Charleston

This is politics at its finest
--Wag the Dog (1997)

And that's what it is,
the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement,
and all you got to do to join is sing it
the next time it come's around
--Alice's Restaurant Massacree,
Arlo Guthrie

 Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive 
of all unifying agents 
--The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
_______________________

In another Wag the Dog moment not to be unexploited, President Obama plied his pipes last Friday at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, SC, the site of the killings of nine black parishioners.

While the killing was surely a hate crime, against which we have legislation, it was not a massacre as the hyperbolic press is wont to label it. Massacres involve groups acting in symbolic ways. Instead, this was the deranged act of a pathetic, rootless individual.

The President performed a call and response near the end of his oratory: “Clementa Pinckney found that grace,” repeating the phrase after each victim's name. No, they did not find grace but were rather murdered in a deluded individual's vulgar and tawdry attempt at self-glorification. In a self-contradiction, Obama later said, "In the Christian tradition, grace is not earned."

Perhaps more horrifying than the actual killing is the fact that twelve years into the war on terror, none of our military or intelligence was able to predict or deter this event. This was neither an act of terrorism nor of home-grown or sleeper cells of terrorists. This was simply an act of good old-fashioned American hatred. It is a hate crime -- nothing but.

Mr. Obama may fly down in Air Force 1 and interpose himself in a show of force, but he was and is powerless to predict or stop such acts. He may order drone strikes world wide, but they do not make us any safer from terrorists, criminals, or crazy, crusading idiots.

People like the shooter give off little of a predictive nature. When they do, it is often within the confines of their little crazy worlds, often lived in the bubble of innumerable virtual chat rooms, and thought crime is not yet prosecutable. 

Hatred is the glue that holds the world together. Even for those who claim fealty to a religion, it is a hard row to hoe to "love thy neighbor" (= The Other) when your religion -- any religion -- gains its legitimacy by virtue of cleaving from every other. This is by definition, and a built-in failure of most dogma.

You are you, by virtue of not being THEM, and the "them" is an excoriated unknown, condemned by your creator to a life of everlasting torment in the hereafter, at best.

Meanwhile, when the Charleston story was claiming the spotlight, heinous and murderous violence continued apace throughout the world. Hatred and opposable thumbs (to create and carry weapons) may be the defining feature of the hominids -- not a great legacy.

To refashion the lyrics of songwriter George Gershwin, "In time the Rockies may crumble / Gibralter may tumble / There're only made of clay / But ..." hatred is here to stay. Our biracial President trying to get his groove on singing a negro spiritual will not alter the fact. 

We are a nation of hatred and violence protected by a government that holds hatred and violence near and dear. Oh, if you kill the right ones, that is. Someone else's mammas and pappas.

Then the leaders of that same government cry crocodile tears when the violence is visited on the home team. 

It is a predictable and sad story, and the "sad" is a double entendre.

Media Lynch Mob

Everybody's so busy wanting to be down
with the gang.
"I'm conservative", "I'm liberal",
"I'm conservative". Bullshit!
Be a fucking person! Lis-ten!
Let it swirl around your head.
Then form your opinion.
No normal, decent person is one thing, okay?
--Chris Rock

The cops reported you as just an another homicide
But I can tell that you were just frustrated
From living with Murder Incorporated
--Murder Incorporated,
Bruce Springsteen

one may smile, and smile,
and be a villain
--Hamlet, I. v
__________________

Rounding out race week: What it means to be liberal.

One of Ranger's associates once asked me, "So what are you?" after their discussion of their early years in Catholic school. "I'm a human" I said (thank you John Lennon), so absurd seemed the question, as though he could draw a bead on me via such categorization.

So how do we know who anyone is? We have been discussing the rush to judgement this week on the Trayvon Martin case. In legal matters, we come to know what's relevant based upon the workings of our legal system. If we no longer have faith in the process, we have a problem.

