It may or may not be the case that actor Johnny Depp participated in a British pop band’s song blaspheming Jesus Christ. Every news organization from Reuters to ABC claims this is so, but they all rely on a report by the British tabloid The Daily Star, which now appears to be at least partially false, at least according to E!. Unlike reporters from the more “serious” news outlets, E! actually bothered to fact-check its sources.

And according to E!, which originally mimicked other news agencies in parroting The Daily Star’s claims, a spokesman for Focus on the Family—one of two Christian groups cited by The Daily Star for condemning Depp—has denied issuing any such condemnation.

I don’t know how often journalists attribute dozens of words—27, in this case—to organizations that later deny having made any comment at all, but it certainly ought to raise eyebrows.

More suspicious still is the fact that while The Daily Star quotes a spokesman named Lee Douglas from The Christian Coalition as asserting that Depp and other band members will “burn in hell,” a search of the Coalition’s website finds neither a press release about Depp nor any evidence that it has a spokesman by that name in its employ. Representatives from the Coalition have yet to respond to a request for clarification from WORLD.

I suppose it doesn’t matter whether The Daily Star reporter simply fabricated her quotes; secular readers and writers are inclined enough to believe that Christians will proclaim someone hell-bound that they don’t even need the quotes in the first place. In fact, prove that these quotes are invented and the average reader is likely to say to himself: “Well, maybe those Christians didn’t say it, but I know darn well they were thinking it.”

And maybe a good many Christians are inclined to think such a thing, given the blasphemy of the song, which posits Jesus as a drunken party guest. I know I’m tempted to think so, perhaps not as much for the blasphemy as for the awful quality of the song itself, which has the plodding, uninventive vocals one might associate with Soviet-era patriotic hymns. If anything is an offense against God, then surely bad art is.

Still, it’s troubling that so many major media outlets will run almost verbatim a tabloid report when it suits their ideological agenda. I’m hard-pressed to imagine the same outlets running, without verification, a tabloid report indicating that abortion increases breast-cancer risk or that atheists made death threats against a prominent preacher.

My friends on the left often wonder why my friends on the right and in Christian circles are so distrustful of the mainstream media. Here’s a great example why.

Little do my socialist friends know, but “The Internationale,” the worldwide anthem to communism written (of course) in France and popularized by the Soviet Union, is really about worshipping Christ. I mean, look at the first two lines:

“Stand up, damned of the earth / Stand up, prisoners of starvation.”

All of us are damned without Christ, you see, and all starving for the Word as well as the Body and Blood of the Eucharist. How hypocritical, then, of socialists who fail to heed the calling of their founders when they try to live without God.

And consider the first two lines of the second stanza:

“There are no supreme saviors / Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune.”

What that means, of course, is that the Trinity doesn’t include mortal rulers, but the Triune Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, co-equal in majesty and power. Clarifying the essence of the Trinity was always important to socialists, even if their modern-day counterparts don’t understand this.

The rest of this hymn to God is filled with a calling to spiritual discipline (”So that the spirit be pulled from its prison / Let us fan the forge ourselves”), peace (”Let the armies go on strike”), and the eventual return of Christ (”The sun will shine forever”). What a pity, then, that today’s socialists don’t revere God the way they should, getting caught up instead in worrying over who will get what portion of the economic pie. That was never what socialism was about.

Now, will someone please send the foregoing to self-appointed voices for Christianity on the left, who are fond of yanking Bible verses from their scriptural and traditional contexts, and forcing them into service of an economic vision that was about as important to Christ as what brand of sandal He wore? Whether it’s Jim Wallis, declaring that the Occupy Wall Street protestors are carrying forward “Gospel issues,” or Jeremy John, explaining that the Occupiers are battling “Christ’s ancient foe, the love of profit above the needs of people,” they’re engaged in a word game that is no less silly than combing through “The Internationale” to prove it’s really a faith document.

In other words, if socialist Christians could start treating the Bible with as much respect and integrity as they would treat texts written by the misguided apostles of their true, underlying faith, we’d all be better off.

I’m predisposed to agree with arguments against participating in Black Friday. So I was prepared to nod my head to Aiden Enns’s essay in The Washington Post’s On Faith blog, in which he lays out reasons why Christians should avoid today’s madness.

Instead I found myself wondering how many people might be persuaded to take Christianity more seriously if the know-nothings who write under a Christian label would take up some other occupation.

