Occupy Wall Street

Protestors at Occupy Wall Street in New York City on 17 September 2011. (David Shankbone, Wikipedia)

To satisfy my humanities requirement for my degree, I'm taking American Cultures this semester here at the University of Houston. I'm not necessarily going to publicly criticize or make a gratifying statement about the course. It's just a class, I take it online, and I just took the midterm earlier here on campus.

I have to credit this class to introducing me to something that most people are not even anywhere familiar with. Hell, I never even heard of arielism until I read about it a few weeks ago. However, the American interpretation of José Enrique Rodó's 1900 seminal work is rooted in elitism as, Frederick Pike wrote, the American elitist clique believed that the lower class needed to be "liberated" from materialism, which was fed to them by Corporate America. Indeed, Rodó's Ariel does criticize materialism, but also calls on the need for Latin American youth to aspire to not fall into the shadow of the United States. Keep in mind, this was written two years after the Spanish-American War which established the United States as a world power and the cemented the States as the national power of the Western Hemisphere. Whether American arielists misinterpreted that part of Ariel or deliberately ignored it, who knows.

I bring this up because the American elitist gripe of the early 20th century is has similarities with the Occupy Wall Street / We Are the 99 Percent social movement that has sprung up in the past three weeks.

Pike wrote that the American arielists aimed to expose the lower class to higher cultural tastes for they believed that culture should set the tone of society and not economic achievement. He further wrote that these arielists sought to reaffirm what they believed to be their place in the American social hierarchy (of course them being at the top) and basically leave the "lower class" to be happy with their lot in life and accepting of their subordinate position to the cultural elite. Needless to say that something of this sort happened, but not in the way the arielists would hope for it to happen.

A brief history lesson here: as the modern "corporate America" took shape in the late 1880s it gained a fairly shitty reputation, as evidenced by strike after strike by laborers that felt victimized by Corporate America and a federal government that felt that Corporate America represented an obstruction on the American economy. Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt based their presidencies around "trust-busting", which was basically the federal government's fight against cartels (or at the time widely known as "trusts"). However, Corporate America had the same aim as the American arielists albeit in a different way: people of the "lower class" in this class the actual economic lower class and middle class, should be happy with their lot and accept the fact that Corporate America runs the show in the United States. In addition, Corporate America believed (and advertised) that materialism should be where Americans find value.

It brings us to today.

A friend of mine wrote to me on Facebook in response to my post on what should be the size and role of government in the United States that the wealth and income disparity statistics is mainly a product of a mathematical outcome. I did concur that it was a mathematical outcome, however, when considering all points, it comes out to being more than just a mathematical outcome. It's a by product of what I call corporate arielism: that Americans should be accepting of the fact that corporate America provides the hands from which the United States feeds from, whether it is in the form of politics, society, or simple daily life. The value of life, at least in the eyes of Corporate America, should come in the form of how much you are able to participate in materialistic consumerism. It will be Corporate America that allows for opportunities to exist. It will be Corporate America that decides whether or not the opportunity that you think is yours is really yours. Corporate America will be responsible for what it wants to be responsible for. And I could go on and on.

Take that into consideration, and it is obvious to see what the Occupy Wall Street movement is actually about. Those that support movement believe that Corporate America arielism is screwing Americans in many forms from not hiring, to laying off, to not providing enough jobs, to health care, to hijacking the political process, and to securing their financial position at the expense of the American that wants to pursue their dream of living a comfortable, decent life. Whether the logic is flawed is in the eye of the beholder; however, their message shouldn't be ignored.

Like I said before, there are winners and losers in capitalism in the sense that someone gains wealth at the expense of someone else. Is that the reality of the free market? Sure. I'd be absolutely stupid to deny that. However, capitalism, corporate arielism, and Corporate America as we know it now have a bigger question on their hands as middle and lower class discontent begins to grow and spread: sustainability. So few people can control so few of the wealth for so long. Personally, I believe this: if the Occupy Wall Street gains the momentum that their inspiration, the Arab Spring, did, then just maybe we will see a new form of arielism to develop over the course of this century that the majority of Americans will be willing to accept -- the arielism of the middle class, where the middle class runs the show and the upper class will have to be the ones living with it, and the middle class would be free from having to abide by and depend on Corporate America.