"Whose Park? Ours!": The Last March on Zuccotti Park

The Anniversary

Occupy and disoccupy. All that will be left of Occupy Wall Street are the slogans that inflamed the Internet — the virtual plaza that, one year later, lights up with every taunt to the protest, the Chicago teachers’ strike, Mike Bloomberg — the billionaire mayor who says that New York’s homeless are better off in the shelters than at the Plaza. All that’s going to be left of Occupy Wall Street is the anonymous blogger who recalls the struggle, not citing Marx or Marcuse or Marcantonio, but the Beatles — “I don’t care too much for money / Money can’t buy me love.” Yes, money can’t buy their love for the revolution. But when they march again tomorrow morning — and Monday the 17th runs the risk of turning into a new Black Monday on Wall Street — don’t say they didn’t tell you so.

Don’t say they didn’t tell you so when they cleared them out of here, one December night a year ago; don’t say they didn’t tell you so when they shouted, “Whose park? Our park,” meaning, of course, Zuccotti, which is more than a park — you see it, now that it is cordoned off by the police once again? More than anything else, it’s a big avenue surrounded by four trees, transformed into a camp when the crazy idea to occupy Wall Street for real collided against a wall of tear gas. Here it is, look, here on the corner along Broadway was the social library: More than 5,000 volumes donated from all over the U.S., there was John Steinbeck and (for goodness sake) Angela Davis, but hardly any rants that in our times would have been cataloged under CGDCT: Come Giustamente Diceva il Compagno Togliatti — “As Comrade Togliatti Rightly Said.”*

Dennis Laumann, who is a professor at the University of Memphis and a true communist, registered with the official Communist Party USA, even climbed up here from the city that assassinated Martin Luther King’s dream, knowing full well that he’d find himself close to not only to those disappointed with Barack Obama but also to the less angry members of the tea party. “Both movements borne of disaster,” explains Kalle Lasn, the founder of Adbusters, the Canadian magazine, which up to now has been multinationals’ nightmare for having launched “No Buy Day,” the consumption strike. Now Lasn has announced to La Repubblica that what’s going to be left of the Occupy movement could wind up as a political party. But who’s going to tell Fernando, Vicente, Angel, Begona — that is, the little professors who everyone here knows only by their first names, the transplanted Spaniards in U.S. universities who have brought the seed of the “indignados” — who’s going to tell them that the guys in Puerta del Sol should unite transatlantically with Sarah Palin’s grandchildren?

Here, this on the other hand is Trinity Church, the symbolic church in the shadow of the Twin Towers that became the temple of September 11: Even here they tried to displace the guys from Occupy, driven out of Zuccotti, Foley Park and Thompson Square, where it all really started amid the beers and the Spaniards’ proclamations. In the end, even the church evicted them. All those sleeping bags went away with the realtors, who along with the monsignors of every denomination have always done divine business. And here, way downtown, between Ground Zero and the best boutiques in the neighborhoods of the cool people from Tribeca up, there is still plenty of room to raise a lot of beautiful Towers of Babel to the sky. Isn’t construction, in any case, Mayor Bloomberg says — next to the Wall Street paper factory, naturally — the heart of New York industry? And so what do these guys want — these guys who, paraphrasing Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, denounce the society where the top 1 percent own everything and the 99 percent pay for it all?

The unemployed blonde who came from Worcester and who slept for more than a month at Zuccotti, gets chills when she recalls the delicacy with which Newt Gingrich — the former speaker of the House from Bill Clinton’s time and until a few months ago the claimant to the nomination of Mitt Romney — summed up the movement’s philosophy: “They want jobs? Let them take a shower first.”** Who knows if the guys who try to march again will be remembered in New York a year from now? And who knows if even Mike Bloomberg’s police, a year later, will show the same (let’s say) harshness with the evicted people who returned the square to John Zuccotti, the Italian-American whose eminent business renown that space was in fact dedicated to, which originally had destiny in its name “Liberty Street” — until it was discovered that the [owners of] Zuccotti owed the city $140,000 in back taxes. To reporters, down in Tampa for the Romney convention, Brendan Hunt, at not even 30 years old one of the leaders of this leaderless movement, said that New York should learn from the mild-mannered Chief Jane: Ms. Castor, at the helm of the Florida police, who showed up with a megaphone in front of the guys who were besieging the festival rather than clubs: To debate. Occupy & disoccupy: History, they say, doesn’t repeat itself. Is another history possible?

*Editor’s note: Comrade Togliatti refers to Palmiro Togliatti, who led the Italian Communist Party from 1927 to 1964.

**Translator’s note: The actual quote was “Go get a job right after you take a bath.”