Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts

Friday, May 29, 2020

The crooked, white heart of a dying land

You need to watch this. You need to hear what CNN's Don Lemon has to say.

You do that -- I'll wait. Then I have something I need to say. In advance, I ask that you pardon my French.

Have you finished with that Don Lemon video? Good.

Now, you know what the problem is here, right? It's this: Way too many white folk are just like Donald Trump -- narcissists who lack empathy, only in their case that deficit only applies to those whom they've been raised to disdain.

Guess what, people. Those who raised you in such a manner were just as fucked up as you are. They taught you wrong, and you just aren't introspective enough to question your assumptions and conditioning.



LISTEN,
the bad news is we're all fucked up. The good news is you're not alone. The better news is you have the power to fix your fucked-upitude. You have an imagination -- use it. Put yourself in the other guy's shoes for just a minute.


Until I got to Baton Rouge Magnet High, due to life in the public schools of Redneckistan and thanks to my own family dynamics . . . well, let's just say it's easy for me to understand the sort of rage we're seeing tonight. At age 59, I consider it, as Bobby Kennedy related in 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, "the awful grace of God."

It's not terribly difficult for me to imagine just wanting to "burn the motherfucker down." It's not terribly difficult for me to understand internalized rage and humiliation.

Of course, it's not right to just "burn the motherfucker down," but it's certainly understandable as hell. At least if you get a hold of your self-absorbed self and imagine what it's like to have a cop with his knee on your neck . . . just because he can, figuring the consequences for that will be minimal.

WELL, we're seeing the consequences now, ain't we, Cap?

The problem here is that this sort of riotous anarchy has to be quelled, but the ones whose job that is have zero moral standing to do it. Not anymore. That doesn't make a violent mob any less a violent mob; it just makes us well and truly fucked right now.

Really, we're in an awful place when the tripolar dynamic in any society is, first, the lawless, enraged mob. Then, second, there are the jackbooted thugs, as embodied by Donald Trump and his cultists.
Finally, third, there is what appears to be the feckless liberal authorities -- in this case in Minneapolis -- who believe in relevance and self-abasement (self-abasement which isn't unmerited, I hasten to add), but are powerless to do much else but validate the feelings of the unthinking, enraged Id indiscriminately destroying everything in its path.

Welcome to the Revolution, folks. Chances are, it won't end well.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

This breaks my damn heart


1962. It was the blackest of years; it was the most idealistic and hopeful of years.

Jim Crow refused to go quietly in the South. Communism, and the fear of it, haunted everything we were, did and said in America. Between us and the Soviet Union, we almost blew up the world.

But also in 1962, if we made it through October, the world would be a better place by springtime -- we just knew it.

Young Americans brimmed with idealism. Black college kids and white college kids risked their lives for their ideals in a peaceful assault against segregationist brutality in Dixie.

The youth of a country that 17 years before had vanquished Nazi Germany and militarist Japan found inspiration in a young president who challenged them to ask what they could do for their country.

JOHN GLENN orbited the earth three times. Next stop: the moon.

America had set its gaze on the New Frontier, and John Stewart of the The Kingston Trio could write liner notes like these above.

I was 1 year old. Hope was alive and kicking. Even in the South.

2019. A broken-down, 58-year-old music-show and blog guy sits at his iMac, typing. He wonders what the fuck happened.

He reads the hopeful, idealistic and oh-God-how-naive words of the late Mr. Stewart, and he wants to cry. He fears that there are no more tears left. Even more, he's terrified that fear will be put to the test again and again.

"So now, as never before, an age of introspection is reaching every one of us." Now our nation is becoming what we've willed within ourselves -- a heart of darkness.

"The horror! The horror!"

Thursday, June 20, 2019

And lead us not into tempta . . . oh, screw it


The Democratic Party has become so woke . . . and so puritanical . . . and so alien to the spiritual concepts of grace and forgiveness . . . and so beholden to its most extreme voices . . . and so intent on demonizing its own peculiar versions of The Other -- so solipsisticly intent upon becoming a funhouse-mirror reflection of Trumpism -- that there's really no more point, actually.

Joe Biden
Our only alternative now is to watch the United States reap what it has sown and for us, somehow, to find ways to bear the unbearable pain of watching one's country die an agonizing death from a condition that hasn't the decency to kill one expeditiously and just be done with it. Oh . . . and manage, somehow, not to end up destitute, imprisoned or dead as the sociopolitical malignancy consumes the body politic.

