March of the Idiots at OccupyLA May Day

I don’t employ the term “idiot” lightly; but really, there’s no more accurate term to characterize the sheer nitwittedness on display at last week’s May Day march spearheaded by OccupyLA.

As documented by indefatigable photojournalist Ringo in his “Occupy May Day / General Strike – Los Angeles” report, the idiocy manifested in at least four distinct ways:

• Thought disorders
• General ignorance or stupidity
• Foolishness, or the absence of wisdom and insight
• Narcissism

Let’s look at each type of idiocy separately, in the following brief selection of images from Ringo’s massive photo essay. (Ringo posted hundreds of pictures so that, as he puts it, he “can’t be accused of ‘cherry picking’ the worst images.” What you see in this PJM excerpt is just a small appetizer from OccupyLA’s overwhelming all-you-can-stomach idiocy buffet; click the link above to see the rest. All images here were taken by Ringo.)

Thought Disorders

It’s one thing to squat in your darkened basement scribbling word salad messages to the demons in your head. It’s quite another to carefully craft an oversized protest sign intended for public display at the next Occupy protest. But many of the Occupiers could not seem to keep the two behaviors distinct, and the result can only be seen as evidence for major thought disorders among some of the protesters. Occupy Wall Street: serious protest movement, or manifestation of brain malfunction?

Stupidity

Just as in Oakland, the latest fad among teenage anarchists is to fashion riot shields out of plastic garbage cans.

But unlike in Oakland, where they figured out that it’s best to hold the shield upside-down, some of the LA Occupiers held what looked like full-size garbage cans right side up, so that they appeared to the casual observer to be Vaudeville slapstick comedians standing in trash cans for the audience’s amusement. Or, more succinctly: FAIL.

One thing about those nasty olicarks: They know how to spell.

Because everyone admires the environmental records of Soviet Russia and Communist China, protectors of the Earth!

Foolishness

This category is reserved for Occupiers who, through foolishness or “absence of wisdom and insight,” ascribe to political ideologies which have already been thoroughly discredited or debunked. Chief among these is…

…Communism, which seemed to predominate at L.A.’s May Day rally, with communist and socialist groups turning out en masse for the march. My only question at this point is: Where do these people come from?

Second-most popular foolish ideology of the day: Anarchism. Which in many ways is the polar opposite of communism, and equally unfeasible as an actual organizing principle for society — but none of that seemed to matter to the swarms of ignorant youths burning off their hormones by running up and down the street trying to look like rebels. Sad, really.

And then there are those, such as this young lass, whose foolishness has no label, other than perhaps “shameless avarice.” How did we reach a point in history when people could proudly hold up signs saying, essentially, “Give Me Your Money”? The other side of her sign reveals all:

So I guess capitalism is, according to her, a system in which people get to keep their own assets, something which in her foolish universe is entirely unacceptable. Noted.

And then there is what strategists like to call “bad optics.” Who exactly thought it would be a good idea to march around in paramilitary uniforms at a political rally which calls for the confiscation of other people’s money? Are we seeing this generation’s “brown shirts”?

And then there is the foolishness of environmental utopianism. Many young fools in the Occupy movement embrace the vague fantasy of some kind of magical “green” future in which neither humans, plants, animals nor the Earth are “oppressed,” and everybody lives in beautiful harmony forever after. Oh, how glorious! (Will Thomas Hobbes please pick up the white courtesy telephone?)

He has a point. And so does the carpenter who says, “If no one’s going to pay me to work my ass off for a year building a house for this lazy jerkwad, then he can go live in a cave for all I care.”

Narcissism

But many people weren’t even there for putative political or rational reasons. They just wanted to be the center of attention.

These rampaging anarchists, for example, paused mid-rampage to do some very public tai-chi or yoga. Hey, look at us! We are hipper than thou!

LOOK. AT. ME.

Narcissistic personality disorder, coupled with delusions of grandeur.

Hate to break the news to you, but no one’s gonna respect you whether you’re free or not.

Rest of the Report

These pictures only begin to touch on the many bizarre themes found at the protest. For example, for the first time I’ve ever seen, political radicals now carry quotations from the Qur’an to street protests. Start of a trend?

This sign was used to assault four police officers, as seen clearly around the 2:45 mark in this video. The perpetrators, of whom this is presumably one, got away with it. The video reveals exactly how Occupy’s strategy works: They blindside the police with an unprovoked assault, then the attackers instantly scatter, while other Occupiers with cameras are waiting immediately behind to record the police’s hoped-for overreaction. And they think that this is so very clever that no one’s yet caught on to their tricks.