Open Season on Hogs

by G. Murphy Donovan

Celebrity is the knife that cuts two ways; fame on the left, shame on the right.

David Hogg is learning that lesson today. Alas, Mister Hogg is a child trying to navigate puberty on national television. He casts himself as a victim, a “survivor,” a spokesman, if not a hero, in the wake of yet another school slaughter. In fact, Hogg is none of those things. He is just another timid child that hid in a closet during the recent Parkland shooting, putting himself in a class of passive bystanders like the Miami FBI and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office. Before the fact, the FBI (echoes of 9/11) never followed up on ominous reports about Nikolas Cruz. Then armed local cops, including the officer assigned to the school, Douglas Scott, never entered the school during the mayhem.

If an armed cop at school is a “resource” officer, isn’t the resource there to defend – children or teachers perhaps?

Mayhem brings out the worst in those who do the least. Citizen Hogg and Officer Scott are examples. Hogg was quick to make excuses for the school resource officer, claiming that a cop with a Glock isn’t a match for a shooter with an AR-15. No David, you’re wrong! Cops carry semi-automatic handguns precisely because they are more effective than a rifle at close quarters. Hogg apparently believes he is now an authority on police tactics and guns just because he matriculated with shooting victims.

Fame is, if nothing else, ironic. Hogg is full of himself on the media circuit. Whilst cowering under fire when courage mattered, a pandering press now holds Hogg up as the brave post facto conscience of dead schoolmates. Hard to know who might be more venal or creepier in the Broward narrative, the used or the users. David Hogg is a tool, literally and figuratively.

On the one hand he is used, wittingly or not, by Hillary sore losers and Trump haters. At the same time, he is the kind of pretentious nerd that media exploits as the new normal. The subsequent, so-called, “March for Our Lives” was a flop if it was supposed to represent young sentiment. Most of the marchers were aging, liberal, female, pro-Hillary, anti-Trump malcontents according to Washington Post research. Only twelve percent of the marchers identified with gun-control issues.  

The shooter, Nikolas Cruz is the real survivor, another media hero in waiting. Cruz not only eluded timid Broward police at the scene, but now, like Charles Manson, he stands to become a jail house celebrity. Hogg might get 15 minutes of fame but Cruz will probably enjoy a lifetime of celebrity on the Florida taxpayer dime. Cruz is already getting fan mail. The sunshine state, like California, recycles its garbage.

For the moment, Hogg is the darling of the fake news industry, anointed as a “survivor” as if he spent four years in Auschwitz instead of skating through a Florida high school. David not only uses a transient lectern to talk nonsense about guns, policy, and political adults; he also uses his ephemeral fame to whine about college rejections, as if his juvenile politics matter to admissions officers. David, if you are a reject in California, of all places, consider real culprits. A 4.1 GPA from a public school today is a little like that trophy you “earned” in T-Ball. Fake public school grades, like fake news, are a thing, kiddo.

If you are pretty, and you mouth is bigger than your IQ, then you are bound to see some return fire too. Hogg now finds himself in the crosshairs. A Stallone labeled him a “pussy.” A disabled vet called David a “—-,” rhymes with runt. Such hyperbole may be an insult to honest cats and stolid women everywhere. Unlike Hogs, cats are notoriously independent and surely a lad without bollocks is not necessarily a vagina.

Twunt maybe, as an erudite Englishman might say, but not twat.

Such are the wages of fame for the millennial poseur; a boy too green or immature to think for himself, repeating all the tropes and memes he sees on his Twitter or Facebook feeds. Unfortunately, there are no heroes this time around; not David Hogg, not the press, not the FBI, not the local cops, nor the Parkland High School staff. If Hogg is the best foot forward or the pride of Broward County, then homicidal alumni like Cruz are probably easier to rationalize.

A wizened and acerbic Scotsman that appears on these pages with some regularity has characterized “the cult of adolescence” as a “hideous homage to tragedy – recreational grieving at its worst.”  

Amen, sir!

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Outside Reading for Extra Credit:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/28/heres-who-actually-attended-the-march-for-our-lives-no-it-wasnt-mostly-young-people/?utm_term=.18c72775c892

https://www.mediaite.com/opinion/should-all-parkland-survivors-get-into-the-college-of-their-choice/

https://www.mediaite.com/online/sylvester-stallones-brother-calls-david-hogg-a-pssy-wants-classmates-to-sucker-punch-him/

https://www.dailywire.com/news/28962/wounded-army-vets-fiery-response-david-hogg-goes-amanda-prestigiacomo?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=idealmedia&utm_campaign=dailywire.com&utm_term=68763&utm_content=2213601

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/red-alert-politics/david-hogg-fame-and-a-lesson-in-rejection?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=idealmedia&utm_campaign=washingtonexaminer.com&utm_term=68938&utm_content=2213606

https://www.yahoo.com/news/look-shocking-fan-mail-parkland-184002060.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma