She's perfect. Miley Cyrus, Hollywood's perpetually half-dressed wild child with an insatiable appetite for attention, jumped in front of the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon this week. The young Disney mogul unveiled a YouTube anthem hailing the aimless, anti-capitalist protesters. Smells like opportunistic teen queen spirit.
Like so much of the warmed-over, Big Labor-underwritten Occupy movement, Miley's musical tribute to its foot soldiers is a worn-out derivative remix. She took "Liberty Walk," a year-old single; spliced in video footage of union marchers carrying carbon-copy "TAKE BACK OUR DEMOCRACY" signs; tossed in random scenes of global discontent from London to China to San Diego to Salem, Oregon; slapped on a treacly dedication to "the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in" (like, whatever that is); stirred; auto-tuned; and released:
"Sayin' goodbye to the people who tied you up/ It's a liberty walk, walk/ Feelin' your heart again/ Breathin' new oxygen/ It's a liberty walk, walk/ Free yourself, slam the door, not a prisoner anymore!"
Somehow, all the Occupier outbreaks of lice, public defecation, property destruction and rape got left on the cutting room floor.
Hipsters are horrified by the Hollywood hijacking. To borrow a favorite Occupier phrase, they rained "downtwinkles" on the starlet. One Occupy activist prominently distanced herself from Hannah Montana, Teen Revolutionary, and issued a challenge. Priscilla Grim, an Occupy flack, told the website TMZ that while Miley's music video "'rocks' in spirit ... she doubts the singer has the guts to actually hit the streets." Grim dared "Ms. Cyrus" to "fight on the front line of economic civil rights" and join the agitators at Los Angeles City Hall.
Will Miley put her Louboutins where her vocal cords are? With an estimated net worth of $120 million, the radical chic poseur is no dummy. While her video stokes anti-police hostility and anti-bank rage, she and her managers can safely raise their figurative fists with one hand while inking new corporate deals with the other.
One YouTube commenter decried Tinseltown's "cynical ploy":
"This is disgusting. Another celebrity cashing in on the Occupy movement for their own profit. First (rapper) Jay-Z selling T-shirts and giving no money to the movement and now this. It might be different if she was giving all the profits from this song to the movement, but she's keeping all of it for herself. I am an active member of Occupy — and on behalf of the movement I would like to say f**k you Miley Cyrus and f**k you Jay-Z. You are blood-sucking scum!"
That's just a bit harsh. After all, diehard Occupiers themselves are hawking photos, documentaries and all manner of assorted swag from one coast to the other, while live-streaming their nocturnal, police-obstructing parties over corporate airwaves. They've opened bank accounts with the same companies their masked peers have vandalized. Their union elders are cutting deals with the same retailers they besieged on Black Friday.
In so many ways, Miley and the Occu-mob are a match made in heaven. Vacuous. Hypocritical. Entitled. Vain. Nihilist. Exhibitionist. Coddled. Forever adolescent, treating life like an endless "Party in the U.S.A.," and demanding that everyone else pay for it.
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.
