social world. And the greater the conceptual distance between the two likened objects, the more interesting the likening – and the greater the understanding to be found.
That’s absolutely right, and it gets to the heart of my games and analytic practice — to see and acknowledge both parallelisms and differences, oppositions…
Oxford is the polar opposite of Cambridge as anyone at the annual boat race between them will tell you — yet they’re so similar that the term Oxbridge exists to distinguish them as a dyad from all else the wide world round…
Similarly, in the example illustrated above, Cath shows two items from the Museum collection that were juxtaposed by players of an early version of her game, and writes:
the Sembl players who linked the above branding iron to the breastplate – because both are tools for labeling bodies – cast new light on the colonial practice of giving metal breastplates to Aboriginal people.
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Since the essence of my own analytic style (and that of HipBone and Sembl games) is the recognition of parallelisms and oppositions, I was particularly interested to see one group of early Tea Party folk reaching out to the emerging Occupy movement. Here, then, are two posts in which we can see the beginnings of recognition that there may be a kinship between the two…
Occupy Wall Street: Another View:
You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?
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It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.
That comes from a post on FedUpUSA, a site with the Gadsden flag as its web-logo that was [as “Market
Ticker”], one of the founding orgs behind the TP. It’s from someone who identified as a Libertarian Party activist.
Here’s another post from FedUpUSA, not so identified:
An Open Letter From FedUpUSA To Occupy Wall Street Protestors All Over The Country:
This is a letter to OWS from FedUpUSA, one of the original Tea Parties:
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We support you in exercising your First Amendment Right. We are outraged that any peaceful demonstrator would be assaulted or abused by any authorities.
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If you are protesting because there are no jobs— We stand with you.
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We are for a free economy and recognize that what we have now is NOT a free economy; it is not capitalism what we have is a fascist state or crony-capitalism. There is nothing free about doing business with Countries that manipulate their currencies to attract cheap labor. We agree that these jobs need to come back to America.
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If you are protesting because no one has gone to jail— We stand with you.
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Regardless of what is being said from the white house and media, we know that there are many in the financial district and the banks that have committed fraud and outright theft and we too want to see them prosecuted. We support the stop looting and start prosecuting.
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If you are protesting because everything costs more— We stand with you.
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We see prices rise in our food, gas, clothes yet our wages have stayed the same or have decreased. The Federal Reserve has bailed everyone out but us and not only are we going to have to pay for that, those bailouts make the price of everything else go up because it devalues our currency. We support monetary reform.
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If you are protesting because you are tired of our bought and paid for government on both sides— We stand with you.
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We are also against the banks and big corporations buying our politicians and writing laws that favor their special interests. We understand that our economy is broken BECAUSE of this and that all of our other issues will never be addressed as long as the financial elite control OUR government.
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We understand that these issues cross party lines and ideologies and effect each and every one of us. We also understand that these issues will never get fixed as long as we continue to let the media, the elite, and members of the government separate us by our differing ideologies.
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Only Together, can we Implement Change
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It is time, We Americans, put our ideologies in our back pocket and not let them separate us so that we can work together for this ONE COMMON GOAL: to get the special interest money and elite out of OUR Government and return it to US — the people.
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As long as the banks, largest corporations, and wealthy elite control our government, we will never have a representative republic and laws will continue to be passed that only benefit the few 1% at the expense of us 99
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Demand that NOT ONE MORE LAW gets passed until they pass:
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Lobby reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:.
Lobby any member of the US Congress outside of the district you live, work, or own a business.
Lobby a member of congress while they are physically outside the district they represent.
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Campaign Reform:
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It is a Federal Offense punishable by a minimum 5 years in prison to:
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For any one person, corporation, enterprise, group, union or the like, to donate more than $2,000 to any one candidate during one campaign period.
For any member of the media to deny equal access to competing candidates.
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These two laws will cut the control the Financial elite have on our government by leveling the playing field. You will have just as big as a voice with your representative as the big box retailer that resides in your town. Simply, it will end the Crony-Capitalism that is strangling our economy.
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I encourage all my fellow Tea Partiers to join Occupy Wall Street protesters in their non-violent, peaceful protests and together demand that the Government be returned to the people. After all, this is precisely what the Tea Party was intended to be before it was taken over and marginalized by the establishment politicians..
