How The Bums Lost The Class War

How The Bums Lost The Class War: An Eyewitness Account of the “Kerfuffle at Golden Pond Lane”

I was there when the so-called “Class War” went down. I saw the whole thing happen, on a cul-de-sac called Golden Pond Lane. Until now, no one has told the real story of what went on that warm spring day in Connecticut. So I will. Before I take you to that epic battle, bear with me for a brief digression—I promise it will pay off later.

I was born and raised a few miles away from what was known as “The Serial Murderer Capital of the World”--Santa Cruz, California circa early-mid-1970s. At one point there were three major serial murderers working the same beach town’s turf at once. Which probably explains why I was an inveterate bedwetter until I was about five.

Over time serial killers lost their shock value and got absorbed into pop culture, while I learned to hold in my piss until I got out of bed. Life returned to normal. But one incident from that scene haunted me then, and still gives me bladder-spasms today. It involved the most notorious of all the Santa Cruz serial killers, Edmund Kemper, an ogre-sized nerd who specialized in murdering hitchhiking hippie girls, chopping up their bodies and sodomizing the cuts. One day Kemper picked up a young dance student named Aiko Koo, drove her into the woods, and pulled out a gun to terrify her. It worked. As Kemper later said, “I pulled the gun out to show her I had it...she was freaking out. Then I put the gun away and that had more effect on her than pulling it out.”

Now here comes the really disturbing part: instead of killing her right then and there, Kemper put the gun down, stopped his car and got out, then closed and locked the door. I repeat: Kemper locked himself out of the car. With his gun inside, next to the girl. He gave the victim a chance to save herself.

Guess what the girl did? She unlocked the door and let him back in.

As Kemper himself later explained, “She could have reached over and grabbed the gun, but I think she never gave it a thought.”

She never gave it a thought.

After she let him back in the car, Kemper went to work according to serial-killer script: he taped her mouth and squeezed her nose, suffocating her to death…yada-yada-yada. The ol’ Freud Gone Wild schtick, no surprises here, folks.

It’s not the murder that’s so horrifying, it’s that she unlocked the door and let him back in.

That was us, “the people,” in the opening battle of the Great Class War a few weeks ago. You may have heard about this in the news: a group of protestors angry over AIG bonuses chartered a bus and toured the mansions where the AIG executives lived, going straight to their front doors. With no intention of Christmas caroling or trick-or-treating. No, this had class war written all over it. And for the first time, the plutocrats were running scared.