Dear Dirty America

By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.

Although Bellafante ultimately disparages the Occupy Wall Street movement for its lack of focus and purpose, I deeply enjoyed her opening paragraph. If Bellafante were a slightly better writer, I could say I was as inspired as I was when I read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.