Normally, I would counsel seeking refuge in one's religion. Then again, I am Roman Catholic, and I know from the bitter experience of the past two decades that, institutionally, my church will be worse than useless as shelter from the storm. As for the evangelicals, Southern Baptists and the like . . . their institutional feet are on fire, and their asses are catching.

Really, when the woker-than-thou are stooping to Trumpian tactics to smear Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden as some sort of cryptoracist enabler of Jim Crowism, what the hell chance do the rest of us stand?


THAT "joke about calling black men 'boys'" came as Biden spoke off the cuff at a New York fundraiser, lamenting the loss of the sort of political comity that allowed him to work with even the likes of the notorious longtime senator from Mississippi, James O. Eastland.

Here, from a pool report by The Wall Street Journalis what Biden actually said:
Mr. Biden then recalled his time serving in the Senate. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Mr. Biden said, briefly channeling the late Mississippi senator’s Southern drawl. Mr. Biden said of Mr. Eastland, “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”

Mr. Biden then brought up a deceased Georgia senator, “a guy like Herman Talmadge, one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys. Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
THE DISINGENUOUSNESS with which Biden's remarks are being characterized by presidential rivals Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Kamala Harris and any number of other party Jacobins is staggering, even by contemporary Americal political standards, which have been influenced by Donald Trump -- and not for the better. Obviously.

Let me add that I choose to characterize the criticism of Biden as cynical because I find it difficult to believe that reasonably accomplished politicians -- or journalists -- can be that goddamned stupid. But Donald J. Trump is president of the United States, so I totally could be wrong on that account.

And the cynicism (and perhaps abject numbskullery), it runs as deep to the left as it does to the right -- leaving sanity stuck in the middle and shit out of luck.

For a taste of that, let's listen to a segment from today's edition of All Things Considered on NPR:


 
LET'S JUST get something straight. And as a born-and-raised son of the Deep South -- a son of a certain age even -- I am well-positioned to set something straight:

"Boy" is not always and everywhere a racialized term of derision.

Eastland, the onetime Mississippi segregationist, was old enough to be Joe Biden's father. In the South -- and I have no damned idea how Yankees addressed men young enough to be their offspring in familiar settings -- it would not be uncommon for someone of Eastland's age and generation to informally address a whippersnapper as "boy." It had nothing to do with race.

If the addressee were African-American, it could have something to do with malignant racialist intent. Or not. It merely could have been a case of cluelessness, or momentarily forgetting that it was fraught to address a young black man the same way you might familiarly speak to a young white man.

I am 58 years old, Southern and male. If I had a dollar for every time I have been called "boy," by my parents, older relatives, acquaintances and even buddies, I could say "screw it all" right now and move to an island paradise far, far away from this insane, imploding country.

Ditto for "son," which is used in a gentler context than "boy." This is not brain surgery; what Joe Biden was saying isn't particularly opaque, and it shouldn't be controversial in the slightest.

Then we get to the unspoken implications of "woke" Democrats' condemnation of Biden for even attempting to work with (or even associate with) past segregationists in the United States Senate.

One implication is that grace does not exist. Another is that people's views cannot moderate or change over decades. Yet another is that those we deeply disagree with cannot be engaged with, only targeted and destroyed. And if someone is -- or was -- a racist. . . .

In the moral universe of what is emerging as today's Democratic Party, there is no redemption, only condemnation. We know where this road ends -- where the internal logic of this worldview dictates that it must end.

In the universe of woke Democrats, my Southern self was obligated to condemn and hate my racist Southern parents, along with every last one of my racist Southern kinfolk. In this moral universe, if I had failed to denounce them -- to expose their thought crime -- I would have been as guilty as they.

In this universe, one is nothing more than the worst thing one believes or the worst thing one ever has done, for which there is no forgiveness or redemption. Ever.

But if you want to write an article comparing and contrasting your various abortions -- abortions, plural -- then declare one, which came at age 41, the best ever . . . well, that's something not only to be tolerated but, indeed, celebrated. On the New York magazine website, no less.

AND AMERICA, such as it is, is supposed to think Joe Biden is guilty of some sort of fucking moral outrage here? Or that Donald Trump is the real problem here?

