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.

That does not compute

"Let me ask you this; if you were a resident of New York, how would you feel if they all of a sudden decided to take down the Statue of Liberty, would you be against that?"

-- Joseph Anseman

Kenner, La.

Nolaspicedesigns

Louisiana's commissioner to the Texas Secession Convention explains, in February 1861, why it seceded from the Union the previous month.

To the Hon. O.M. Roberts, President of the Convention of the People of Texas.

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the people of Texas.

I have the honor to address you as the commissioner of the people of Louisiana, accredited to your honorable body. With this communication, by the favor of your presiding officer, will be laid before you my credentials, the ordinance of secession, a resolution in regard to the Mississippi river and the ordinance to provide for the appointment of delegates to a convention to form a Southern Confederacy. These ordinances and the resolution were adopted at their respective dates by the people of Louisiana in convention assembled, after serious debate and calm reflection.

Being desirous of obtaining the concurrence of the people of Texas in what she has done, Louisiana invites you to a candid consideration of her acts in resuming the powers delegated to the government of the late United States, and in providing for the formation of a confederacy of "The States which have seceded and may secede." The archives of the Federal Government bear ample testimony to the loyalty of Louisiana to the American Union. Her conservatism has been proverbial in political circles. The character and pursuits of her people, her immense agricultural wealth, her large banking capital, her possession of the great commercial metropolis of the South, whose varied trade almost rivals that of the city of "ten thousand masts" present facts sufficient to make "assurance double sure" she did not take these grave steps for light or transient causes. She was impelled to this action to preserve her honor, her safety, her property and the free institutions so sacred to her people. She believed the federal agent had betrayed her trust, had become the facile instrument of a hostile people, and was usurping despotic powers. She considered that the present vacillating executive, on the 4th of March next, would be supplanted by a stalwart fanatic of the Northwest, whose energetic will, backed by the frenzied bigotry of unpatriotic masses, would cause him to establish the military despotism already inaugurated.

The people of Louisiana were unwilling to endanger their liberties and property by submission to the despotism of a single tyrant, or the canting tyranny of pharisaical majorities. Insulted by the denial of her constitutional equality by the non-slaveholding States, outraged by their contemptuous rejection of proffered compromises, and convinced that she was illustrating the capacity of her people for self-government by withdrawing from a union that had failed, without fault of hers, to accomplish its purposes, she declared herself a free and independent State on the 26th day of January last. History affords no example of a people who changed their government for more just or substantial reasons. Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity. As her neighbor and sister State, she desires the hearty co-operation of Texas in the formation of a Southern Confederacy. She congratulates herself on the recent disposition evinced by your body to meet this wish, by the election of delegates to the Montgomery convention. Louisiana and Texas have the same language, laws and institutions. Between the citizens of each exists the most cordial social and commercial intercourse. The Red river and the Sabine form common highways for the transportation of their produce to the markets of the world. Texas affords to the commerce of Louisiana a large portion of her products, and in exchange the banks of New Orleans furnish Texas with her only paper circulating medium. Louisiana supplies to Texas a market for her surplus wheat, grain and stock; both States have large areas of fertile, uncultivated lands, peculiarly adapted to slave labor; and they are both so deeply interested in African slavery that it may be said to be absolutely necessary to their existence, and is the keystone to the arch of their prosperity. Each of the States has an extended Gulf coast, and must look with equal solicitude to its protection now, and the acquisition of the entire control of the Gulf of Mexico in due time. No two States of this confederacy are so identified in interest, and whose destinies are so closely interwoven with each other. Nature, sympathy and unity of interest make them almost one. Recognizing these facts, but still confident in her own powers to maintain a separate existence, Louisiana regards with great concern the vote of the people of Texas on the ratification of the ordinance of secession, adopted by your honorable body on the 1st of the present month. She is confident a people who so nobly and gallantly achieved their liberties under such unparalleled difficulties will not falter in maintaining them now. The Mexican yoke could not have been more galling to "the army of heroes" of '36 than the Black republican rule would be to the survivors and sons of that army at the present day.

