Break their legs? Slash their faces? Both?

In Boston, the disgraced offspring of an enormously rich family have, over the years, bought five of six apartments in a condo building on Comm Ave. They control the condo board, and they want the sixth owner, a retired Brandeis prof and his wife, who are in their late 80s, to sell to them. The prof refuses. The richies have the elevator disabled in summer 2009; the prof and his wife, who can't climb that many stairs, bump up and down on their butts. The richies spend enormous amounts for the building, trying to force the prof into going bankrupt to pay his end. Not much clever plotting here, just brute checkbook waving.

Our enlightened court system in January ordered the richies to fix the elevator - by the end of June.

So, what to do with such folks? They are loathsome, fetid creatures, who apparently are entirely within their legal rights. And thus a problem.

I have suggested publicly, in the Boston Globe, and in conversations with a lot of friends, that some physical confrontation and threat would be helpful, since financial penalties are unworkable. The threat of broken legs, or slashed faces, or some such primitive act, is a different matter, not to be taken so lightly. The Globe tends to censor those posts. The friends tend to move slightly away from me.

I take from the matter that there is a breakdown in the informal control mechanisms of social life - the tragedy of the commons, played out on Comm Ave. People are horrified when I start talking like this, but I see myself as being on the side of the angels....that we need to restore those social controls, and fast. The legal system is a clumsy, slow beast, enormously weighted in favor of the rich. Naked fear, of the crowd with the torches and pitchforks, tends to keep people in line; even if there is no conscience, there is a reptilian - heh, it sure is reptilian - part of the rich person's brain that fears the impulsive act of vengeance or despair.

And rightly so. As the saying goes: "How come they don't call it class warfare when they do it to us?".