Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(I’m trying to catch up on postings from before my hospital time, just the few for which materials were already on my desktop. This is the first.)

From, I think, Ann Burlingham, this Octopi Wall Street t-shirt, based on Ray Troll’s 2011 political cartoon (one of a number he did):

The t-shirt, with the slogans “Less Inc More Ink”, “Bail Out Boats Not Banks”, and “Eat the Rich”

From the Mother Jones magazine of 10/6/11, in “Octopi Wall Street! by Dave Gilson

A few days ago, photographer and idea blogger David Friedman tweeted, “Octopi Wall Street. You can have that.” Beyond the Occupy Wall Street-inspired wordplay, he was on to something. There’s a long American tradition of mixing economic populism with cephalopods.

Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi famously described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” More recently, Mother Jones cartoonist Zina Saunders drew the Koch brothers as the twin heads of an oil- and money-spewing “Kochtopus.” But the first comparisons of moneyed interests to voracious tentacled creatures date back to the Gilded Age. Here, a quick review of the metaphor’s greatest hits. [The piece gives 8 examples, plus a link to still more; and an extensive set of other Occupy links]

And then from the Cultural Politics site on social movements, on “The #Occupy Wall Street movement”:

Occupy Wall Street and the larger #Occupy movement grew largely in response to deepening national and world-wide growth in income inequality. While the movement began in one sense in Zuccotti Park, New York City, USA [in September 2011], the roots and breadth of the movement stretch much further. It quickly spread to over 900 cities around the globe. While the movement no longer exists in its original form, the upheaval it created reverberates, reshaping the conversation about political economy in the U.S. around the world.

This entry was posted on December 14, 2020 at 11:41 am and is filed under Language in politics, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.