Another victory for people! Take that, Wall Street!

If only the Occupiers could tell us what, precisely, they wish to change (other than their clothes).

There’s no question that some of the young people milling around Wall Street have legitimate grievances. Job creation remains stagnant; lots of bright young people—and no small number of middle-aged workers—are out of work or underemployed. The national unemployment rate seems stuck at just over 8 percent. That’s bad enough, but things actually are worse here in New York, where the rate is 10 percent.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some people are taking their anger to the streets. The problem is that the Occupy movement is steered by folks who are using legitimate grievances as an excuse to demonize the successful, provoke the police and otherwise display their contempt for free enterprise and American capitalism.

That much is obvious in the rhetoric of the Occupy leaders. They don’t have a plan. They don’t have an alternative. They don’t have points to negotiate. They certainly don’t have the ability to turn discontent into political action. (For all the publicity they’ve received, have the Occupiers had any influence over this year’s presidential campaign?)

What Occupy’s leaders lack in specific plans, they make up for in demagogic speeches and publicity stunts. True, they have won the hearts and minds of English and history professors around the country, which ought to be proof positive that they have nothing practical to offer. But for the millions of Americans who are out of work, for the millions who live at the margins, the Occupiers must seem to be absolutely frivolous. What solutions do they propose? What programs do they support? What job-creation strategy do they wish to implement?

The short answer: They have no plans, no strategies, no programs. Oh, they do enjoy thumbing their noses at authority. As they gathered downtown on Monday, some Occupiers demanded that police officers identify themselves by name—“in case you decide to attack me,” as one Occupier put it.

What a charming group. You’d think that given their keen sense of class consciousness they might see police officers—or anybody who works for a living—as comrades of sorts. But that would require them to reconsider their own prejudices and attitudes. And that would be almost unbearable.

So they march and shout and disrupt and hope that they will at least provoke a police officer into arresting them. They can tweet news of their arrest in real time, and know that they are considered heroes in some of the best faculty lounges in the land.

The rest of us will pay them little attention, since they really have nothing to say.

Not the bagpipers arrested. (Brian Gautreau/Flickr)

The N.Y.P.D. was holding back regarding Occupy Wall Street protest actions on Saturday night until they put the smackdown on a band of European bagpipe players in nothing flat. The pipers showed around 11 p.m. and began playing for the assembly, but within 5 to 10 minutes they had been arrested, resulting in a sharp rise in tension in the crowd.

Bagpipers just started marching into the park bringing the party mood with them, NYPD arrested one of them, and things got real heated. #OWS

— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) March 18, 2012

As police led the musicians away, the crowd chanted, "One more song!" The @NewYorkist Twitter feed reported the bagpipers were French musicians who had participated in a St. Patrick's Day parade earlier in the day.

Authorities began mobilizing in force to evict protesters and close Zuccotti Park after the bagpipers were taken away. Many protesters passively resisted by linking arms and sitting but mass arrests ensued.

Goldberg and Adam Driver not all that sure what they're talking about. (Roundabout Theatre Company)

The arrival of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s revolutionary play about anger, decay and the rage simmering beneath the surface of British losers in the 1950s, revolutionized play writing and marked the beginning of a new decade of torn T-shirts and kitchen-sink misery on the London stage and the end of the well-written, elegantly staged works of Terence Rattigan, Enid Bagnold and Noël Coward. It was hailed as an important work when it opened in 1956 at the small, experimental Royal Court Theatre off Sloane Square, an alternative to the glossy productions in the West End. It was filled with hell and fury and shouted obscenities, a “protest” play unlike any slice of realism ever witnessed by refined London audiences weaned on Ibsen and Shaw. The excitement faded fast. By the time it was turned into a film of sweat, grief and brimstone in 1958 starring a young, virile Richard Burton, its time had passed. The movie was a flop and Look Back in Anger was toothless history. Mr. Osborne was credited (and cursed) with shuttering the complacency of well-ordered British dramaturgy. Time has now born witness to a desperate need to bring back Rattigan, Coward and the others. And not a moment to soon. (Revivals of the Rattigan ouevre are all the rage in London during this, his centennial birthday year, with a pristine new film of The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz in the role originated on stage and screen by Vivien Leigh, set to open next month.)