The people of Louisiana would consider it a most fatal blow to African slavery, if Texas either did not secede or having seceded should not join her destinies to theirs in a Southern Confederacy. If she remains in the union the abolitionists would continue their work of incendiarism and murder. Emigrant aid societies would arm with Sharp's rifles predatory bands to infest her northern borders. The Federal Government would mock at her calamity in accepting the recent bribes in the army bill and Pacific railroad bill, and with abolition treachery would leave her unprotected frontier to the murderous inroads of hostile savages. Experience justifies these expectations. A professedly friendly federal administration gave Texas no substantial protection against the Indians or abolitionists, and what must she look for from an administration avowedly inimical and supported by no vote within her borders. Promises won from the timid and faithless are poor hostages of good faith. As a separate republic, Louisiana remembers too well the whisperings of European diplomacy for the abolition of slavery in the times of annexation not to be apprehensive of bolder demonstrations from the same quarter and the North in this country. The people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery. The isolation of any one of them from the others would make her a theatre for abolition emissaries from the North and from Europe. Her existence would be one of constant peril to herself and of imminent danger to other neighboring slave-holding communities. A decent respect for the opinions and interests of the Gulf States seems to indicate that Texas should co-operate with them. I am authorized to say to your honorable body that Louisiana does not expect any beneficial result from the peace conference now assembled at Washington. She is unwilling that her action should depend on the border States. Her interests are identical with Texas and the seceding States. With them she will at present co-operate, hoping and believing in his own good time God will awaken the people of the border States to the vanity of asking for, or depending upon, guarantees or compromises wrung from a people whose consciences are too sublimated to be bound by that sacred compact, the constitution of the late United States. That constitution the Southern States have never violated, and taking it as the basis of our new government we hope to form a slave-holding confederacy that will secure to us and our remotest posterity the great blessings its authors designed in the Federal Union. With the social balance wheel of slavery to regulate its machinery, we may fondly indulge the hope that our Southern government will be perpetual.

Geo. Williamson
Commissioner of the State of Louisiana
City of Austin Feby 11th 1861.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

-- The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus

* * *

LONG STORY SHORT: When the people of a state -- and Louisiana unfortunately often is the prime example of this condition -- have lost their f***ing minds, their brains aren't very far behind.

It's a scientific fact. Twisting your mind into a pretzel in the defense of your culture's honoring and fetishizing of evil makes you stupid. Tragicomically, mouth-breathingly, knuckle-draggingly stupid.

I suggest that New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu just dynamite the remaining damn Confederate memorials before the state's collective IQ slips into negative numbers.

Whitewashing history to keep living a lie

Here's the problem with us white Southerners, as succinctly as I can put it: We don't know who or what the hell we are apart from defining ourselves by the most horrific sins of our forefathers, then trying to whitewash that evil because it was our kin what did it.

Above, behold the truth of the antebellum South before our defeated ancestors managed to sanitize the whole unholy thing into "the Lost Cause" and -- in a triumph of what passed for "fake news" in the 1880s and 1890s -- turn the Civil War into a glorious-yet-doomed campaign against Yankee usurpers in the name of states' rights. A completely logical and fair question to ask here would be "States' rights to do what, exactly?"

The answer you would not get from the originators of Lost Cause mythology then, and the answer you will not get today from the patently racist defenders of "Southern heritage" and "history," is one reflecting the truth. The plain truth you will find in the original source materials, or from talking to any serious historian of the "War Between the States," is that, in 1861, the 11 seceding Southern states wanted to maintain the "right" of whites to hold blacks in bondage, buy and sell them like you would lumber or cotton, and then -- if Satan so moved them -- whip the "property" until their backs looked like this famous 1863 photo of an escaped Louisiana slave known as Gordon or "Whipped Peter."

