Comic-Book Legend Frank Miller on Occupy Wall Street (OWS): "Wake up, pond scum."
Legendary comic-book auteur and movie director Frank Miller channels his celebrated version of The Batman, and lays into the Occupy movement:
"Occupy" is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.
"Occupy" is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the "movement" – HAH! Some "movement", except if the word "bowel" is attached—is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.
This is no popular uprising. This is garbage.
So far, IMO, Miller is making some cogent points: As demonstrated in more than a few Reason videos and commentaries, the Occupants (Occupiers? Occutards?) seem to be missing the basic point that if the government bailout of politically connected financial institutions was awful (and it was), a bailout of, say, holders of student loans isn't the way to correct the problem.
But then Miller, creator of the Sparta-worshipping comic The 300, goes into a non-sequitur that is more mind-bending than his early Daredevil morphology:
Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.
Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.
And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently—must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh—out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.
In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas' basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft.
Got that? Shaddupya face about TARP and other policy FUBARS because of Islamic extremists? I'm really not following here. Sure, fixed-gear-bike hipsters are annoying as hell. The OWS crowd is violent in a way that the much-more-maligned Tea Party never has been, and god knows that Salon's manifesto is rock-bottom-rotten. It's unclear, though, that Osama bin Laden is chuckling in whatever paradise he resides in.
Channeling America-Love-it-or-Leave-it rhetoric that wasn't convincing when articulated by a pre-prison Spiro Agnew is no way to win arguments and influence people. But then again, when it comes to the Occupy movement, neither its participants nor its critics seem overly interested in persuasion per se.
Hat Tip: The great Sean Higgins of Investors Business.
Bonus to look forward to: Reason's Peter Suderman reviews Miller's new (and widely panned) anti-Islam graphic novel, Holy Terror, in the next issue of the mag.
