Scenes from the "revolution"

As much as the Zuccotti kids like to compare themselves with the “Arab Street,” they’re really much closer, I think, to their cousins across the pond. A Q&A with some of those rioters on the BBC swiftly became infamous. What are you all raising hell for, asked the Beeb, after two young girls giggled over their “free alcohol!” “It’s the government’s fault. I don’t know,” admitted one. “Conservatives,” chirped her friend. “Yeah, I forget who it is. I don’t know.” They eventually settled on an answer: “It’s the rich people, the people that got businesses, and that’s why all of this is happening, because of rich people. So we’re just showing the rich people we can do what we want.”

There’s this running gag on the Internet where, whenever someone makes a mountain out of a molehill—“GRRR! Glee sucking this season!!! FML!!!—someone retorts, “#FirstWorldProblems.” Three simple words, but they illustrate one’s lack of proportion with comparative ease. When life is exponentially easier for you than it was for most of the world throughout most of human history— right up until the mid-twentieth century—boredom creates a vacuum. To be a hero, you have to create your own dragon to slay. But fighting real oppression, the kind ayatollahs dispense daily? Too brutal, too gauche. Mastering the intricacies of credit-default swaps so as to articulate an effective reform of the broken financial system? Way too tough. Better to create a dragon that can only be slayed with performance-art zombie metaphors.