The New York Times has finally found a poster boy for the Occupy Wall Street mob. It must have been tough to filter out the usual clowns from 15 splinter communist parties, the peace groups, Code Pink, and MoveOn.org as well as the street people, druggies, and panhandlers; but after careful consideration Times reporter Cory Kilgannon settled on Edward T. Hall III. The problem as P.J. Gladnick reveals is that Little Eddie is a rather bizarre drama queen (Warning: crude language):
You too can be a Drama Queen
The Times article describes Little Eddie thusly:
Mr. Hall is a well-educated young man with a privileged upbringing who said he was following a calling greater than getting a job and making money. He said he saw the protest as a global movement to help fight poverty and economic inequality. He has spent the past month sleeping in the park and is one of the organizers of the protest.
...
Mr. Hall said that he grew up in New Mexico and that both his parents were politically active lawyers who were thrilled that he was pursuing a socially conscious life and was involved in the Occupy Wall Street protest. Mr. Hall said he attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and then transferred to Bard College in upstate New York because of its reputation as a socially conscious school.
He had been renting in Washington Heights for the past two years while attending doctoral classes at Columbia University as a nonmatriculated student. He said that he supported his modest lifestyle with savings from working as a teenager and that he also had “a small trust fund” from his grandfather that he had not drawn from yet. For the past four weeks, he has eaten free meals and has slept in the park.
Translation: Little Eddie is a spoiled Trust Fund Baby whose family is paying for him to hang around in New York amusing himself and annoying others. Probably a good idea since having Little Eddie living in the basement might be fraught with peril. Particularly since there is more to Little Eddie than just bad acting - among other things he is also well known for crawling though the baggage carousel at JFK airport in January to get around security so he could visit a girlfriend in San Francisco (more at Loon Has A Lot of Baggage). The best part is:
Conditional discharge in New York State means that if Ted stays out of trouble for a year, he stays out of jail. When he was not actively looking for trouble or trying to spend a little more time with Maya, Ted was previously employed as a research assistant at Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions: his specific discipline, human impatience.
Let's see, a whacked-out 1%er pretending solidarity with the common folk. One can't help but congratulate the Times on their choice. One can only hope that Little Eddie gets to use his Go Directly to Jail card soon.
