Flea Party leaps in protest

LITTLE ROCK — I’m sold on one man’s proposed name for that unwashed, whining, smelly mob occupying and infesting Wall Street because they either:

1. Are being paid by big-bucks special interests to be there and create violent confrontations or. . .

2. Have no jobs, are bored and have nothing better to do but hang out together and screech “Pervert!,” “Boycott!” and “The world is watching!” as they intentionally pick fights with police to create headlines (and Internet videos for the 2012 election) or. . .

3. Are harboring free-floating anger about life as free Americans and are in search of scapegoats for their rage. Or, all of the above.

Yep, the calculated hatching of America’s newly named “Flea Party” seems to fit this mob. And shazam! It rhymes with Tea Party.

It is interesting to contrast the motives, methods, sense of responsibility and public hygiene practices reflected by each of those groups.

Those New York occupiers are in serious need of soap, antiperspirant and restrooms. I’m reminded of the 1969 Woodstock crowd, only with violence and profanities thrown in to ensure media headlines.

Anyone out there feeling empathy with their undefined causes? Do you identify with their rants, or why they are “occupying” anyplace? Is it the evil Wall Street employees? Insufficient government handouts and insufficient control? Their parents? Public corporations owned by citizen investors that employ millions? The lenders behind their college student loans?

Various interviews I’ve watched tell me the majority of these protesters are ill-informed, inarticulate and unsure themselves exactly why they are there except to vent emotion and party on.

My bet is that most are performing on cue and exactly as hoped for by wealthy, ultra-liberal power brokers using them for political purposes as 2012 approaches. I honestly can’t believe national Democrats have publicly embraced this mob.

Remember that old saw that says no change occurs without conflict? Well, welcome to the Flea Party Revolution against free enterprise, free choice and freedom itself.

National blogger Andrew Breitbart offered up a revealing cache of archived e-mails from those participating in the Occupy Wall Street production.

Here is a verbatim one from Breitbart’s collection:

“We’re in this for the long haul. There are no ‘solutions’ that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It’s in those moments that we have to push the envelop [sic], pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabalize [sic], but maintain momentum. And when that’s the new ‘normal’ then we go farther. That’s how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.”

Pretty much says it all. And who’d ever have thought our president, who openly lectured the rest of us about the need for “civility,” would support such hateful and vile behavior? The hypocrisy emits the odor of desperation.

Then you have Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House who supports the Wall Street Flea Party. I recall her, too, publicly calling for gentler discourse a couple of years back as she was trying to demonize the grass-roots Tea Party demonstrations as her idea of “astroturf.”

The manic Occupy Wall Street fandango happened to strike my remaining active memory nerve, which sent me in search of a previous column. I was commenting on Chicago’s Ben Hecht’s explanation of how power seekers create scapegoats (or crises) amongst “sheeple” by demonizing others to achieve their ends.

I finally located the article published in 2005, which reads in part: “The late journalist Ben Hecht explained how best to accomplish this in his theory of the scapegoat. The irascible Hecht showed us how easy it was to identify a problem and blame it publicly on one person or group or race or sect that was in the minority.

“Once enough sheeple begin to echo the bogus blame message, it soon becomes accepted as truth, and the scapegoating is successful. This tactic is effective on a grand or small scale.”

(For example, in Germany, Jews were demonized and scapegoated by the Nazi party. And we all know how that plan turned out.)

“When I stop to reflect on the topic, it’s easy to see that truth is the most significant victim when intentional spirits are snuffed out by the desire to conform,” the column continued.

“I see scapegoating all the time. So many of us have become uncomfortable with others who exhibit genuine intention in their lives. Intention, you see, can reflect itself in all aspects of a person’s life and belief system.”

Jump back a few inches to that enlightening paragraph about the occupiers’ email and plan.

Now imagine “evil” Wall Street and corporations and Americans who’ve worked hard to acquire wealth, and lenders who granted student loans. See if Hecht’s scapegoat theory doesn’t fit as tightly as Che Guevara’s sweaty beret.

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Mike Masterson is opinion editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Northwest edition.