The current Broadway revival of Look Back in Anger, produced by the Roundabout at the Laura Pels Theatre on West 46th Street, makes me wonder what the fuss was all about in the first place. Gone is the suffocating claustrophobia of a nasty slum flat in the Midlands that was home to Jimmy Porter, his emotionally scarred wife, Alison, and their lazy flatmate, Cliff, who lies around reading the Sunday papers like a lump of biscuit dough, cracking his toes. The flat has now expanded into a vast, coffin-gray cavern with no wing space and a back wall against which the three louts smash dirty dishes and toss the garbage and each other. I’ve seen ugly devastation passed off as an emotional wasteland before, but I have never seen anything this vile. Even the toilet seems to flush into the room. At one point, Jimmy dumps a can of what looks like dog food on top of Cliff and it stays there for the entire play, on the floor and sliding down the wall, with the actors stepping over and around it like dog poop. The set is littered with tomato peels, used Kleenex, empty beer bottles, broken furniture and a fouled mattress everyone sleeps on. In one corner of the stage I noticed a cabbage someone had tossed onto a pile of soiled underwear. It’s tough to concentrate on dialogue when you’re a nervous wreck about what the actors are going to step in.

Jimmy Porter is a college-educated man who uses words like “pusillanimous” and “phlegmatic” to describe people, but is too dumb to realize that the word “putrescent” describes his environment perfectly. He has never been able to hold down any job other than selling candy in a street stall. He rants against the filth around him, but as an “angry young man” it is never clear just what he’s angry about. His squalid life consists of playing roughhouse with Cliff and emotionally vandalizing his weak, masochistic wife, who is too afraid to tell him she’s pregnant. At one point, he even knocks over the ironing board while she’s doing his shirts in her slip, burning her with a hot iron and ignoring her pain. Three years married and all he does is abuse her, ridicule her for going to church, and toss his used soup tins across the room for her to clean up. They are working-class cretins, the British equivalents of Stanley Kowalski without the humor or the humanity, and “common as dirt” as Marlon Brando used to say, scratching his crotch. Enter the wife’s snobby best friend, Helena, who not only meddles but plots to rescue Alison from her marital prison. After she succeeds, Helena switches gears in an implausible character reversal, moves in with Jimmy and Cliff and takes over Alison’s place in the flat, in the slip, in the bed and at the ironing board. She’s intended to symbolize the ultimate demoralization of women who will lower their values and forsake everything they believe in for a good fuck. Now we have four pitiful, unhappy weaklings instead of three. As the play drags on to a dismal ending, there is more, but who cares?

Sloppily directed by Sam Gold, this dour revival is a two-and-a-half-hour mess. The fire and passion are missing. The acting is functional, with the exception of that of Matthew Rhys, who hails from Wales and looks a lot like Kenneth Haigh, who originated the role at the Royal Court and on Broadway. He has real talent and range, and he shows you the anguish beneath the skin, but his eloquent tirades are tiring. Sarah Goldberg, as the battered, nerve-jangled wife, is no Mary Ure. She shows you the bruises but not the sensitivity, and why are her feet black as coal and hideous black gashes across her legs? When she returns from civilization after losing her baby, her feet are still dirty. These lapses in reason may seem trivial to you, but they drive me crazy. Maybe there is no sink backstage at the Laura Pels. Look Back in Anger is like a pit bull with its teeth extracted. It’s a dated slice of postwar British culture long dead and forgotten, its whining self-indulgence grows wearisome, and it has nothing relevant to say to today’s audiences. Some things should just stay in mothballs and never travel.

rreed@observer.com

Photo via WCAX.com

Sad news today: an unidentified man lies in grave condition after being shot at the Occupy , Vermont protest at Burlington's City Hall Park. Early reports say the wound was self-inflicted and may have been a suicide attempt. WPTZ reporter David Schneider reports via Twitvid from the scene.

So far information on this story is scarce, but people have been tweeting what they've seen and heard from the scene. If you have any more information regarding this case, please contact us.

