Grievance deficit disorder

LIBERAL HERO WANNABES
Like Don Quixote, the would-be hero finds himself living in the wrong era, a world in which the true heroism of storybooks no longer seems possible. He has read of MLK and the Freedom Riders and Bloody Sunday in Selma. Next to them, the causes for which he would fight today (abortion on demand, greater government control of the economy, higher taxes) are so much less noble than the old ones, whose hardest parts were won by better men.

Had he lived back in the day, perhaps our hero would have bravely faced the firehoses, bombings, and beatings. Or perhaps not. Either way, he can only relive those days now in his imagination, by inflating the threats that he thinks surround him. He cannot accept that Americans, though imperfect, are good and decent people, or that America is a good and decent nation. He is short of real grievances, and eager to re-enact (with much lower stakes, of course) the far more glorious battles of ages past.

This is where hoaxers and hysterical liberal pundits come in. They facilitate the creativity of minds thus afflicted with this “grievance deficit disorder.” In cases like Oberlin and the Google shuttle, their behavior is a function of supply rising to meet demand. It was easy for Andrea Brazier of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, to land an appearance on Piers Morgan’s CNN show because hers was the kind of story Piers Morgan likes. She seemed to be a hate-crime victim. She is now suspected of spray-painting her own home with racist messages and then accusing high school football players who had supposedly hazed her son. She was discovered only after the team canceled the last two games of its season.

Dayna Morales, the waitress in New Jersey who famously faked an unkind note from a customer about her own sexuality, quickly landed several news interviews and received thousands of dollars in cash from well-wishers, before she was discovered to have made everything up.