Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Unfortunately, the judge believed in jail

Aug. 8, 1974: The front page of the Baton Rouge (La.) State-Times had the biggest headline I'd ever seen in my 13½ years on Earth: Nixon to Quit.
Inside, on Page 20-A, was this campaign ad for Gil Dozier, running for Public Service Commissioner that fall.

His campaign chairman, Dr. Billy Cannon -- local orthodontist and LSU's only Heisman Trophy winner -- paid for it. Dozier lost.
But the next year, Dozier got himself elected Louisiana agriculture commissioner. And in 1980, he got himself convicted on federal racketeering and extortion charges. After a failed appeal in 1982, he took up residence in the federal pen in Fort Worth, Texas.

In 1983, Cannon ended up in federal prison, too -- in Texarkana, Texas -- after being convicted of counterfeiting $6 million in $100 bills. Both got out of the pen in 1986.

I wonder how many folks ever think "Hey! Both of these guys went to federal pen -- funny how life works" when seeing an old newspaper political ad from their misspent youth. I'll bet a bunch . . . if they're from Louisiana.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

The Brown Plague Report . . . or News Down the Rabbit Hole


If I never see Michelle Root on television again, it will be too goddamn soon.

In January 2016, Eswin Mejia rear ended Root's daughter, Sarah, on L Street in Omaha. He was driving a pickup. She was in a car. She was slowing down or stopped. He was street racing.

She was sober. He, say authorities, was drunk as a skunk.

He also was 19,  from Honduras, had no license and no papers. The judge set bail, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement wasn't interested enough to take him into federal custody when he left the state's.

Mejia, for his part, wasn't interested in a future as a guest of the Nebraska Department of Corrections. He skipped bail and, presumably, the country. All political hell broke loose. And the Root family has been poster children for "doing something about them fuckin' Mexicans" ever since.

Hondurans? Whatever.

The bottom line is the Roots have immigrated to the local TV news . . . and the pages of the Omaha World-Herald . . . and they won't leave. Because now they're activists for "immigration reform." And whenever somebody with brown skin and no immigration documentation does any damn thing that somehow impacts a regular white American, it's lights, camera . . . MAGA!


MEANTIME, regular white American drunk drivers who fatally plow into regular, sober white Americans are feeling a little ignored. Not-as-regular black American evildoers are thanking their lucky stars they're not Dominican.

And Michelle Root can be found on television sympathizing with any other regular white American who's had a regular white American child hurt or killed by One of Those People (TM). That is, when she's not found on television campaigning for Donald Trump . . . or onstage at a Trump presidential rally . . . or at the White House or otherwise protesting the Brown Menace.

Facts are facts: The Root family, with Michelle right out front, has been exploited by Trump from Day One. Michelle Root has become such a pro-Trump and anti-immigration fanatic that, to my mind, she's completely tainted as a news source.

And that's completely apart from the ethical and media issues that present themselves when shallow reporters -- particularly the TV variety, who always have been and always will be suckers for this sort of journalistic cheap grace -- put their brains in neutral and set their jerking knees to 11 anytime a Latino without papers does any damn criminal thing.

This is the laziest form of bullshit, stereotypical journalism there is. It plays into the hands of demagogues -- like the one Americans elected president -- and it will get someone killed.

You don't have to be a journalism professor, a philosopher or an ethicist to be outraged the 10th time some lazy reporter or editor tries to foist this sob-sister act on the public (which, naturally, will eat it up), much less the hundredth time the Roots pollute my TV screen with their grief-soaked vendetta.


IS NO JOURNALIST curious about Michelle Root's Twitter feed? About the retweets of posts from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that not only advocates against illegal immigration but also against most legal immigration and is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center?  Retweets of extremist Iowa congressman Steve King? Retweets of missives by Arizona's "Sheriff Joe" Arpaio?

Listen, any normal human being grieves for, and with, any parent who loses a child. But that cannot and does not give the press license to turn a blind eye to reality for sentimental reasons, nor does it give the reporter license to become, in effect, a propagandist. In this case, we have local reporters who cross that line every time they run to the Roots for another bong hit of tragedy and aggrievement every time an illegal-alien Latino hurts somebody somewhere.


It's not only wrong, it's horrible journalism. The victimized Michelle Root the Omaha press portrays is a simplistic and deeply misleading portrait. It's sanitized. People who should know better are engaging in some real "fake news" because, one suspects, they figure the public can't handle the truth . . . and neither can their ratings or circulation numbers.

Reality in this case is a lot messier, a lot uglier and a lot sadder. I think it's also a lot more interesting, but there's more profit in playing to people's prejudices than in piquing people's interest. Always has been, always will be.




IF YOU'RE a reporter tempted to lazily saunter over to the Roots for yet more pathos and dire warnings about the Brown Menace, just ask yourself this: "Would I dare do this kind of story every time a white person is killed by a black person? Would I dare do it every time a Gentile gets offed by a Jew? If I would, exactly why would that be?"

