“The zombie youth ‘occupying’ Wall Street are contemptuous of the world that sustains their comforts,” Mark Steyn writes in his latest column:
Michael Oher, offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, was online on Wednesday night when his Twitter feed started filling up with tributes to Steve Jobs. A bewildered Oher tweeted: “Can somebody help me out? Who was Steve Jobs!”
He was on his iPhone at the time.
Who was Steve Jobs? Well, he was a guy who founded a corporation and spent his life as a corporate executive manufacturing corporate products. So he wouldn’t have endeared himself to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, even though, underneath the patchouli and lentils, most of them are abundantly accessorized with iPhones and iPads and iPods loaded with iTunes, if only for when the drum circle goes for a bathroom break.
The above is a somewhat obvious point, although the fact that it’s not obvious even to protesters with an industrial-strength lack of self-awareness is a big part of the problem. But it goes beyond that: If you don’t like to think of Jobs as a corporate exec (and a famously demanding one at that), think of him as a guy who went to work, and worked hard. There’s no appetite for that among those “occupying” Zuccotti Park. In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due.
Prior to joining the Ravens, Oher was the star of Michael Lewis’s book, The Blind Side. The HuffPo reports Lewis telling Bloomberg TV that, as the HuffPo paraphrases, “America needs to hit bottom ‘like an addict’ to rebound from its economic woes:”
“At every level of the society we have been willing to basically sacrifice our long term interests for short term interests,” Lewis told Bloomberg TV’s Tom Keene in an interview Wednesday. “It’s not sustainable and I think what happens is we have to hit bottom first, like an addict.”
And where is the bottom, according to Lewis, the darling of Wall Street traders, politicians and writers alike?
“It’s some level of unemployment, slow growth, what we’re going through now and people say ‘enough already I want the truth and I want our lives to be organized differently,’” Lewis said in the interview.
One way or another, that’s coming after next year — though it’s awfully rich for a liberal writer beloved by the New York Times, the HuffPo, New York magazine and Hollywood to say that Americans are being lied to.
Speaking of which, “It’s official: White House defending violent, anti-semitic, 9/11 Truther, Marxist Mobs,” Doug Ross writes at his Director Blue Weblog (see also, JWF):
The White House is criticizing House GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s description of Wall Street protesters as a “mob,” saying the activists compare favorably with the tea party movement.
“I don’t understand why, you know, one man’s mob is another man’s democracy,” presidential press secretary Jay Carney said Friday.
Interesting turn of a phrase; Reuters would be quite proud.
(Image above via Power Line.)
Related: “Stinking up Wall Street: Protesters accused of living in filth as shocking pictures show one demonstrator defecating on a POLICE CAR.”
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