In his book A People’s History of the Vietnam War, the American-expatriate author and playwright Jonathan Neale describes a scene in 1966, in the midst what would become one of the longest and most sanguinary periods in American history. President Johnson, in consultation with his advisors, is told by some simpering geek from the Pentagon that according to their computer’s calculations, the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved many more lives in the long run than they claimed; thus, he argues, a full-scale carpet-bombing of Hanoi is in order. Johnson’s response managed (unwittingly) to capture the spirit of the time:

"I have one more problem for your computer- will you feed into it how long it would take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?"

The United States has a proud history of progressive protest (and an equally long and more vomitous history of reactionary protest), beginning at least with the Boston Tea Party, now appropriated and degraded by the baser elements of American society. As I have written before, we seem to lack this flair for dissidence in Canada.

We have no equivalent in our literary canon, for instance, of Henry David Thoreau, who once wrote, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Instead, we have the gruelling onanism of SlutWalk, the deranged warblings of Ron Banerjee, and a free ride for Henry Kissinger.

The most recent instalment in the narrative of the Great American Protest is the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now nearly a month old, the march began as a crowd of disgruntled everymen descending on the hub of American – if not global – finance to vent their rage at a system they perceive to have failed them. These are the true discontents of globalization, hinted at in Joseph E. Stiglitz’s landmark 2002 book. One is reminded of Sidney Lumet’s extraordinary film Network, in which a crushed and possibly schizophrenic news anchor implores his bovine audience to get out of their chairs and shout: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

There are several major criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Largely promulgated by the Fox News folks, the gist of it all is this: there is no coherent message, no real leaders, no official goals. It is simply not enough, these detractors claim, to be emphatically opposed to the continued esurience of global financiers. But this is to ignore the context out of which the protests have sprung; on the Occupy Wall Street website, the organizers specifically make reference to those movements which may be said to have been progenitors: the Egyptian revolution that saw the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the various protests in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the major demonstrations in Spain back in the spring, which were subsequently banned by the Spanish government. There are many reasons to feel antipathy towards America, but their tolerance of political dissent is not one of them.

The parallels we ought to be drawing are to those protests mentioned. Did the demonstrators at Tahrir Square know anything about democracy, or have any prescribed program for change? Of course not. There were no leaders in Cairo, either (for which, admittedly, the Egyptians seem to be paying), but that did not delegitimize their protest, or their grievances. These criticisms are the pathetic sneers of an arch-reactionary political faction, the intellectual bankruptcy of which appears to be pursued by the financial bankruptcy of the country. This is the legacy of sloppy fiscal conservatism.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have proven fecund. There are now Occupations in Atlanta, Buffalo, Seattle, Chicago, and Austin; in London, Rome, and Edinburgh; in Vancouver and now in Toronto.

The Canadian protests might seem a tad odd. There were no big bank bailouts in Canada; in fact, when the housing bubble of 2007/2008 burst and the auto industry found itself thoroughly mangled, the only bailout of note that resulted in this country was that of General Motors, which took $1.4 billion in loans from the Canadian government. This was initially met with some scepticism from a great many people, myself included (isn’t failure what capitalism is all about, after all?), but we are now forced to admit we were wrong. The loans were repaid five years ahead of schedule, and hundreds of jobs were saved.

So what, then, are the folks down at the Market Exchange griping about? Well, at best it is show of solidarity with the counterpart movements in the United States, which in itself is admirable and worthy of our support. And if you vide their website, you may be somewhat impressed to find that they claim to be “sending a message to the financial sector worldwide that banks exist to serve us, not the other way around, that the practices of speculation and fractional reserve lending have created a massive inequality and are no longer valid systems.”

This is considerably more coherent a mission statement than the American organizers have managed to devise; currency speculation and fractional reserve lending are specific policies that can be specifically reformed. In Stiglitz’s book Globalization and Its Discontents, he notes that currency speculation was a root cause of Thailand’s real estate and stock market bubble back in the ’80s. He describes it as an “exuberance” of “hot, speculative money” exacerbated by the International Monetary Fund’s quasi-Reaganomic free-market policies that ultimately ended up with a lot more money going into the pockets of currency speculators than the Thai economy.

If there is one major impediment to the Canadian manifestations of the Occupy protests, it is that they are Canadian. Whatever it is that prevents us from being anything but frivolous or farcical eludes me, but I suspect it’s not so much the politicians as the electorate, and the bloody journalists. Consider that while the demonstrators are congregating to protest currency speculation, the Toronto Star, the most widely circulated newspaper in Canada, ran a front page article a few days ago profiling a certain Fawad Khan, a man who makes money doing - guess what? Currency speculation.

I would like to imagine that a newspaper that pretends to be as “progressive” as the Star does would be lampooning this behaviour, but I encourage you to read the article and see if it makes the practice anything less than appealing.

This is to say nothing at all of the Star’s appalling coverage of the protest itself. Open yesterday’s paper and you’ll find a series of flippant profiles of the various Occupations in Halifax, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver, with hockey-card stats including “Beefs” and “Best Dressed.” The Star is careful to mention, when discussing the “Beefs” of the Montreal protest, that one of the protesters wrote “Kevin O’Reilly” on a sign instead of “Kevin O’Leary,” and the “Best Dressed” section is devoted to sneering at outlandishly clad protesters. All this is nothing less than an opportunistic Us Weekly-esque indulgence in sensationalism, turning what ought to be a meaningful political protest into just another farcical Canadian dog-and-pony show. By refusing to report seriously on this issue, the Toronto Star does nothing but undermine the movement and further compound its position as the kind of establishment press that is part of the problem in the first place.

The National Post is no better, devoting much its time to discussing the non-event that was the “conflict” between John Fox of the American Indian Movement, and the organizers of the Occupy Toronto protest. Why is the Canadian press devoting all of its time to discrediting or jeering at these people? Those of you who take some delight in assuming a holier-than-thou attitude towards Americans might take note; our media is just as partisan, just as reactionary, and just as ineffectual.

So far, the Occupy protests have grown and have not faltered. But although they have not failed, at least in Canada they are flailing through a darkness of reportage that is unwilling to support them. One only hopes they find some handhold before the whole edifice collapses and Canada is once again left where it began: holding an empty bag.