Why is the Occupy Wall Street crowd inadvertently making Mr. Sinister their mascot? Nobody knows, but the "mutant" theme is rather apropos.
It was only a matter of time. The “Occupy Wall Street” crowd has been around for days now, and they needed a mascot. Should they turn to the guy spraying diarrhea on a cop car? Zombies? A college kid who protests by day, but asks mom to put money on his meal card at night? The guy wearing the V for Vendetta mask? The clock was ticking.
It turns out that Marvel Comics’ Mr. Sinister is the winner—at least in my book. At Tea Party rallies, the hardest of the hard-core dress up as the founding fathers. At an “Occupy” rally, your run of the mill attendee dresses as a zombie. At Tea Party rallies, really old people with loose bowels and bladder control issues manage to get through the ordeal without making a mess on the National Mall. At Occupy Wall Street gatherings, it appears your average Joe feels the need to defecate on a police car.
“Doug, Doug, Doug…you’re being unfair!” you say? “That was only one guy who opted for Number Two to demonstrate his displeasure.
True. But I surmise there would have been a few more incidents, had those using the local jail’s bathroom to relieve themselves been given the opportunity. Besides, when someone shows me a picture of a George Washington look alike at a Tea Party with his pants around his ankles or his hands in cuffs I’ll apologize.
What’s going on? Oddly enough, City Journal found a local writer who knows (and who happens to be my sister):
There’s this running gag on the Internet where, whenever someone makes a mountain out of a molehill—“GRRR! Glee sucking this season!!! FML!!!—someone retorts, “#FirstWorldProblems.” Three simple words, but they illustrate one’s lack of proportion with comparative ease. When life is exponentially easier for you than it was for most of the world throughout most of human history— right up until the mid-twentieth century—boredom creates a vacuum. To be a hero, you have to create your own dragon to slay. But fighting real oppression, the kind ayatollahs dispense daily? Too brutal, too gauche. Mastering the intricacies of credit-default swaps so as to articulate an effective reform of the broken financial system? Way too tough. Better to create a dragon that can only be slain with performance-art zombie metaphors.
It turns out that if you spend your days playing Xbox and your nights running up debt at the local clubs it doesn’t translate into human capital; it only translates into more debt. But hey, the Xbox told you that if you voted for Barack Obama everything would be fine, right? Wrong.
It turns out that if you spend tens-of-thousands of dollars for a Music Theater degree at NYU it might be hard to recoup that cost after graduation (especially if Mom and Dad stop shelling out bucks). Who knew.
Conservatives know about winners and losers, profits and loss—and they’ve tried to convince us: “When you bail out losers there’s no end to the costs.”
Dear Occupy Wall Street crowd,
Call me when you take Econ 101 and I’ll congratulate you. I just won’t shake your hand because I know where that thing has been…
