The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Today's sociology lesson came from some random asshat on the train. I should know better than to change my routine, because it never works out very well.

Instead of getting off the train at Brickell and taking the shuttle to Bayfront, I got off at Government Center. Once downstairs and on the shuttle, there was a ten minute delay. But, luckily for all those on board, we had a vocal lunatic on hand to give us a running commentary on the state of America with side notes about American history, the curse of poverty and the origins of certain ethnic slurs.

Unluckily for those of us on board, the guy was a raving idiot, and possibly a Tourrette's sufferer too, because he Never Shut Up. He had a sidekick, to whom he addressed his lecture.
Allow me to paint you a picture, if you will.

The doors are open, and a young male who appears to be Anglo (fair, light eyes, tall) comes in and holds the door for his friend, a not-so-young black male in a wheelchair. The guy in the wheelchair has some sort of twisty-writhing thing going on, so that every time I glance over at him, he's in a different position, including, at one point, (I kid you not) upside down, with his head on the foot rest, facing in.

None of these contortions phase his buddy in the least, if, in fact, he is even aware that his friend is wiggling around. The fair-haired boy is wearing a pair of baggy (of course) denim shorts complete with large logo on one leg, and a styled denim jacket in a very now acid wash, fully buttoned to the throat, where he has tied on a grey bandana, old west style, like a bandit about to pull it up over his face just before the bank robbery. Clean sneakers, no baseball cap. And then he opens up his pie-hole and does not stop. He talks like a seriously "gangsta" inner-city thug. Reminds me of Jamie Kennedy in Malibu's Most Wanted. A lot.

It is a rant about how all these people are going to work in offices where they are going to talk on their cell phones and sit on their asses and make piles of money whereas he is a poor working guy who does construction and gets laughed at by the stiffs in their Chryslers. America is doomed to crash. America deserves to crash. But he and his friend will be OK, because they are the poor and the downtrodden and they have better survival skills.

When the power goes out, and OH IT WILL, all of us will be down, and he will be on top and he'll know what to do then, oh, YES HE WILL and we will all be working with our hands and suffering because the (and I quote) SPICS and the NIGGAS will be on top. The working peeps who know what it's like to blahblahblahblah. Then there was a slight digression as he explained where the term spic came from... except I don't think the last letter began with a C...or a K. Anyway.

But America is going to CRASH and it'll be worse than the Great Depression in his granddaddy's day. (HUH? This asshat knows about the Great Depression? I'll be damned.) OH YES IT WILL. And he's got the popcorn ready.

OK. You get the gist. Repeat with variations ad nauseum for the ten minutes we are stuck at the station (although while he was on the people in the towers with their cell phones portion, there was a general fleeing of the ship by the rats in question), followed by more variations on a theme for another ten to fifteen minutes while we creep along the el to my stop. He was still going on when I left.

But, and here's the thing, for all his anti-Capitalist Pig, anarchy in UK posturing, the kid is wearing new clothes, in new styles with highly visible branding. And while I have no way of knowing his level of education, he at least was awake long enough to learn about the Great Depression and even able to place it in the correct time frame... which is more than I can say for a lot of high school graduates.
He is bragging that he's got his popcorn ready when America falls (never mind that Gill Scott Heron said that the revolution will not be televised), which would indicate that he has a home, and the money to pay the electric bills and fork over the buck fifty for a bag of Jiffy Pop. He talked about his job, working hard with his hands. So, anarchy boy? Aren't you just more of the same as me? Job. Rent. Food. Clothes. Mass Transit. TV. Electric bills.

Sucks being the man, don't it?