O-15

Chris Hedges hits it out of the park in Times Square. I'm old enough to know why he chokes up at the end. Occasionally I've felt the same way while watching the feeds. Because my generation -- those of us born in the shadow of the decades-long American decline, who are old enough to remember the Cold War -- failed to stop neoliberalism, until it nearly wrecked the world.

Well, maybe failure is too strong a word. "We tried to warn them, but the Administrator just wouldn't listen", as a famous line in Valve's Half Life (1998) put it. This Empire (and its semi-peripheral clones) was an immovable weight on this planet's neck for thirty-five years.

Now that weight is shifting. Most of those semi-peripheral clones have been swept away, and the final redoubts of Empire -- the ones Americans have been carrying around in their minds for centuries -- are now beginning to totter. Just as Egyptian soldiers left their barracks and joined the Arab Spring, Sgt. Shamar Thomas came back from the Middle East and delivered this amazing lesson in civic patriotism.

Something magical is happening, something which happens only once in a lifetime. Zizek gets it right: the protests are a new kind of ink, the digital ink out of which the 99% will begin to reshape the destiny of this planet.

All births are deeply sacred moments, and this one has its own special elixir of joy, anxiety and wonder. You can almost see the vast, skyscraper-sized shapes of Bearzilla, Pandazilla, and Brazilla off in the mist, singing and chortling and greeting some new arrivals: the people of Tunis, the workers of Cairo, the lions of the desert who defeated North Africa's Mussolini, and so many others...