But that is precisely what has happened. Most reasonably informed people in the U.S. and elsewhere know about the O.W.S. movement and its many iterations in other cities. While the demonstrations have lacked a certain degree of message clarity, and while the movement’s leaders are more than a little imprecise about their proposed solutions, there’s no question that O.W.S. has tapped into deep discontent and anger over the status quo.

Now it’s time for the demonstrators to end their protests on their own terms, and with more than a little dignity and pride. Reports of crimes committed against demonstrators have raised concerns about public safety. (Most recently, a Brooklyn man has been accused of sexually abusing an 18-year-old woman in the park.) Continuing the camp out in Zuccotti Park could lead to public health issues, especially with winter approaching. The message of frustration and the demands for action could become overshadowed by the fringe elements that have sought to attach themselves to the movement. (The presence of signs condemning Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza suggests that there are agendas at work here beyond frustration with the U.S. economy.)

There is little left for the O.W.S. movement to prove, at least not in Zuccotti Park. Demonstrators who were arrested over the past few weeks have refused on principle to accept plea bargains and are now demanding their day in court. That shrewd move will give the movement another very public platform to air its message of discontent.

What’s more, a very critical presidential campaign is taking shape out in the fields of Iowa and the villages of New Hampshire, sites of the first-in-the-nation caucus and primary, respectively. President Obama, too, is in full re-election mode, and has been on the road selling his jobs program. If the O.W.S. movement wants action, the action over the next several months will not be in Zuccotti Park. It will be in town meetings and campaign rallies. The O.W.S. movement may disdain conventional politics, but its leaders would be foolish if they ignored an opportunity to shape the nation’s political dialogue with the best available tool, their votes.

The time has come to put away the placards and drums and barricades. The demonstration has altered the nation’s political dialogue in ways few would have thought possible in early October. In that sense, the movement has been a success. Organizers need to figure out how to build on that success while allowing residents and businesses near Zuccotti Park to return to their lives.

Update: The man let go of the rope on purpose or accidentally fell into the water around 2 p.m., according to The Nation's Greg Mitchell. He landed in water or on the deck of barge and was taken to police barracks, Mr. Mitchell reports. The man's condition is unknown, but NBC New York reports the man fell in the water, not on the barge. Right now he's on an emergency worker's boat, according to Gothamist. Before jumping he also took off his pants, apparently, and tried to swim away but emergency workers gave him a life preserver, which he took.

Occupy Wall Street might have to step up their protesting efforts. A man is currently dangling off the Tappan Zee Bridge, protesting his termination at a mental health facility Rockland County. Michael Davitt is clinging to a banner that's tied to a van blocking traffic on the bridge over the Hudson River, occasionally taking sips from a thermos. The banner reads "ROCKLAND EXECUTIVE LEGISLATURE COVER UP RETALIATION," and Patch reports his car has closed one lane.

Emergency crews are gathering in three boats below the bridge in Tarrytown. They don't seem to know what to do.

Mr. Davitt is a Rockland County resident who has alleged during several county council meetings he wrongfully lost his job, Rockland County Sheriff James Kralik told Patch. Mr. Davitt has apparently been conducting one-man protests in front of the Rockland County Office Building in New City and has spoken several times to the Rockland County Legislature. Sheriff Kralik also told patch his comments to the Legislature were "somewhat threatening." Before losing his job, Mr. Davitt worked for the Department of Mental Health at Rockland County's health complex in Pomona. Do we need to point out the irony?

Slavoj Zizek. Photo by Neotint

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek turned up at Zuccotti Park to address the Occupy Wall Street demonstration on Sunday, offering up a seminar on Radicalism 101 for an appreciative crowd.

Despite some difficulty with the Human Microphone—the sometimes unwieldy but strangely appealing system the protesters have adopted of repeating a speaker's words, phrase by phrase, for the benefit of the crowd—he held the floor for the better part of an hour.