The source materials and the photographic record tells us that the mutilated Gordon is a far better representative of the South's antebellum and wartime reality than the "history" and "heritage" peddled by Southern snake-oil salesmen since 1877, when Reconstruction ended at least a couple of generations too soon.

In 1961, when I was born in Baton Rouge, Southern "heritage"consisted of moonlight, magnolias and -- as Randy Newman correctly put in in his seminal "Rednecks" -- "keeping the niggers down." Or, as Alabama Gov. George Wallace put it in 1962:

"In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

Today, being that our parents couldn't stop the feds from giving blacks the vote, preserving "Southern heritage" and "history" centers on venerating the Confederate battle flag and preserving the "Lost Cause" monuments to the generals and founding fathers of the Confederate States of America -- tributes in cement and stone that started going up as soon as the last Yankee soldiers got out some 140 years ago.

In my native state, Louisiana, brainwashed Lost Causers of the Deep South booboisie are figuratively (and perhaps literally) losing their minds now that New Orleans is actually removing the first of those whitewashed tributes to treason and tyranny that rose with the Jim Crow reassertion of white supremacy. The first to go -- in the wee hours of Monday, as SWAT snipers and New Orleans street cops guarded helmeted, masked demolition workers clad in flak jackets -- was the Battle of Liberty Place monument.

It's "fascism and tyranny," one Lost Cause dead-ender yelled at the "cowardly" work crews, who also covered up the company name on their vehicles and removed the license plates. Of course, the workers wore masks and the company name was covered because every firm that so much as bid on the job faced a barrage of abuse and death threats in the name of "history" and "heritage." The owner of a Baton Rouge firm that originally won a contract discovered that his $200,000 sports car had been turned into a molten glob of metal in his parking lot -- burned.

He declined the job.

THE FAKE NEWS about Liberty Place we Louisianians were taught for a century or more was that the victory of 5,000 White League combatants over the 3,500 from New Orleans' integrated Metropolitan Police and units of the state militia represented the beginning of the end of rule by carpetbagger "usurpers." The reality was that the deadly September 1874 insurrection aimed to overthrow the Republican governor of Louisiana following a disputed 1872 election, and the White League succeeded in capturing state offices as Gov. William Pitt Kellogg took refuge in the Customs House and begged Washington for help.

Three days later, the Pelican State putsch ended when President Ulysses S. Grant sent in the U.S. Army and the White League slinked away.

The Liberty Place monument went up in 1891, erected by the Jim Crow city government. Inscriptions noting the battle's importance in establishing white supremacy were added in 1932.

From The New Orleans Advocate:

The removal was delayed, however, as the city found itself tied up in court battles that lasted until earlier this year, when the 5th Circuit ruled that the city could move forward while a trial on the monument backers' suit played out.

That case also was resolved on Monday, when U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier dismissed claims made by several groups led by the Monumental Task Committee, ruling that the plaintiffs had not shown they could succeed on the merits. Among their arguments was that the committee should have a say in what happened to the monuments because it had done work over the years to clean and restore them.[New Orleans Mayor Mitch] Landrieu was not spotted at the removal itself, and other city officials there were not allowed to comment to the media, leaving the city’s official comments to a release issued two hours after the process began and then Landrieu's news conference.

“Our past is marked by racial divisions. Today we are moving to a place of healing,” Landrieu said.

That event was held at the police memorial in front of NOPD headquarters, a deliberate choice by the administration to accentuate the fact that the White League killed members of the city’s biracial police force during its rebellion.

Emphasizing the city’s focus on security, members of the media had to email city officials before even being told where Landrieu would speak.

“Of the four we will remove, this is perhaps the most blatant affront to the values that make New Orleans and America strong today,” Landrieu said of the Battle of Liberty Place monument.

“We will no longer allow the Confederacy to literally be put in the heart of our city. The removal of these statues sends a clear message, an unequivocal message to the people of our nation that our city celebrates our diversity,” he added.

The Liberty Place monument has always been a flashpoint of controversy and was a site of rallies years ago by white nationalist David Duke and protests by civil rights leader Rev. Avery Alexander, something that may have contributed to Monday's level of security.

