"...a bold, shrewd countermove to the rapacious march of income inequality"....

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But eye-level isn’t the only perspective for appraising something as prismatic and mutating as Occupy Wall Street. Look up after you leave Zuccotti Park to the west and there spires the silvery glass of 1 World Trade Center under construction, so abstractly imposing and declarative. Silvery glass sheathes skyscrapers from outside scrutiny, “the sun-comprehending glass” (to borrow poet Philip Larkin’s phrase) reflecting all, revealing nothing. If nothing else (and it has accomplished so much else), Occupy Wall Street has altered the geography of consciousness, taking back part of the mental real estate of Manhattan from the death shadow of the fallen towers and the squandering greed of the bankers. Within a few weeks of peaceful occupation, the controversy over the “Ground Zero mosque” had been set aside, nearly forgotten, and the 9/11 Memorial wasn’t the only visitor draw. Something human-scaled had rooted.

One difference from the 60s demonstrations is that the O.W.S. organizers have coalesced a group identity that has denied the snout-poking media its craving for a freshly hatched celebrity spokesmodel. The Port Huron Statement of 1962—the rousing prolegomenon of the New Left, calling for a rejuvenation of participatory democracy and a peace movement after the fear-based paralysis of the Cold War and the entrenchment of inequality at home—made a firebrand symbol out of its chief author, Tom Hayden, a founder of the Students for a Democratic Society; the Free Speech Movement of 1964 gave us Mario Savio with his ringing speech on the steps of the University of California at Berkeley’s Sproul Hall; the Columbia University uprising of 1968 produced Mark Rudd; and the militant black-nationalist movement had its avatar in Malcolm X. The only celebrities at O.W.S. were dignitaries paying hospitality calls and expressing solidarity, such as the ubiquitous Russell Simmons, Tim Robbins, Roseanne Barr, and that one-woman wagon train of personal and political evolution known as Naomi Wolf, whose arrest on October 18th on Hudson Street outside the Huffington Post’s “Game Changer” award ceremony at Skylight Soho that she was attending was a major miscalculation on the part of the N.Y.P.D., a publicity gift that the maned huntress would infuse with the melodrama of Susan Hayward in I Want to Live! Yet few could doubt Wolf’s sincerity and devotion to the occupation (she wasn’t down there dilettanting), and the speeches and interviews given in support of O.W.S. by global-minded, history-informed heavy lifters such as authors Chris Hedges (“I think people have finally woken up to the kleptocracy that we live in”), Naomi Klein (who told the assembled, “Only when you stay put can you put down roots”), and the promiscuously prolific Slavoj Žižek (“Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time here,” he counseled. “But remember, carnivals come cheap . . . ”) underscored that this wasn’t an extended sleepover for idealistic indigents and foolish dreamers but a bold, shrewd countermove to the rapacious march of income inequality, eroding standards of living, austerity imposed from above to pay for the ruinous follies of the few, the corporate grinding of the poor and the weak into snuff powder.

He writes about the possibility of ruptures from within based between "doers and talkers," in the structure of OWS groups, quoting Al Giordano:

Within any venture, there are “doers” and there are “talkers.” Typically, the talkers spend a lot of time discussing and debating what the doers should do. . . . They’re lonely and we feel bad for them, but nor do we want to spend our days and nights listening to them drone on and on with their inner monologues. Consensus meetings attract this kind of person like flies to shit. They also attract ideologues—the proverbial “socialist with a shopping bag of his own press clippings” as Lower East Side performance artist Penny Arcade has observed—and also people who love to debate the semantics of language and identity politics ad nauseum.

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If such a rupture doesn’t occur naturally from within, it can be induced from outside. Why resort to the crude application of state violence to rout occupiers, as the Oakland, California, and Denver, Colorado, riot-geared police did, deploying pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and old-school beatdowns (a Marine veteran named Scott Olsen received a skull fracture at the Oakland fracas), when you can craftily subvert it by despoiling its very strengths and virtues? That’s right out of the Karl Rove playbook, and it appears that the Bloomberg administration took a page out of it. An eyewitness account by Harry Siegel in the New York Daily News (October 30, 2011) speculated that the New York Police Department had begun using the inclusiveness of O.W.S. against it, encouraging undesirables to make the park their deadbeat club: “Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to ‘take it to Zuccotti’ by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks,” and the N.Y.P.D. was suspected of also giving homeless people a pass there to funk up the place. Rather than uproot an encampment, engulf it, turn it into a zombie attraction—that seemed to be the police command’s divide-and-conquer strategy. With critical mass building in the park and winter approaching (there’s already been one freak snowstorm), calls were made for O.W.S. to devise an exit strategy before it found its flanks completely overrun, overwhelmed: pick a date, declare victory, and disperse. The initiative shown by the young organizers and volunteers of O.W.S. had already achieved more with less than anyone could have conceived. Past a certain point, what’s left to prove? Hardy and resilient, they had already outlasted anything the Tea Party could put on. A Tea Partyer’s idea of roughing it is packing only one picnic cooler.

The rest of this short piece by James Wolcott at Vanity Fair.