FedUpUSA.org
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And we’re deep into John Robb territory…
What do you think? Do the parallelisms strike you, or the oppositions — or, perhaps, both?
FWIW, Cath’s Sembl version of my game looks like it is going to be a beautiful steampunk affair…
October 9th, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Here’s another one.
Open letter from original Tea Party member to OWS on dangers of being co-opted. It’s brilliant. The two movements have plenty in common and are realizing it.
October 10th, 2011 at 3:32 am
Except one thing. Age. The original tea partyers are a good 20-30 years older than some of the people on the streets. Will they be able to overlook generational differences?
October 10th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
[…] Tip: Zen Pundit […]
October 10th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
My observation of the one Tea Party I know well is not consistent with what Mr. Morris says, or the letter he links to.
The main motive for many of the OWS protesters seems to be student loans. Those kids have been coopted by a bunch of people who have different concerns. Making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy is simple justice and both parties should support it.
October 10th, 2011 at 5:54 pm
Somehow I think you’re correct Lex. By simply discharging student loans into bankruptcy would be enough to co-opt them back into the corporate environment, from which they came, as long as the tea partiers still lets them live at home :))
October 10th, 2011 at 9:40 pm
Larry, that will spur another revolt ten years down the line: "Un-occupy My House."
October 11th, 2011 at 5:45 am
What fascinates me in all this is not so much the politics on display as the difficulty we humans have in finding common ground and forming coalitions, when faced with the overwhelming appeals of opposition and (heh!) schism.
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To add a new wrinkle to an old saw — the world population can conveniently be split into two opposing camps — those who split the human population into two opposing camps, and those who claim not to.
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I once read my way through the 788 pages of this impressive University of Chicago tome, knowing next to nothing and understanding even less of the arcane arguments between the various schools of French psychoanalytic thought — but completely absorbed by the determination shown by all parties to form as many different groups as possible, until in the extreme, each individual psychiatrist would have his own practice, theory, refereed journal and publishing house, nay, more than one, if schizophrenia could be achieved.
October 11th, 2011 at 2:50 pm
Charles, that book looks my idea of an absolute nightmare. The only thing worse would be a postmodern "ironic" version of the same history. I’d rather read (to pick something at random out of my mental rag bag) about the design, manufacture, and operation of the Lancaster bomber — something tangible, that did some good in the world.
October 11th, 2011 at 3:32 pm
It had, as they say, "all the fascination of a slow motion train wreck" — I couldn’t put it down, and I don’t imagine I’ll need — ever — to read it again.
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Unless I write my own five-page General Theory of Fissiparity.
October 11th, 2011 at 5:46 pm
" but completely absorbed by the determination shown by all parties to form as many different groups as possible, until in the extreme, each individual psychiatrist would have his own practice, theory, refereed journal and publishing house, nay, more than one, if schizophrenia could be achieved." Charles, Freud is just as relevant today as he was yesterday. The profession have no answers, only questions. It appears to me you were looking for answers, at least the correct ones, and you should have been looking for, and choosing, the correct question.
October 11th, 2011 at 5:48 pm
"Larry, that will spur another revolt ten years down the line: "Un-occupy My House."" Kanani, we don’t have ten years.
October 12th, 2011 at 12:57 am
Larry:
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I probably had some interest in trying to figure out what Lacan was all about when I opened the book, but psychoanlytic theory and practice was not what kept me reading. What fascinated me was the way that, time after time, the members of a self-identified group who were united in their opposition to some other group would find reason to oppose each other.
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Thus one schism occurred when those who thought a patient benefited most from gaining a sense of "closure" at the end of each therapeutic session differed from those who felt that, on the contrary, leaving the patient in "cliff-hanger" mode at the end of each session would be more productive.
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What can I say? It may depend on the individual — analyst or patient.
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But then you get "talk more" vs "talk less" and "analyst may snore" vs "analyst should show signs of attention to the patient" and "couch" or "no couch" — "analytic terminology" vs "plain speech" — the combinatorics are staggering.
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And in all this, people were taking sides, and becoming indignant, and shunning each other…
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That was what fascinated me about the whole process, not "the profession". If I might use a term that seems to hover between the psycho- and theological, the entire book was (for me) a case-study in schizmogenesis.