Ghost of a flea: Fight the Vampire Squid

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April 30, 2012

Fight the Vampire Squid

Goldman Sachs was founded in the 19th century when Jews were excluded from other firms.

If you believe that Goldman has done nothing wrong, then any criticisms of Goldman or use of the firm as a symbol of the crisis are obviously unfair to Goldman. Furthermore, they would raise the legitimate question of "Why pick on Goldman?" and the possibility that anti-Semitism is part of the explanation. Similarly, if you believe that anything Goldman did wrong was done wrong by lots of others, the question of "Why pick on Goldman" arises, as does the same obvious answer.

The same obvious answer, but one - supposedly - lost on the BBC, today celebrating Occupy as a new artistic movement.

Paul Mason, Economics editor for Newsnight - and therefore the right choice to cover an arts movement, somehow - cites Molly Crabapple's impromptu salon of graphic novelists, painters, illustrators and graphic designers a few streets away from Zuccotti Park.

Now she is hard at work on a major series of paintings on themes of protest and rebellion, entitled Shell Game . The most complete of the works shows a Vampire Squid, depicting Goldman Sachs, surrounded by a crowd of little fat-cat capitalists doing various unspeakable things in the style of a Bosch or Breugel painting.

"I started out just doing graphics - I drew this picture of an octopus with 'Fight the Vampire Squid' on its belly - and put it online and people used it as protest signs all over the country," Crabapple says.

A vampire squid representing Jewish bankers is le dernier cri for these intellectuals. Anyone want to guess what the Economics editor for BBC Newnight makes? Or what it costs to maintain a salon a few blocks from Wall Street? But then this was never about money; it's about virtue.

I am not saying Molly Crabapple is anti-Semitic - in fact, being only one or two steps removed from her social circle, I am certain she isn't - but I am saying there is a reason some images resonate with the words "banking" and "conspiracy" while others don't. She couldn't have compared Goldman Sachs to, say, the Borg? And Occupy had to focus on a Jewish banking firm rather than, say, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose ideologically driven mortgages triggered the meltdown in the first place?

Matt Taibbi, whose 2009 Rolling Stone article "The Great American Bubble Machine" is the immediate source of the vampire squid metaphor, is another story. Taibi describes Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 30, 2012 08:48 AM