Donald Trump is a problem -- a massive problem. But he is not the problem.


That large swaths of the Democratic Party have a problem with what Biden said -- or at least want their own "low-information voters" to think folks should have a problem with it -- bodes well for the re-election of a massive problem.

But even if we somehow do manage to rid ourselves of this turbulent president, that just leaves us with the Democrats. If our only choice ends up being between the devil and the deep blue sea, we might find that a decisive contingent of voters might loathe Trump but also figure he'd put us out of our national misery a hell of a lot faster.

Thursday, October 05, 2017

Fear and loathing in high-school radio


Who's the leader of the station that's made for you and me?

N-O-T  Y-O-U,  teen-age disc joc-key.

And when it comes to our public schools and the people who run them, the exercise of authority over the inmates students can, indeed, quickly become a real Mickey Mouse operation. This usually comes down to raw politics . . . and the sad reality that once they turn 18, the kids who sat in the back of the classroom are eligible to vote for school board.

Another other sad reality -- and this is one teenagers generally learn long before graduation -- is that what you learn in civics class is 75 percent aspiration and only 25 percent actual execution.

Take your constitutional rights as public-school students, for example. Despite the case law on, say, high-schoolers' First Amendment rights being pretty well settled since the early 1970s -- and since 1943 in the case of those choosing to not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance or the national anthem -- every year, some principal or some school board will try to show some dissident somewhere who the real boss is.

I think you can get the right answer to this question even without the benefit of a multiple-choice exam.

So, every year some principal tries to censor or shut down some high school newspaper or, this year, threaten prep football players with "fire and fury" if they take a knee against racial injustice during the Star-Spangled Banner on Friday night. And unless the student knows a really good lawyer. . . .

Because people are stupid, politicians feel the need to be even stupider. It's a matter of solidarity with the electorate. Mostly, though, it's a matter of getting re-elected.

WBRH bumper sticker, circa 1978
WHEN I was growing up in Louisiana, and on the student side of the power equation, things could get a little weird.  This had a lot to do with how politics pervade everything in Louisiana . . . and how politics in the Gret Stet tend to have this certain Venezuelan je ne sais quoi.

This is where the "fear, loathing and radio" part of the post kicks in.

In any banana republic, the first lesson one learns -- or else -- is not to piss off the Maximum Leader. This goes double for the party newspaper and state radio. When the party organ is your local high-school newspaper and state radio is, for instance, the student beacon of Hometown High, students may have their First Amendment rights, but the Maximum Leaders in the principal's office and on the school board still have leverage.

Like money, for instance. Like the power to hire or fire faculty, for another. Like just shutting this troublesome radio station the hell down. When push comes to shove, "freedom of the press" belongs to him who owns one.

Does the Maximum Leader have to threaten a thing? Nope. Sane employees with house notes to pay and kids to feed know who butters their toast. And Maximum Leader Is Watching YOU.

August 1977
IN THE CASE of WBRH, the radio voice of Baton Rouge Magnet High School, the licensee isn't the Autonomous Students of Baton Rouge High. It is the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board.

Can the state exercise prior restraint against students who staff official, publicly funded media? Theoretically, no, if Maximum Leader cares to pay lip service to the U.S. Constitution.

But does the constitution require the state to fund a radio station or any other official organ? As far as I know . . . no. There's always an angle.

Especially in Louisiana, a state filled with geometry savants.

In banana republics, the peasants always are seditious, Maximum Leader always has an itchy trigger finger, and the employees on the bottom of the government's food chain always are nervous.

WBRH radio now takes you to the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, where Smiley Anders' universally read local column has just rolled off the press. It is June 1, 1981.


IT IS DELUSIONAL to think that everybody who was anybody at the East Baton Rouge Parish schools central office didn't either read, hear about or field jokesters' telephone calls about Smiley Anders' column that day.

It likewise would be delusional to think that the WBRH general manager, radio broadcasting and electronics teacher John Dobbs, didn't quite reasonably think "Oh, shit . . ." when he saw Smiley's column. Or was told about it in no uncertain terms.


We again take you to the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, where Smiley Anders' universally read local column has just rolled off the press. It is June 3, 1981.


MY LAST airshift at WBRH came a couple of years before that -- I graduated in May 1979. And it's true: It was a tradition and, thus, a coincidence.