Standing above the assembly in a red T-shirt, the heavily bearded dissident–turned–academic superstar at first spoke from prepared notes, hitting on many themes that will be familiar to fans. Several riffs were recycled almost word-for-word from earlier talks included in the 2005 documentary Žižek!, but to be fair, they killed at the time and are perhaps even more relevant today.

He told, for instance, an old Eastern Bloc joke (borrowed from the introduction to 2002's Welcome to the Desert of the Real) about a dissident who's about to be sent to a work camp in Siberia. Since he knows his letters will be censored, he tells his friends he'll write to them using a simple code: Blue ink for the truth, red ink for lies. His first letter arrives, and it's a glowing report of life in the camp—a lovely apartment, great food, beautiful women. Then he concludes, "The only thing we can't get is red ink."

Occupy Wall Street, he explained told the crowd, is pointing out the lies that underlie American capitalist society. "You're the red ink," he said.

Mr. Žižek also offered some practical advice. Noting the festive atmosphere in the park, he warned, "Don't fall in love with yourselves. Carnivals come cheap." The meaningful work will be what comes afterwards.

He steered the discussion away from the Cold War debate between communism and capitalism, noting that former communists, particularly in China, "are today the most efficient, brutal capitalists."

The communist revolution "failed absolutely," he said, suggesting that "the only way we are communist is that we care about the commons," citing the environment as an example.

Mr. Žižek suggested that the left "abandon certain taboos," including hard work, discipline and following orders, if they support the agreed-upon goals. And he advocated reclaiming certain notions that had been adopted by the right wing, including family values.

Somewhat controversially, he described organic food as a "pseudo-activity," designed to make consumers feel they are having a positive impact on the world and thereby absolving them from looking at the more destructive systemic issues.

Noting that he supports George Soros, he compared the lefty billionaire financier to a chocolate laxative. Since chocolate is said to be constipating, he explained—a controversial point—Mr. Soros is similarly exhibiting an internal contradiction. "First they take billions from you, then they give back half," he said. "And that makes them the world's greatest humanitarians." Take the money, sure, he advised, but don't stop fighting to overturn a system that makes it necessary.

In answer to one question, he suggested that Organize Wall Street embrace the Tea Party rather than be seen as its opposite. "The tragedy is that many of the Tea Party people should be on our side," he said. "That's where we should work. They may be stupid, but don't look at them as the enemy."

The most interesting bit of advice may have been a little hard to parse for some, but given that this quickly spreading movement seems still to be in its infancy and unsure about how to proceed, it seemed especially worth pondering: "People often desire something but don't really want it," Mr. Žižek told the crowd. "Don't be afraid to want what you desire."

The Adbusters writers had a clear aim:

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand? The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.

But the leaderless movement, which at any one time must be counted by hundreds rather than thousands, is held together by enterprising volunteers who are coordinating the protest via various working groups. The message about a presidential commission has been completely lost. Media attempting to report on the protest grabbed quotes like, "I want to create spectacles," and “Oh, we’re just here, like, you know, protesting what’s going on.”

After spending a Saturday at the protest, it did seem the various grievances nursed by protesters had a common theme: a vague but certain notion that the richest percentile of the country remains fat and happy as the going-on-five-year-old recession continues to batter the middle and working class.

What do the protesters want to do about it? Less clear! But we found some suggestions in the hand-made signs they carried over the weekend.

“Do not kill my family!” read Debra Davidson’s sign, as she stood with a small group of enraged members of Fans United against ABC (cleverly named with the acronym F. U. ABC) outside of ABC’s Times Square studio earlier this afternoon.

Protests occurred today in 21 other cities, including Chicago and Miami, in attempts to call attention to the cuts of One Life to Live and All My Children, both of which have been on the air for over 40 years.

Davidson, now 47, has watched another ABC soap potentially on the chopping block, General Hospital, for the past 34.

“I had fallen in love with Luke and the rest was history,” recalled Davidson, who now has a framed poster of the General Hospital family tree in her house. She says she is “scared to death” about the potential cancellation of her “favorite show in the world” and doesn’t know what her mental state will be if it is canceled.