There are plenty of reasons for a Christian not to participate in Black Friday. Most of these reasons are applicable to every human being with a modicum of good sense. If you value your time, for example, you don’t want to squander it in some of the longest lines of the year.

If you value your money, and you’ve been paying attention, you know that retailers are desperate. (Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that you could still smell the sunscreen on people when shopping centers started hanging wreaths and playing pseudo-Christmas jingles?) Which means the longer you hold out, the better deals you can get, unless your loved ones absolutely have to have whatever trinket is exceedingly popular and rare this year.

And they don’t, by the way, which means the power lies in your hands to teach them an important lesson about letting go of what they covet.

Finally, if you have any fashion sense, you know that black is out this fall season, making Black Friday terribly passé. What’s more, there’s no way to congregate with a bunch of sweatpants-wearing, bargain-addled shopping addicts who’ve been up since 4 a.m., and look good. No way.

These are all valid reasons to eschew Black Friday. What is not a valid reason is virtually any of the argumentation offered by Enns. “It’s not that there’s something more important than the economy,” he claims, “it’s that the economy needs to be refashioned.” By this he means we need committees of smart people to address “poor labor conditions, exploitative hiring practices, unfair monopolies, and irresponsible resource extraction.”

History shows that people who don’t really understand markets generally make things worse when they start monkeying around with them in the name of “social justice.” But there’s a deeper problem here, which is Enns’s tacit assertion that there is nothing more important than the economy. This is not uncommon among those in the social justice wing of Christianity, who are at their hearts first and foremost about economics over faith.

But the real howler is where Enns writes this: “It’s dumb to say it this way, but Jesus was like Gandhi before Gandhi was Gandhi. He came alongside the poor masses and gave them hope because he stood up to the enforcers of empire.”

Here’s a writing tip: If you begin your sentence with, “It’s dumb to say it this way,” that’s a real strong clue that what you’re about to say is, in fact, dumb.

Jesus was no Jewish Cesar Chavez. He didn’t just chose “solidarity,” as Enns asserts, “with people of the lowest ranks,” as at least one centurion and one powerful tax collector can attest. He comes as King, and He overthrows the power of sin and death, not passing economic monopolies and labor injustices. To write about Him otherwise is to cheapen Him, and cheapen Christmas.

So fine, fellow Christians, stay home on Black Friday. Heck, abstain from shopping during the entire Christmas season. But do it not because Jesus wants socialism; do it, if you choose, because Jesus has more important work, with you, me, and our neighbors, than fussing over whether that new spatula we’re about to buy meets a set of Fair Trade standards.

I recently had several men from where I work over to my place, for chili, beer, and a movie. I warned them in advance about the profanity. Not mine, the movie’s. The film we assembled to watch was Glengarry Glen Ross, based on the David Mamet play. I defy anyone to find a film with more profanity per line of dialogue.

One young man from work opted out because the prospect of so much vulgarity disturbed him. I respect his decision, especially in light of the tacit peer pressure resulting from everyone else attending.

It gave me pause, in fact. It’s a problem the Christian artist faces—the world is filled with the profane, and so to write or paint or play act it out as if it does not is to set aside an artistic imperative, which is to craft beauty from ashes. On the other hand, many Christians feel compromised if they hear or read or see what is vulgar.

The Christian non-artist frequently enjoins the Christian artist to thread the needle when it comes to vulgarity. The fact that Bill Cosby was funny without sounding like Richard Pryor is a common example. Except that Cosby did curse on occasion, to great comedic effect.

Fine, might come the rebuttal, but art doesn’t need this kind of ugliness to be art. Shakespeare didn’t have sex scenes, after all.

Except that he did, as does the Bible (see the Song of Solomon).

But at least there’s no cursing in the Bible, the rejoinder might go.

Except that there is: David is finally filled with bloody fury because Goliath utters blasphemy against God far worse than any modern English dirty word.

Sometimes I think what it boils down to is that we’ve reified breasts and fairly uncreative naughty words until they are the devil himself. Still, I can appreciate a young man not wanting the words we all agree are dirty on his ears. One can’t control other forms of profanity one hears—abusive words from a parent to a child, say, or lies from a preacher in the pulpit—but at least one can exercise some control over when one hears variants of the seven words George Carlin gleefully immortalized.

