The problem that Occupy Wall Street has getting its message out is the same problem the left has had in the post-Reagan era: they haven't come up with a good way to articulate their argument that the state needs to take an active role in society, especially the economy. In the face of "government is the problem" rhetoric, many Democrats have simply caved and accepted the basic premise, ala Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama. Obama started to go in a different direction, but his general ineptitude with messaging hasn't gotten anywhere.

The left needs to articulate that it's not a question of the size of government, it's a question of whose interests the government is protecting; is it us, or them? Then they need to come up with clear, specific things that could be done. How about putting Americans back to work through a new CCC, a new WPA? Putting people back to work puts real money in peoples' pockets and back into the economy, reduces the real long-term problems caused by long-term unemployment, and most importantly would restore peoples' faith in their government. It worked in the 30s, at the very least restoring peoples' faith in the promise of America. People simply want jobs, not handouts.

There have been some good points raised about history being more than narrative that I would like to weigh in on. As a Ph.D student in history, I have thought about the fascinating possibilities of using video games as teaching tools, for video games, especially complex non-linear ones such as Grand Theft Auto and others, tend to emphasize a sense of contingency: that choices are are made for many different and often personal reasons, and that unexpected consequences result. World of Warcraft and other MMOs have gone even farther in this direction. Contingency is one of the most important facets of history that I try and emphasize with my students: that narration is just a tool to help us understand events, but when it comes down to it determining causality is an extremely difficult enterprise in which a multitude of factors need to be considered when considering human actors. I, unlike some, do not want to completely discard narrative or to give up on determining causality; for me, the ultimate project is to humanize the past, to get down to the individual level, beyond crude economic determinism and hollow constructs. I haven't worked it out completely, but basic parameters such as being able to experience an event from multiple perspectives on replays, having the subject be able to make choices within the parameters of available evidence, and not having endings predetermined would go a long way towards furthering the project of understanding the past not as a series of inevitable events, but as complex human stories.

Perhaps this is a pipe dream, but we're talking about sci-fi technology here, so why not? Imagine what would happen if we invest in alternative energy sources on a massive scale - say 500 billion dollars, which could come from the defense budget (still leaving the United States as the top single spender on for defense, spending nearly twice as much as the next largest spender, France, according to wikipedia's figures). If we didn't need fossil fuel, we would most certainly be able to pull out of the middle east, and ignore them just like we ignore Africa (not that this is a good thing, but that's another issue...). There goes the main reason for war cited by those who attacked us on 9/11 - the fact the we are occupying muslim lands. See Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. In fact, we could view investing in alternative energy sources AS defense spending - a solid investment in a crucial strategic interest of the United States, not to mention a great way to attack the current environmental problems we face. This sort of investment would not solve the problem overnight, and undoubtedly it would need to be allocated very carefully, but just look at what we did back during the Cold War era when we seriously invested in education and technology - we reached the moon, something that would have been considered science fiction 30 years previously! Call me naive, but I can hope, right?