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My first real job was working in a shopping mall at a music store, and thanks to my employee discount, I was able to get that first Massive Attack album at a price close to cost, thus keeping me in the know during that time period in one's life where "the right album" could ensure "the right relationships", i.e boundless fumbling escapades with a beautiful young woman named "finds my presence tolerable, has parents that work late." But eventually, the sight of all that music, so much of it beyond the reach of my meager paycheck, wore me down.
Luckily, the mall I worked at was already on its way toward the haven of criminality it has now become (four fatal shootings between gang members in the last 9 months!), and I was able to work out a relationship with a hardy group of entrepreneurs. These fine young gentleman (and their on-again/off-again girlfriends) would stop by the store whenever my manager wasn't around, bring up a stack of the latest in tunes, and I would ring them up for the cost of one of those paper CD cleaner things. In exchange for the discount, they'd donate a bit of marijuana to a side business I'd developed, and, like a late night informercial come true, my income skyrocketed.
And sure, that was stealing.
And okay, that was wrong.
But you can't deny that there was some effort.
Most of what passes for stealing in America today is, to describe it colloquially, lame. Sure, you can jampack an iPod with 37.6 gigabytes of music, you can pick up unavailable-on-DVD British spy dramas overnight, you can even watch
The Hurt Locker a month before it gets a theatrical release in full digital glory--but you aren't working for it. It's all mouseclicks and fill-in-the-blank .rar" google searches, it's nerd crime, and it's boring.
Stealing used to be something you had to put some effort into, and that's why, when you walk by a shuttered Virgin Megastore, you're only feeling a twinge of the pride that comes from knowing that you had a part in breaking the backs of your corporate overlords. When you steal for real? When you have a woman's purse in your hands, and you answer her phone with your best Christopher Walken impersonation and tell her she should pay more attention to her things when she's shopping for shoes, what you feel is called
power, and power isn't aspirin, it has no off-brand substitute.
Theft built America. We--meaning white men--stole this country from the natives who lived here. We stole people out of their beds, their countries, we stole their children, and we put them to work--our railroads, our plantations, built off of theft, built out of a toil we didn't pay for. Theft is in our blood, it shaped our DNA, and it comes to us as natural as breathing. Again and again, we take what isn't ours, and we've taken over the world by doing it on a scale that our forefathers--a bunch of hemp-smoking maniacs who replaced their teeth with jaws of wood--could never have imagined. Theft used to be something that engendered respect, a bit of steel that turned boys into men. It was something that required skills to pull off, be those skills the intelligence of a robber baron or the crazy courage of an irritated gas station customer with a Lazer Tag pistol. Anybody could be a thief, but everybody wasn't going to succeed, and the rules of the game were clear: don't get caught, and if you do, take it like a man.
Nowadays? It's just a crime committed by the lazy, a hobby that demands nothing of its practitioners. Thousands take advantage of an Amazon pricing screw-up, a large scale mislabeling of products, and a beautiful sea of crime results, one that is initially bragged about at a volume usually reserved for when they sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. It's gorgeous from the bird's eye, a fantastic rainbow explosion, with children and professionals running to their computers and grabbing everything they could ever want, laughing hysterically as they pant out their credit card numbers before turning to the social network of their choice to proclaim what rampant criminality has wrought forth.
But when they get called on it, what do they say?
"I'm going to file a class action lawsuit" -
some random infant, repeated exponentially
That's the kind of response that would make George Washington weep. A class action lawsuit? Really? That's the legacy you want written across your face, attached forever to your name?
Crime is a holy profession, and to join its brotherhood is to put oneself alongside this country's greatest heroes. After oil and weapons production, it's the most successful industry on the planet, with a storied history that stretches further than any religion. Getting caught out in it--even if all you did was take advantage of a gigantic corporation's obvious pricing error--is something that should be handled with nothing short of the pride of a Dwayne Michael Carter. Playing the hurt consumer in this situation is the equivalent of standing in the door of the bank after the ATM accidently farts out an extra 20 and refusing to hand it over. It's spitting on the flag, it's saying that you're only willing to play the game if everybody agrees to do it by your rules, and your rules are these: you can't have done anything wrong, because it's somebody else's fault.
You're a thief, or you aren't. Pick a side.
Image appropriated from
Bleeding Cool.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
