Elizabeth Warren, Jim Webb, Rand Paul — The Mockingjay rebels

“Panem today, Panem tomorrow, Panem forever.” Katniss Everdeen blankly mouths the phrases handed her by the totalitarian agent. The phrasing echos the famous manifesto penned by Asa Earl Carter, speechwriter for segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Just moments before in the film, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” a girl in the adoring crowd approaches Katniss to say, “One day I’m gonna volunteer just like you did,” her blond locks and bright country dress cleverly composed to suggest the children in Hitler Youth camps.

{mosads}This is clearly a revolutionary movie. Pundits and politicians should watch closely this exchange: President Snow, dictator-in-chief, watches a rough crowd brewing to rebellion and suddenly turns to his young granddaughter.

“Your hair looks lovely, darling,” he says, noticing that she has started wearing her hair in a long braid like Katniss. “When did you start wearing it like that?”

“Everyone at school wears it like this now, grandpa,” she replies.

Anyone who has been to a high school graduation these past years since 2008 when the book The Hunger Games appeared will recognize the three-finger salute of Katniss and her rebel band, as it spontaneously rises in high school graduations across America; a salute that has since been banned by the military government in Thailand.

And the crowds we have seen recently in the streets in New York and Ferguson, Mo., do indeed suggest those which President Snow glimpses in the streets of Panem.

“Events like the Brown case in Ferguson and the [Eric] Garner case in New York have raised indignation levels across the progressive spectrum,” New York Times columnist David Brooks writes in an op-ed piece titled “Warren Can Win.” “As the party slips more into opposition status, with the next Congress, this aggressive outsider spirit will only grow.”

MSNBC reports that “At a panel Saturday organized by the groups involved in the draft Warren effort at the Roots Camp conference. … ‘Ready for Warren’ brought a life-sized cutout of the populist senator as Katniss Everdeen, the symbolic leader of the rebels in the ‘Hunger Games’ film series. Warren is ‘catching fire,’ they joked.”

But you know what Freud said: “There’s no such thing as a joke.”

It may almost be fair to say that a day of reckoning may be approaching, even a time of rebellion. New approaches are appearing from dynamic new leaders both red and blue, bringing a challenge to the status quo, while the status quo hunkers down, as it classically does when crisis approaches, by defaulting to old families.

Not only Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) suggests Katniss and her rebel bands. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) does as well. He defends his father’s opposition to globalist, military adventurism and draws support from Judge Andrew Napolitano, champion of states’ rights and constitutional government. Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (D), as well, first to call out the “robber barons.” He preceded Warren and others now in his call for income equity. And there are certainly some to watch in the rising Congress, especially Sen.-elect Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) and Sen.-elect Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who comes to Congress with a gelding knife. Indeed, America bristles with new thinking and challenges to the tradition.

We may well default to the old families — Clinton, Bush or another — in 2016. It will bring a soft landing — a thud — to the last century. But the American future starts with these Mockingjay rebels.

And in time we may all be asked, what side are we on, Katniss Everdeen’s or grandpa’s?

Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.