WaPo Not 'Shy' About Plugging 'Art of Occupy'

December 6th, 2011 12:39 PM

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.