Your Saturday Guide To Guy Day, Guys

TPM has your list of other Guy Fawkes Day "celebrations" this weekend as both Anonymous and Occupy Together have a number of things planned.

This year, a number of distinct but somewhat overlapping quasi-political protest events against banks, media companies and a Mexican drug cartel have been planned for November 5, 2011 by various groups, including various people working under the name of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, the Occupy Wall Street protesters and one woman dedicated to undermining the nation’s largest banks. Even MTV is getting in on the action.

Whether any of the plans come to fruition - and if so, to what extent - remains to be seen. After all, last November 5, 2010, passed without much action.

Still, whatever happens, there’s no denying that the day, formerly not widely celebrated outside of England, has gained currency around the Web in the last five years as the hacktivist collective Anonymous has grown, with self-identifying Anonymous members adopting and promoting the symbolism of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by the vigilante main character in “V for Vendetta,” a seminal Alan Moore graphic novel turned Hollywood movie about said vigilante’s violent guerilla war against a futuristic totalitarian U.K. government. 

Still, it will be interesting to see if Operation Fox Hunt and Bank Transfer Day are successful (or if they're even noticed.)  Somehow I think both of them will be more than most people expect, but we'll see what happens on whether the Village actually reports on it or not.  Personally, I think FOX will gladly use Anonymous to tie to Obama as thugs and will do so for the rest of the campaign season.  It's right up their "Obama/ACORN/OWS/NBPP Axis of blackity black blackness coming for your nubile white daughters in the night" alley to play that particular victim card.

Keep an eye on it.  Because frankly, if FOX's online propaganda arm was shut down for a while as people realized that FOX News is not, in fact, a news organization but the media division of the GOP and its corporate masters, then maybe the country could heal a bit as Steve M. suggests.

Then again, FOX does like to overplay its hand.