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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

OWS: Kermit is the new Che

Life imitates The Onion, again: A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to […]

Life imitates The Onion, again:

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school.

OK, wait a minute. Guy quits a steady job and takes out $35,000 in student loans to get a master’s degree in … puppetry? Really? What’s the punch line?

Like a lot of the young protesters who have flocked to Occupy Wall Street, Joe had thought that hard work and education would bring, if not class mobility, at least a measure of security (indeed, a master’s degree can boost a New York City teacher’s salary by $10,000 or more).

Um, so you’re saying it’s Wall Street’s fault that nobody’s hiring Puppet Man? Come on, what’s the punch line?

Within his first hour at Liberty Park, he was “totally won over by the Occupation’s spirit of cooperation and selflessness.” He has been going back just about every day since. It took him a few days to find the Arts and Culture working group, which has its roots in the first planning meetings and has already produced a museum’s worth of posters (from the crudely handmade to slicker culture-jamming twists on corporate designs), poetry readings, performance-art happenings, political yoga classes and Situationist spectacles like the one in which an artist dressed in a suit and noose tie rolled up to the New York Stock Exchange in a giant clear plastic bubble to mock the speculative economy’s inevitable pop.

There’s not going to be a punch line, is there? You people are serious, aren’t you?

… it dawned on Joe: “I have to build as many giant puppets as I can to help this thing out—people love puppets!” And so Occupy Wall Street’s Puppet Guild, one of about a dozen guilds under the Arts and Culture working group, was born.

Un-make-uppable. The apotheosis of SWPLdom. That muffled whirring sound you hear is Saul Alinsky spinning in his grave. Somewhere in Hell, the Devil is taunting Lenin with this news from the barricades.

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