Let the Air Out of Their Tires

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Okay’s here’s the deal, see, I was reading this story here; a Bloomberg exclusive:

While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by targeting the most expensive cars — symbols of German wealth and power.

And it got me to thinking. (Run for the hills!)

While we Americans do like us some violence, we prefer the Hollywood variety. We’d rather experience the thrill of violence without the blood and guts. And while there’s almost 14 billion guns in the United States and twenty-six trillion bullets, video games outsell bullets.

Some of us, though, do wander off the deep-end and go postal and end up in gobs of splatter and spume signifying nothing. But most Americans prefer to bark than bite. We prefer to keep to ourselves and live and let live, most of us that is who aren’t prone to the violence of ideas. Because some do go off the deep-end of ideology and justify the most awful atrocity in the name of RIGHT.

Now, in eight or nine weeks or whenever summer comes; when it gets hot and smoky and folks are trading food-stamps for party cigarettes at the local McDonald’s dumpster; when the other shoes drop like personal credit card debt, commercial real estate, derivative bubble or the seemingly endless billion-dollar ponzi schemes of predatory pimps who make King Midas look like an old muffler; when unemployed and homeless fall like snow into breadlines, then the growing horde of poor folks are gonna set off some fireworks. Bet on it.

Now, in Greece they like the standard Trotskyite Molotov Cocktail. Still packs a punch, looks good on TV and doesn’t really do much damage. Don’t tell Molotov but his famous cocktail does not slow down the rich riding around in their armored Hummer coaches flanked by Blackwater, excuse me, Xe (pronounced Zee) bodyguards.

In Paris…toppling barricades…okay, is this a reference to the French Revolution or…okay, obviously things aren’t that bad in France at this point. Toppling barricades? Even we do that at Walmart the day after Thanksgiving. Who gives a rip?

Budapest? Eggs? Politicians? Okay. Here we do pies. Or, we would, you know if we actually did anything to protest the global ponzi scheme foisted on the people of the world like a plague. Anyway Google famous Hungarians: Johnny Weismuller and Zsa Zsa Gabor and a whole bunch of other people you never heard of. What do Hungarians know about fighting back against tyranny. Have you ever heard of the Huns, Atilla; hello? Forget eggs. Forget cocktails.

Now, those crazy Germans are torching high-end automobiles. BMWs and Mercedes’ are status symbols of wealth and power. They’re like the Twin Towers of Automobiles. And now the entirety of the world’s wealth has disappeared in the wink of an eye up the tailpipes of the Maserati class, well it makes perfect sense to send 50,000 smackers up in flames to protest the tiny discrepancy between the many and the few if you can call an abyss a discrepancy. But, let’s be honest, torching rides of the rich is so German. They started two world wars and are not known for their sense of humor. Did it never occur to the fire-starters those cars might be insured? Put in a claim, get a rental and wait for the paperwork. An elite can handle the whole situation on his Blackberry in two minutes. No, destruction for destruction sake is not the answer no matter how good it looks on TV.

We Americans are better than that. We put the, uh, American in revolution. We wrote the book. We inspired a world 230 years ago. That’s right more than two centuries ago we Americans were pretty hot. We loved to fight. And since then too. We even fought ourselves once in a great civil war. We single-handedly won both World Wars the Germans started. We kicked gook ass from the Philippines to Japan to Korea to Vietnam. And then we lost Vietnam, because we just plain got tuckered out or didn’t have the political will to go all Hiroshima over their ass – depending upon your Republican reading of history.

Americans made almost non-stop war for centuries. When we weren’t fighting we were recovering from or preparing for more. Why, golly, someone might get the idea it’s a conspiracy or something that some folks want to have war all the time for reasons which have nothing to do with “freedom.”

America loved war so much we did some pussy wars. Grenada. Panama. Desert Storm – it wasn’t even a war, but an advertising slogan. And then we did some un-American wars like Nicaragua and El Salvador. Then we did stupid wars like the Balkans. And none of this includes all the really secret coups, assassinations and meddling we did in every continent on the earth in the name of “free trade.”

And then, out of nowhere, we were attacked by strange aliens in flying ships on 911.

And everything changed. We got our War on again. Yea!!! We went overseas for like the umpteenth time and kicked some rag-head ass because, uh, you know, OSAMA!!!. That’s all you need to know. You’re on a ‘need to know’ basis and that’s all you need. And then wow, when Saddam threatened us with annihilation via magic mushroom clouds, well by golly, what red-meat American could resist that, plus, when, you know, they released the tape of Osama, Saddam and Charlie Manson planning 911, well that was better than fool’s gold for truth seekers everywhere.