This is also the second time the monument has been removed. It was taken down from its original spot on the Canal Street neutral ground during roadwork in the late 1980s and was put up again only on orders from a federal court. It was placed in a less conspicuous spot at the foot of Iberville Street, between a garage and the floodwall.

The timing of the statue’s removal came as an odd historical coincidence in a debate focused on the Civil War and its aftermath.

Monday was Confederate Memorial Day in Mississippi and Alabama. It also marked the 155th anniversary of the day Union ships under the command of Capt. David Farragut managed to pass two Confederate forts on the river in Plaquemines Parish, an attack that started at almost exactly the same early morning hour as workers began taking down the monument. Once Farragut’s squadron made it past those forts, New Orleans, the Confederacy's largest city, was left defenseless. It surrendered without a fight four days later.

Exactly 15 years later, federal troops would leave the city on April 24 on the order of new President Rutherford B. Hayes, marking the end of Reconstruction.

The end of that federal oversight, which ushered in the Jim Crow era, was commemorated on the Liberty Place statue itself in 1932 with a plaque that said “the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” Less inflammatory language was added when the marker was moved to Iberville Street.

THIS IS HISTORY.  The monuments are propaganda, erected to obscure history, not to shine a light on the fraught past of the American South. The Liberty Place marker and the ones yet to come down -- massive statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, who fired the opening salvos on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, as well as the biggest of all, that of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Lee Circle -- say nothing about why the South fought or what it all meant.

All they do is cloak the ugly reality of a sick culture and a wicked economy built upon the exploitation and dehumanization of an entire race . . . and the culpability of the men who led 11 states into treasonous rebellion to defend the indefensible.

"History" to people either too racist or too brainwashed to comprehend the obvious is, instead, nothing more than a crude attempt to bestow a patina of dignity upon a people's and a region's ignominious and total defeat. The only relevant history involving these tributes to a well-lost cause would be that of the how-tos of disinformation and cultural brainwashing on a civilizational scale.

The "heritage" they represent is a God-damned abomination.

Once upon a time, as a well and good brainwashed son of the South, I'd be offended at all the little digs and insults from Yankees about my home place. But when you step back and look at the enormity of the South's sin and the enormity of the South's delusions -- even to this day -- you start to realize those humiliations haven't been nearly bad enough or often enough.

Frankly, there ought to have been a de-Confederafication of the South at least as extensive and long-running as the de-Nazification of Germany after World War II. Confederate symbolism should have been made as unacceptable and untouchable as the swastika became for postwar Germans.

Being charitable to vanquished enemies is one thing, but bygones-as-bygones isn't an option when the real enemy is cultural and ideological. You can rebuild the ruined land, but you damn well cannot allow the rebuilding of the toxic, deadly ideology.

The federal government, however, damn well allowed the rebuilding of the South's toxic, deadly ideology. And here we are in 2017, with loyal sons and daughters of the Southland still making excuses for the sins of their forebears -- when they can bring themselves to acknowledge America's original sin at all.

IF MITCH LANDRIEU were to ask me what to do with Lee Circle after that most prominent of the Lost Cause love letters comes down, I'd tell him that I think the city should replace the statue of Robert E. Lee with a monument to that whipped Louisiana slave whose photograph caused such a stir in the North. There should be a gigantic memorial to Gordon, or "Whipped Peter," or whoever that suffering soul was.

According to the Wikipedia entry for the famous Civil War picture, Gordon joined the Union Army after the Emancipation Proclamation -- first as a guide (he was captured by Confederates, tied to a tree, beaten, left for dead . . . and then escaped) and then as a sergeant in the Corps d'Afrique. He fought bravely at Port Hudson (La.), the first battle where black troops took the lead in a Union assault.
 
Where the soon-to-be-removed monument to Lee stood, I would erect a wall several stories tall. On one side, a relief of that picture of the scarred, disfigured slave who fled a plantation near Krotz Springs, La., and made it to safety in Union-occupied Baton Rouge.

