Be Impossible, Demand the Realistic
McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street, spoke to the Occupy Washington Square Park Teach In on 6th November. The original text of his speech is below:
There is a specter haunting Wall St, the specter of a people. We've got them spooked—that unholy alliance of closet fascists and pseudo-liberals who deny we exist: Bloomberg and Fox News, David Brooks and Larry Summers. Its high time that we speak for ourselves, that we take the mic and pass it around.
Those who talk about the 99% without talking about what they really love, what they really desire, what everyday life is a struggle about—they are speaking with a corpse in their mouth. The struggle to live unites us all—in all our differences.
Our ideas are on everybody's minds. Be impossible, demand the realistic. There is tenderness only in the crudest demands. Nobody should go hungry. Nobody should go homeless. Or be crushed by debt.
But what haunts our waking dreams is the power to imagine: The world made real. The world come alive The shadow of a new world without the ded hand of capital and lifeless spectacles.
To Fox and Friends, we are Halloween clowns. To us they are zombies. Wall street are zombies. Fox news are zombies. Congress are zombies. They want to eat our brains. Braaaaaiiiinnns!
We are not afraid of zombies. We are scarier than zombies. We are the old haunting specter, the anonymous class. We are legion, everywhere and nowhere. We come in the name of the grand old cause, to take the world back, before zombies destroy it.
We ghosts have a message, but not from the past. We come from the future. When the lights come on, and the zombies are gone. The owls of Minerva have already flown. They flock at dawn.