Let me pose a politically incorrect question: How is it that the big guys who helped create the mortgage crisis get heaped with blame and scorn, while the little guys who are at the root of the whole mess get sympathy and money?

One inconvenient fact that’s been largely overlooked is that this crisis didn’t crash down on ordinary citizens. It crashed up on Wall Street titans. We think of economic cataclysms as events that have their origins in the corridors of power, and then cascade down onto the heads of the innocent. But that’s not what happened in this case. Instead, millions of regular Joes took on more debt than they could afford, or didn’t bother to understand exactly what they were getting into when they signed for adjustable-rate mortgages, and their troubles trickled up. It took a couple of years, but that trickle eventually turned into a tsunami — which then swept away Wall Street.

Nonetheless, a guest column in my local paper yesterday wasted no time in establishing the victim narrative in its plea for a bailout of the little guy. Here’s the first paragraph:

Amid the headlines about huge stock market losses and collapses in the financial services sector, it can be easy to forget the human face of the problem that our nation now confronts.

Only later did it grudgingly acknowledge reality:

Certainly, some of these consumers might have been irresponsible in taking on more debt than they could handle. The vast majority, however, were simply trying to buy a piece of the American Dream.

I haven’t seen anything suggesting that the “vast majority” of the people facing foreclosure were careful with their personal finances and are truly victims of circumstance. I suspect that exactly the opposite is true — that the majority of people caught in the housing squeeze are those who (1) applied for, and got, “liar loans;” (2) agreed to adjustable-rate mortgages because that allowed them to buy more house than they could actually afford, and gambled that they could refinance or sell out before the interest rate adjusted up; or (3) speculated in real estate during the boom years, and simply got caught holding property when the bubble burst.

Whatever the case, the word “victim” isn’t the first to come out of my quiver of descriptions.

Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t a brief on behalf of corporate big shots. I’ve got no sympathy for them. They played the game, earned obscene piles of money, and however this crisis shakes out none of them will be going hungry. But neither am I buying into the oppressed-masses storyline.