But I’m fond of this movie not because the profanity is realistic (because really, who talks this way to one another?), but because Mamet makes use of it. In other words, his goal is not simply realism; his point is that men have tremendous barriers between them. Most of us don’t know how to talk to one another. Thus the most common verbs in the dialogue of this film’s characters are conversational: Speak, talk, listen—verbs like that. Meanwhile, the cursing erupts from the lips of the characters because it is their primal rage—they have nothing else they know how to say, but so much they need to say.

The average viewer doesn’t get this, of course, and so he is either titillated or offended. Flannery O’Connor, often beset by good church ladies for writing stories with freaks and perverts, noted that most good church people shouldn’t read her work, and that this reality didn’t imply anything poor about them or her writing. It just wasn’t suited for them, given their spiritual maturity (or lack of it).

That makes sense to me, and so I respect this young man for not attending, just as I would have respected David Mamet had he been a man of great faith when he wrote his play.

But I suspect I am an outlier in that regard. So what is the proper role of the Christian artist? Protect the minds of his weaker or more stringent consumers, or simply craft art as he best knows how, trusting people to determine what is best for them to consume? Is it possible for a good Christian to write a profanity-laced play, or is it inherently a sin?

It’s certainly an indication of my hypocrisy that my first reaction upon seeing the recently released video of a Texas state judge cursing and beating his daughter with a belt is that I’d like to punch his lights out. (Warning: Use caution if you view this video; the foul language is extreme.) It’s certainly evidence of my fallen nature that my more thoughtful reaction after considering some of the variables that have been made available in press accounts and taking into account his lengthy and grammatically flawed public statement responding to the video is that now I’d first like to make the judge read a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and then punch his lights out.

I have four sons, and at times I’ve spanked them all. I’ve spanked them properly and improperly, and like anyone who has ever spanked his children, I know full well the difference. Any time I’ve let anger creep into my voice, or worse still, into the little wooden cooking spoon I’ve used for spanking, I have regretted it terribly and asked my children to forgive me.

And they do, because children—unlike most adults—are more filled up with love than anything, until we beat or scold or bore or ignore it out of them.

I know how guilty I’ve felt when I’ve spanked too hard, and so it amazes me to see a man prowling about over his daughter’s cowering frame, randomly lashing out wherever he sees exposed flesh, cursing her, pausing to regain strength, and then resuming the beating. The video was made in 2004, and the man in the video is a bully, plain and simple. I don’t know what Judge William Adams is today, but “repentant” doesn’t seem to be among the possible descriptors, if his public statement is any guide.

And what of the approving folk quoted in the various stories about it, or who comment on blogs and news sites covering it? There seem to be two camps: those who are rightly worried that opponents will use this video to push for laws that forbid all forms of corporal punishment (and will have the same potential for abuse by authorities that vagrancy laws of old had), and those who seem to think that because the Bible admonishes parents not to spare the rod, a grown man can whip the daylights out of his child in a furious rage, and Jesus will approve it.

So imagine that the blessed moment of Christ’s return is when Judge Adams is in mid-swing. His arm cranked back, belt sizzling through the air like an angry snake, his face mottled with rage, and then there is Christ, He of the bloodied brow, He who stood between the adulteress and her judges, He who warns all mankind not to seek His forgiveness while we are yet unforgiving.

How do you think it would have gone for Adams in that moment?

And perhaps there’s the challenge for any of us, in our darkest moments, our most secretive moments, to imagine Christ standing there, silently watching, mourning how even now, with sin and death conquered at our feet, we choose to wrap ourselves up in destruction.

Imagine a group of economists assembling to advise clergy on how best to conduct church affairs. Consider the subjective value of your customers, they might say. Instead of being captured by an outdated notion of what your industry should be, think outside the box. Consider what the church could be, if it really understood its customers. Remember the sad lesson from the railroads: They thought only about how to become more efficient at railroading, when instead they should have reengineered themselves as transportation companies.

The sad truth, I realize as I type this, is that likely somewhere, in some fluorescent-lit basement of a church hell-bent on growth, there’s a consultant giving precisely that advice to a group of elders even now.

But most of us recognize that asking an economist to sort out how best to manage the institution founded by a God-man and governed by a Spirit whose plans and purposes are beyond our ken is like asking a podiatrist to conduct an orchestra.

