“Mic check. MIC CHECK!”

The now-familiar chant of OccupyLA protesters wafted through the warm night air outside the south-side steps of City Hall, as a lanky man with corkscrew hair drew closer to the mic. Old men in track pants, hippie girls with hula hoops, young men in suits and the now ubiquitous Guy Fawkes’ masks, were asking him to speak up. Hundreds of others, their dome tents sprung up like a blanket of mushrooms on the lawn, faced his direction. For the second night, a consensus failed to be reached on the subject of courting unions. “In New York, they came to Zuccotti Park. We don’t even have a list of demands yet,” he argued, noting that local media had erroneously attributed a recent protest at a downtown BoA to OccupyLA. “We can’t afford to get hijacked.”

As Occupy Wall Street entered its fourth week, the movement has spread to some 840 cities, and a fair criticism—lack of cohesive message—nipped at OccupyLA. In late September, a new maxim was proved: he who registers ye olde domain name first, wins. A cyberspace kerfuffle between Occupylosangeles.org and OccupyLA.org resulted in a vote being taken on the location of the main action before the great unwashed had a voice in it, irking many of the nearly 100 folks who showed up for the first publicized “General Assembly” in Pershing Square. A “focus on minutiae” dogged early GA meetings; audible giggles were heard as a sort of “protest semaphore”—hand signals to indicate confusion, disagreement, and the like—took eons to work out; protesters clutching sheets of cardboard wandered around LA Historic Park, looking for a poster-making event; a mistyped announcement had directed them to the post-Burning Man Decompression party by mistake.

A week and a half into ‘official’ Occupation, and with ten times the initial participants, OccupyLA boasts the support of city council members, supplies donated by the LAPD, laudable organization—but still, what some complain is a lack of focus on the core issues: Wall Street’s blatant raping of the country, overturning the notion of corporate person-hood, wealth distribution more grossly unequal than that of Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt–the last point articulated in the chant, “We are the 99%”–as in 1% of Americans control 40% of the nation’s current wealth.

The sparkling weather adds a touch of surrealism not found in Boise, DC, or Portland, just as the mirage of what’s nebulously referred to as Tinseltown is never far off. Political protest, Los Angeles style: news vans nestled nearby on the eve of OccupyLA’s march to City Hall were parked there, in fact, to resume coverage of Conrad Murray’s trial the following Monday. For a time, the mayor’s office had been occupied by the crew of Gangster Squad, a period noir recounting LAPD efforts to keep the mob out of town, and while star Ryan Gosling snubbed the protest, plenty of celebs brought their support—Chuck D, Shepard Fairey, Danny Glover. Dr. Cornel West spoke; Tom Morello performed “This Land is Your Land;” Fox poked microphones into the faces of the least articulate and most outlandishly dressed.

“We’ve got every kind of ideologist from Marxists to Tea Partiers here,” Dan, an out of work carpenter says, underlying the difficulty in even reaching a “democratic consensus.” Posters demanding campaign finance reform and reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, signs dissing the bank bailouts, student debt, dependence on unsustainable energy, the endless wars, the mortgage crisis, drug policy—all vie for eyeballs. On that first day at City Hall, 911 theorists had a presence. Eight days later, a screen on the lawn was projecting the horrors of factory farming, a table was set up to promote “The Zeitgeist Movement,” and some feared the focus was being lost before it had been found. “This is like the whole city’s soap box,” Max, a CSLA junior, half-way complained, his gaze settling on a hand-lettered list of demands which included Roosevelt’s lost 2nd Bill of Rights, universal healthcare and free education. “We all had issues we were pissed off about coming down here. But if we can’t focus, we’re toast. We have to present an articulate message.”

While chanting “we are peaceful,” various activists believe corporate interests are planning infiltration of the movement. While Fox News bellows that OWS has cost NYC taxpayers $2 million in additional police work, they fail to mention JP Morgan recently “donated” over twice that amount to the NYPD. It’s different here: today’s LAPD is not Daryl Gates’ LAPD, although potential police brutality had been a primary concern. (Before OccupyLA had been granted their permit last Thursday, which among other things, allows for sound amplification, a splinter group of self-described “anarchists” claiming responsibility for the MacArthur Park May Day mini-riot in 2007 blasted music after midnight in an unsuccessful attempt to bait the cops.)

Amid speculation that even one single interloper could unleash all kinds of ugly (right-wing turd/American Spectator editor Patrick Howley having bragged about infiltrating the Washington DC Air and Space Museum protest, his lone, aggressive attempts to “mock and undermine” the Occupy movement resulting in clouds of pepper spray unleashed on peaceful marchers), protesters are on their best behavior. Murmurs of Bush’s 2008 Mutual Military Agreement with Canada, of FEMA-run camps for dissidents , wind their way through the crowd. “People blaming the Bilderbergs, the CFR, the Trilateral Commission—some of that seems closer to real now,” an anonymous security committee member notes. “But who needs ‘em, when we know what the Koch brothers and Lloyd Blankfein do blatantly.”

Just as organizer Stephen Box rightly had reminded everyone that “the Declaration of Independence arose from a list of problems Americans stood up against,” it is understood that “we’re up against a monster, not a unicorn,” but, as someone had noted at Pershing Square, “This is a national grassroots movement still in its infancy. We’re not gonna come out with a magna carta in two days. We’re here because we’re fed up with this convoluted mess.”

With no consensus reached on union involvement, the GA moves on. “We have a special guest,” the night’s moderator says. Antonio, a participant in Madrid’s civil uprising six months earlier, approached the mic. “Am I dreaming?” he said. “We had the same questions that you have here… we debated for weeks. What is important is… the difference between leadership and representation. Focus on the main questions. There are two things to do first: create a solid structure, and then address the issues. Ideologies—we are not talking about Left and Right, but about changing the system.” In Spain, this has resulted in a new political party with parliamentary representation; in Italy, it’s led to a transparency counsel, in Iceland, the creation of a new constitution. America could use a system over ride, but one wonders just what can be changed in this deranged, imbalanced republic. Amid cheers, Antonio continued: “It took Spain two months to get to where you are in nine days.”

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