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the wall, there would be a relief of this woodcut -- the Union sergeant named George, who fought as the equal of any white man at Port Hudson. And I'd rename Lee Circle something a lot more fitting . . . and inspiring.

Resurrection Circle.

I also would point out to the mayor that this Southern boy has Southern skin in this. My great-great grandfather, François Seguin, was a Confederate soldier at Port Hudson. And there he died.

In the name of a God-damned abomination.

(Later, we can discuss Louisianians' bitter refusal to honor LSU's founding superintendent . . .  William Tecumseh Sherman. Not one thing on campus is named for him. James Carville thinks the Parade Ground should be named for him; I think it should be the Union. I have skin in that controversy, too. For one thing, I am a Louisiana State graduate. Then there's the matter of another of my great-great grandfathers, Ulysses Broussard, a Confederate soldier from Louisiana who fought . . . in the Battle of Atlanta. Which is where he is buried.)

THAT'S the thing about wicked ideologies and sick cultures -- one way or another, they kill everybody without prejudice.

Caucasian sons and daughters of the South owe it to ourselves, our ancestors and history itself to, at long last, live in truth. A people and a region have no identity at all if the one they claim is a lie -- a lie that manages to both dishonor and ignore the history and humanity of fellow Southerners dehumanized, enslaved, abused and killed for the sake of "Southern heritage."

Then again, if history so far is any predictor, my people will stick with the Southern status quo of livin' the lie and partyin' like it's 1899. In that case, allow me to put a record on the turntable. You may have heard it -- fella used to live in New Orleans.

We're rednecks, we're rednecks
And we don't know our ass from a hole in the ground . . . .

Ve haff veys to mach joo zaloot ze banner uff freedom

In case there was any doubt left that the Republican Party has given itself over to the fascist bullying of the right, consider Hal Daub -- a University of Nebraska regent plotting his very own Night of the Long Knives against a trio of college football players.

Were they communists working undercover for Red China, plotting to destroy Husker baseball and make ping pong the national sport?

Were they deep-cover moles for Vladimir Putin, planning to hack the university's computer network and mete out 26,000 incompletes?

Did they not want to Make Football Great Again in Lincoln?

No, it was worse than that . . . at least for Daub, a Donald Trump delegate and onetime congressman who missed the House Un-American Activities Committee by this much.

What the players did was kneel in protest during the national anthem before a Nebraska road game at Northwestern last week. I think it is clear by now why they did. And for that, there must be consequences -- human rights, freedom of conscience and the First Amendment be damned.

Daub (R-Paraguay)

NU Regent Hal Daub of Omaha said he was disappointed in the Husker players because he doesn’t believe a football game is the place to express political or social views. Expressing their views is fine, he said, but not when it’s “disruptive.” 

“You don’t have to put your hand over your heart or sing, but out of respect for other people’s point of view and wishes, the respect they could show would be, at least, stand or not be on the field” when the anthem is played, he said.

Daub also said he was disappointed in the reaction from Husker football coach Mike Riley, who backed the players.

“I was not pleased with his response,” Daub said.

Daub said he believes the matter will be a topic of discussion among the regents at some point. 

“Nobody’s out to censure anybody or limit anybody’s free speech, but speech is limited,” Daub said. “Conduct is limited.” 

Daub, who served in the U.S. Army, said he’s received between 50 and 60 emails about the issue, and the majority disagree with the players’ decision.

The Lincoln Journal Star reported that Daub said the players “had better be kicked off the team.” 

But Daub denied saying that during an interview with The World-Herald.

Asked what kind of punishment, if any, the players should face, Daub said he’s unsure.

“I think that’s a debate that will unfold here,” he said.

NO, I THINK the debate that should unfold here surrounds how Daub (R-Nuremberg) even thinks he has any moral right to speak on the subject, much less condemn Husker linebackers Michael Rose-Ivey and Mohamed Barry or defensive end DaiShon Neal.