But there's no denying that it was an epic and happy coincidence. Well, not for Mr. Dobbs, but still . . . coincidence or not, in the world of student media, you take your shots when you're able, and you count your victories when you can.


In my student-media days, I counted a few victories. I also racked up some defeats and collected a couple of battle scars.

First, there was the time I helped introduce Baton Rouge to the Sex Pistols when I brought my British-import 45 of "God Save the Queen" to the studios of 90.1 FM. Maximum Leader was watching. Or listening, actually.

After a few spins during the fall of 1977, "God Save the Queen" was as banned in Baton Rouge as it was on the BBC. Mr. Dobbs even confiscated my 45. I got it back when I promised never to bring it back.


Then, maybe a couple of months later, there was the time we had Fannie Godwin on Teen Forum, the 20-watt, high-school FM radio version of Meet the Press. I'm sure it was indistinguishable from Bill Monroe's NBC program but for the acne.

Godwin was a local activist, vice-president of the Baton Rouge ACLU chapter and a "school board watcher," meaning "watchdog" in regular American English. In the fall of 1977, the organization had undertaken the controversial, nay, subversive practice of . . . passing out booklets to high-school students informing them about their constitutional rights.


IN 1977, this was a full-blown, red-alert controversy in Baton Rouge. I'm sure it would be today, too. 

The Other Student Rights and Responsibilities Handbook informed East Baton Rouge Parish students, right there on the cover, that "You are not in the Army. You are not in prison. It only seems like it. . . ." This was because 40 years ago in my hometown, in most high schools, it seemed like you were in the Army. In a few, notably Zachary High School under Obergrüppenführer Jerry Boudreaux, some freethinkers swore it was a lot more like a prison.

This seems to be the part that got folks the most riled up. Naturally, it involved the First Amendment.
You can speak your mind, wear buttons, and arm bands, hand out literature, picket, form clubs and invite speakers, all on school grounds as long as you don't clearly interrupt the normal school process. It will be up to the administration to prove disruption. You do not need prior permission (even though the parish handbook says you do) to speak, wear buttons, hold meetings, and form clubs.
 
THE PARISH school board called the Zachary High administration, parents, students and good Christian townspeople of Zachary before it to mount a defense against the horrible allegations with which the American Civil Liberties Union was filling reporters' minds -- and stories.

Obergrüppenführer Boudreaux denied all. Parents decried the civil-liberties troublemakers. Students took the microphone to pull what we'd later come to recognize as total Tracy Flick moves.

"A former Zachary student, who did not give his name, said he was 'unlucky enough' to have also attended other high schools," State-Times reporter Linda Lightfoot wrote in the Sept. 16, 1977, edition of the evening paper. 
"Nobody makes us salute the flag," he said. "We are proud to be a Christian community.“

He added that the "ACLU is dead wrong if it is saying Jerry Boudreaux is running the school in a totalitarian manner."

Darwin Williams. a senior at Zachary, said a "glint of Communism" shows through in the ACLU literature.

Jill Wilson, editor at the Zachary High school paper, said that the ACLU leaflet seemed to imply that she could say anything she wanted to say in the school paper. “Well, I don't want it that way," she said.
State-Times, Sept. 16, 1977. Click for full-size version

IN ZACHARY, obviously there was no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.

This was the milieu amid which WBRH had Fannie Godwin, second-ranking "commie" in all the parish, on Teen Forum. Charles Knighten was the moderator; I was one of the panelists.

We were keen to know about these constitutional rights students possessed. And we talked much about the ACLU's alternative student handbook.

A just-graduated friend -- a former WBRH staffer -- had dropped by the studio as we were about to tape the program. He told me of pre-performance prayers by the drama students and teacher, suggesting that would make for a good line of questioning.

It was a good topic to quiz the local ACLU vice-president about. If you were (1.) an independent journalist at (2.) a news-media outlet (3.) somewhere in the United States of America.

My journalism and civics teachers would have told me I was, WBRH was, and Louisiana was. Facts on the ground would come to indicate (1.) no, (2.) no, and (3.) "What have you been smoking?"


We thought the show went swimmingly and that Fannie was a great guest. After all, her needling of members during school board meetings surely was high performance art before anyone had heard of performance art.

Someone somewhere in the Maximum Leader ranks thought otherwise. Apparently, I had passed classified material to the enemy.

