Visual Rhetoric: Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street

Recently, there has been somewhat of a grassroots counter-attack to the popular and controversial Tea Party. The Tea Party, a generally right-wing conservative movement has found a challenger in the "Occupy Wall Street" movement and its various spinoffs. The Occupy Wall Street Movement, according to the "unofficial, de facto" online resource, OccupyWallSt.org, is a "horizontally organized resistance movement employing the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to restore democracy in America." The movement generally seems espouse socialist and anti-corporate ideas, judging from most reports of their rallies across the nation.

As arguably the original grassroots movement, the Tea Party has been subject to a variety of visual displays of violent rhetoric. The most prominent can be found in the much-maligned TEA PARTY ZOMBIES MUST DIE online video game, where players must use a variety of hand-held weapons and firearms to fight off zombified Tea Partiers.

Although the Occupy Wall Street movement is relatively new, they have been met with much less violent responses. They are, however, the butt of jokes in cartoons like this one.

The contrast between the level of violence in visual attacks against these two grassroots movements is striking. A good googling couldn't produce any violent images about the Occupy movement, but a quick search could give you access to an online avenue for slaughtering Tea Partiers. The difference could be explained by the youth of the Occupy movement, but it is certainly eyebrow-raising to see the varying levels of violent rhetoric employed by each side.