Brendan O'Neill, and who are you going to call when in urgent need of a bunny joke?

(Above: we liked the teaser so well, we wanted to preserve it in digital aspic. If it doesn't give you a laugh on a Monday, nothing will).

Thought the current round of demonstrations had something to do with Wall Street, with wealth inequality, with unfairness in the system, with fat cat financiers and bankers?

Golly, did you get out of the bed the wrong side this Monday morning.

Perhaps you read on the weekend Mike Carlton all in a rage, completely mistaking the point of what's going down:

We must all hope that the Occupy Wall Street movement is the first wave of a great global uprising against the greed, stupidity and incompetence of the world financial system. It is early days, but the signs are that it might be. Increasingly, the guitar players, hipsters, and starry-eyed dreamers who kicked it off are being joined by middle-class, Main Street Americans infuriated by the havoc brought to their lives by bankers and governments. (here)

What a klutz, what a dope.

You see, if you get up on the right side of the bed, you can take a decisive step into the la la land of Brendan O'Neill and the minions of Murdoch, which is to say the world where supposed, claimed, alleged Marxists can think Rupert Murdoch is one of the world's leading Marxist thinkers. And the current carry on and demonstrations are an insult to the workers of the world, as outlined in Wall Street occupiers are an insult to the workers:

Just imagine if, during the great New York strikes of the early 20th century, one of the leaders of the workers had stood up and yelled: "We must respect nature's limits!"

Yes it was that damn Republican and progressive Theodore Roosevelt who set up national parks, and dammit, look at what we've ended up with. Parks where people can enjoy themselves. The unmitigated cheek of the cad ...

What we have on Wall Street today is nothing progressive or pro-worker, but rather a very public display of middle-class piety, of petit-bourgeois values such as thriftiness and meanness and disdain for the vulgar hordes with their insatiable materialism. That this way of thinking and style of protesting are spreading around the world speaks to the global decay of the once progressive left.

Peti-bourgeois! Oh I do so drool with love when Marxist insults are flung around with gay abandon. And there we were thinking that thriftiness and meanness infected the world of the rich and Scrooge (or so Dickens told us), and it was the middle class who affected an insatiable materialism and gave rise to the pleasure palace malls that are direct descendants of retail emporiums ...

But I guess when you're into meaningless generalities, any port in a storm of meaningless generalities:

It is an insult to the many generations of working people who fought for a better world, for a freer and more plentiful world, to describe this internationally contagious middle-class miserabilism as a "return of working-class anger".

Yes, with the workers united under Brendan O'Neill and Rupert Murdoch, once more they will be free ... free to indulge in their insatiable materialism in a materialistic world without end or without limits.

Of course this kind of thinking, and this style of rampant indulgence has nothing to do with the actual experience of workers living through the great depression, or struggling through the great wars, or experiencing rations and poverty in the fifties ...

But you can rely on O'Neill for flatulence, and excessive verbosity and righteous indignation and the free spending of words and meaningless concepts to show how the workers can liberate themselves, and access their own kind of flatulent indulgence.

Yes, it's only by standing up for the bankers and the corporate giants and the financiers and Wall Street that you can truly recognise a friend of the workers, a kindly concerned chum who really can't stand these idle layabout protestors:

The occupiers blame the selfishness of individual bankers for bringing about the economic crisis. They demand an end to "the age of greed". Their embrace of conspiracism and cheap moralism, their borderline priestly assaults on the alleged decadence of champagne-swilling bankers, reveals the extent to which the Left has abandoned any attempt to develop a serious critique of society and the economy in favour of wailing at the wealthy.

Whatever you do, you mustn't wail against the wealthy, even if Marx was once inclined to do so. Otherwise you'll end up sounding like that dreadful Mike Carlton:

Forbes magazine, the plutocrats' bible, chortled this year that the world now has 1210 billionaires, up from 1011 last year, with a total worth of some $US4.5 trillion, more than the gross domestic product of Germany.

Even here, in lil ol' Australia, median pay for the chiefs of our top 100 companies has rocketed by 131 per cent in 10 years, with bonuses up by 190 per cent. But the stockmarket value of those companies has increased by just 31 per cent.

Oh dear, that sounds a tad perplexing. How can this be rationalised in la la land?

They think corporations are responsible for every ill. These twisted men-in-suits have apparently "poisoned the food supply through negligence", have "purposefully covered up oil spills", and have inflicted "cruel treatment on countless non-human animals". Won't anybody think of the bunnies?

Yes, by a cheap joke about bunnies of the kind you'd expect from a dimstick. Oh dear, won't someone think of the dimsticks ...

You see, it's important when trying to spread as much muddle and befuddle when pretending to be a friend of the workers by explaining how the bankers and the corporations are doing everything in their power to make life sweet and comfortable for the workers.

It also helps if you can yearn for a time when everybody sounded like an earnest young Trotskyite, early on the path to becoming a bright young Stalinist:

There was also a time when the Left believed the problems facing humanity were primarily social in nature, rather than having been brought about by the licentiousness or greed of immoral individuals.

Leftists resisted the temptation towards conspiracy theories or narrowly moralistic critiques of society, in favour of arguing that through proper use of our intellectual resources we could work out what was wrong with society, and how to fix it.

