Populist Rage? ...Never Mind

Posted by Joe Klein
Time

A certain newsmagazine--hint: not this one--has put Populist Rage on its cover this week and features a series of essays, several quite good, about all the fury churning out there in pitchfork land. I suppose that there is a fair amount of anger about, especially with stories like this one popping up on an almost daily basis. I certainly loved every minute of Jon Stewart's takedown of Jim Cramer. It got to the heart of the crime: selling, and insuring--and making huge, bonus-driven fortunes off on--piles of mortgages that were bound to go unpaid is a Ponzi fantasy, of Madoffian enormity, even if each of those mortgages represents an actual home that can, and will, eventually, be resold.

So, yes, people are "angry" at Wall Street. They are also "angry" at Octomom. I wonder if the depth and quality of those two rages differ--or is this all just a television show? I mean, how many demonstrations, how many economic riots, have there been? There have been real free-for-alls, featuring real violence and bloodshed, in places like China, where the level of societal unfairness and desperation makes our own not-insignificant inequities seem like a workers' paradise. There used to be economic riots and marches here--back in the Great Depression, and further back in the populist era of the late 19th century. But none lately. There doesn't even seem to be significant movement in the polls, which are our own, latter-day way of marching on Washington.

(More here.)