Boy Racers are the new Folk Devils

What you looking at? Oh yeah, my shitty car...

This just in, an update on the recent Christchurch boy racer attack, complete with startling new made-up revelations:

Boy racers who attacked a female security guard near Christchurch International Airport on Wednesday night were merely responding to a ferocious attack on their taste in music.

Reliable witnesses concur that the youths only trapped the woman’s vehicle with their cars and smashed her windows after she had yelled out the window ‘out of my fucking way you Linkin Park-loving fucktards’.

According to these witnesses, the bottles were only thrown through her windows when her verbal assault on Linkin Park continued by claiming their new single, New Divide, to be a ‘cynical nu metal disgrace, and don’t get me started on giant shithole that will be the Transformers sequel.’

At this point witness accounts diverge, with some claiming that it was the hassling of the Transformers franchise that had actually tipped the balance toward violence, given that most Boy Racers have lucid dreams that their cars are actually Transformers and that they are the human guy who helps the Autobots all the time.

But seriously

I found a great wikipedia article on the ‘Folk Devil’ that describes really well what’s going on with this whole Boy Racer ‘phenomenon’. Here’s an excerpt:

A folk devil is a person or group of people who are portrayed in folklore or the media as outsiders and deviant, and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems.

The pursuit of folk devils frequently intensifies into a mass movement that is called a moral panic. When a moral panic is in full swing, the folk devils are the subject of loosely organized but pervasive campaigns of hostility through gossip and the spreading of urban legends. The mass media sometimes get in on the act or attempt to create new folk devils to create controversies. Sometimes the campaign against the folk devil influences a nation’s politics and legislation.

About the legislation side of this issue: Hey! People over the age of 40! You’ll find if you pull your heads out of your asses for one second, that laws we currently have actually cover any criminal activity by boy racers quite well. The last time you came out for a breath, did you come across the disgrace that was the Patriot Act in the US?

Remember, they said that existing laws were inadequate in combatting this crazy new thing called ‘Terror’ and so you had to give up all your civil rights when really it was just so some CIA dick could put video camera in your shower to catalogue the colour of your pubes for the top-secret national pube database (kept inside a mountain in Colorado of course).

Of course it’s really the media behind it all again. They’ve become increasingly desperate to generate sensation as more and more people forsake traditional media for more exciting stuff online: dutch auctions, free pornography, and menwholooklikekennyrogers.com.

Speed Racer - where it all started for many a boy racer.