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Four Essays on Occupy Wall Street
15 December 2011
Me at Zuccotti Park, October 2011. Photograph © Noah Sheppard
The Pain notes with sorrow the passing of the English language's greatest contemporary polemicist, Christopher Hitchens. I didn't always agree with Hitchens, most notably on the subject of Iraq, but his prose was always an intellectual and æsthetic pleasure to read. I'm thankful he wrote so much, of which I've read so little. In meager tribute to his memory I present you this week with some of my own less accomplished efforts at invective and advocacy.
Evidently I'm unable to get any of these published through my usual outlets, who prefer my human-interest pieces to my wacko utopian rants, so I'm afraid you get them instead. I wrote the first four of these essays over the previous three months, during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I didn't post them here because I'd hoped to get them published somplace where they'd make more difference. You'll excuse, I hope, some slight overlap between them; they were originaly intended for separate audiences, so there are some redundancies. Some of them are also a bit dated, now that OWS has been forcibly dispersed by those heroes the NYPD. The last one I wrote just yesterday, on the jubilant occasion of our withdrawal from Iraq, V-I Day. Ah, I wish you all could've been here in New York; sailors kissing nurses in Times Square, a blizzard of ticker-tape on Fifth Avenue.
If you like these, feel free to disseminate them across the Internet (giving me appropriate credit, of course) and don't forget our dontation button below. I'm still waiting on my next advance check from my publisher, seriously overdue at this point, and I could use some Christmas money.
An Open Letter to the Tea Party
Pain News
- I have finished my book of essays, We Learn Nothing, for Free Press at Simon & Schuster. It is scheduled for publication in June 2012.
- My latest collection of cartoons, Twilight of the Assholes, remains available for order at Fantagraphics Books. It includes all my best political cartoons and essays from Term II of the Bush administration. It is a mere $28.99, money you know very well you'll otherwise just spend on booze.
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