Hal Daub was mayor of Omaha from 1995-2001, presiding over this Midwestern city at a time when, thanks in part to Daub's "get tough" policy, residents of predominantly black north Omaha came to see the police department as almost an occupying force . . . in the German sense of the term. Police-community relations, in a word, were awful.

Community leaders talked of certain Omaha cops with a reputation for routinely roughing up African-Americans for no other reason than they could get away with it. The tactics did not lead to any great reduction in -- or great campaign against -- violent crime in the city.

For example, here's something that ran in the Omaha World-Herald in September 2000:

Omaha black leaders said Tuesday that they have no intention of losing the momentum for action demonstrated by people who gathered Monday at a civil-rights protest. 

The Rev. Everett Reynolds, president of the local NAACP branch, said
community leaders and members were planning to gather next Monday at Morning Star Baptist Church, 20th and Burdette Streets, to plan the next move.

"We have a lot of folks that are excited and want to do something," he said. "Our task now is to put that in focus."

More than 1,000 people gathered about noon on the steps and the grassy courtyard of the Douglas County Courthouse, protesting recent police killings.

It was a much bigger turnout than the estimated 300 people published in The World-Herald Monday evening. The lower figure was based on an estimate provided by one of the protest organizers late in the morning while the crowd was still gathering.

Calling it a "funeral for justice," about 400 cars wound their way from 24th and Lake Streets to downtown. Headlights on and horns sounding, they made downtown streets look and sound like midtown Manhattan at rush hour.

Organizers pleaded for an end to past wrongs, including the killing of black men by police officers and a lack of response by the criminal-justice system.

In particular, leaders decried Officer Jerad Kruse's shooting of George
Bibins after a high-speed police chase. Bibins, who was unarmed, had been fleeing from police in a stolen Jeep.

Kruse was charged with manslaughter, but those charges were dropped before the case went to a grand jury. The grand jury declined to file charges.

In a peaceful demonstration, speakers called for authorities to release
information about the Bibins shooting and bring charges against the officer.

"What I hope happens is they take notice that the community has had enough and that the Bibins family wants answers and the community wants answers," Eric Bibins, the brother of George Bibins, said after the protest ended. 

Reynolds joined him - hoping that the protest put a dent in community denial and put some pressure on local authorities.

"I'm hoping they'll understand the dissatisfaction and do what is right," Reynolds said.

At the start of the protest, pallbearers carried a metallic gray coffin
through the crowd and set it at the top of the courthouse steps. Looking to the coffin, the Rev. Larry Menyweather-Woods said: "Justice, Omaha-way, is inside."

"We want to bury this justice," said Menyweather-Woods, whose Mount Moriah Baptist Church was the starting point of the procession and rally. "We want a new justice to rise up."

In words and signs, the residents unleashed a flurry of frustration about race relations in Omaha. On the one hand, they said, they're harassed by police. On the other hand, they're ignored by city policy-makers.

One sign said: "There is no justice in north Omaha. There's just us."

THE PROTESTING football players in Lincoln, I am sure, have never heard of what happened when Hal Daub was mayor of this city 50 miles northeast on Interstate 80. Michael Rose-Ivey is from Kansas City, Mo. Mohamed Barry is from Georgia. DaiShon Neal is from Omaha, but when this story appeared in the World-Herald, I don't think he read it -- he was not yet 3.

Regent Daub, on the other hand, probably would like to forget some of these inconvenient truths of the Omaha he led as mayor. More accurately, Daub probably would like us to forget what happened then.

Like another incident from deep in the Daub days, the October 1997 shooting of Marvin Ammons on a north Omaha street during an early, freak snowstorm. Ofc. Todd Sears told investigators he thought the Gulf War veteran, who was African-American, had a gun in his waistband. It was a cellphone.

A grand jury indicted Sears in 1998, but a district judge dismissed the indictment due to alleged misconduct by an alternate grand juror. The cop never faced charges -- a second grand jury declined to indict but harshly criticized Omaha police in the case.

