Recent statement cropping up on a lot of social media about the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare Insurance over some other social media posts lionizing Luigi Mangione:
"A healthy society doesn't lionize vigilante killers.
But we don't live in a healthy society."
My response: Really? We don't lionize? Kyle Rittenhouse leaps to mind. I remember members of a certain party saying, "I want him to be my Senator", and urging him to run for office, even though he took a semiautomatic rifle (a Smith & Wesson M&P 15) out of state (from Illinois to Wisconsin) to a BLM riot. Seventeen year olds don't do that unless they're looking to shoot someone and he did. Daniel Penny, just acquitted for using excessive force in killing a homeless mentally ill man who was yelling at people on a subway, was taken to the Army & Navy game where he sat with President Elect Trump, VP Elect Vance, and Elon Musk. Seems a little like lionizing to me... Not to mention the long, tragic, on-going tradition of lynching.
Here in America, it's all about who gets vigilanteed. And it's assumed that some people are untouchable. And we all know that.
BUT – The simple truth is that there comes a point where the "common man" has had enough of being ripped off and used, and... crap happens. Let's use the Way-Back Machine and go to the Great Depression (1929-1939), when the most common folk heroes were bank robbers.
A little history first: The banks in the Roaring Twenties had invested a tremendous amount of money - too much money, most of their customers' money - in the roaring stock market. So when the stock market crashed, they closed, a polite term for went bust, collapsed, went bankrupt. And as those banks failed, people tried to withdraw all their money from both the collapsing and surviving banks, which only made things worse. Banks liquidated loans and other assets. 800 banks in 1930, 2100 in 1931, 9000 by 1933.
And there was no FDIC - which was created by FDR and which federally insures our deposits to this day - so if a bank failed, people who had any money in those banks lost it all, with no hope of getting it back.
MY NOTE: Certain people in the post-January 20, 2025 world want to abolish the FDIC because... reasons... No history, but "reasons"...
Meanwhile, there were a lot of small rural banks which were unregulated. (Again, times have changed.) They'd grown up after WW1, when the world needed a lot of corn and cotton. As farmers bought more land, real estate went up. As real estate went up, farmers took out more loans. As the economy tanked, these banks called in their loans, but farmers didn't have the money. And the Dust Bowl hit - the "Dirty Thirties", which was a severe drought (up to 8 years in some areas) exacerbated by "deep plowing" which led to soil erosion. Crops failed. No money. Result? Foreclosures, foreclosures, and more foreclosures. The banks took the farms, booted out the farmers, and then sold the land at a nice profit to someone else - anyone else.
The result was that about 3.5 million people left the Great Plains - 86,000 moved to California the first year - trying to find a place and a way to live. They weren't welcomed with open arms. They were called "Okies" and "Arkies" and treated as subhuman. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)
Anyway, all of these people - and more - blamed the banks for taking their land. They hated the banks. And so when various armed gangsters started robbing banks, they became folk heroes. It didn't matter that they often killed people during their robberies. Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd (who allegedly destroyed mortgage documents when he robbed a bank), and many more were heroes, because they were fighting back against the filthy banks that had taken everything the common people had. They even (sometimes) gave (some) money away, just often enough to make them Robin Hoods in the public eye.
And these modern day Robin Hoods / folk heroes showed up, in legends and ballads like Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, which included "Tom Joad", "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues".
They also showed up in the serious literature of the day: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (published in 1939) Ma Joad told her son Tom Joad about Pretty Boy Floyd:
"I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…He done a bad thing an' they hurt 'im, caught 'im an' hurt him so he was mad, an' the nex' bad thing he done was mad, an' they hurt 'im again. An' purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint an' he shot back, an' then they run him like a coyote, an' him a-snappin' an' a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An' he was mad. He wasn’t a boy or a man no more, he was just a walkin' chunk of mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn' hurt 'im. He wasn' mad at them. Finally then run him down and killed 'im. No matter what they say it in the paper how he was bad – that’s how it was."
When it came out, The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller that was banned and burned in many states, but also read voraciously. And it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Bonnie & Clyde, of course, got the full movie treatment, more than once - 1967's Bonnie & Clyde (directed by Sam Peckinpah) is the most famous. And there are a lot of songs written about them:
And here's one, in French, sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.
And you can read Bonnie Parker's own account of their career in "The Trail's End" Here.
Meanwhile, John Dillinger probably has the most movies made about him. Lot of people have sung about him, written about him (William Burroughs loved him and hoped he was still alive), and played him in the movies...