I think we all know the answer to that question. So does Donald Trump. So did Adolf Hitler.

And isn't propaganda nothing more than telling the same misleading, incomplete story over and over and over again? That's where the Omaha press is now with the Root family. We hear all about the tragedy of Sarah's death. We hear all about criminals with brown skin and no papers.

We never hear a fucking thing about the rabbit hole you followed Michelle Root down into so you could do the same damn interview you already have done -- or so it seems -- a thousand times before.


I, for one, eagerly await the next Michelle Root PR availability when, say, a Norwegian who overstayed his visa slits an American's throat or drinks a fifth of Jim Beam before turning some young woman's compact car into a sheet-metal accordion.

I said I eagerly await it. I didn't say I'd be holding my breath.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Gates of Hell 1, Catholic Church 0


The Catholic Church -- the institutional church, at least -- in this country is finished. The gates of hell, we are assured by scripture, will not prevail against the church everywhere, but they have here.

I say this after reading a "little" story from Pennsylvania uncovered in today's grand jury report on the spiritual, ethical and legal cesspool that is the Catholic Church there. The entire document is here. Maybe you have the stomach to tackle it in its immensity -- I do not.

But this one snippet from a massive global scandal and sacrilege is instructive. A huge story begins to just become a jumble of factoids and statistics, but the horror is best appreciated in looking at just one thing.

JUST ONE destroyed life. Sorry, make that two . . . because abortion. Just one mutilated soul. Just one sociopathic prelate.

This, from Diocese of Scranton in the 1980s, is just one in an unbelievably long parade of horror from just one American state since World War II. Here is the account from the local newspaper today, the Times Leader:

You can be assured that what the grand jury -- various grand juries over recent years -- uncovered in Pennsylvania will likewise pop up out of the clerical swamp in every diocese from sea to shining sea.

You also can be assured that most of our shepherds are wolves in chasubles and mitres.

I feel as if I should have more to say about this, something eloquent, profound and original. I don't.

Perhaps it's the cynicism I've clung to for the last 16 years as a coping mechanism. It's not ideal, but it seems to work for me and keeps me somewhere within Christianity instead of screaming "F*ck you!" as I storm out the door into . . . what? Nothingness?

Yeah, probably nothingness. And then the pointy-hatted motherf*ckers could notch yet another lost soul onto their liturgical staffs.

And yes, I just said "pointy-hatted motherf*ckers." The great scandal of American clericalist Catholicism is that all the "right" faithful will be a lot more scandalized by my phraseology than by priests raping young boys and girls, homosexual brothels disguised as Catholic seminaries and "princes of the church" aiding and abetting all of the above.

If you are offended, go say a rosary for my damnable soul . . . on the grave of an abuse victim who killed himself or herself after the misplaced shame and the unceasing torment became too much to bear.


Some of us will remain Catholic in the wake of this filth. I don't know which -- the jury's still out for most of us, I suspect. But I do know this: Whichever way we find to keep the faith, such as it is and assuming we do, it will not be the way we have kept it in the past. At all.

The collapse of the institutional church will follow the collapse of the hierarchy's reputation and credibility, a process begun in earnest in 2002 and finally completed today with the Pennsylvania grand jury's scathing 900-page report. The collapse of that credibility flowed out of the collapse of episcopal integrity, the visible sign of God-knows-how-many collapsed episcopal souls.

May God have precisely as much mercy on them as they showed their flocks.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Meme-ing down your leg with holy water


Today's prayers, thanks to yesterday's inaction.

















* a sampling



What good is it, my brothers and sisters,
if someone says he has faith but does not have works?
Can that faith save him?
If a brother or sister has nothing to wear
and has no food for the day,
and one of you says to them,
"Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,"
but you do not give them the necessities of the body,
what good is it?
So also faith of itself,
if it does not have works, is dead.

Indeed someone might say,
"You have faith and I have works."
Demonstrate your faith to me without works,
and I will demonstrate my faith to you from my works.
You believe that God is one.
You do well.
Even the demons believe that and tremble.
Do you want proof, you ignoramus,
that faith without works is useless?
Was not Abraham our father justified by works
when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar?
You see that faith was active along with his works,
and faith was completed by the works.
Thus the Scripture was fulfilled that says,
Abraham believed God,
and it was credited to him as righteousness,
and he was called the friend of God.
See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.
For just as a body without a spirit is dead,
so also faith without works is dead.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

3C&T: Always first with products for today

Click for full-size version

From Vox:
Mueller’s team describes Papadopoulos as a “proactive cooperator.” That’s a big deal.

Here’s why: Mueller purposely sealed the indictment and kept the arrest secret so that others wouldn’t know Papadopoulos was working with his team — because the probe might be using Papadopoulos to obtain even more information on possible Trump-Russia collusion.