The quick and severe sectarianism even in the legitimate press over this issue has been shocking. Among the commentariat, if one sides for the guilt of Zimmerman, one is correctly liberal, and if one calls for delegating the matter to the authorities, one must be a bigot. I am confounded by the majority of my supposed fellows who cannot countenance my position of non-outrage over the non-revealed facts.

To be a liberal thinker is to be broad-minded and inclusive, to consider as many angles as possible, and to shut off no option until it becomes a dead-end or fails to jibe with the preponderance of the data one ingathers. Yet -- it seems today, liberal equates with toeing the party line, swallowing an agenda, being either-or. How did thought become so factionalized and such a bully point?

In the Martin case, what does this imply, this imperative to whitewash any possible culpability of the killed member of a confrontation if he is black and his killer is not? I am not making any judgement here, but simply asking the questions. Is this another opportunity for the anti-gun crowd to argue their agenda?

We have a race problem in this country; of this there is no doubt. It is Hobbesian in proportion, as it really is all against all. Of course, this is not admitted in polite company, but if you drive a mile across Division Street in most towns, you'll see it. It is confusing why we cannot seem to get it together. Part of the problem is that we are not brave enough to speak about it; part is that we -- none of us -- do not even understand it. Magical thinking -- not acknowledging the problem or erasing any culpability is not solving it.

There are some nuts and bolts deficiencies, but there are esoteric and philosophical aspects, too. It may be that people always need a scapegoat. Maybe we are lazy and scared, or angry, or a little of all. What seems clear is that we like to be outraged and like to feel righteous, but still, NIMBY rules the day for most.

I loved the "Portlandia" clip about the principles deep and abiding concern for the provenance and well-being of the chicken they were ordering at a restaurant, but the bottom line? They are going to eat Harold the chicken, providing his upbringing is devoid of enough terror so as not to upset their delicate equilibrium after ingesting him. And this is not to bang Portland (how wonderful to have a microbrew - cafe culture; I wish we had such a thing!)

So you can gussy it up and make eating meat a little more palatable, or you can stop eating it altogether. Your degree of conviction is what is on the chopping block.

All I'm saying is, we have some race problems, and we have people entrenched on both sides of the matter. The problem cannot be solved through outrage over one incident which only got print because of some salacious thinking in the hardcore liberal circles. The problem is not going to be fixed by throwing money at it; it is intransigent, and has thus far resisted the solutions offered.

So, you can get up in arms at the police, or call people pansies for not walking in the Tenderloin or being suspicious of a guy with a hoodie pulled over his head. But it's all about place and time, concealment and intent: A burqa, niqab or a chadri would arouse similar suspicions in our terror-fearing world, and what to do about that?

I'll stick with my original statement: Martin's death would have been a non-starter, save for some crime reporter picking up up on the novelty of the name of the shooter. By the time it went national, the reporters had only just discovered that Zimmerman was not only not white, that he was, in fact Hispanic and Catholic.

The Jewish students who campaigned for and died fighting in the American Civil Rights Movement are forgotten; it is a long-known sociological phenomenon that those who help pull you up are later resented for the inequity of power which they once represented.

In one of the more grotesque examples of the hatred in the Left, the radical's darling rag, CounterPunch (The Second Killing of Trayvon Martin), describes Zimmerman as "a pathetic, chubby, Chaz-Bono-lookalike" -- boy that really makes you bust a gut, huh?

Writer Eskow goes on to enjoy more schadenfreude at Zimmerman's expense: "Any man who lived through public high school knows George Zimmerman, and may well have had occasion to kick his ass," because, you know, George is fat and pathetic, and looks like a transgendered individual. Hey, let's laugh at some she-males ... do we feel bigger, yet?

And the final line delivers the knock-out punch: Zimmerman has "a shyster lawyer" -- surprise, surprise. So, dammit, we have missed the bus on finding a Jew perpetrator, but we can surely skewer a Jew sort-of accessory to the fact, right?