The only folk hero (so far) who beats him is Jesse James. I think Jesse James is proof that bank robbers have never been that unpopular among the "common man". When I was a little girl, my grandmother would sing "Jesse James" to me as a treat. I'll never forget her wavering voice singing the refrain, "The dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave." You could tell where her sympathies lay. Here it is, sung by Johnny Cash:
BTW, in case you're thinking that this is a grim message for the day after Christmas, you need to read more Dickens. First of all, Ebenezer Scrooge would be an obvious target for a folk hero's bullet - and was threatened with an ignominious death by the deceased Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Future. And then there's Dickens' The Chimes, so bleak it makes Cormac McCarthy look cheerful. Yes, Dickens does supply the mandatory happy ending, but until then... it's a treatise on the ultimate result of Victorian economic theory and practice (pay the poor the absolute minimum and step on any of them who objects), and a legal system designed to eliminate the poor the hard way (lock them up if they don't starve first). This fun read for the holidays is available for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/653/653-h/653-h.htm
Or you could just take a walk down some of the poorer streets of your city... Talk to some of the elderly who are working at hardscrabble jobs to make ends meet, because their Social Security isn't enough. To some of the working class parents, both of them working two jobs to pay for everything, and always falling behind. To that woman, living in her car because she lost her job, the bank foreclosed, and she still can't figure out how it all happened so fast. To the elderly man who divorced his wife, not because he doesn't love her, but because she's in a dementia ward, and the only way to keep her there is to let the nursing home take all the money, while he lives in a little apartment on his Social Security and works one of those hardscrabble jobs to keep himself alive. To the family of the teenager who got meningitis/encephalitis and was in the hospital for almost a year and got smacked with $1 million in debt... And that was AFTER a chunk of it was forgiven by the hospital...
The #1 reason for bankruptcy in this country (66.5%) is medical debt.
I ran across an article by Katherine Cross in the Daily Beast that used the expression "Potemkin morality," which struck me as an interesting phrase. Her piece is about the alt-Right troll campaign against CNN, with its echoes of GamerGate. (GamerGate is itself a complicated story, with a subtext of women-hating and a foretext of anti-Semitism and agitprop, essentially tone-deaf to facts and reasoning, or shame.) http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-anti-cnn-harassment-campaign-is-using-the-gamergate-playbook
She uses the Potemkin reference to mean something akin to crocodile tears, or bare-faced hypocrisy, to make the truth uncertain and proofs negotiable. Prince Grigory Potemkin was an 18th-century Russian, a favored minister of Catherine the Great. Governor-general of Novorossiya - the southern Dnieper watershed and the Black Sea from Odessa to the Donbass, including Crimea – he famously hosted Catherine on a trip downriver from Kiev in the summer of 1787. Along the banks, he allegedly built colorful villages that were basically stage sets, and peopled them with thousands of smiling, waving peasants. The empress graciously acknowledged her happy subjects from a suitably royal remove. The story is by all accounts exaggerated, but hence the term Potemkin Village. More than a false front, or a false-fronted building, it's a false narrative, a belief system, but constructed out of whole cloth. From what we know, Catherine might not have been fooled, or she may have chosen to turn a blind eye to the deception. You can turn this back to front yourself, of course, depending on PoV. Usually, it's seen as a cautionary tale, about vanity. Or a courtier's flattery, telling your queen what you think she wants to hear. Catherine, we suspect, would have been better served by honesty, but that's a toughie. What if the unwelcome truth cost you your place near the throne, or your own head? Gifts and favors can be withdrawn. In the event, however, Potemkin's village is an empty shell, a facade, a ghost town. The empress graces it with her glance, and it drifts astern. Its purpose has been served, to distract attention from broken walls and failed crops, sickly livestock and barefoot tenants. Misdirection is one way of putting it. 'Active disinformation' is another possibility - borrowing the vocabulary of the modern security apparat - and I think this is the sense Katherine Cross intends. She means Potemkin, the modifier, to indicate something not simply staged, a puppet show, but a more sinister design than that, calculated disregard. None of your moral relativism, either, Complete abandonment. No baseline whatsoever. Prince Potemkin's fiction is inflated to metaphorical extremes. But it was always a metaphor about surfaces, and hollow figures, empty air. In the context of the Daily Beast article, we're talking about vigilantes on social media, and the practice of doxing [dox = docs = documents], exposing somebody's personal information on the Internet for revenge. This isn't a tactic exclusive to the alt-Right, but the politics of bullying are familiar enough. It's old wine in new bottles. Even if the delivery changes, the message stays the same, and it's curious how the clothes of righteousness still seem to be one size fits all. (It is a little disconcerting how many of these people are neo-Nazis or Aryan Nations or white supremacists, in or out of uniform.) Oh, but of course they themselves wear masks, this being the Internet and all. You can't disguise your handwriting, though. It gives the game away. We know to mistrust absolutes, orthodoxy, the received wisdom. Too often it's an alibi for cruelty, or flat-out extermination. But aren't there basic norms? We accept certain conventions, like driving on the right (or the left, in some countries), just to make it safely through the day. And we accept certain others, simply because they seem part of civility, or common decency. You don't have to subscribe to any particular party line. Most of us, for the most part, agree a few courtesies are necessary. There are always the ones who think rules are for suckers. A lot of them are criminals. Not all of them get caught. What they share is a sense of entitlement. They're the dispossessed, they've been cheated. Trolls, lurking in the virtual undergrowth. Parasites, by any other name. It comes down to something outside our own convenience, a fundamental respect for other people. The lesson of Prince Potemkin's reconstruction is that it's theater, a dress rehearsal. You don't rehearse morality. You don't wear it as a costume, and take it off when the lights go dark.