The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale reports that when prosecutors consider someone to be a “proactive cooperator,” it could signal that that person was wearing a wire. And if that’s true, that means Papadopoulos might’ve talked to Trump campaign officials with a wire on. That’s still speculative, of course, but it could pose a serious problem for Trump if officials with secrets to keep unknowingly divulged information to a wired-up Papadopoulos.

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.

Monday, August 14, 2017

Land of the sucker, home of the coward


You know about Charlottesville. You know what President Trump said (or, rather, didn't say) about Charlottesville.

You probably have heard some Trump-addled right-wing ditwad blame the neo-Nazi riot in the Virginia college town on former President Barack Obama, or Black Lives Matter . . . or on any damned thing apart from the neo-Nazis and their chief enabler and encourager, Donald Trump.


You even might have heard some Trump-loving American fascists -- and make no mistake, to love Donald Trump and his agenda is to be an American fascist -- blame Heather Heyer, 32, for her own death in an act of neo-Nazi domestic terrorism. I have heard just that. Then again, I am originally from the fascist stronghold of Baton Rouge, La., and sometimes read the comments on local news stories there.  (I need to quit doing that.)

Heather Heyer
As the demented Nazi-apologist argument (such as it is) goes, Heyer is to blame for her own demise . . . because she was there. And for being a hateful "libtard" who had the gall to protest against white-supremacists who, after all, were exercising their First Amendment rights.

In the words of the American troll's favorite American antihero, "BAD!" Or was it "SAD!" ? I forget.


THIS BRINGS me to something Al Jazeera English dug from the depths of YouTube. I hesitate to bring Al Jazeera into this, because someone sees "Al Jazeera," thinks "MUSLIN TERRORISS!!!" and what's left of their brain freezes up. Anyway. . . .

What the cable-news outlet found and posted to social media was a clip from the 1947 reissue of Don't Be a Sucker, a 1943 anti-fascist propaganda film produced by the U.S. War Department. Cliff's Notes version: The film opens with a montage of all the ways one can be suckered, segues into a fascist stump speaker on the courthouse square in Anytown, U.S.A., then outlines the rise and fall (and toll) of Nazi rule in Germany.

The clip going around Facebook, et al, was supposed to be a history-based argument on the evils of fascism and white supremacy. And that it indeed is. But if you hunt down Don't Be a Sucker on the Internet -- a high-quality version is downloadable from the Internet Archive -- and watch the whole thing, much more becomes clear. Clear as someone caught in the high-wattage beam of a concentration-camp spotlight.


Cleaned-up a bit for 21st-century consumption, the fascist agitator's spiel in the public square is a remarkable facsimile of a Donald Trump campaign speech. The National Socialists' tactics to divide and conquer German society resemble something as contemporary, and Trumpian, as today's headlines. And our divided, faltering American society today is ripe for the conquering.



DONALD TRUMP knew that two years ago. American Nazis and other assorted white supremacists know it today. It is no accident that many of the racist rabble on parade in Virginia were chanting "Heil, Trump!" as they gave their stiff-armed Nazi salutes.

What the government of the United States warned its citizens about more than 70 years ago now is running the United States government. American voters who damn well ought to have known better -- been better -- put fascism in that high position.


Think about that, if you can stomach it.

Then think about what the hell you're going to do about it.

Wednesday, September 07, 2016

Cracker like me?

Zack Linly doesn't know the half of it!


Zack Linly is an African-American activist.

He also is a poet.

And a performer.

And a freelance writer.

And a community organizer.

So it's no great surprise that when a man spread that thin reconsiders the usefulness of engaging with whitey, he doesn't take the time to consider that he's just decided that George Wallace was right after all.

Gee, when you're 12 percent of the population, decide to quit engaging with anyone else, lump all white people into the same racist boat, then basically tell the whole lot to f*** off . . . I wonder where that strategy possibly might go wrong in this Age of Trump?

But if some hothead is going to be stupid, and then he decides to write down his stupidity, it would almost be wrong if some American newspaper somewhere didn't publish it for the sheer entertainment value, if nothing else. In Linly's case, it was The Washington Post's turn. To wit:

Could it be, and I’m just spit-balling here, but could it be that white folks are … completely full of it? 
This is why I submit that black people should simply disengage with white America in discussions about race altogether. Let them have their little Klan-esque chats in the Yahoo and USA Today comment sections. We need to stop arguing with them because, in the end, they aren’t invested like we are. They aren’t paying attention to these stories out of fear for their lives and the lives of their children and spouses; they are only tuned in out of black and brown contempt. This is trivial to them, a contest to see who can be the most smug, condescending and dismissive. When black people debate these issues, we do so passionately — not always articulately, and often without a whole lot of depth to our arguments — but we always come from a place of genuine frustration, outrage and fear. 
When most white people debate the very same issues from an opposing stance, they do so from a place of perpetual obtuseness and indifference. Their arguments always seem to boil down to “If it isn’t my experience, it couldn’t possibly be yours.” Even “well meaning” white folks tend to center themselves in the discussion (#NotAllWhitePeople #IDontSeeColor). Yes, there are plenty of white people who aren’t racist, who think shouting “Blue Lives Matter” is wrong, who truly do wish things would change. But the fact is, they figuratively and literally have no skin in the game. 
I understand that white people are mad. They’ve gone their whole lives being the default for social and cultural normalcy and never really had to think critically about race at all. 
Now a black first lady addresses the nation, and she talks about slavery. Now social media identifies and challenges their micro-aggressions. They’re getting the tint snatched off of their rose-colored glasses; that “Shining City on the Hill” they know as America is starting to lose some of its gloss. And they ain’t here for that — but we are. 
So we need to let them cry. Let them gripe about how white is the new black and they are now the true victims of racism because their black co-workers don’t invite them to lunch or some black guy on the train called them a cracker or because black people on the interwebs hurt feelings. (How nice it must be to have the option of simply logging off of your oppression.) We need to let them cry. And we need to learn how to just sit our intellectual selves back and enjoy it.
NO, I DON'T think black folks would enjoy it. Not at all.
The fact is, we can fight systemic racism without white validation. We can continue shutting down bridges and highways every time there’s a new Alton Sterling, Philando Castile or Korryn Gaines in the news and let white folks complain about the intrusion on their lives. We can continue moving our black dollars into black banks and keeping our money in our businesses and communities. We don’t need them to “get it” for us to keep fighting.
And likewise, white people who truly want to be allies can find their path to ally-ship without black validation and without us having to take time out of our days to educate them. They can find their own curriculum and figure out for themselves how they can do their part in fighting the good fight. And they can do it without the promise of black praise. And, I’m not about to keep checking to see if they’re doing that much. Because it’s not my job – and it’s not yours, either. 
Black people, it is long past time for us to start practicing self-care. And if that means completely disengaging with white America altogether, then so be it.

WELL, you certainly can try to fight systemic racism without white validation, but I don't know how far you're going to get. Keep telling white people to screw themselves while you scarcely treat white allies better than you do sworn enemies like David Duke, and I think -- and I'm just spit-balling here -- you're going to create even more enemies.

You're going to take people of good will and ultimately convince them that they are being targeted by blacks, and then that whole self-preservation thing kicks in.

Remember Bosnia? The United States already is well on the way to getting there in Trump's good time, and Mr. F*** Whitey proclaims that throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire looks like a solution to him.


Ensure that all the hated, innately racist white people come to see you not as fellow Americans -- or even brothers and sisters in Christ or merely part of the brotherhood of man -- and see what wonderful and immediate results come from "shutting down bridges and highways every time there’s a new Alton Sterling, Philando Castile or Korryn Gaines in the news and let white folks complain about the intrusion on their lives."

Let's take a brief moment for a brief history lesson from just my middle-aged lifetime.

IN 1963, it was the abject horror of the American public at TV pictures of fire hoses and police dogs turned on peaceful black protesters in Birmingham -- the horror of the predominantly white American public -- that made it politically possible for President Lyndon Johnson (white President Lyndon Johnson) to ram the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress (the overwhelmingly white Congress) over the strenuous objections of powerful (and segregationist) Southern members.

A year after the Civil Rights Act's passage, it was the abject horror of the American public at TV pictures of segregationist vigilantes and Alabama state troopers attacking peaceful black protesters in Selma -- the horror of the still predominantly white American public -- that made it possible for President Lyndon Johnson (the still-white President Lyndon Johnson) to ram the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through Congress (the still overwhelmingly white Congress) over the once again strenuous objections of still powerful (and still segregationist) Southern members.

Muhammad
So, if Zack Linly would like to know how successful he and his might be after disengagement with -- and his near-blanket villification of -- honkies like lil' ol' south Louisiana-born me, that not-so-ancient history might be a reliable guide. He'd well know that if his study of African-American history had extended beyond "We were slaves" and "White people bad."

Here's my educated guess on how African-Americans might fare under the Linly Plan, which is nothing more than a less-articulate version of the Elijah Muhammad Plan.


Connor
Bull Connor would be just a warm-up; that's how well it would go. Yes, some white people are ugly nowadays. I am old enough to well remember a time when a lot more were a lot uglier. I would advise against daring white people to be that way once again.

Especially, as I said, when African-Americans are about 12 percent of the population, and white people are better armed.

Micro-agression that.

WHEN THE center does not hold, bad things happen. Given that Americans oftentimes aren't all that bright (or particularly well-versed in history), it's looking like were going to have to find that out the hard way.