Wall Street Vampire Slayings

By on September 21, 2010 in News 7

Wall Street Vampire SlayingsTomorrow, September 22, at 11:09 pm in downtown Manhattan, the Aaron Burr Society will gather for a “Wall Street Vampire Slaying” that from the description provided, lands somewhere between more recent anti-war die-ins and the use of the absurd by the situationist movement to draw attention to the greed and self-indulgences of Wall Street and Western Capitalism:

“On the night of September 22, 2010 there will be a Vampire Slaying of Wall Street Bloodsuckers, traitors who wrap themselves in the flag.

Symbolic Slaying 11:09 p.m., arrive at 10:30 p.m. in front of the New York Stock Exchange at Wall & Nassau Streets, NYC 10005. Slayers after–party TBA.”

The mood should be light, as participants are asked to “Dress up, bring lights, noise makers & proper shoes to dance on their collective grave”.

See you there!

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  • Andrew

    Be careful what you wish for. If you grant the government the power to stop things from eating you, they’ll eventually stop you from eating anything. And you’ll deserve to starve to death.

    • Word Eater

      how about if the government just punish the people who break the existing laws instead of hiring them?

  • Andrew

    Be careful what you wish for. If you grant the government the power to stop things from eating you, they’ll eventually stop you from eating anything. And you’ll deserve to starve to death.

  • Word Eater

    how about if the government just punish the people who break the existing laws instead of hiring them?

  • Vox Penii

    More incoherent street theater from situationists? What a shock.

    A short review, for those of you who were gone when we covered this information: Situationism was one of many responses amongst the far left to the abject failure and of Marxism and Socialism by the 1950s when all or Marx’s predictions had been disproved — and worse! — capitalism had proved itself better than socialism at creating equality and improving quality of life. Some Marxists admitted that their god had feet of clay, and moved towards the mainstream. Some turned to violence (e.g., Bader-Meinhoff Gang, the Black Panthers), hoping to force capitalism to collapse — but failing miserably. Others made like ostriches, thrusting their heads in the sand and saying la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you-and-Stalin-and-Lenin-aren’t-bad-guys-and-capitalism-will-collapse-any-day-now. Others clumsily welded Marxism to vague, inconsistent, contradictory philosophical gibberish — hence the situationists. Though Marxists had argued for a century that wealth was good (but that capitalism was bad for concentrating the wealth in few hands), these Marxists made an abrupt about-face: now, they insisted, wealth being spread around to more people than ever before was bad bad bad because it “trapped” people in comfort (and thus diverted the proletariat from their preordained responsibility to overturn capitalism and rage against the machine.) because logic and reason revealed that Marxism was false, some on the far left rejected rationality: “The loss of confidence in reason implied, as a matter of
    practical politics, that the intellectuals now had even less confideence
    in the average person’s capacity for abstract reasoning. It is
    hard enough for a trained intellectual to conceive, as classical
    Marxism requires, of all of humankind as ultimately members of a
    universal class sharing the same universal interests. But—the more
    epistemologically-modest theorists of the 1950s begin to ask—can
    we really expect the masses to abstract to the view that we are all
    brothers and sisters under the skin? Can the masses conceive of
    themselves as a harmonious international class? The intellectual
    capacity of the masses is much more limited, so appealing to and
    mobilizing the masses requires speaking to them about what
    matters to them and on a level that they can grasp.” (Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism (2004)

    thus the infantile protests of the Situationists and others, who rail against the system as a child rails against broccoli for supper. as philosopher john searle wrote in his 1971 book “The Campus War,” the main goal of protests is not to change anything, but to be seen looking chic and countercultural; to create a Debordian spectacle that ultimately resolves nothing but endows participants with warm fuzzies that they were immortalized by news cameras (or today, by a self-uploaded YouTube video of “fotos” collection on your own website). As searle asked, “Why is so much so-called protest not directed at solving the putative problems but at damaging universities? Why is so much of it irrational, in the sense that it does not seek to maximize the probabilities of social improvement? Why does so much of it seem to manifest deeper disaffections that have little to do with the issues? Why is so much of it of a “revolutionary” variety?”

    Now, we have the “aaron burr society,” a textbook example of situationist incoherence — after reading their homepage twice, I still don’t know if their named after Burr because they love or loathe him. the aaron burr society’s recommended reading list contains such stalwarts as Howard Zinn (a commie stooge, even after Stalin’s atrocities were exposed) and Naomi Klein (whose books repeat anti-globalization arguments that were discredited in the 1920s when they first appeared in Lenin’s book Imperialism)

    the aaron burr society us is comprised of … how many people? to hazard an educated guess, the aaron burr society a wound-up sophomore under the spell of a quasi-Marxist professor and writing from a dorm room? or is the professor the oldster in the fotos?

    in summary, I’m as angry as anyone at the financial impropriety on Wall Street. But I can’t see how irrational, bizarre protests accomplish anything worthwhile … other than making you feel bitchin’ for being so kewl and countercultural.

  • gemmarama

    guess who tried reading “society of the spectacle” but couldn’t get their head round it..?

  • gemmarama

    guess who tried reading “society of the spectacle” but couldn’t get their head round it..?