DallasNews | The real name for this is mindless, idiot violence. The correct term
for the people involved is criminals so stupid they shot and stabbed one
another in a chain-store shopping center where ordinary citizens go to
eat lunch, browse sporting goods, shop for sofas.
“Thug” might be a little too smart for this bunch. And while we’re at it, “biker” and “outlaw” may be a little too romantic.
Los
Angeles writer Donald Charles Davis, who blogs about the “1 percenter
lifestyle” under the pseudonym “The Aging Rebel,” elegantly describes
gang-affiliated bikers as “brotherhoods of men who have left themselves
no choice but to stand apart from the world at large.”
Oh, those
daring outlaws, the ghostly remnants of a manly frontier spirit that
“stands apart” from a culture made soft by iPads and wine tastings and
women who talk back. TV and Hunter S. Thompson-addled journalists have
turned “MC clubs” into the last of the Marlboro men.
Except
they’re not. Take away the motorcycles and the vests (“cuts”) and the
hieroglyphic patches and you have your basic gang-banger. A thug. A
dum-dum so besotted by his own sense of “badness” that he’ll shoot
someone over some perceived act of “disrespect” — walking into the wrong
bar, wearing the wrong color, sporting the wrong patch.
Sure, you can call that “bad.” You can also call it “dangerously stupid.”
“These
guys become very violent to each other very quickly over nothing,” said
McClennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara. “Very quickly over nothing”
is a woefully inadequate reason for a broken jaw or a knife in the gut
or a gunshot to the head.
Davis (“Aging Rebel”) is a gifted
writer, but if you read some of the 1 percenter comments to his blog
post about the Waco shootings, you’ll find something scary but drearily
familiar.
You’ll find the contemporary flavor of bunker-brained
craziness that’s poisoning everyday culture: vicious hatred of
government, contempt for ordinary citizens (“sheeple”), manic belief in
elaborate conspiracy theories.
One online scenario that’s floating
around the Waco shootings is this: Law enforcement orchestrated the
Sunday killings, sending undercover cops disguised as bikers into the
bar to start a fight. Once the fight spilled outside, SWAT teams opened
fire, deliberately slaughtering members of the brave brotherhood who
dare to stand apart.
That’s a level of paranoid delusion I find a lot more alarming than an academic debate over who we can or can’t call a “thug.”
