Is Obama inciting the poor to take what they think should be theirs to his political advantage?
There is an interesting convergence of notions here in the wake of “The Dark Knight Rises”…the film, not the murders.
In “The Dark Knight” an evil man (yes, named Bane) takes over Manhattan (Gotham) by telling the people of Gotham that the rich have taken everything from them so they should take it all back. Then he holds the city hostage for about six months so they can do just that. What follows is a season of pillaging of all the rich folks’ homes, where the looters found, to their dismay, that Central Park West apartments didn’t have any bigger flat screens than they already had, and that the shoes in the closets were all leather, not a Nike to be found. And who eats caviar when Lays Potato Chips and moon pies can be had at the corner bodega? So they just tore everything up, and strewed it all about, especially since there were no longer any rich people to fence the stolen minks and jewels to anyway? With no dentists they couldn’t even give their girlfriends diamond inlays for their front teeth.
“Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” (Coleridge)
Clearly, what they did not do was seize the rich folk’s businesses, which created all that wealth in the first place. Remember how Robert Mugabe gave his cronies all the white farms in Namibia, turning a nation that fed Africa into its leading basket case? We know that when the poor break out, and the rich break up, there really isn’t anyplace to go, except into chaos?
Do you suppose Obama the mountebank knows this?
In his now-infamous “You Didn’t Build That Speech” in Roanoke (and yes, it did cost him the election) Obama seemed to be stirring the same sense of entitlement among his audience (mostly on the public teat anyway) that Batman’s enemy was doing, with the same ulterior motive…destroy just so you can own the ashes.
Some have suggested that Obama was indirectly inviting these people to take to the streets, store fronts and malls and start taking what is rightfully theirs, a la Rap Brown in the 60s.
That remains to be seen, but it is worth some thought and preparation.
Flashmobs
In this vein, some are also trying to equate the string of flash mob thefts around the country at malls and stores with this political sentiment of entitlement.
Judge for yourselves. This in Portland, this somewhere else, and this also somewhere else. (h/t LadyImpactOhio)
We can view this in one of two ways, since teen gangs have been running through malls since the 70s, looking for a little excitement and any opportunity to snatch and grab. They are either kids looking to get over or are they are part of a larger strategy that capitalizes on their predilection for easy theft?
You see, this sense of entitlement that Obama was speaking to has been around for a long time and has always existed on the edges of outlawry. It’s why highwaymen robbed stagecoaches, and why pick pockets actually went to “schools” to learn their trade. At both ends of the economic spectrum there has always been a wannabe leisure class.
Much of the modern welfare state has always been, in Butch Cassidy’s words, the “If they’ll just pay me what they’re paying to have me stop robbing them, I’ll stop robbing them.” unwritten contract. It’s a bribe-price paid to keep the poor quiet and on the plantation. Much of Obama’s base is being paid up front not to be outlaws. The Democrats have seeded, watered and fed them like an annual bean crop ever since the Republicans handed them over to the Democrats in 1968 after Dr Martin Luther King (a Republican) was assassinated by James Earl Ray (a Democrat).
(I’ve never been able to figure that move out, but it was clearly a seminal event in GOP character development.)
It’s too early to know whether these hooded kids are just opportunistic sharks or cunning velociraptors (from “Jurassic Park”) gaining in skill and knowledge as they get bigger and stronger. But we recognize the strain, both of the seeds, and the planters. So they should be watched….and tagged, as one does a bird in the wild.
You’ll also notice no one seems to be interested in stopping these kids. There are reasons for that, as will be outlined in a deterrence piece I’ll have a hand in writing later, only not here.
My friends over at Great American Zeroes have taken this “tagging” as a deterrence on as a project. I invite you to start looking in there from time to time. They have been working on tactics to impede the Occupy crowd for several months now, and this flash mob idea could be a variation of that theme, all based on the idea that authorities, whether cops in a city park or clerks in a clothing store, will do anything to avoid injury, including letting them do it again and again and again, ensuring they will only grow and grow, not go away.
GAZ is looking at these tepid little flash mobs as a potential for far worse things later in the year. So should you.
In Augie D’Onofrio’s latest piece, “Government Has a Face, Find it and Use it” he mentioned some counter strategies being developed which I believe can be used to insure kids who steal will not be able to use the things they steal, and may even walk out of the store a bigger loser than when they walked in. I’ll let them explain this in future postings, as I plan to add a couple of paragraphs about flashmobs in their list of applications.
But prepare yourselves, at least psychologically, about what might happen this year. Or the next four years, after we win. We haven’t had widespread rioting in America since the 1960s, when Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and the original Black Panthers fanned the flames. Maxine Waters has boasted she can put them in the streets anytime she wants. Ordinarily a stupid woman, on this account I believe her.
If we can get out in front of this, we’ll see if they can stand being around themselves once they do.
