April 16, 2009

Home Impoundment: ‘Liberation’ Style

Once upon a time – actually, 34 years ago this very month – I wandered into Pizza Bob’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and observed a long-haired counterman and a comrade exchanging gleeful low fives.

“Liberation, man,” the employee exulted, in one of those half-stoned tones we have since come to associate with deadhead dudes in teen guy-bonding flicks.

I knew, of course, that the happy hippie’s joyful expression was a Humpty Dumpty formulation: Using a word to mean just what he chose it to mean, no more and a lot less. Lo and behold, within a month, the first of an eventual flood of a half-million South Vietnamese boat people began their desperate, death-defying pirate-dodging flight from their northern “liberators.”

Humpty Dumpty and Happy Hippie, meet Max Rameau. Demonstrating his facility for Wonderlandish wordsmithing, Rameau heads an organization called the Center for Pan-African Development, which apparently operates exclusively in the United States. One of the center’s two projects, called “Take Back the Land,” is actually focused on – there’s that word again – liberating foreclosed homes and handing them over to homeless squatters.

Rameau’s organization has freed exactly 10 such homes, which has earned him coverage in a single week in the New York Times and on ABC World News Tonight and Good Morning America.

The Times differentiates the enterprising Mr. Rameau from run-of-the-mill squatters in that he and his organization are “operating openly, screening potential residents for mental illness and drug addiction, and requiring that they earn ‘sweat equity’ by cleaning or doing repairs around the house and that they keep up with the utility bills.”

How big of them.

Both the Times and ABC ratcheted up the sympathy factor by featuring families who had moved back into their own homes. And Miami Police Chief John F. Timoney piped up, in full political correctness mode, “What social good would be served by arresting a mother and then separating her from her children?”

Well, if you ask the question that way . . . none, of course.

But dial up the observation made by both ABC’s weekend anchor and correspondent: “All of this is illegal.” Oh.

Now, let’s try again that interrogative again: “What social good would be served by enforcing the laws against trespassing and illegal entry?” Thought you’d never ask.

The answer has to do with the “broken windows” theory of policing and the entitlement philosophy lurking behind Rameau’s overheated rhetoric.

“Broken windows,” as famously implemented by former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton and America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, holds that lowering the boom on small crimes like vandalism and graffiti also smacks down serious stuff like theft and mayhem and murder. Or to express it in psychobabble, you gotta set boundaries.

But combine an assurance of lax law enforcement with Rameau’s resort to the language of “liberation” and housing as a “human right,” and you’ve got a formula for, in those immortal words of Don Cheadle, Barney . . . Rubble . . . trouble.

If one has the right to help oneself to a home that, no matter its former ownership, now belongs to a bank, what’s next? I’m not driving my car at the moment. Can the unfortunate wheel-less liberate it? Can hungry masses “emancipate” potato chips and soda pop?

Receipts? We don’t need no stinkin’ receipts.

Look, I’m not Ebenezer Scrooge, although I sometimes play him at home. I sometimes cry over chick flicks and love furry kittens and cuddly babies. And I would hope that similarly soft-hearted bank executives might consider voluntarily inviting folks to move in, especially if it helps keep up neighborhoods and ward off vandals.

But, Humpty, that word “voluntarily” means exactly what I want it to mean. No matter how sympathetic the figures involved, outright declaring open season on liberating Other People’s Property invites a descent into anarchy.

And all the chief’s horses and all of his men will never put society together again.