barthel:

It’s no accident that the video focuses not on the more staid moments of the protests, but almost exclusively on police confrontations. A bunch of hippies camping in a park is every stereotype you could have of a radical protest, but authority figures preventing young people from expressing themselves sounds like the plot of half the shows the Disney Channel has ever run. This is to say that the protesters made the movement acceptably progressive, but it took the police to make it all-American. (In one shot, a cop is literallytearing an American flag away from a guy trapped on the ground.) The ultimate effect of all that pepper-spraying and “kettling” has been to create an overwhelming body of images connecting the protesters to characters and narratives we’ve been culturally conditioned to see as heroic. Members of Occupy Wall Street now plausibly seem like the subject of a Miley Cyrus song.

I wrote about Miley’s OWS tribute for the Voice.