Tessa McKenzie, a 34-year-old who has been watching soaps since she was a little girl, was the first to arrive at 3:30 for the protest, and the only one present for about the first half an hour (during which the Naked Cowboy continued to draw more attention) before ten or so more soap supporters would arrive.  Sporting a General Hospital­-inspired Luke and Laura t-shirt while toting a trash bag full of neon signs for the afternoon, she was undeterred by the lack of attendance early on and explained to The Observer how her life had changed since ABC announced “the murder” of her soaps on April 14^th.

“Those soaps are such a part of our lives,” she said. “All my focus is on saving them…. I don’t sleep at night. I have anxiety all the time. You can’t even breathe [or] even relax while watching them.”

Her message for Disney? “We won’t let our soaps die… It’s not just a show. It becomes part of the family.”

McKenzie watches One Life to Live, All My Children, General Hospital and The Young and the Restless every night from 7 to 11, and says she is willing to do whatever it takes – including producing a documentary – to make Disney’s stock crash.

Cheneise Carey began watching soaps with her now deceased great-grandmother and great-aunt when she was younger, and continues to watch them Monday through Friday from 1 to 4. Suffering from MS, she arrived at the protest with a walker and explained the benefit the soaps have offered her by allowing her to “disappear into another world.”

“It’s like this little world that you have,” Phoebe Abraham, a student at USC, agreed of the Soap bubble.

Estimating that she has gained 15 pounds since hearing the news of the cancellations, Carey continued, “They touch on so many things in real life that aren’t touched on in regular programs.”

Cole Bell, who spearheaded the nationwide rallies, watched One Life to Live beginning at 8 years old and said similarly that watching Ryan come out as gay character on the show helped him in his own life.

"The story lines and plot lines have kind of followed my own life," Bell said.

If only they foretold their own futures.

"This mayor loves to brag how devoted he is to the numbers," said Mr. de Blasio. "This is the fastest growing borough, and this borough needs more fire protection, not less. And the numbers show it."

The crowd of more than 200 cheered. They had rallied in front of the 105-year-old, redbrick building that houses one of 20 fire companies slated to close as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed budget cuts.

"The mayor is saying to some parts of this city, 'You're going to be less safe,' and somehow, you're supposed to grin and bear it," said Mr. de Blasio. "That's not right and that's not how a democracy works. That's not the city government doing its job."

Over the past two years, Mr. de Blasio has tried to make the most of his own job as the city's public advocate--a loosely defined, barely funded perch that seems to exist primarily as a bullhorn for citizen complaints.

"My view at this moment is, this is exactly what the office was meant to do," he told The Observer in a phone call late on Friday afternoon.

In recent weeks, Mr. de Blasio has emerged as the most visible critic of Mr. Bloomberg among those who might be jockeying to replace him. City Council Speaker Quinn has generally shunned protests in favor of direct negotiations with Mr. Bloomberg. City Comptroller John Liu has taken a more wonky approach to his job, issuing a steady stream of reports, and Congressman Anthony Weiner has mostly stuck to the impact of federal cuts as they relate to the city.

"I think this mayor in particular understands relative silence as assent," said Mr. de Blasio. "A lot of times that has not been the case, although that's how he likes to interpret it. So, I think it's really important and for the record to show that people are not comfortable with these choices and it will have a very big impact on their lives."

"You know," Mr. de Blasio continued, unprompted, "most people who have become mayor have come up from the grass roots and through a variety of offices and have a natural understanding of what some of these actions do to people and mean for people. I don't think this mayor has that."

By his own account, Mr. de Blasio does.

One year after managing Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign in 2000, Mr. de Blasio was knocking on doors in Park Slope, campaigning to become their councilman. ("Don't forget the school board," he noted, of his pre-Council public service. "One of the finest unpaid offices around.")

For eight years on the City Council, Mr. de Blasio demonstrated a penchant for gathering loud swaths of the city to voice their displeasure with decisions being made inside City Hall. In 2003, the first time Mr. Bloomberg proposed a major round of firehouse closures, Mr. de Blasio threw his 6-foot-5 frame to the forefront of the debate.

He got arrested protesting the cuts, along with his neighbor, the actor Steve Buscemi. ("He lives about five or six blocks away from me," said Mr. de Blasio. "We bonded when we got arrested together.")

