Casi me da ataque de risa cuando lei este articulo.
Es acerca de como en CNN un reportero queria de alguna manera justificar lo que habia hecho el terrorista de Times Square diciendo que el haber perdido sus dos casas lo habria hecho reaccionar de esa manera.
Joe Queenan, el autor de este articulo usa el tema para buscar justificacion a todo lo que han hecho los protagonistas de los crimenes mas grandes de la humanidad.
Por supuesto que advierte que todos los americanos que han perdido sus casas estan a un paso de convertirse en terroristas o asesinos masivos, asi que hace un pedido a todos los que conozcan a alguien que esta perdiendo una propiedad notifiquen inmediatamente a la policia.
Menciona como Hitler hizo lo que hizo por la humillacion que sufrio cuando no lo recibieron en la escuela de arte, Stalin mato a 50 millones de rusos por que el fue un campesino con un acento diferente y nunca se sintio uno mas entre los rusos, Napoleon por supuesto peleo contra Inglaterra simplemente por que le negaron un puesto en la Marina de ese pais, como olvidar al Che Guevara y Fidel Castro quienes perdieron la cuota inicial de una propiedad que compraron juntos, ya todos sabemos como termino la historia, el asesino de J. Kennedy estaba bajo el stress que le causo el perder $30,000 en una propiedad y Pinochet se enfurecio cuando su inversion en un REITs (bienes raices) se fue al diablo, la biblioteca de Alejandria fue quemada por ocho partners (socios pasivos) que perdieron dinero en la operacion y el asesinato de Julio Cesar fue maquinado por que Brutus fue estafado en una propiedad por Marco
Antonio. Cicero dijo en ese tiempo que la perdida de una propiedad general tal miseria, depresion y ansiedad que les arruina las vidas.
Por supuesto Mr. Queenan es un satiro.
Shahzad's Lesson: Foreclosed Is Forearmed
By JOE QUEENAN
The news that Faisal Shahzad, the alleged Times Square bomber, is in the midst of foreclosure proceedings on his Connecticut home has brought a much-needed sense of perspective to the incident. Ruminating about the circumstances that drove Shahzad around the bend, CNN's Jim Acosta said that the possibility of losing one's house most assuredly "brought a lot of pressure and a lot of heartache on that family."
Even more insightful was Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, remarking: "It's a reminder that foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don't make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we've done to save the financial sector, we've not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners."
No, we haven't. And since an awful lot of people of all nationalities are in foreclosure at this very moment, the authorities are going to need all the help they can get in monitoring this situation. If you know of anyone in your neighborhood that has fallen behind in his mortgage payments, immediately contact the police.
As CNN's and the Post's astute analyses make clear, homeowners are only one missed payment away from becoming depraved terrorists. This is yet another case where unscrupulous mortgage brokers, heartless banks and conscienceless real-estate agents have brought this society to its knees.
The Shahzad incident has spawned a great deal of soul-searching among the media about the connection between personal humiliation and violence. Hitler, it is widely known, was so devastated by his failure to win acceptance to art school that he drifted into fascism and ultimately mass murder. Stalin, with his peasant roots and comically rustic accent, never really felt part of the Soviet in-crowd, which may have accounted for his otherwise puzzling decision to butcher 50 million of his countrymen. Napoleon, a short foreigner from Franco-Podunk was saddled with a coarse Corsican accent, strange hair and very poor orthographic skills. Many psychologists believed that he waged his lifelong war against the English merely to avenge a youthful slight, when the Brits turned him down for a position in the Royal Navy upon his graduation from military school.
Rancor against such humiliation can run deep, and mistreatment at the hands of the high and the mighty is not soon forgotten. As the great English poet W.H. Auden once put it:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn.
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Obviously, the inept Shahzad's crime pales in comparison with those of the totalitarian fiends of the 20th century. Yet it doesn't take a whole lot to unleash the evil that forever lies slumbering in the deepest recesses of the human heart. And in an astonishing number of cases, a real-estate deal that went south is the cause of all the trouble.
On this point, the historical record is clear. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, roommates in medical school, only became bloodthirsty revolutionaries after the title-search company handling their lease-purchase of a Mexico City duplex ran off with their deposit, taking their life's savings.
Lee Harvey Oswald's decision to assassinate John F. Kennedy was almost certainly triggered by a $30,000 beating he took on the sale of his suburban Dallas condo.
Augusto Pinochet, who presided over Chile from 1974 until 1990, decided to depose his rival Salvador Allende after a Santiago-based Real Estate Investment Trust went belly-up. Recalls a retired junta member: "Augusto was a klutz when it came to real estate. When that REIT blew up, he just went ballistic."
The library of Alexandria, with a collection that included scores of irreplaceable Aeschylus manuscripts, was burned to the ground in A.D. 642 by eight silent partners in a downtown Luxor redevelopment project that imploded.
The sack of Rome, in A.D. 476, was ordered by a barbarian named Odoacer, who had squandered the inheritance left him by his grandfather Attila on a Helvetian buy-leaseback garrison conversion deal brokered by a cabal of shady Brigantes.
And the assassination of Julius Caesar was almost certainly triggered by Brutus's getting scammed on a Transalpine Gaul timeshare deal by Marc Antony. As Cicero said at the time: "This is a reminder that foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don't make headlines but do ruin lives. The evil that men do dies with them. The crummy real-estate deals live on for centuries."
Mr. Queenan, a satirist, is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Closing Time" (Viking, 2009). His parents lost their home during the 1958 recession.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11