I was off the Teen Forum panel. And I don't think Teen Forum was back for a second season.


SO, what have I learned in these 40 years since my high-school radio days?

Well . . . I'll tell you.

I've learned that WBRH is made of sturdy stuff. Baton Rouge High's FM station has survived many Maximum Leaders in the school board central office, has endured the politics that infest every single damn thing in my home state, and has grown exponentially despite it all . . . by sticking to the music. Teen Forum still is dead as a door nail, though.

I've learned that digging through old hometown newspapers from one's salad days sure knocks the rose color off your glasses right quick. Ugliness in black and white beats the crap out of nostalgia and sentimentalism every time. (I also am reminded of why I got the hell out of Baton Rouge -- for the last time -- nearly 30 years ago. According to contemporary headlines, things there haven't much improved.)


I've learned that even though I disagree with the ACLU on some things, America damn well needs the ACLU.

Finally, I've learned from the latest effort by "good, Christian Americans" to vilify and intimidate those who, in protest of injustice, take a knee for the national anthem that some things never change. At all.

I have learned that, in this country, there is a wide gulf between the rights society tells people they possess and the rights society permits them to exercise in peace.
 

BATON ROUGE HIGH,  God bless it, was not the Army and was not a prison. Despite the best malevolent efforts of Louisiana's various Maximum Leaders, my old school was a great old school . . . and still is. There, I learned pretty much everything I needed to know in life.

College was just for the advanced degree in drinking.

Friday, September 01, 2017

Peace, love and understanding . . . by any means necessary

Newsweek

I am not exactly a Weekly Standard kind of reader. But I read Matt Labash's long piece about how antifa went apeshit on the Patriot Prayer people at a Berkeley "protest" (and by protest, I mean riot), and you should, too.

The takeaway from this story -- and from spending any random three minutes on Facebook or media comment threads -- is that America never will defeat the fascism of Donald Trump by adopting the violent Stalinism of "social-justice warriors" like antifa and all the other toxic granola of the radical left.

The other takeaway is that Donald Trump was unknowingly more right than we're willing to admit. Not right -- just more right than we thought. There are no "very fine people" among the Nazis and other white supremacists.

Likewise, there are none among antifa or other left-wing hate groups, which these assembled fanatics most certainly represent. The sulfurous, Satanic stench coming from each camp smells about the same, because the Nazis and the "antifascists" are about the same. The difference between the opposing vortices of hatred is a mere matter of targeting methodology -- one determines who is subhuman based on race and ethnicity . . . the other, ideology.

Given free run of the United States, each would leave a trail of corpses behind it as the fanatics rampaged their way toward their Father Below.

Below, a sampling of what Labash saw in what must be the first American insane asylum to actually incorporate:



On the walk up to the square, Joey’s several paces ahead, seemingly in another zone, not even noticing the protester in the “Nasty Woman” shirt who starts filming him, as though she’s doing surveillance. After all the hype, he is now so infamous in Berkeley his face is instantly recognizable, and people act like it’s Jesse James walking into a bank. They elbow each other, scandalized.

From the moment we hit the square, the “Nazi” catcalls start. Whatever’s happening on the stage seems to cease to exist, and the energy around us turns very dark, very fast. Joey, Tiny, and Pete start walking with greater purpose, on the balls of their feet, almost like fighters entering a ring or Christians entering the Coliseum, except instead of facing one lion, they’re facing thousands. As the chants rain down (“Nazis are here! .  .  . F— you! .  .  . F—ing fascists!”), we near the stage thinking we might find some kind of buffer zone, since the police knew that some of Joey’s original rally-goers would show up. But there isn’t one. Our progress is halted when we run up into a small clearing snug up against a barrier. And behind that barrier, near the park’s “Peace Wall,” is a wall of human blackness.

A hundred or so masked-up antifa ninjas and affiliated protesters seem to simultaneously turn. It looks like we’ve interrupted al Qaeda tryouts. Joey, Tiny, and Pete all raise their hands high in the air, and flash peace signs, a conciliatory gesture. But nobody here wants peace. Not with fascists on the scene. As Joey nears the barrier, one of the ninjas swings and misses. Then the barrier topples, and they pour over, chanting, “Fascists go home!”