I see this media lynch mob as a prime example of racist bullying, and racism is racism. If you want to present as anti-racism Mr. Eskow, et. al, it would be really good if you were not racist.

So the liberals do the weighing act, and I guess up against the shysters and the alternatively-gendered buffoons, Mr. Martin in his hoodie is looking pretty good. Is this the best we can do in our efforts to ferret prejudicial rot out of our society?

You are either all in about civil rights and human rights and trust in the rule of law, or you wallow in a personal miasma in which you are constantly tallying up the score of least-reviled individuals based on your proximity to the perceived threat.

It looks like easy outrage has trumped rationality for the moment.

Slam Dunk, Not

“Look at me,” shouted the waza Bombur Yambarzal.
“This thickheaded, comical, bloodthirsty moron
is what you have all decided to become.”
--Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is
--Winston Churchill

_______________

The most recent polls released yesterday show candidates McCain and Obama in a statistical dead heat.

The most obvious question: In this of all presidential elections, following a two-term President leaving office with the highest disapproval rating of any modern President (over 70%), with an ongoing, open-ended two-fronted war, an unfathomable budget deficit and dire economic indicators all-round, how is it this nation does not clamor for a change? How is it the Democratic candidate is not a shoo-in, a slam-dunk?

Polling results show 9% of voters said a black candidate is problematic for them. Rather than decrying provincialism, racism, or whatever you feel the problem with your "stupid fellow Americans" to be, my question is: Who were the demographers that placed such a problematic candidate as Obama on the ballot?

Were they enjoying a nice soy latte at a West Coast cafe when the idea for a nuevo-RFK - Malcolm X - iPod listening - terrorist consortin' (Weather Underground) - hoop-shooting - biracial - Harvard-educated candidate came to mind? A candidate who could not even take California, not even with the Kennedy's and Oprah's imprimatur?

You may not like it, but America is not ready for a woman president, a bi-racial president, a Jewish vice president; America is not there yet; not quite. So to force such problematic candidates on the often insular and frightened U.S. public is counterintuitive to success. Winning is the goal in politics, not forcing some kind of societal shift.

It is an uphill battle: Barack Hussein Obama. We in liberal blogland can chuckle about the name shared with that "bad man" that we got hanged. We can be comforted (though I don't know why) in Obama's protestations that he is thoroughly Christian, and has been saved and taken the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior. But then. . . there's the matter of his two Muslim daddies. And attending a madrassa. And a mother who was obviously a fellow-traveler.

Hit every Rick Warren enclave you will -- there remains that 9%. That America is racially and religiously, age and gender-biased is a sad fact, for sure. But it remains a fact, nonetheless. One day, as our population shifts and matures, views will naturally realign. But not yet. This is not about what ought to be, or could or might be; it is not p.c., but it is the truth. You can not shame people or force their hands by constricting their choices. Because not voting is also a choice.

43 to 45%, a dead heat with a 3% margin of error. In 2008, when almost everyone is disillusioned and hurting from the battering of the past eight years. McCain, a man who sold his soul in 2000 to the Bush machine and lost all claims to maverick status, McCain is holding his own against the prospect of change. This is akin to a dehydrated man in the desert bypassing a possible oasis.

The Democratic Party may actually achieve the herculean task of losing Election 2008, an election all but handed to them on a silver platter. If so, that will be a feat of note in the record books.

So for now, an incredibly weak Republican candidate holds his own with Obama because time is not yet for Obama. The people should not be faced with such a conflicted candidate. Perhaps, if Obama really were something different and new, instead of just new packaging, perhaps the choice might be clearer.

As it is, he is the same old thing, in an unfamiliar wrapper. Who shocks me? Not my fellow Americans, who are a known quantity. The Democratic party shocks me. If they lose this election, of all elections, they deserve it. Though we do not.

Because this election should be a slam-dunk.