This year, Mr. de Blasio is finding less arresting ways to voice his opposition. He helped organize a march across the Brooklyn Bridge this week to protest firehouse closures. Already, he's visited a number of them, appearing with defiant Council members, angry union members and outraged residents.

Then there are the schools, where Mr. Bloomberg's budget proposes laying off 4,100 teachers. Mr. de Blasio set up a phone line where anyone with an opinion can leave a voice message about the mayor's proposed cuts, then hear it posted on Mr. de Blasio's website. Last week, he staged a Parent Day of Action at schools across all five boroughs.

All of which appears to have gotten underneath the administration's skin.

Earlier this month, Mr. de Blasio and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson engaged in a protracted argument on Twitter, with Mr. Wolfson saying the public advocate "remained silent in the face of massive ed cuts" in the state budget.

The two are old friends, dating back to their days working on Ms. Clinton's Senate race, when Mr. de Blasio served as the campaign manager and Mr. Wolfson was the spokesman.

"You are our advocate," Mr. Wolfson wrote. "Needed your advocacy in Albany at budget time--perhaps your advocacy then could have helped averted [sic] cuts."

The two met for lunch at Nobu and the bickering ceased, if not the debate.

"Bill has been my friend for more than a decade," Mr. Wolfson told The Observer in an email. "And we agreed to continue to disagree. I think he would have more credibility now if he had been vocal in fighting state cuts."

The administration's position is--more or less--that the person to blame for the city's deep cuts is Governor Andrew Cuomo, who greatly decreased funding to New York City as part of an austere state budget that sought to close a $10 billion deficit. 

Mr. Bloomberg called the cuts to New York City "an outrage," and liberal activists descended on Albany in protest.

Mr. de Blasio was not among them.

"I think a lot of what the governor has done was really important and necessary, showing that we could exercise restraint and think about the concerns of taxpayers while at the same time fulfilling the obligations of the government," said Mr. de Blasio.

"I didn't want the outcome we got," he said on Tuesday. "Wish we had gotten more. But the bottom line is the governor had to balance an extremely difficult budget and that was in everybody's interest, including the future of New York City. So, I just think Wolfson's response misses that larger point."

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo are longtime allies. Before he worked for Ms. Clinton, Mr. de Blasio served under Mr. Cuomo in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration, and the public advocate aggressively promoted Mr. Cuomo's campaign for governor last year.

"You're not going to see Bill de Blasio running around saying, 'Hey look, why don't you send us some more money, Mr. Governor,'" said Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Mr. Bloomberg's most recent re-election campaign and was speaking from a beach on Memorial Day.

"The politics of this is: Albany, the governor, have decided we're not getting the kind of money we used to get," said Mr. Sheinkopf. "Therefore you got to cut someplace. And the best thing to do, if you're going to help your political allies, is to blame Mike Bloomberg, even though he's not responsible."

But, in Mr. de Blasio's view, the cuts forced onto the city could be handled more sensitively.

"I laid out a series of alternative cuts I thought made a lot more sense," he said. Those include reductions in teacher recruitment efforts--about $25 million--and scaling back outside consultants and technological work, some of which is "futuristic, but not as important as a classroom teacher."

Mr. de Blasio suggested there were "less essential pieces" that could be trimmed from the budget before laying off teachers, calling the fight "somewhat ideological."

"It's not that the mayor and his people couldn't find the money in the city budget; it was a choice," Mr. de Blasio said. "And we have to portray it as such. It's not about fiscal responsibility. It's about philosophy."

Whether Mr. de Blasio's noisemaking will have any tangible effect on the city's budget is a matter of some disagreement.

Mark Green, the city's first public advocate--who frequently tangled with Mayor Rudy Giuliani over budget cuts and has subsequently run for office against both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. de Blasio--said all the haranguing by Mr. de Blasio is late, and not entirely substantive.

"A public advocate should ideally either analytically expose bad policies or propose thoughtful alternatives," said Mr. Green. "Protest letters and rallies taste great but are not very filling."

apaybarah@observer.com