As I’m reading the action into my recorder, antifa slides around me on all sides, nearly carrying me off like a breaking wave. The boys are about 20 yards off and walk backwards. Pete catches a shot right on his stars’n’stripes dome from a two-by-four and goes down, blacking out for a second. Tiny, trying to protect everybody, pulls him up with his massive Samoan hand and pushes him out of the scrum. The mob ignores Pete, as he’s just an appetizer. Joey is the entree.
LIBERAL DEMOCRACY. Don't you just love it?

There's more.
War is peace. Love is hate.
First he catches a slap in the head, then someone gashes him with something in his ribs. He keeps his hands up, as though that will save him, while he keeps getting dragged backwards by his shirt, Tiny trying to pull him away from the bloodthirsty ninjas. Someone crashes a flagpole smack on Joey’s head, which will leave a welt so big that Tiny later calls him “the Unicorn.” Not wishing to turn his back on the crowd, a half-speed backwards chase ensues, as Joey and Tiny are blasted with shots of bear spray and pepper spray. They hurdle a jersey barrier, crossing Martin Luther King Jr. Way while antifa continue throwing bottles at them. The mob stalks Joey and Tiny all the way to an Alameda County police line, which the two bull their way through, though the cops initially look like they’re going to play Red Rover and keep them out. No arrests are made. Except for Joey and Tiny, who are cuffed.

A crack reporter for the Los Angeles Times will later write that they were arrested for charging the police, which couldn’t be less true. A Berkeley cop tells me they were arrested for their own safety (and weren’t charged). When I catch up and reach the police line, the cops won’t let me past to follow my subjects. My reportorial dispassion has worn thin. I yell at the police for doing nothing, for standing by while two men could’ve been killed. One cop tells me there’s a thin line between solving one problem and being the cause of more, as though they’re afraid to offend antifa. I am sick at what I just witnessed. Angry, even. I wheel around on some protesters, asking them if they think it’s right to beat people down in the street. “Hell yeah,” says one. I ask them to cite anything Joey has said that offends them, as though being offended justifies this. A coward in a black mask says: “They’re f—ing Nazis. There’s nothing they have to say to offend us.”

All around me, good non-antifa liberals go about their business, pretending none of this has happened, carrying “Stand Against Hate” signs. There’s the sound truck with preachers in clerical garb, leading a “Whose streets/our streets” chant. There’s the gray-haired interdenominational “Choral Majority” singing peace songs: “There’s no hatred in my land / Where I’m bound.” I want to vomit on the Berkeley Peace Wall.

I’m made even more sick when I look down the road and see a punching, kicking mob form a circle around a new victim. By the time I roll up on them, an older man in camo-wear spits out from the maelstrom. As he runs to safety, an antifa thug runs up behind him, sucker-punching him as hard as he can in the back. I will go home that night and watch several more cold-blooded beatdowns on YouTube that I didn’t personally witness.
SAY WE ACTUALLY get rid of Trump and stem the tide of Trumpkin fascism in this country. What are we going to have left?

This?

What, then, will we have gained? Or, rather, will we have saved ourselves from the frying pan only to find America in the fire?

Remember, Communist tyrant Josef Stalin killed even more people than Nazi tyrant Adolf Hitler. File under: Facts, Inconvenient.

We're supposed to embrace the ideological thugs and bullies to rid ourselves of the fascist ones? Really? When members of the Resistance glibly proclaim "By any means necessary!" are they aware they're coming out in favor of gulags in the name of staving off concentration camps?

I am a Catholic. Not a "progressive" Catholic or a "conservative" Catholic which, in my book, means you're leaving some Catholic out to better accommodate your politics.  I am just Catholic in search of the authentic freedom that lies in my faith's tension between justice and mercy -- between dogma and "God created mankind in his image."

And, as a Catholic, this is what I know as surely as I know fire burns and ice freezes: Die-hard Trumpkins hate my guts, because "libtard." The left's "social-justice warriors" hate my guts, because "hater." Verily, in the open-air insane asylum that is the United States today, from Berkeley to Baton Rouge, there is no greater love than to hate.

For all the right reasons, of course.


Eventually, this, too, shall pass. Someday for America, in the words of the old hymn,
There will be peace in the valley for me, oh Lord I pray
(There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, my Lord,
no trouble, trouble I see)
There will be peace in the valley for me
UNFORTUNATELY, that day probably will come because we've all killed one another. It will be the cold peace of those who rest six feet deep.

