Occupiers’ Alternative Lifestyle Comes Out of Somebody Else’s Pocket
If you’ve never watched “The Rockford Files,” then you have missed some of the greatest social commentary ever to come out of a sit-com. One of the best episodes is when Jim Rockford, played by James Garner, teams up with a New Age nut named Jane Patten who goes by the name Sky Aquarian (Valerie Curtin). If you ever want to know the answer to the question “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?,” then this episode of “The Rockford Files” is the one to see. It’s called “Quickie Nirvana.” It was first broadcast November 11, 1977.
There’s another scene in this episode where Rockford engages the mumbo-jumbo insantity of what would describe today’s Occupy Wall Streeter.
Rockford: What can you do, lady?
Jane: My consciousness doesn’t lend itself to problem solving like yours, okay! I’m into an alternative lifestyle. I’m a seeker after truth. Now what’s so wrong with that?
Rockford: You’re alternative lifestyle comes out of somebody else’s pocket. You mooch, you borrow, you hardly work, but anybody who doesn’t go along with it . . . They’re fascists, unmellow, competitive; all that love and freedom is just another way of saying me first!
Jane: It is not!
Rockford: Yes it is! You just don’t have a sense of responsibility, that’s all there is to it!
Jane: What I mean is I’m not into a structured living or accumulated things. I’m into my consciousness!
Rockford: Consciousness! You’re practically unconscious 24 hours a day! What you’re into is having someone else do your thinking for you. There’s Gordon Borchet, Baa Baa the Bhagavad Gita. Next it’s going to be Sam Levinson or Francis the Talking Mule for all I know. They have all the answers, right. Don’t you have any answers of your own?
There is nothing new under the Sun. What goes around comes around. Today’s Occupiers think they’ve discovered the truth, that they were with it first. Baloney. Their worldview has been tried and found wanting. A dose of “Quickie Nirvana” might prove to be the cure.