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Occupy Wall Street Merchandise: Totally Missing the Point

When the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols was first issued on CD sometime in the late eighties, frontman Johnny Rotten was not a fan. He said that he didn't see the value of the band because of how accessible it had become. Essentially, the band that set out to bring down the rock n' roll establishment had been marketed so well that it had become the establishment itself.

While I would normally not give a shit about anything Mr. Rotten has to say, the point is a valid one and can be applied to virtually anything. For example, I can walk into the building next to my apartment complex and buy pro-Tea Party bumper stickers (you've probably seen them yourself – the word 'NOPE' with the Obama 'O') or pins decrying gay marriage (“Celebrate Diversity – Marry a Yak!”). While I can't attest to how original these ideas are, they are hand-made by the shop owner. He profits off of other people's fear and anger. The same thing happened to Che Guevara – if you can find a college campus in this country without a Che poster somewhere in the student dorms, you should legally be declared blind. Someone's cranking out posters with a dead guy's face on it because someone thinks his revolution can apply to any revolution.

So long as you feel or think something, someone else will be waiting in the wings to market a bunch of useless shitty shit to you. It was inevitable that this happen with the Occupy Wall Street movement, so I can't say I'm really all that surprised by it. The Associated Press reports that the U.S Patent Office has received numerous applications to trademark various slogans related to the protest. While some of the applications are from protest groups looking to prevent anyone from profiting from such trademarks (because that would be all sorts of hypocritical – it's hard to say you oppose corporate greed when you're literally paying for it), most appear to be from people looking to turn out some cold, hard merchandise.

Now, you and I can argue for days about whether or not Occupy Wall Street can succeed in achieving its goals. Last week when stories of protestors engaging police officers in combat were as common as high-fives and bro-grabs, I was swearing up and down that it would be the death knell of the movement. At first this headline only confirmed that notion. After all, how legitimate is a movement when I can walk into a Hot Topic and buy its major talking points on a single t-shirt? But to see that someone actually cares enough to try to stop the profiteering has changed my thinking somewhat.