God bless America.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The look of hate is in our eyes


This is what white privilege looks like.

In GQ magazine, documentarian C. J. Hunt says the "video of this part-time Nazi, this junior secessionist, is a perfect portrait of the very white privilege the so-called 'alt-right' decries as liberal fiction."

I cannot disagree. When you're a little chickenshit Nazi who gets separated from his volk in a big, bad race riot, gets chased, then caught by a bunch of anti-fascist counterdemonstrators but gets to walk away alive -- walk away unmolested in any way except for the debasement he has visited upon himself -- because he can strip off his "uniform" and beg for mercy, saying he's not a real white supremacist . . . that's some serious white privilege.

It also is proof positive that Donald Trump's "alt-left" holds all kinds of moral high ground over the "very fine" Nazis our catastrophe-in-chief assures us he knows all about. The Nazis, you see -- the ones who are so tough en masse but turn into sniveling little cowards when alone and cornered -- would not have had mercy on someone who couldn't "pass" by taking off a white polo shirt.

Don't believe me, watch this.
 

I AM someone who thinks, as a rule, "identity politics" is unhelpful in holding this diverse and troubled country together. I also think it's a losing political proposition unless, of course, you are someone as evil and as shameless as Donald Trump, who managed to identify enough of the dispossessed,  the angrily conservative, the hypocritically religious and the blatantly white and fascist to cobble together a barely winning coalition.

But I also say this as a middle-aged white Southerner who's lived in the Midwest for more than half my life. The parts of my identity that I can't strip off like a polo shirt are not likely to get me killed.

Not if I stumble across a Nazi rally, and not if I get pulled over by an Omaha cop.


"White privilege isn’t just an easy bank loan or the cumulative effects of discriminatory housing policy," Hunt, the documentary filmmaker, said in his GQ article.
It's also the privilege to disappear. The privilege to terrorize a community and return to your regular life with the ease of peeling off a polo shirt. The privilege to come to someone else’s town, invoke the symbols and slogans used to terrorize Jews, African-Americans, and countless other races in history’s darkest chapters, and pretend it’s simply your way of showing ethnic pride. It’s the privilege to engage in terror “for fun,” and the privilege to walk away. For most of my life, I've thought of racism as the vestiges of a dying generation. It's far more terrifying to behold a sea of young people for whom white supremacy is just a rec-league sport.
YOU DON'T have to surrender to the relative tribalism of identity politics to admit what is as plain as day, yet as invisible as mountain air to your average white Trump voter: If people aren't looking at you funny . . . or following you around as you shop for fear you'll steal something . . . or blowing your brains out during a traffic stop . . . or trying to make it as difficult as possible for you to vote . . . or assuming that anything you've ever achieved had to be at their expense . . . or beating the crap out of you in a parking garage because of the color of your skin, you're probably not endangered, threatened or have that much cause to feel aggrieved.

And when you see those things actually happening to folks of color, they probably are . . . and have cause to. Be aggrieved, that is. 

To recognize the bleeding obvious today, all one needs is just a bit of empathy, a quality that also happens to be in exceedingly short supply and, when acquired, usually is applied highly selectively.

The standard American conceit is that we're better than this. Obviously, we're not. Maybe we've backslidden in recent years; maybe we never were.

Alton Sterling protest, 2016 / Reuters
WHAT KEEPS me up every night is that I see this country becoming more and more like the Louisiana I knew as a child and a teenager. That's not a good thing. That's a racist, hateful thing.

Surely, it's one of two things -- that we have profoundly regressed as a people, or that we've dropped a societal façade so convincing that it caused us to become somnambulant.

To the great detriment of my mental health, I sometimes read the comments on Facebook pages for various Louisiana media outlets, generally on stories having to do with race or Confederate statues . . . or protests against Trump. If someone, like myself, is perverse enough to read that crap, it's reasonable he's going to be alarmed. It's bad out there . . . or on there, as the case may be -- even accounting for the propensity of nuts and those full of resentment to number among the most constant commenters.

On a Baton Rouge TV station's Facebook post about Monday's protest in Durham, N.C., where leftist protesters tore down a Confederate memorial, there were at least three "kill them all" comments, several more calling them "animals" (contemporary Southern replacement for the N-word), hundreds of demands to lock them all up, several commenters eager for the commencement of civil hostilities . . . and at least one fellow as sure as his 1861 ancestors that the filthy lib'ruls would surrender as soon as the first shot was fired.