Why the Vatican sees fit, then, to appoint a committee of experts profoundly ignorant of economics to hold forth on markets eludes me. This analysis of how to fix the world economy, from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, is in fact so astoundingly incompetent in its analysis that it borders on intentionally nefarious.

The statement begins as innocently as such intellectual train wrecks can begin, in the curious admixture of sophomoric economics jargon and groupspeak that is the hallmark of an assemblage of second-rate academics, as anyone familiar with the pronouncements from most university ad hoc committees can attest. Markets are currently a mess because they haven’t been regulated adequately, the world is in thrall to capitalism, and so on—exactly what we’ve come to expect from people entirely unfamiliar with the extent to which governments distort market processes with regulations, subsidies, and subtly inflationary monetary policy.

The council then approvingly quotes Pope Benedict, who labels the current economic crisis moral in nature. People should be selfless, he admonishes, which misses the point of markets, namely their ability to coordinate the behavior of people who don’t know each other. For example, the beauty of international trade in coffee is that I don’t have to spend hours understanding the needs of the bean grower and his family in Colombia, nor does he need to understand just how passionate I am about my morning coffee. We interact through dozens of intermediaries to make one another better off without the intimacy essential to moral interaction.

In other words, it’s precisely because people are far-flung and often not angelic that markets are so essential; they force us to make strangers better off in order to yield profit for ourselves.

But the pope’s is a rookie mistake, and one to be forgiven someone who has devoted his life to an endeavor that has absolutely nothing to do with economics. Still, one is tempted to offer to refrain from issuing personal encyclicals about the essence of the Holy Spirit, say, in return for a concomitant willingness on the part of the pope to keep silent about things for which he is entirely unsuited to hold forth.

But the ignorance of the pope is just the tip of the iceberg. From here the committee veers into the kind of academic insanity that only serves to fuel the paranoia of people living on compounds and waiting for the black helicopters to descend. It calls for a world governing authority. “The world’s peoples,” declares the committee, “ought to adopt an ethic of solidarity to fuel their action.”

As a sentiment this is admirable. As a potential vision of life after the Second Coming, it may well be prescient. But as a statement of practical governance, it deserves ridicule. The Church exists, after all, in part because man is fallen and in need of the saving word and Word. To call for a government that depends on man not being dark-hearted, then, is like a hospital exhorting its community to stop being sick so it can become a recreation center.

But the silliness escalates because the committee’s pronouncement calling for a world authority capitalizes the word “Authority.” The next effect is a document that honors a man-made political construct in the same way that we honor God the Father and the Holy Spirit by capitalizing them. Which is fitting because what the committee calls for is heaven on earth built by the goodwill of man.

The entire statement is an embarrassment. Perhaps the only saving grace is that nobody takes it seriously. Which is a shame, given the loftiness of its title: Justice and Peace. Perhaps a good step would be to fire everyone involved and instead appoint people who have some sense of what those words actually mean and how much they might be attained in a world that still, despite the Council’s utopianism, falls short of Christ.

I’ve always been partial to efforts to prove God from the evidence. I think this was mostly due to my intellectual orientation, my Western-oriented notion that one “knows” something first and foremost by turning it over in one’s mind. And there is pride, this overdeveloped pride I carry about in my chest. I never liked atheists thinking I’m stupid because I believe in God, so it served my pride well to be able to hold forth on the mechanics of natural selection, or the essential agreement of the Synoptic Gospels, or what have you.

A focus on evidence can have a valuable effect, especially when your run-of-the-mill atheist essentially parrots the dogma of his creed without understanding what it is he’s decided he doesn’t believe. Christians aren’t supposed to be so good with logical thought, nor is there supposed to be any evidence left by God on the earth. Altering that prejudice alone can open the door to someone’s mind, so that he considers, for the first time, whether all this God stuff is really as silly as he’s been taught to believe.

At the same time, to write, as pastor Dan Detzell does in The Christian Post, that “Christianity stands upon evidence,” and to assert further that the order of salvation is evidence followed by faith, is to embrace the flawed worldview of atheists. It is to fall prey to the notion that knowing comes through the five senses, and that anything beyond that cannot essentially be known. It tells us that the Christian uses his five senses to get himself oriented to the evidence of God, and then he trusts, through faith, that God is out there somewhere, though essentially undetectable insofar as the five senses cannot find Him.

