Add “Mau-Mauing†to your vocabulary, it’s a great way to understand some current events, especially as they relate to Mizzou, Yale, Ferguson etc.
We are watching classic “Mau-Mauing†directed at bureaucratic and academic “flak catchers,†like the university president forced to resign yesterday by pure mob tactics. It works, so expect it to spread, as it has to Yale today. Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s have seen this all before, with Black Panther marches, campus administration office sit-ins, etc.
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
1970
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe. The book, Wolfe’s fourth, is composed of two articles by Wolfe, “These Radical Chic Evenings,†first published in June 1970 in New York magazine, about a gathering Leonard Bernstein held for the Black Panther Party and “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,†about the response of many minorities to San Francisco’s poverty programs. Both essays looked at the conflict between black rage and white guilt.
“Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchersâ€
The second part of Wolfe’s book is set at the Office of Economic Opportunity in San Francisco which was in charge of administering many of the anti-poverty programs of the time. Wolfe presents the office as corrupt, continually gamed by hustlers diverting cash into their own pockets. The essay centers on the irony of these failed programs fortifying not the diets but the resentment and contempt of the Black, Chicano, Filipino, Chinese, Indian, and Samoan communities of San Francisco.[2]
Wolfe describes hapless bureaucrats (the Flak Catchers) whose function was reduced to taking abuse, or “mau-mauing†(in reference to the intimidation tactics employed in Kenya’s anti-colonial Mau Mau Uprising) from intimidating young Blacks and Samoans, who are seen as reveling in the new-found vulnerability of “the Manâ€. The flak-catchers smile pathetically, allowing their tormentors to indulge themselves in abuse; the process is seen as a farcical but useful expedient, condescending toward the resentment of these communities. He described one mau-mauer who would show up at the offices and hand over ice-picks, switch-blades and straight-razors that he said were taken from gangs, in exchange for payments from the program. As a result, much of the money of these programs was not reaching its intended recipients, rendering the programs largely ineffective.
New Black Legion = Old Red Guards.
Doctrine WILL be enforced.
Just waiting for Obama to swim Potomac...
Anyone who read Wolfe, recognizes the same old, same old of today.