Celebrities being arseholes about Occupy Wall Street

Legendary comic writer/artist Frank Miller is proving himself to be an arsehole over the Occupy movement. Well, I never liked his work as much as many others, even in my comic reading days – overrated and way too much problematic stuff regarding race and gender for my taste. This post is still stunningly nasty. It’s also real smart to blanket-insult a movement whose demographics probably intersect with that of comic book buyers in no small way. After all, the Occupy movement took its symbol from a comic, though not one of Miller’s.

Another celebrity who is being an arsehole about the Occupy movement is Joachim Gauck, Lutheran priest turned East German civil rights activist turned keeper of the Stasi files turned failed presidential candidate. Gauck considers the Occupy protests silly, because they are Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Capitalism automatically equals Communism and Gauck suffered under Communism, as he never fails to remind anyone who will listen to him. And anyway, the Monday demonstration movement in East Germany in 1989 was so much more noble and the only true revolution, blah, blah, blah. This interview clip from Kulturzeit has his whole justification.

I never really understood the Gauck-mania that swept parts of Germany last year – though I did not particularly like Gauck’s opponent Christian Wulff either, speaking as someone living in Niedersachsen where he was prime minister for several years. Gauck was too old in my opinion, too mired in his past as a civil rights hero and unable to move on twenty years after the fall of the Wall. Now however, Christian Wulff is proving himself to be a surprisingly good and measured president, while Gauck insults some 80 percent of the people he was supposed to represent as a president (80 percent of Germans sympathize with the goals of the Occupy movement) and significant swarthes of the two parties that nominated him for the office in the first place. This is even more stunning since even conservative politicians like secretary finance Wolfgang Schäuble (who is the last person anybody would accuse of being a leftist) have expressed their understanding for the protesters.

For the record, I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of the Occupy movement and their political aims truly are vague. But I certainly understand why they are angry.