He sounds interesting...but I really have a problem with the glorification of crime. I know why people like to glorify those that steal from the rich, because of an ironic deep seated hatred of the wealthy in a nation built upon ideas of unlimited upward socioeconomic mobility. But this kid doesn't just steal boats and planes, he steals from regular people who are struggling as well.
He sounds like a very smart, talented individual, and if you ask me, there's nothing glorious about what he's doing, it really just makes it that much more tragic. He taught himself how to fly (but not land), and to do all manner of things that an average kid his age probably wouldn't be able to figure out in the same way. He could probably be something pretty impressive if he hadn't turned to immature crimes.
He reminds me of Christopher McCandless. Both bright, both leading very unorthodox lives. Both living in their own created worlds. Both celebrated as a sort of folk hero. But McCandless died because of hubris. One wonders if Harris-Moore will share the same fate. In either case, there's little to be celebrated or glorified here.
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It is tragic. He illustrates the wasted potential of children with crappy families. He's probably a genius but turned out this way since his daddy gone.
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Sounds like there was a little more to it than absent father, mal.
As for the fascination: we love criminals. See: Burn Notice, Leverage and White Collar. Criminals are adorable, skilled, intelligent and reasonably happy according to these shows. Colton is living the dream.
Of course, it's not a dream. It's going to escalate one way or another. Hopefully nobody gets killed.
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True, his mother doesn't sound too good either. He does have the potential to have been great but his ability has been refocussed. I'm sure their are drug lords who could've been Bill Gates.
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Well, I disagree. Leverage is about a group of highly skilled, flashy career criminals who, as frequently happens in tv shows, are brought together and become the good guys. They work outside the law.
The guy in White Collar is a criminal. He's not reformed. He's only reformed due to outside influence (i.e. it's either that or jail.)
In Burn Notice, they may have formerly worked for the government, but now they are firmly working outside the law. Nor are they particularly ethical all the time.
The point is, they are all supposed to be criminals and they are all glamourized.
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Yeah, in Leverage they're the good guys. How is this kid in any way the good guy?
As for White Collar, how is he not reformed? He hasn't stolen anything since he got out, and he's helping to solve cases left and right as a condition of his parole. Isn't that sort of the definition of reformed? As far as "it's either that or jail," isn't that also how it generally works? I mean, if you break the law, you go back to jail. Duh. You get out, you stop breaking the laws, or you go back. If that isn't reformed, then we have MILLIONS of unreformed criminals in our midst!
I understand that criminals are glamorized, as I've said. But often it's for justified reasons. They stole because they were stealing from bad people to help good people. They stole to recover stolen goods. They stole from people who could afford to lose it (and here's where we journey down the slippery slope), etc.
My point is that there's nothing particularly glamor-worthy about this kid.
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And...Robin Hood didn't steal from the rich, he stole from a tyrannical govt. He was a conservative hero.
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Lyrhawn, I wholeheartedly agree. There *is* nothing glamour-worthy about this guy. When I said he's living the dream, I meant that I suspect he's living his dream. In his mind, he's LIKE these shows-- he probably has a few justifications going on.
My point is not that he is like these highly fictional adorable criminals, but that he is, in the eyes of those who would glamourize him, in the same category. Since you don't glamourize him, you wouldn't put him in the same category.
quote:And...Robin Hood didn't steal from the rich, he stole from a tyrannical govt. He was a conservative hero.
Which, at the time, was synonymous with the rich.
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I don't admire him any more than I admire a successful gang leader. I acknowledge his genius, although misguided.
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This is one of those times when it's hard to know when to go from "Poor kid" to "bastard". He obviously had a horrific childhood. He obviously has talents that were never directed to a positive end. And yet... eventually a person is responsible for their own actions.
I do know that I'll never be naming a child Colton!
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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is it wrong to join the facebook group? Just incase it get's to be a big deal and he does something drastic, or if he turns himself in, I can be part of the bandwagon first? ehm, uhm. ... I'm going to have to give this one a couple of days, it's a tough decision.
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quote:And...Robin Hood didn't steal from the rich, he stole from a tyrannical govt. He was a conservative hero.
Yeah, that whole 'give to the poor' schtick-big hit with conservatives.
ETA: And, y'know, before you hit me with the, "But conservatives would favor giving to the poor if the money was unjustly taken," well, you're right actually. But not your sort of conservative, who believes that one's status in life is entirely, 110% due to their own character and work ethic.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Well there's the crux of it. Mal's entire conception of party politics is actually the projection of a generalized morality, which is fairly binary. Robin Hood = good, therefore Robin Hood = conservative. Here the actual ambiguities and shades of character necessary to actually motivate a person to steal from the rich and give to the poor is completely replaced with a sort of tetris game, switching out the jargon we use in order to establish what appears to be a clear line of reasoning for the conflation of morality and politics.
If you want some more in depth insight into the true masters of this particular brand of rhetoric, you should study the work of the apparatus of the Soviet Kremlin. The ability to simply replace reason and ambiguity in morality with jargon and absolute terms was one prized by the Bolshevists.
It's just as easy to go the other way, and say that Robin Hood was in fact, being the son of a king and a prince himself, the true representation of legitimate government fighting against the cronyism and greed of a pretender to the throne, in order to establish a more equally distributed pool of wealth in his kingdom, which would make him very much a *liberal* hero, rather than a conservative one.
That argument is juuust about as legitimate as Mal's- which is to say not very much at all. The Robin Hood story is more about personal integrity and leadership- the giving to the poor thing is a way of dealing with what would otherwise make Robin Hood appear to be just a highly ambitious and power hungry dictator. It makes him *less* political.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: But not your sort of conservative, who believes that one's status in life is entirely, 110% due to their own character and work ethic.
I like this! It works on so many levels! There's even a subtextual jab at conservative media's tendencies with poll data.
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Boredom, mostly. And a wish for threads to stay on topic longer than it takes for Mal to find them and post in them.
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