Because that's exactly what happened after Fort Sumter, right?

MY SLEEPLESS NIGHTS bring me to another rumination about identity and "white privilege."


We all know what Trump did Saturday. What he reluctantly -- and unconvincingly -- said Monday. How the Trump Train came off the tracks on Tuesday and the president angrily threw his true colors in the face of the assembled White House press corps, revealing himself to be a Nazi-sympathizer. (Really, there's just no other way to put it.)

The coastal media elites seem to think that's the end of him, then.

New Orleans, 1960
Those of us still enough in touch with "flyover country," particularly the Deep South, know better. In the American South, as objectively awful as Trump's words are -- and as awful as he is -- if the 2020 presidential election were tomorrow, he'd probably win in a cakewalk. It would be reasonable for you to ask, at this juncture, "What the f***?"

The eff is pretty much this: Large swaths of the United States are now fully fascist in every way but name. And the Deep South always has been.


When I was growing up, having been born toward the end of Jim Crow (1961) and having lived nowhere else but Baton Rouge until early 1983, I didn't realize that, because I knew nothing else. None of us did -- at least none of us white folk.

I went to legally segregated public schools until 1970. Yes, 1970. In 1970, neighborhood schools was a desegregation plan. White people still lost their shit. Very Trumpian, actually.


"Degenerate Music" exhibit catalog
Between something like 1963 and 1970, desegregation was a "freedom of choice" plan for blacks to go to all-white schools in their attendance district, starting with 12th grade and adding a grade to the plan every year. For an elementary kid like I was, the biggest threat one's parent could make against your misbehaving self would be to "send you to the nigger school."

I imagine parents are still making that threat today -- education is still that segregated there. Only now, starting when the feds ordered busing in 1981, whites have almost totally abandoned the public schools; they're 90 percent nonwhite. When I graduated in 1979, they were roughly 67 percent white.

Likewise, Baton Rouge itself has been largely abandoned by whites. A city that was more than 60 percent white in the early '80s now is majority minority. What was a unified parish (county) school district has turned into four school districts, as suburban cities broke away and formed their own. Unincorporated suburbs in the southern part of East Baton Rouge Parish want to incorporate as a new city so they can form a new (mostly white) school district. This, of course, would gut Baton Rouge's tax base. A couple of years ago, St. George activists fell short after a terrible and bitter battle that got worldwide news coverage.


Yet, they will not go away. The battle likely will resume as soon as electoral law allows.

Someone could argue that, in parts of the United States, we're fighting a civil war right now, just without the shooting (so far).

IN MY HOMETOWN,  there is white privilege. It is deeply institutionalized in law and in custom. Like a white polo shirt, my people -- white Southern people -- could take it off. But they will not. Is that, broadly defined, not the heart of fascism?

Was not the antebellum South, with its brutality, master-race theorizing and chattel slavery, not a spiritual progenitor of Nazism? Did not the postwar Jim Crow South, -- that of ritualized brutality, culturally internalized racist beliefs, de jure segregation and government-enforced second-class citizenship for blacks -- provide a legal blueprint, if not the legal blueprint, for Nazi Germany's Nuremberg Laws of 1935?

That's exactly what a Yale law professor argues.

From the introduction to James Q. Whitman's book, Hitler's American Model:

Moreover, the ironic truth is that when Nazis rejected the American example, it was sometimes because they thought that American practices were overly harsh: for Nazis of the early 1930s, even radical ones, American race law sometimes looked too racist.
PRIVILEGE. Fascism by the name "Americanism" -- or "Southern heritage" . . . or any other damn thing but what it was. That's the all-American world in which I was reared, and which exists even today, in pockets, from sea to shining sea, and almost unbroken from Virginia to Texas.

Yet we are shocked, shocked there are Nazis among us. That white supremacy once again is ascendant.

Yet we wonder how the hell an amoral, racist -- and dangerous -- buffoon like Donald John Trump became the 45th president of the United States.


To me, the issue in this country isn't whether the United States will go fascist; the issue is whether a) the South ever will QUIT being fascist, or b) the rest of the country will become fascist, just like the former Confederate states.

The answer to that question, only God, through His tears, can see.