There were scads of new people at last night's Otto's get-together. Two of them turned out to be a couple who had been in New York with the "Occupy Wall Street" mob getting arrested on Brooklyn Bridge. The guy was infuriated that I kept snickering at his righteous difference-making revolutionary status; apparently it makes up for his nowhere non-union job with the university. Funny thing is, he's being forced to work part-time because he won't join the union, and somehow that's the fault of The Man instead of the Teamsters. Real sense of cognitive dissonance there.

He's pissed about Obama too, and kept going on about not wanting "the lesser of two evils", and was yammering about how the Obamabots were trying to take over the Wall Street neo-commie campaign. Towards the end of the night, I said something about how I was a firm believer in the least of presented evils. One of the other new people asked in anticipatory horror who I'd vote for, and I admitted as how I'm still looking at Rick Perry. Apparently the WIC thing is a big to-do in Democratic circles. I got dragged into the discussion, but at the end I pointed out that in conservative new media, people are much more agitated about Green corporate welfare like Solyndra than actual welfare scamming, O'Keefe showboating about ACORN and similar organizations aside.

I should be more sympathetic to Joe Protester, because I had a rough late Nineties stuck in nowhere jobs, and I was pretty pissed and radical (for me, at least) about it. But the sympathy bleeds away when you start rambling starry-eyed about the wonderful "non-profit, non-profit" farming communes in Burlington, VT and how they give food away to the homeless and spend their free time taking care of the elderly and blah, blah, anarcho-commie blah. His wife/girlfriend was pretty quiet, and seemed to have a grad-student job with the Agriculture College with prospects.

The rest of the new people were law-clerk buddies of a friend of a friend. Wasn't able to talk much with them, I hate our usual table at Otto's, it's an echoing, exposed, cramped pen of a booth. You can't hear what somebody's saying three or four people over unless they're yelling across the table like Joe Protester.