What Happens When Angry Citizens Crash the Gates of America's CEO Class?

(an excerpt from an article by Mark Ames. read the whole thing at the link below)

What Happens When Angry Citizens Crash the Gates of America's CEO Class? Over time serial killers lost their shock value and got absorbed into pop culture. Life returned to normal. But one incident from that scene haunted me then, and still gives me bladder-spasms today. It involved the most notorious of all the Santa Cruz serial killers, Edmund Kemper, who murdered and rapd hitchhiking hippie girls, chopping up their bodies and sodomizing the cuts. One day Kemper picked up a young dance student named Aiko Koo, drove her into the woods, and pulled out a gun to terrify her. It worked. As Kemper later said, “I pulled the gun out to show her I had it...she was freaking out. Then I put the gun away and that had more effect on her than pulling it out.”

Now here comes the really disturbing part: instead of killing her right then and there, Kemper put the gun down, stopped his car and got out, then closed and locked the door. I repeat: Kemper locked himself out of the car. With his gun inside, next to the girl.

Guess what the girl did? She unlocked the door and let him back in.

As Kemper himself later explained, “She could have reached over and grabbed the gun, but I think she never gave it a thought.”

She never gave it a thought. It’s not the murder that’s so horrifying to me, it’s that she unlocked the door and let him back in.

That was us, “the people,” in the opening battle of the Great Class War a few weeks ago. You may have heard about this in the news: a group of protesters angry over AIG bonuses chartered a bus and toured the mansions where the AIG executives lived, going straight to their front doors. With no intention of Christmas caroling or trick-or-treating. No, this had class war written all over it. And for the first time, the plutocrats were running scared.

Here’s how the “Battle of Golden Pond Lane” unfolded: On Friday, March 20 -- after a week of populist rage over news that Americans were funding obscene multimillion dollar bonuses to the same AIG multimillionaires who ruined our economy, word spread about an anti-AIG bus tour of the mansions of the company’s execs, planned for March 21. The plan was to transform the bus into a kind of Class War Assault Vehicle, and steer it straight into the upper-class New England hamlet where all the AIG execs live: Fairfield, Connecticut. It was like Stripes meets Spartacus, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The robbed would see exactly where the robbers lived, what their homes looked like, what their addresses were, where their front doors were located…

This story reminds me of a conversation with my 10 year old daughter last week. She asked me what ideology is. I said something about the matrix establishing the parameters of our actions and beliefs. She said, "I guess an example would be starving in a grocery store." My example was going to have been Santa Claus.

Comments

[Alain]

Hi Jodi

I found it interesting how the rest of the story focuses on how the media took up most of the space on the bus. So in the end there were only two "working people" who ended up going to the guys house. I get the point but can we really extrapolate a general apathy from this particular episode? I am not sure.

[Jodi]

apathy--no; but, a kind of capture in ideology, yes. The very best efforts get captured and redirected--it's heartbreaking.