Code Name: The Squad
Bet you thought this was to be about the election audit. Nope, it’s taken from a film, “Raising Arizona”, from 35 years ago, about the kidnapping of a child by that name. (If you’re GenX or Millennial, you might want to watch it.)
For several years I’ve encouraged adult citizens to use low-grade misdemeanors, mostly property crimes, to teach certain natural-law lessons among the political and education class. This may include the occasional bloody nose if the opportunity arises and a safe retreat available.
At my age one might even consider taking his/her chances with a jury. Actually it’s been proved over decades that the prosecution’s chances of conviction are very low if the victim incited it by doing something very bad. I recall the flag-burner on the court house celebrating a court win 40 yrs ago, when an old vet stepped out of the crowd and cold-cocked him. Cops ran up, but the other citizens standing around said they “didn’t see a thing”. Oops!
I figure the same rules apply today. I believe if police pulled you off of any member of The Squad trying to cram a bar of Dove in one of their mouths, I’d say your chances would be pretty good. Since every city/state government now has its own Squad copycats, each trying to get their own minute of fame, just consider both the risk and the return.
But I don’t recommend this, for in the end, while it might result in an overdue reckoning, it doesn’t implant that very important element of Fear and Deterrence as when a Squad member raises her head and sees only a dark figure racing away, wondering “Who is that #$@%* masked man?”
I’ve spent years watching elements of the state class at every level step outside decency, law, decorum, honesty, allegiance to the Constitution, the flag, all of which are incorporated into that oath they take, then flagrantly pee on it. They could be members of a school board, local and state bureaucrats, and most every elected position. The Squad with the help of Media only have added an element of Hollywood to it. I’m told they’ve even added two new members, which may mean they see themselves as a growing movement.
My view is, although it does require more planning and stealth, that rather than engage in vengeance, the better message would be to instill the far greater deterrent: Fear
That fear of righteous punishment was what parents were supposed to mete out when they bent Sally or Tommy over their knee and gave them 5 stings with a paddle.
For doing wrong. Its teaching rate has always been exponentially higher than any of the alternative programs offered up the various leagues of child psychologists. And involves no prescribed drugs.
I’m not the least bit interested in inflicting pain, including a bloody nose, unless the lesson learned is to bring on Fear…and the learned lesson to never do that again…because someone in the dark, someone I can’t name, see, or even know for sure is there, may be watching.
As you may know, this is a lesson I learned at age 12, when a “bully” named Mick Hensley, age 14, bloodied my nose, for lying. The truth of the matter was that I had indeed lied. But had my mother found out about it Mick would have ended up in reform school instead of being able to quit school and get a job when he turned 16. With that fear of being a public snitch looming over my shoulder, I chose to lie (a real lie in the church-sense of the word) to my mother about how my shirt had gotten so bloody.
What I have observed since the 1980s, raising two sons in public schools in a rural county, where they to had to deal with raw-boned farm kids, is that those off-premises fights-for-honor, (or a girl) were made almost impossible because one of the on-lookers would undoubtedly run off to “tell Teacher”…even if the fight was half a mile away in a parking lot. I’ve never agreed with those extensions of state authority. So, the one fight my son had with a classmate, Andy, over a girl, had to be conducted in our backyard, with me refereeing from the back porch. My wife stormed inside, didn’t speak to me for a week, but the boys went at it, and yes, according to script, each bruising the other, decided that was enough, shook hands and walked back to the house, and best mates from then on. Andy went on to marry that girl a few years later.
These are the kinds of lessons that are no longer allowed to be taught, or learned, by over-weaning parents, government and school systems. As a rule, the natural rites of passage had always done it better, simply by keeping the long arm of the law, and now, it’s pettifogging bureaucracies, at a distance.
And no matter where you go, there is always that matter of class. In my coal town we had ten kids, tops, that were the children of bosses, what you might call the social elites, who were able to walk around with an invisible protective shield of “Paul’s boy” keeping their hair from being mussed up. Today we have entire school systems made up of “affluent-only” families, where not one in a thousand have ever heard a firm “No”, not had their butts stung with a parent’s hand, or not a single bloody nose without the bringing down of the entire county police department or school administration on the ruffian who popped “My David” on the nose….even if for lying (more likely “snitching”).
It’s been three generations, now, so I’m not sure there’s even a natural road back to letting the culture once again write its own rules of civility. And that’s the tragedy of it, since those rules were infinitely more fair, maturing, and “survival-enhancing” from the society point of view, than what is imposed upon us.
There is no harm in replanting that fear of “things that go bump in the night”, especially among the spoiled bratling class who do seem to believe they can teat-fit their way into political power.
That said, I’ve never discussed high-profile individuals largely in part because they are so high-profile. The Squad even carries around their own armed protection. But at the state legislature level?
I discuss AOC and The Squad as a type here, for they represent a generation, now two generations, that modern media wishes to seal in power as continuously representing a new generation, now that the Baby Boomers are about to pass, that will be about a third of the population. They want to seal the control of that group, not just as voters, but as icons of the Pop Culture.
None of them have any more knowledge of Marx than if they’d seen a 4-minute Zoom lecture. When they talk about political issues, as the Squad does, they sound like “children of the damned” at Berkeley in 1968, chanting “Workers of the World Unite!”, having no more clue what a worker was than Karl Marx, who, incidentally, never sat down and shared a meal with one. (He believed there were too damned stupid to talk to, thus justifying his self-appointment as their savior.)
“If you can’t beat them with brilliance, then baffle them with BS”, a motto I used to think was only the lawyer’s creed, seems to be rallying cry for two generations of camera-friendly bratlings in America. There’s a far broader plan and permanent place for them here, as Alinsky laid out in the late 60s. As I mentioned in my last piece, younger Americans prefer Marxism and Communism over the more complicated economic planning of Corporate Fascism, because they are never taught that everywhere Marxism is tried it fails, only it take 3-6 generations to do so. Young, giddy students who take jobs with the State, as i learned in the old Soviet Bloc (USSR, Ukraine, the Balkans), though bored and cynical with the job, spending over half of every working day out of the office, often drinking a few before catching the train to their homes, are the last to know their system is about to collapse. But if they are able to make it up the ladder of the “apparatus” into the management ranks of the “nomenklatura”, as the Squad has, then, even if/when they learn the system is collapsing, as the Soviets did by the 1980s (thank Reagan) they can still jockey for the eventual collapse, to become the oligarchs and leaders of a post-Soviet fascist Russia, which is exactly where they are now. (The Chinese are similarly jockeying for that day, as well.)
All you have to do is pay a little attention to Lenin’s use of “useful idiots” and Saul Alinsky’s even better teaching of it, to know that “management’s” mission in life is to grab and keep the souls of the next generation beneath them, GenX-teaching-Millennials, Millennials-teaching-Gen Z, both still in progress. Then, once they cross that 50 year-threshold it’s every person for himself.
I honestly don’t know whether The Squad knows this or not. Vanity is still a greater self-hypnotizer then stupidity. But they likely don’t. They likely feel they can beat the odds, and land on their feet, in some gated estate even if does collapse.
They still spew outrageous lies about their knowledge of this country, not only because they are as dumb as a rock, but because they think they have some deep inner knowledge of Nietzsche, Marx (Karl or Groucho) or Che, when they know nothing of anything they believed. And in my view, you can even count Barack Obama among kindred minds in this regard, just a generation earlier.)
My lesson here is that being high profile doesn’t mean they’re immune to Fear. It just takes planning and stealth to carry it off.
The Squad has become something of a metaphor for an entire generation,
