A Trip to the Circus

Back from wherever he keeps himself, the Venerable Bede has been writing a string of posts all of which deserve a read, but the one on the Occupy Wall Street crowd, or whatever they call it over in London, was just too fun to pass by:

But there is a far from negligible selection of normal people too, all displaying a bizarre sense of entitlement that would have simply baffled their grandparents.

There's "Lili Wallace, 23, a business student at Greenwich College", who asks us to share her sense of outrage over the fact that “I’ve applied for a million and one jobs, and I can’t get access to funding for the business I want to set up.”

A full 23 years old, and she can't get funding to start her own business? What is happening to the world! Take to the streets!

Then there is "Floella, 35, who has friends in work who can’t even pay their gas bill", a tellingly silly and impossible claim, and "a security officer from Somerset who has three children to feed and “has to count the beans out one by one”."

Whatever you think of these stories, and I have to say they shock me personally in a rather different sense to the one intended, you still have to ponder both the automatic assumption that, as if by algebraic inevitability, one man's misfortune must be another man's fault, and the certainty with which they have chosen their childishly symbolic villains. The deeply arguable assumption that the existence of very rich people hinders, rather than has no effect upon, or perhaps even promotes, the improvement of conditions for those less fortunate is, it seems, an argument long-settled, resentment always being more comforting to the ego than reason.

“I’m no ideologue,” says "Mina Naguib, a 25-year-old medical student at Nottingham". “I have friends in the City. But just because Marx’s solutions were wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that his analysis was also wrong.”

No, it just makes it incredibly likely.

I'm sorry, but I can't read that without cracking up and feeling good all over. Nicely done.