Prager has a lot of problems, but about twenty-five years ago on his radio show, he put it like this: If poverty caused crime, Bel-Air would be a seminary.

We see that it is not.

Like wealth, poverty does not cause a rapacious inner nature, it reveals it.

The liberal left tend to romanticize poverty and crime - a la Les Miserables. After all, if your enemies are the wealthy in general, your heroes are the poor, by default.

Remember, it was leftists who romanticized Jessie James, Butch and Sundance, Bonnie and Clyde, Bugsy Seigel, Ned Kelley, et al. In Hollywood's hands, these violent criminals became victims of circumstance and mere thrill-seekers. The body count was downplayed and the widespread disruption of middle class lives with the robbery of their uninsured bank accounts was ignored.

Even Robin Hood, a yeoman revolutionary standing up against an evil king was turned into a romantic collectivist with "Steal from the rich and give to the poor."

Murder tends to be intensely personal. If your cause of death is going to be murder, it is very likely that you know your killer, and know them pretty well.

Quote:

"As a test of whether you are in touch with somebody, being loved can never be a patch on being murdered. That’s when someone really has risked his life for you."

Conan, not sure if Jesse James really fits your thesis. He was romanticized as a folk hero long before Hollywood existed in the South by people that are not best described as Leftist. Of course Hollywood took advantage of that. Not sure if the first people in Hollywood to romanticize him were leftist or not. Also not sure if the politics of the creators of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” can be safely described as leftist. And it seems somewhat like a corrective of previous romanticizing films of Jesse James as it shows him as a callous vengeful petty tyrant who happens to have a certain charisma. Violence didn’t seem like it was celebrated to me in that movie.

We in the West, left or right, tend to over-romanticize outlaws for whom we have some affinity. That's why the Confederate Battle Flag remained popular despite its connections with slavery - what's more outlaw that rebelling against a government you consider corrupt. After all, we didn't win this county in a poker game. We rebelled.

It took Hollywood to turn Bonnie and Clyde or Butch and Sundance into romantic heroes. Because, when those movies were made, the left was in a cultural rebellion and in search was on for heroes (or anti-heroes, if you will).

As for Jessie, he was immortalized in a folk song long ago, back when anti-establishment folks wanted to immortalize someone for taking on the powers that be; in this case, the railroads and the banks.

Notice that Jessie was immortalized, but not Frank. Frank settled down. Jessie wanted to return to a life of crime when the settled life left him restless, bored, and broke.

Perhaps we need a few more correctives to de-romanticize our cultural anti-establishment heroes. Now, if we could only get people to acknowledge the truth about Che Guevara and stop wearing that ridiculous t-shirt.

Driven by a need for bread, yes, but indirectly.

Jean Valjean's sister's kids are starving, so both he and his sister Jeanne Valjean get extra jobs. No one is supervising all those kids, so they get into trouble. They're sick of those Thenardier kids having fancy clothes and toys, so they go steal a doll off the dollmaker's cart.

Then, when they get out of prison, now they are dealing with the stigma so they totally steal the Bishop's silver. Not to buy bread, but because it's there and he was dumb to leave it where they could get it, it makes them feel superior to take it.

Conan, I'm pretty sure the yeoman revolutionary stuff came AFTER the robber legend... and was part of the romanticization, "He's not just a thief, he's a patriotic hero!"

Anyone remember the Brady Bunch episode where Bobby is obsessed with Jessie James so his parents bring in an old man whose family was killed by him, and Bobby has nightmares about it?

Actually, NicoleK, the existence of Robin Hood is debatable. In different legends he's been a yeoman farmer, a revolutionary, a disinherited noble, etc.

That Robin used a long bow is indicative of yeoman status. Nobles in that age did not use missile weapons, preferring the manly arts of swordsmanship and hand-to-hand combat. The English yeoman owned his own farm and was required by law to train with and own a long bow. It took years for a long bowman to gain the strength and technique to shoot a long bow proficiently.

The upshot - for the yeomanry, at least - is that the king was now faced with a permanently armed populace. Perhaps that, by itself, is the origin of Robin Hood, a folksy lesson for kings and nobles. Sir Walter Scott put Robin Hood into the rebellion against King John in Ivanhoe.

I've read speculation that the restraints on abuses by the nobility derived from having an armed yeomanry was the inspiration for the Second Amendment.

To keep the peasantry from being armed, the French went with the crossbow, a weapon whose use could be learned quickly and did not require each peasant to own one. The English claimed the superiority and ubiquity of their long bow enabled them to win at both Crecy and Agincourt.

Here's what historian Richard Shenkman wrote (this is not from one of his more sophisticated books, mind you):

There have been quite a few people in English history who stole from the rich and gave to the poor (though stealing from the poor and giving to the rich seems to have been far more common), but none, as far as we know, went by the name Robin Hood.

Historians have found a half dozen or so medieval men by the name of Robert Hood who pretty much fit the bill. One, who lived back in the 1200s, even seems to have gone around stealing from the rich “for the benefit of the many.” But nobody knows if the Robin Hood saga is based on the adventures of this particular fellow or not.

The Robin Hood saga, I should point out, has changed over the years.

That Robin Hood was an aristocrat, for example, seems to have been added into the story in the sixteenth century. So was the business about his love of Maid Marion and his friendship with Friar Tuck. In the original versions of the story, he didn’t even roam around Sherwood Forest. He lived in Barnesdale Forest. Why suddenly somebody decided to have him in Sherwood Forest I couldn’t tell you.

In some early accounts, Robin is not so much the class-conscious hero of the poor as the tribal leader of the downtrodden Saxons, many of whom remained unreconciled to the conquest of the island by the conquering Normans. Robin, however, was a funny name for a Saxon leader, as it is French.

And just to show you how his story keeps changing, in the medieval versions he wasn’t even lovable. Say a fellow he didn’t like happened into the forest and by accident crossed his path. Think Robin would just search the man’s pockets for gold and stuff and let it go at that? Robin was a two-fisted-troublemaker of the first order. At the least he’d box the guy’s ears and yank off one of his limbs or something.

What he’d do to clergymen you wouldn’t want to hear. I read it wasn’t too pleasant.
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If you want to know, regarding that last (prepare yourself):

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch154.htm

Search on "monkes." It's about 1/5 down the page.

Though from the next verse, one might infer that Robin Hood was doing a pretty important favor to women and children everywhere.