But this concedes too much to the atheist, who is essentially always a materialist, a devout believer in the notion that nothing exists outside the five senses, because otherwise one of his five senses would have detected it, a piece of illogic so staggering and unscientific that one marvels at how a pre-eminent scientist like Richard Dawkins can embrace it.

Whereas the materialist says, “I cannot detect this invisible God,” the materialist Christian says, “I’ve got plenty of evidence to trust that there is an invisible God.”

But what of prayer, the greatest theology, the deep knowing of God that every Christian, if only for once, in perhaps the darkest night of his soul, has known, though he could neither hear, see, taste, smell, or touch it? Surely to find your heart’s tuning fork humming in accord with the forever-beating heart of God is a knowing, even though you can’t record it to the satisfaction of a Richard Dawkins.

In fact, I’ll bet that for many Christians, the process of conviction took exactly the opposite path from what Detzell suggests. We are suddenly struck, as Whittaker Chambers wrote of a moment in his childhood, by the breathtaking reality that God is real, more real than any material thing that has been troubling us. And this epiphany is so soul-shaking that we set about trying to prove it to ourselves. Paul wrote that we are saved by faith, after all, and not from within.

I appreciate the quest for evidence, I really do. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the reality that it is God who first pierces us. Only subsequently do we set about trying to scratch away at the obscuring reality around us, to fashion our intellectual briefs for Him. We shouldn’t cede this great knowing to the materialists. Let them stand on the five senses. As children of God, we know there is a deeper knowing than these senses can afford.

It’s been one of those sucker-punch days, at the end of a week of getting kicked in the pants. I jumped into a struggling organization a year ago to try and help stop the bleeding and get it on the right path again. It seemed, at the time, like it would be hard work, to be sure, but work with clear direction, like digging a ditch. You may sweat a lot, but at least you know what a ditch is supposed to look like.

Of course, it hasn’t been that simple. And, of course, there’s pain for everyone around when you parachute into a place and start changing everything at once. And, of course, I know all that because I’ve done it before, but this job has all kinds of wrinkles to it, wrinkles that leave me wondering sometimes—in the middle of the night, mostly, though sometimes I’m overwhelmed after a day of said sucker-punches—if I can do it, or if I’m instead going to make things worse for everyone else.

It’s a frightening feeling and an exhilarating feeling to know that you may succeed or you may fail catastrophically, and to genuinely not know which outcome will prevail. There’s safety in a big corporation (though less and less), but it’s rare that you get this kind of excitement.

But golly, sometimes there’s too much excitement. Add to that the personal stress of travel and financial strains and legal pressures, and I’m starting to get that compressed feeling, the feeling one of those self-help experts might be inclined to turn back on me with some kind of faux wisdom about pressure making diamonds. Pressure makes a diamond or two, to be sure, but mostly it just crushes stuff. I mean, have you seen what they do to cars in junkyards?

The pressure can be crushing, and so in the midst of it I think on two things. The first, quite simply, is that I know what hell on earth is like, because I’ve been there. Nurse your dying child and then bury her, and an imbalanced budget is suddenly just not that intimidating.

The second thing I remember is that all of us have within our power, at any moment, the ability to turn our eyes on the hurts or on the blessings. Now, I am one of the best hurt-counters in the business. I can not only tell you just how much water is missing from the half-empty glass, I can offer you odds on who took it, and give you half a dozen reasons why I know he’s out to get me. Suffice to say that surveying blessings instead of wounds is not something that comes naturally to me.

But what a difference it makes, when I remember to do it. So after this sucker-punch of a day, the kind that in the boxing ring brings you to your knees, I sit thinking on the blessings: like my four healthy sons, safe with their mother while I am away; the fact that I have a job; that I can pray any time of the day without fear of being locked up or shot; my friends, more than I can count, who would take me in if I had nothing; and my God, who is so loving that His heart calls out to the likes of me.

When I write them down, these blessings, I run out of paper. My cup runneth over. Why fear, then, a few sucker punches? The world is a hard and sometimes unforgiving place. But love has won. Love has won.

It’s certainly an eye-popping finding, at first glance: Baylor University researchers are tentatively reporting, according to Christianity Today, that frequent Bible reading makes one more politically left-wing.