“Shock and awe, shock and awe, shock and awe”, as Private Gomer Pyle would say. And though, ultimately it wasn’t the best TV in the world, at least you knew with our gazillion kilotons of bombs there was plenty of splatter and spume to go around for the sand-gooks. It was classic carpet-bombing Americana. From the Halls of Montezuma to Shores of Tripoli. Kill them all and let The Billy Graham Committee for Heavenly Ascendance sort them out later.

But then something awful happened on the way to happy-shiny empire. Bloodlust was replaced with migraine headaches. Patriotic bravado gave way to disillusion as the tragedy of 911 was hi-jacked by bipartisan Neo-Conservative global hegemony. But the money used to build and maintain empire was more money than an economy which has nothing to sell can afford. Well, not quite true. America’s biggest export is its debt. America is itself an economic bubble. A bubble, try as many shades of lipstick as you like, which has burst.

It is only matter of time before Americans join the folks in Greece, China, Haiti, Latvia, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Russia, Iceland, France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Pakistan, Thailand, India and others not trickling down to the western press, and find ourselves in the streets in rebellion born of desperation and hopelessness.

The turmoil hitting the streets of the world today is because of the unchecked discrepancy between the rich and the poor in the world. When the have-nots reach a critical mass, they will try and take from the haves. It is not rocket science. It’s survival. We are reaching that point. As millions more lose our jobs, homes, pensions, and are called upon to pay our debts with more and more borrowed money, as more and more families are trapped in straits of despair, then the odds rise exponentially of social unrest and civil decay.

Indeed, the world is amazed America seems so comparatively restful considering America stands to be crushed by the collapse of its house-of-cards empire. But, I think, it’s because we’re out of practice and, frankly, we’ve changed. Americans today want kinder, gentler revolution.

So, fellow feisty Americans, breadline amigos and patriot libertarians who want to take the monetary system back from the Rothschilds, string up the Banksters from lampposts and have a chicken in every pot and a pot-patch in every backyard – what are we gonna do to show our sense of outrage at the pampered few in the upcoming great class war – destined to be known for its classic rebel yell, “Do I look like the top tenth of one percent to you? I owe more on my house than when I bought it 20 years ago!”

Now, while we Americans love violence, we like it in a more voyeuristic, virtual, vicarious sort of way. We may be mad as hell but we don’t want to destroy private property. It’s un-American. The idea of torching people’s cars is hideous. Most people don’t even want to tie up intersections in protests because those who still have jobs shouldn’t be inconvenienced by the hunger of the starving. No, when class war comes and Americans finally rebel against those who still got theirs, we’ve got to do it our way. The American Way.  

And that’s why I propose we let the air out of their tires. Every Porsche, Lamborghini, BMW and Mercedes – let the air out of the tires. It sends a message without really being disagreeable. It can say, “Hey look over here! I’m cold and hungry and homeless, you got five bucks?” And not, “Death to Whitey!” Which, of course, could have solved our problems a long time ago.

And I don’t mean slash tires. God no. That’s actual violence and though we Americans like to talk tough through our John Wayne Rambos, most sensible Americans, now we’ve been chagrined to the point of the world’s laughing stock, don’t really want to hurt people. And we don’t want to be laughed at as losers because we’re at the bottom of our own pyramid scheme. It wasn’t our fault. We followed the dots of the American Way and maybe we couldn’t see the big picture for all the dots but that doesn’t mean we deserve to have the rug pulled out beneath us and the American Dream realized as nothing more than a dead rabbit from the magician’s hat.

No, we gently let the air out of the tires. And we let them know. It could be dangerous for some upper-middle-manager, weary from a day of pushing paper and surfing porn to jump on the gas with deflated tires. Or a soccer Mom, you know, stressed out with kids, a husband with ear-hair and medicated with opium derivatives who pulls out into traffic with a Baby I’m Bored sign is not a good idea. So we leave a little card under the windshield wiper: You Let the Air Out of America; How do YOU Like It?

Simple, elegant; revolution without the stink of blood as it were. Eventually, of course, the rich will start trading down to Volvos and Audis and prove revolution works.

And, after the revolution? Nothing much will have changed but we’ll have done our duty as free men and women who believe in the founding principles of America:

Be Nice. The Rich Are People Too.