Now, Hal Daub, NU regent, is concerned that the Husker players' actions are "disruptive." That's rich.

The man could teach a seminar on disruption. The out-of-control police department and the "get tough" political dogwhistles of Hal Daub's Omaha created a racial tinderbox that was truly "disruptive" -- not to a football game in Evanston, Ill., but to civil society and domestic tranquility right here in Omaha, Neb.

How dare Daub, with his blood-stained record, wrap himself in Old Glory to lead a self-righteous, constitutionally challenged pogrom against black football players who did nothing but take a damn knee.

A First Amendment-approved knee.

But what's free speech -- or trying to ruin the lives of three college kids -- when there's political hay to be made in Donald Trump's Amerika. Only a man so small could talk so big about a transgression so non-existent.

Only a man without shame in a country with no memory.

UPDATE: I don't know that I've ever seen the president of a university bitch-slap one of his bosses, but it just happened at the University of Nebraska. I think we have a keeper here.

God, I love this state.

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.

Again. 

What ye sow, shall ye also reap. Good luck with that.

Huffington Post

Welcome to the confluence of every damn thing that's wrong with my hometown, Baton Rouge, La.:

• Banana-republic policing,
 

• Ineffective, dysfunctional state and local government,
 

• An angry, ignored and historically severely damaged (in every way) inner-city population,
  
• A critical mass of stone-cold white racism locally, and
  

• Systemic breakdowns in education, the justice system, public health care and social services.

You tell me how this ends well. I got nothin'.



I KNEW this would go south Friday night when the protest outside police headquarters -- I've been obsessively watching The Advocate's live streams -- began to turn ugly and the local "community leaders" tried to talk to the crowd and restore order. They were all shouted down.

One state senator from inner-city Baton Rouge kept talking about legislation she was going to introduce to deal with the situation, and how she needed the protesters to get politically involved, blah blahblah blahblah blahblah.

The hotheads may have been beyond reason, but they're not stupid. Any legislation she were to introduce to "deal with the situation" would pass the Louisiana Legislature how, exactly?

The kind of breakdown of public order that the hotheads among the demonstrators would like to achieve in the streets of Baton Rouge, because outrage, is what the GOP-dominated legislature already is achieving politically, because . . . Louisiana. And "conservative" ideology.

BATON ROUGE HAS TURNED INTO SYRIA #AltonSterling #BlackLivesMatter #BatonRouge pic.twitter.com/LCwAyP1AJA

— liz (@lizzkatherine_) July 11, 2016

TELL ME how this gets better. Tell me how this gets better when officialdom is urging everyone to lower the temperature of their rhetoric, but then the comments sections of Baton Rouge media outlets -- both on their websites and on their Facebook feeds -- more or less look like so many Ku Klux Klan message boards, with some outraged black folks responding in kind here and there.

Suggest that -- in the public interest and to promote reasoned dialog -- they either shut down comments or actively moderate them and you get lectured about the First Amendment and not wanting to stifle people's "freedom of speech."

I got that line from some 20-something Channel 2 talking head. Having gotten A's in media law at the LSU journalism school a decade before this lightweight was born, I explained to him that freedom of the press belongs to the owner of the press. Which ain't the amazing number of racist trolls taking over these outlets' comments sections.

So, given all of the above, tell me . . . how is Baton Rouge not even more screwed than it usually is? How is someone, or several someones, not going to end up as dead as Alton Sterling before all this is through?

The last grown-up in American media

 
WFAA sports anchor Dale Hansen may be the last actual grown-up in American media.

All the rest, I am reasonably certain, are dead or have been run off by corporate fools who make human sacrifices to shareholder value.

Please watch this, because this grown-up says some grown-up things about the hellish chaos which we know as the New Normal.

