It's been a while since we've done one of these, but before we get into it, I would just like to mention that Glenn Beck will be at the Freedom Center's Restoration Weekend. As will a far humbler figure, me.
THE HIPPIE, HIPSTER, HOMELESS OCCUPATION CONTINUES
You can't smell Zuccoti Park from uptown, but if you're unlucky enough you can spot the occupiers making their way there. The Hipsters/Hippies/Homeless ratio has made for very poor hygiene and a fantastic opportunity for the rats to make a comeback in Lower Manhattan.
The weather is turning chilly. This morning the temperature was in the 40's and even though tents have been allowed, the hippies and hipsters are about to start discovering how the other third lives. The ones who actually are hopeless.
Hipsters may live in walk ups, but they like to have the heat on and there's a reason hippies usually prefer warmer weather and many of the city's guests from the other side of the coast are about to discover how quickly temperatures here can change and how uncomfortable even mild Northeastern weather can be when you're used to warm air.
Lower Manhattan is a giant heatsink of skyscrapers owned by corporations, and human and automobile traffic from employees of people doing business there. That heatsink is the only thing keeping the three H's from experiencing the weather that they would encounter if they headed over to Long Island.
The irony that the companies and cars they hate so much are keeping the weather warm enough so that they can lounge around in their piles of garbage without freezing would be lost on them. All those winds coming off the water broken by the massive collection of downtown skyscrapers, the sheer mass of people, cars and carbon that lets them pose as revolutionary activists without their teeth chattering are lost on them too.
The left has organized and funded Occupy Wall Street, but it's doing a poor job of controlling it. Its activist chains of command don't flow all that smoothly with the increasing number of homeless people who see it as another encampment and many of the hippies who can't focus long enough to follow the rules.
The problem with OWS is that it attracts people who want to do their own thing without realizing that they're walking into someone else's campaign. The Great Drum Circle Debate which pits the professional activists who understand that getting into fights with local residents will take them down against the hippies who just don't care. Or the Hygiene Hellish standoff with the homeless.
OWS' "innovative" idea of making the protest into a permanent round-the-clock entity was timed to boost the Obama campaign, but the weather is going to have something else to say about it.
It's also worth noting that while Bloomberg has # around OWS, the minority mayors of black cities have taken them on. Mayor Kasim Reed in Atlanta and Mayor Jean Quan in Oakland have been much more forceful about dealing with the OWS trash, while Bloomberg and Menino, white, Jewish and Italian, have pandered to them.
Next up appears to be Mayor Villaraigosa in LA.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City writer and columnist. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and his articles appears at its Front Page Magazine site.
