The Thumbs Of Justice
CEO shooting shows how scales of justice have long been smashed and replaced with pounding and pecking of instant-take social media judge-and-jurying of a man's life.
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The royal rich Lieutenant James Dunbar in Billy Wilder's classic "Stalag 17" encounters class resentment just steps into the Allied prisoner-of-war barracks from one of the kings of cinematic sarcasm, actor William Holden, and his pitch-perfect villian-turned-hero, the hustling and plucky Sefton, another captured American.
Dunbar, a Boston Brahmin who's seen enough combat to shed the purple privilege, doesn't stand for Sefton's working-class barbs.
"What did you expect, glamor boy? The Officers' Club with a steam room and a massage maybe?" Holden's character observes as Dunbar takes to a bunk.
"Just a minute," the admittedly privileged Lieutenant Dunbar fires back. "You made a couple of cracks before and I let them slide. But I don't intend to take any more. If you resent my having money, start a revolution, but get off my back."
The dizzying volume of schadenfreude cascading beneath stories on the gunned-down CEO of UnitedHealth, Brian Thompson, struck me first from the perspective of what I have been most of my life, a community newspaper owner.
The torrents of hate streaming onto Facebook under the KCCI-Channel 8 (Des Moines CBS affiliate) posted story on Thompson, a graduate of South Hamilton High School in the town of Jewell, just north of Ames, would for generations have been tossed into the trash by newspaper editors for the ugliness, the wild and cruel speculation, in fact.
"We would burn those letters," Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and co-owner of The Storm Lake Times-Pilot, told me.
In the fall of 1999, I read through most of the weekly Carroll Times newspapers from the 1920s as part of an ambitious newsroom project to chronicle the full 20th Century. What shocked me the most: articles then (my family would not be involved in the paper until 1929) was the speculation surrounding suicides and other deaths.
The scales of justice have long been smashed and replaced with the thumbs of justice, the pounding and pecking of instant-take social media judge-and-jurying of a man's life.
To lieutenant Dunbar's point, Thompson operated a for-profit company within the boundaries of capitalism. The frustration and anger with denials of health-care coverage, comments from physicians suggesting early deaths and diminished health-care outcomes, should fuel political and legislative debate, and court battles.
The cowardly members of online mobs could be cheering their own pending murders.
Capitalism is brutal. I've been on both sides of it.
Winners win big, losers lose, often catastrophically.
Years ago, over breakfast outside of Tampa, Florida with college-era friends, I got into an argument with a Wall Streeter I know. He made the case for unabashed pursuit of wealth as I stressed that the most dangerous metric in America is growing income inequality.
It's only grown since.
As top executives and the very wealthy are surrounded by protection details they will become less vulnerable. But others in the hierarchies of businesses and enterprises they run won't.
Unregulated big tech and the online-shopping-and-shipping monopolies have left dead businesses, dead towns, in their predatory wakes. Should their employees be targeted for benefitting through the unfairness of the structure?
That's where the online comments will lead.
I've thought for some time that the United States is in something of a cold cultural civil war, that we are but one catalyzing incident way from the conflict turning hot.
The resulting war will be balkanized, with no clear Mason-Dixon line.
As it turns out, the war may unfold in a more anarchical way, much like social media itself, with factions of one — the angry acting on their own, unpredictably.
It will be the weaponization of Main Character Syndrome in which millions of people have outsized senses of themselves.
Here is how the Cleveland Clinic describes Main Character Syndrome:
“Main character syndrome” isn’t a medical diagnosis, but it’s a term that’s quickly piqued curiosity online and social media over the last few years. Main character syndrome is defined by a series of behaviors in which you see yourself as the main character in the story of your life. You are the protagonist and everyone else is often a sidekick or a villain. You often see yourself as the most important person in the room, and you act according to the narrative of your plot — however you define it.
The grievances driven by canyon-sized income inequality are devastating.
Our survival as a democracy, our own humanity, demands painful structural change. A politics of violence will eventually end up your doorstep.
(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )
Great read. Spot on.
Doug, the reality is that, as Warren Buffet said so well years ago, we have had a class war going on for decades, but it's only been fought by one side, the rich, and they have already won (for the forseeable future). Now class wars can be fought non violently, thru political revolution, such as the two presidential runs by Bernie Sanders, thru the electoral route, both of which were crushed by the Dem Party establishment. Or they can be fought violently, such as the French Revolution, with the gulliotines being the final stage of it. For decades now, the rich and corporations have only become less afraid of the masses and us peasants, while meanwhile, they have only consolidated their power over us, by buying almost all the politicians in DC, from both major parties.
As you say, the inequality has only been growing wider and the pot is boiling hot by now, with the lid being just about as ready to blow as it did in the late 1960s. I wish the ruling class and corporations would be willing, as they were back then, to make the kind of concessions to the masses that they need to make, for us to avoid a violent civil war here, but I really doubt it will happen that way. The only reason the ruling class made its concessions to the peasants in the 60s, which have been continually taken back since then, with regressive policies by both major parties, is because the non violent movements led by MLK and the peace movement, were balanced by violent movements like the Black Panthers and SDS/ Weathermen. That combo of both violent and non violent opposition, is why the ruling class allowed LBJ to pass his civil rights bills, along with his Great Society and War On Poverty programs. When I look at our situation today, we have had only the non violent protest for the last decades since the 70s, which have been duly ignored and ineffective.
I wish non violence still worked, like it did back in the 50s and 60s, but it doesn't anymore, since both major parties are unresponsive to it, and our corporate media also ignores and refuses to give fair, balanced and full coverage to the voices of those who protest, unlike the 50s and 60s, when most media was family-owned and practiced a much more fair and balanced form of responsible journalism. Notice how in all the coverage of the CEO's murder, not once do the corporate media ever interview any experts or writers from the left or anyone outside the corporate mainstream, to speak about the anger of the masses against health insurance companies? Could it be because they are afraid of the angry masses being characterized as rational and reasonable in their hatred of the CEO? I fear that violent attacks against our ruling class and corporations, are going to be the result of our voiceless protest movements against those two groups, even tho even those will probably be futile and brutally repressed, and will usually not impact the actual villains at the top of those organizations, but as MLK said, riots are the voice of the hopeless and ignored, and you sure can't argue that it doesn't apply just as much today, to how our system treats those groups of economically oppressed people.
Back in the 60s, the ruling class decided to cave and give the masses the concessions they were demanding, the same as during the Great Depression, rather than continue to fight a civil war, thru the fed government, against the violent protest groups. This time, I don't think they will, since their tools and methods of repression are much stronger now, with the militarized police forces, the anti terror laws like the Patriot Act, and the weapons now available to abuse even non violent protestors, and they now have the whole fed govt., including the SC, completely on their side.