Ah yes comrade, time to call a committee meeting, roll out the intellectual resources, banish the splitters and set up the next five year plan to address the primarily social problems facing society (and whatever you do don't mention individual licentiousness or greed or immoral individuals, or Comrade O'Neill will have you evicted from the room. Comrade Stalin, you can stay. because no one would ever accuse you of ambition or power mongering or being an immoral individual).

Yep, it's not just delusions about the issues facing the world, it's delusions about what it was like to be a member of the working classes in the olden days ...

Naturally the wretched Carlton just kept rabbiting on about stuff, no doubt because he's a bunny lover:

At the heart of it all was the lie that conservatives cling to even today, the so-called "trickle down theory" that everyone would win if the rich were allowed to get ever richer. Or as the great American economist John Kenneth Galbraith memorably put it: ''If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows."

O'Neill's answer?

Some commentators have madly claimed that OWS represents a return of "working-class anger". It is no such thing. It's more an expression of middle-class anger with the working classes, for being thick, greedy, Foxed automatons who dare to think differently from their alleged moral superiors in the banker-bashing East Coast liberal set.

Uh huh. Now you might think that this is a scribbler in favour of being a thick, greedy, Foxed automation, who dares to think differently by thinking like every other member of the sheeples herded along the road, but I'm afraid you'd entirely miss the point. Which is sparrow, that you should get out on the road, and fossick amongst the oats on the road ...

You see, you have to be morally superior to the morally superior East Coast liberal set to understand that banker-bashing is cruel and unnatural and inhumane. Won't someone think of the poor helpless hapless bankers? So much sweeter and cuter than bunnies.

Poor old Mike Carlton thinks he's insulting the wealthy and the bankers:

The money just funnelled upwards and stayed there. Consider these interesting facts:

The richest 1 per cent of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90 per cent.

In Britain, half the population holds just 1 per cent of the country's cash. The gap between rich and poor is wider than at any time since World War II.

Really! Carlton simply can't understand that he's insulting the workers with this kind of bizarre logic, and errant interest in statistics.

Let Brendan O'Neill show how a real, genuine concern for the workers is done:

It is an insult to the many generations of working people who fought for a better world, for a freer and more plentiful world, to describe this internationally contagious middle-class miserabilism as a "return of working-class anger".

Ah yes, you've read that once already, but hey, the point about conspicuous consumption is you always ask for seconds, even thirds. You should never worry about getting fat, and then going on welfare and getting the commentariat agitated about indolent bludgers ... More gruel please should be the cry ...

The alternative is too frightful to contemplate. It might lead to the kind of miserabilism and intolerance and irrational commentariat anger that sees O'Neill lash out at any one who dares to be different, and who dares to think differently, and who might actually seize on the opportunity for protest in a democracy, the result of all sorts of people fighting for a world where views might be expressed ...

So what should we settle for instead? How about another serving of that rolled gold Brendan O'Neill anger (yes, we know rolled gold is second rate gold, but it's all we've got since the bank foreclosed ...)

Week in, week out, you can count on lashings of Brendan O'Neill anger.

Would suggesting he consult a therapist be problematic? Of course, it would involve contagious middle-class indulgence, almost as awful as miserabilism. No decent worker would spend money on a shrink ...

How about an anger management course? Sorry, that would merely be insulting, when after all, we're attempting to develop a serious critique of society and the economy, by wailing at the ways of the middle class ...

What can be done? Well it's probably best to start the week with a hearty laugh, bunker down, and hope that the anger isn't internationally contagious, and might, like some of the more threatening viruses, be contained to the la la land of Murdoch's minions ...

Oh and we might just paraphrase Mike Carlton as a way of getting to the heart of O'Neill's piece:

And what is being done about this scary state of affairs? Answer: nothing, according to the angry, concerned Brendan O'Neill. Governments print money so that bankers can merrily continue to capitalise their profits and socialise their losses. Greed is as unbridled as ever, and that's a jolly good thing.

End the occupation of Wall Street, end it now, so that everyone in the land can fill up the heart of cities with four wheel drives and Hummers and whatever else their heart desires, or get into debt and go bankrupt, or go bunny shooting, or turn into fashionistas, whatever your deeply greedy, profoundly materialistic, devotedly consumerist lifestyle can afford on a well heeled commentariat salary where honest toil is replaced by pounding away on a keyboard (oh yes, the hazards, the dangers of blisters on the fingertips as a result of all that honest working class toiling). Perhaps you might even enjoy magic water and a classy sourdough bread ...

Hang on, hang on that sort of aspirational indulgence is sounding dangerously middle class, almost inner west, chardonnay sipping, champagne loving, latte devouring, well heeled, tertiary educated, sneeringly secularist, and rampantly indulgent, as opposed to miserabilist ...

Well when you discuss the world in stereotypes and cliches, which tends to involve sharing a hookah with Alice's caterpillar and a cup of tea with the Mad Hatter, why are you surprised that you get confused, angry, dipstick bunnies for columnists?

(Below: a few cartoons evoking the terrible confusion in America, wherein it's proposed that the middle class somehow are unable to indulge in conspicuous consumerism. Silly middle class people, it's not the bankers or Wall street, it's all your fault).