There’s an important element left out of the headline, namely that, according to a graduate student associated with the research, it focuses on people who read the Bible outside church. Now, this invites more questions, doesn’t it? For example:

• Do they mean, simply, people who read the Bible when they aren’t in church?
• Do they mean people who get the Bible read to them in church?
• Do they mean those increasingly popular, independent non- and house-church folks, the ones who have taken Protestantism all the way to the end of the line and have decided to protest every single church around them?

The complications grow. For example, the researchers consider a greater propensity to oppose the federal government’s massive new powers under the Patriot Act to be evidence of becoming more liberal. But here’s the thing. I’m a strong proponent of American Founding principles—the kind of person these Baylor researchers would likely call a conservative. But as an advocate of the U.S. Constitution, I opposed the Patriot Act because I don’t trust unchecked federal agents with weapons not to abuse the rights of American citizens.

Likewise my opposition to the death penalty—another indicator to Baylor researchers of liberalism. It’s not that I’m particularly animated against putting someone to death for heinous crimes, or even above doing it myself, were the victims people I loved. But again, I’ve seen enough examples of abuse by thuggish police and crooked prosecutors to make me distrustful of the government’s ability to apply this penalty in a just manner.

There are other questions, about material consumption and belief in science. But belief in consuming less is not inherently antithetical to conservatism, as Rod Dreher and others might note. And many of the great conservative apologists of the faith—as well as many great scientists for centuries—saw no need to set science and Christianity at odds. The right course, they believed—and I believe, is to properly delineate the sphere of each and respect what it can and cannot tell you (a lesson that the decidedly unscientific—when it comes to religion—scientist Richard Dawkins would do well to learn).

Finally, topping off these dubious findings, the researchers acknowledge that frequent Bible reading increases the likelihood a person will oppose—not support—abortion and same-sex marriage. So what, in reality, does this study show? Namely, that the good sociologists at Baylor might do well to take a political science course.

But I suppose that doesn’t make for as catchy a headline.

Steve Jobs drifted in and out of college classes, sleeping on floors and getting free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. (And here we must stop and ask, before criticizing Jobs for going to a Hare Krishna temple—and the Hare Krishnas for being more crazy than not—how many Christian churches in his neighborhood were offering free meals?) He experimented with drugs and Buddhism and then took a job to pay the bills. He tried to discern his future, in an economy with too much inflation and unemployment ranging from 7 to 9 percent. And eventually he discovered it, or it discovered him, and he went on to craft products that improved the lives of billions of people.

A small, ill-educated sliver of those billions are now taking it upon themselves to descend upon Wall Street and Washington, D.C., and a few other places to protest something ill-defined, something having to do with corporations and student loans and the global economy. It’s a buzzword social movement; scrutinize the videos and the press releases and all you find are vague statements about banks and war and democracy and education, the former two being wicked, of course, and the latter two being of supreme importance.

Calling this a protest movement is too generous; it implies they know what it is they’re protesting.

The complaints are all couched in moral language that belies the underlying nihilism of the protestors, all of whom benefit from smart phones, trucks that bring groceries to their cities, manufacturers that make latte machines, and a capital infrastructure that affords relatively low-cost financing to people who are developing the Next Big Thing, people who are currently anonymous and about whom we can say one thing if nothing else: None of them is wasting his time holding a silly sign on Wall Street.

I have a friend who earned a degree in something relatively unhelpful and then took classes while drifting between jobs. He then received a divinity degree from one of those universities that prides itself on employing people who are too sophisticated to consider Christianity without a roll of the eyes. My children understand economics and the Nicene Creed better than he does.

He is, of course, exuberant about the protests.

Steve Jobs prided himself on being counter-cultural, but in an important sense this adopted child who grew to be a tycoon is quintessentially American. He drifted and he wandered and in the end he forged his own future. He risked his time and what capital he could scrape together on a vision, and he worked himself and everyone around him to the bone to make that vision a reality.

What he did not do was tacitly throw his fate—and responsibility for his life—into the hands of other people. These overprivileged, overgrown children occupying city streets share a common worldview that runs deeper than their cobbled-together socialism, and this worldview is that their lives are governed by Great Secret Powers and, further, that they are owed something.

Jobs became a billionaire, while today’s protestors will declare victory if they can throw their student loans onto the backs of people who work for a living. Steve Jobs built computers in a garage, and today’s youth build incoherent, self-indulgent mobs, and therein lies all the difference.