You do that, and instead of producing an episode of 3 Chords & the Truth this week, I will go back to watching my hometown teeter at the abyss -- You may have heard of it recently . . . Baton Rouge, La. -- while white racists unleash their racist slurs on local-media comments sections, enraged blacks lash back with some of their own and local newspaper and TV figures enable this incendiary cesspool in the name of "free speech." (Nota bene: Freedom of the press belongs to he who owns the press. Listen to me; I got an A in media law in college.)

Alas, 2016 is a lot like 1968 -- "one goddamn thing after another."

And now, Minnesota

Amerika today. We have a problem, and it's the police.

We have a problem, and it's that every citizen has become a potential terrorist or insurgent in their eyes.

We have a problem. It looks a lot like some sort of fascist police state, and lots of Americans like it that way.

Donald Trump did not come from nowhere.

We have a problem. When we weren't looking, America became Amerika.

No, we can't all just get along

I've always thought of myself as a writer, among other things. I have a journalism background -- I've worked as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. I know my way around a keyboard.

Increasingly, I find myself without words, at least ones that I can print here. There is something to be said -- something important. I wish I knew what the hell it was.

The enormity of evil has murdered my words. Killed them dead, just like the Baton Rouge, La., police killed Alton Sterling.

Sterling was the CD Man at the corner of North Foster and Fairfields, in north Baton Rouge, otherwise known as the 'hood. Truth be told, lots of my hometown is the 'hood. This part of town, like so many others in north BR, used to be working class and white back when I was a kid.

Members of the community calling for an economic protest over the weekend. #AltonSterling pic.twitter.com/2Kdj9VKqH3

— WWL-TV (@WWLTV) July 7, 2016

White people hauled ass. Now it's the 'hood, the place where -- at least according to too many of those white people who abandoned their city for points south, east and way north -- the "animals" live.

Anyway, the CD Man peddled compact discs, bootleg and otherwise, outside the Triple S Food Mart. That's how he scraped together what some people might call a living, or as much of a living as you can when you have a long rap sheet and can't get a job.

Long rap sheets happen in the 'hood, the 'hood in my hometown and yours, too. You grow up poor, you grow up lacking a father . . . or a mother . . . or both, and then shit starts to happen. Then shit snowballs. Then you get out of jail and peddle CDs. And then you carry a pistol because you got mugged or a buddy got mugged or you're just scared of the 'hood that is your home.

Then you cross paths with the Baton Rouge cops. Again.

And now you're dead, a big-ass hole blown in your chest, point-blank from a cop's service weapon. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I got theories, probably wrong ones. I got no words -- no sufficient ones, at least.

I just know that there Baton Rouge is, sitting atop a tinderbox with people -- many of them white, self-righteous and racist as a son of a bitch -- tossing lit matches from atop platforms provided them by local media. Add some outraged African-American counterparts in incivility, and you have a combox race war. All you need are guns.

There are a few of those floating around Louisiana. And America.

Click for full-size image

I COULD go on and on about the gross irresponsibility of the media aiding and abetting a racist, rage-fueled shitstorm at a time such as this, on the Internet there in America's own banana republic, which of course is a wholly owned subsidiary of Donald Trump's Amerika. Could even complain to those in charge of the newspaper and TV stations.

Wouldn't do any good. The last grown-ups in the media were laid off sometime around 2010.

Heat draws eyeballs. Light gets you squat.

If you're looking for a ray of sunshine amid the darkness, if you're looking for some earthly hope in this space, I apologize for wasting your time. I got nothing.

I got no great hope for my hometown or my home state. I got no great hope that racism won't get anything but worse in this Age of Trump. I got no words -- no useful ones. I got squat.

All I have is that familiar sick feeling in my middle-aged gut. All I have is sorrow. All I have is contempt for my hometown and the hateful stupidity it seems to nurture like a Petri dish does bacteria.

I wish I could say, like the Steve Taylor song, "Since I Gave Up Hope (I Feel A Lot Better)." But I don't. I'm just the same -- tired, pissed and sick to my stomach, just without any real hope this side of the Second Coming.

It's always 1959 somewhere. Somewhere, thy name is Baton Rouge.