Scruffies stealing headlines

What took the left so long to catch on?

"The rich are rich only because we are on our knees. Let us rise!"

Communists, socialists and "occupiers" of various locations finally quit screwing around with the absurd "science" of Marxism-Leninism, "Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis" and hopeful blueprints for impossible creatures such as the "New Soviet Man," and realized, "We outnumber them 99 to 1. If they won't hand it over, we'll just take it!"

These scruffies stealing headlines worldwide are united by the same pathetic fallacy. They can't see a fat man standing beside a thin man without concluding that the fat man got that way at the thin man's expense. And they refuse to let the repeated historical failure of their vision blunt their confidence that "This time it will work!"

At least now the lofty rhetoric and high-minded battle cries of "justice" and "equality" are mercifully absent. A reporter once asked the founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, "What does labor really want?" Gompers briefly, bluntly and brilliantly answered, "More!" If anyone in this naked, drug-besotted mob, which can't tell a police car from a defecatory-appropriate toilet, had the sharpness of a Gompers, then when asked what they really wanted, he'd reply, "Yours!"

We may be ready for a review of communism, now that this new "Red Army" is in our streets. The communist system spawned in Russia, that swallowed Eastern Europe and won fans and an occasional government elsewhere, was not just a failure;it was a mortifying failure. There's a difference. Picture the nerve-wracked cast party of a Broadway show waiting near the bar for the reviews a few hours after the final curtain – and the reviews are miserable and the show closes. That's failure. Communism's failure is more like that Broadway show that was so bad it closed after the first act!

Communism didn't work. It survived only by brute force. Its captives were willing to die barehanded under Soviet tanks to resist it. Kindergarten children knew the difference between East Berlin and West Berlin; the old and free British Hong Kong versus Communist China; any place free versus any place communist. (China, by the way, kept the name "Communist" for sentimental reasons, but abandoned the system and copied the capitalists, thereby dramatically elevating the lives of its people)

Pre-Soviet Ukraine was nicknamed "the breadbasket of the world." Slightly to the west there was another; a back-up "breadbasket of the world": Transylvania, fertile flatland shared by Hungary and Romania. Either could have fed the world with its massive grain production. Then came communism – and guess what? They had to import wheat from America! That gave rise to the wry joke among those captive peoples: "What would happen if the Soviets took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: For three years, nothing; then they'd have to start importing sand from America!"

"We shall control the schools, the media, all communications," trumpeted the communists. "Within one generation we'll have a new kind of citizen eager to work for the good of ALL the people, not just his own selfish little interests." Great idea. In practice, though, it started out weak and gradually tapered off.

I knew by the age of 18 whether the girl I was calling really wanted to go out with me or not. Couldn't the leaders of those communist slave-states sense the rejection of their people? Of course they could. The idealistic communists, heartbroken by the bankruptcy of their sweet dream, quit early and often committed suicide. That left the thugs in charge. And they didn't care how their slaves felt.

Will the rich and super-rich now stand their ground and fight to defend their achievements, or will they fold like cheap patio furniture? The rebuttal to "Let's share the wealth by force!" is "Under traditional American-style freedom, you, too, can be wealthy!" Victory of the latter is far from guaranteed. All the ideological and theoretical claptrap is over and done with. The "Failures' Manifesto" now proclaims "We, the failures of the world, can assuage our pain by using our numerical superiority to help ourselves to the assets of the rich." And that will indeed work, for about as long as a cocaine high.

Watch the dominant middle! Will the security guard hired by the millionaire perform as intended or will he begin to think, "Those occupiers are my more courageous brothers"? Will the police "awaken to their appropriate role in the class struggle"? Or will they remain good cops? Shame on all leaders at every level who have allowed the degeneration to proceed this far without taking the anti-mob stand.

We should have seen this in the embryo stage about the time of the machine-smashing Luddites of the 1800s. Mark Twain joined the curious crowd peeking through the knotholes in the fence looking into a construction site featuring the very first steam shovel. "This is awful," said one of the onlookers. "That monster can replace 100 men with shovels."

"Yes," added Mark Twain. "Or 10,000 men with teaspoons!"

Not all occupiers are failures. They've just allied with them. Many occupiers are undoubtedly sincere. Sincerity is no excuse for stupidity.

Most of them likely feel they could perform well in any of those multi-million dollar jobs they're protesting. After all, success is nothing but luck, right?

Ask any failure.