Diary – 22 October 2011

I arrived at the Occupy Wall Street protests on Monday morning, their one month anniversary, at 7 a.m. raring to go. That’s when the subway stations of Lower Manhattan are spewing out their banking spawn, when the streets are full of capitalist pillagers swarming off to suck what blood is left in the western economies. I was looking forward to a confrontation, some fist-shaking, at least some graphic shouting and argy-bargy. But at Zuccotti Park, I found everyone huddled beneath blue tarpaulin, fast asleep. Four weeks in, the radicals are exhausted. Surrounding the park, half the size of a football pitch and dotted with honey locust trees, stood groups of policemen, television vans and food carts all waiting for the protestors to get up.

• I’ve attended some good protests over the years — G20 riots, anti-Pinochet marches in Chile, anti-National Front protests in Paris — and they’ve all had a certain ravey zest to them. Watching Occupy Wall Street over the past month, there’s none of that. They’ve got a powerful central idea, which has caught on around the world, but here at base camp it’s all a bit wan and chippy, especially against the backdrop of this urgent, restless city.

• Occupy Wall Street is said to be the Democratic party’s answer to the Tea Party. Not so, say the occupiers. They are lovers while the Tea Party are fighters. They are Facebookers and Tweeters, while the Tea Party is a bunch of Bible Belt Alf Garnetts. The Tea Party harks back to the Revolutionary War, when America was ruled by landed elites while the Occupiers claim to derive from the ‘abolitionist movement, the workers’ rights movement, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist and queer liberation movements, the environmental movement’.