WaPo Not 'Shy' About Plugging 'Art of Occupy'
Washington Post Style section editors gave freelance writer Mark Jenkins space for a 9-paragraph, 9-illustration feature item today entitled "Nothing shy in the art of Occupy."
"The occupiers don't have a single agenda, so there's no way any of the posters can be off-message," Jenkins gushed. "They might slaughter Wall Street's bull or show the takedown of the Monopoly icon, or they can send a bold and colorful message to authority," reads a caption underneath four post images on page C1 of the December 6 paper.
"Occupy's fundamental, if unofficial, target is wealth and its power, most often embodied by the 'Charging Bull' statue that stands near Wall Street," Jenkins explained, noting that "Occupy's artists depict the beast being lassoed, castrated, exploded, eviscerated by a bear and -- more than once -- being segmented as in a butcher-shop chart of steaks, chops and roasts."
Peaceful rhetoric, huh?
While Jenkins admits in closing that "the placards' confrontational graphics are a minority taste" that are "meant for people who dream of being on the barricades, not for the ones who'd rather watch on TV when the tyrant's statue topples."
That's the closest the Post has come to admitting the far-left socialistic impulses of the Occupy Movement. For his part, Jenkins failed to dive too deeply into the politics of the artists he featured, but a simple Google search turns up some wacky stuff.
For example, artist Roger Peet -- who drew a poster of a bear eviscerating the Wall Street bull (shown at right)-- is a radical environmentalist who opposes biofuels and insists that "The only thing that might be [ecologically] sustainable is diminished consumption and a smaller human population."
Peet apparently would also like to feed the rich to the sharks:
I made the sharky graphic at the center of this poster....I liked the sharks and the message and thus created this, which seems to me to imply some sort of shark hypnosis: bring the rich to the water, humans, we know what needs to be done.
- Ken Shepherd's blog
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Comments
The Occupy Movement
Submitted by bkeyser on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 1:53pm.
is done. Or at least on it's last public defecation. It was nothing more than an orchestrated techno-mobilization effort by progressives as a test run for 2012. Mark my words, this will resurface next summer. It wasn't about art. It wasn't about Wall Street. It wasn't about corporate greed. It was about mobilization.
The added bonus for the left is that these fools were never able to establish any sort of message at all, which means spoon-feeding them one next summer will be easy. The downtwinkles and General Assemblies and Human Mics were all just the machinations of a bunch of kids playing government in a public park. To them it was a social studies thesis come to life. To the left it was a harbinger. Organizers are wringing their hands in excitement. They'll be poll-testing the message all winter, and paring it down to 140 characters or less by spring.
And if Eric Holder is still AG, they'll be occupying polling stations next November.
Occupying polling stations
Submitted by ThisnThat on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 10:11pm.
Don't laugh. Another part of the test was to see which kind of people and what kind of messaging works best to keep liberal politicians from enforcing laws. The lawlessness was wide-spread, and I'll bet the organizers learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work. There will be a lot more things "occupied" this summer into fall.
__________
“Didn't win the Medal of Honor? Didn't even serve? Then lie about it. We'll support you." — 9th Circuit Court
"They might slaughter Wall
Submitted by Bhaal on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 2:31pm.
"They might slaughter Wall Street's bull or show the takedown of the Monopoly icon, or they can send a bold and colorful message to authority, or they may re-enact Kristallnacht."
Seems to flow.
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/kristallnacht/
remarkable similarity
Submitted by Mark81150 on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 4:53pm.
To Soviet Stalin era art that used similar stark symbolism, with the dehumanized victims being offered up as getting their just deserts.
This kind of fool is the same kind, who like Billy Ayers can calmly discuss executing twentyfive million Americans for the sin of being loyal to the country, and in the next breath denounce the peaceful Tea Partiers as violent reactionary types who must be locked up.
He can man the barricades,.. it'll make the clean up all the more pleasant to find him in the debris,(clutching his copy of Mao's little red book), I know that thought makes me smile. Being an old cold war vet, nothing makes me doubt the intelligence of the occupiers like their embrace of a discredited dead idiology. I mean a 100 million dead in the last century wasn't enough for these rocket scientists? Dried up old seditious scumbags, and college age retro revolutionaries,.... none with a clue, or a work ethic.
So, would this "artist" take offense if I handed out posters with his communist pals being hanged for their war crimes?
no sense of humor amongst the revoltionaries.
Wow, the symbolism is none too subtle.
Submitted by JLin on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 5:42pm.
The Russian bear slaughtering the "Wall Street" bull. The stark communist red with the white and black contrast is classic too, but what caught my eye was the subliminal message in the graphical color breakup of the word "OCCUPY". My mind read it as "CCCP".
That people, especially Americans, are that emotionally invested in an evil 19th century totalitarian philosophy is beyond comprehension. This evil is being bred in the schools and it is getting more aggressive.
⇒ The Occupy Bear
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Wed, 12/07/2011 - 3:18am.
I'm thinking a better "Occupy" mascot would be the that Charmin Toilet Paper bear except he grabs hold of a police car.