Friday, January 02, 2009

Aspen Bomber: The First Case of "Eat the Rich" Syndrome?

I was reading about this Aspen Bomber by the name of James Charles Blanning and was thinking that it may be the first indication of a new "Eat the Rich" syndrome. This is especially the case because the rich bankers and house-flippers caused the pain in the first place.

In some ways some of this stuff happened during the French Revolution. The targets of the revolution was the aristocracy and their wasteful spending as well as the massive land holdings of the church. The French government was also deep in debt due to bankrolling the American Revolution. Thus the French were not able to help people not starve when there was record unemployment and the agrarian economy of France was decimated by a famine. People in the Us aren't starving to the extent of the pre-Revolutionary French but we do have an "aristocracy" of sorts that was spending like crazy people. Plus the US government is deep in debt due to various bailouts and foreign military adventures.

So could this Blanning character have fired the first shot against the mega-rich and the "aristocracy" of today? It might be fairly plausible. Some people view our economic trouble through the lens of crooked Hedge fund millionaires and bankers wrecking the economy and escaping with their golden parachutes. I mean the demonization of Bernie Madoff is filled with quite a bit of hate and venom as well. I was just struck by the fact that someone would actually consider a terrorist bombing against the "beautiful people" in Aspen like that. It just seemed like something that could have come out of Revolutionary France.

I guess these sort of attacks depend on how bad things get. I mean the Great Depression didn't cause the US government to fall through massive strikes and violence but there were food riots and the crackdown against the Bonus Marchers. It might just come down to whether the rich are seen to have contempt for the plight of the poor like Mary Antoinette was suppose to have. I think people can take a rich person buying extravagant crap if they are just simply unemployed. However, if normal people are starving to death then it will seriously raise the stakes. It seems that violence against the rich only manifests itself when things are truly dire.

No comments: