Ft. Apache, Cleveland

--Peace on earth, 
Arend Van Dam

I'd rather be a farmer than to be a police
I'd rather be a singer than to be a police
I'd rather be a father than to be a police 
--Mr. Policeman, Rick James 

I went back to Ohio 
But my city was gone 
There was no train station 
There was no downtown 
--My City Was Gone, 
The Pretenders

 --Any information from the street so far? 
--Are you kidding?
Anyplace else a guy sees a cop get killed,
he runs to the phone, here the doors close.
Right now there could be five people
who know who did this, in a few hours maybe ten,
maybe more, but not us.
Up here Captain, cops are like husbands --  
they're always the last to know   
--Ft. Apache, the Bronx (1981) 

Idle hands are the devil's workshop
__________________

What sort of country has police that kill people for illegally selling cigarettes on the street, or a boy aiming a toy gun outside of a community center?

It should not happen in a civilized nation, yet it has happened here. The U.S. is one nation under fear, and it needs to get a grip on itself if it is to succeed.

Sadly, as always, the response to these and like events is the predictable bifurcation along political lines: The Left expresses outrage about a Stalin-esque spectre; the Right defends the response of those charged with maintaining law-and-order. Digging in thusly, neither accomplishes the thing that needs doing -- an honest assessment of and reckoning with the state of race relations in America. We can't do it because we are not honest, are restricted by our resentments and hamstrung but the strictures of political correctness.

Last month Ranger found himself in Cleveland re-visiting the remains of his old neighborhood. The house he grew up in on Eaglesmere had been demolished since his last visit, but the majority of the houses remain, in various stages of hideous decay. Very occasionally one will see a homeowner attempting upkeep that consists of more than Visqueen over the windows, and it is sad to think that there is nowhere for their property value to go but down.

The homes in the blocks surrounding Ranger's childhood home were solidly white, labor and Catholic, with some Jewish merchants thrown into the mix. The complexion has changed: it still ethnic, but now the predominate groups are African American and Asian. At some point after the early 1970's, white flight to the suburbs began, and urban decay set-in.

Still, five minutes away sits the grand neighborhood of Bratenahl, and the police treatment of the two zones is telling.

For countless blocks of Cleveland degradation one will not see a police cruiser, only the forlorn residents drinking alcohol on their porch at 11 a.m., except when the police must come in to investigate a crime. The day Ranger drove through was such a day.

On 11/9/14 a teen was shot on the same Eaglesmere corner where another man was killed the previous week -- the same street on which Ranger grew up.

The police were taking reports. The residents of the house on the corner claim the shootings were unrelated, and that the police should be protecting them; a city alderman calls the residents thugs and is moving for their eviction.

"Ward 8 Councilman Michael Polensek says the occupants are a nuisance and a threat to the public's safety. 'It is chaos. It is no coincidence,'" said Polensek. "Look at the number of times police have had to run to that house.'"

This was an area that was once safe for children to explore by bike, or ride public transportation. Now only a fool or a desperate person would walk these streets or stand at a bus stop at night. Ranger feels naked traveling this ground without a firearm.

Another thing you notice in the 133rd Street Eastside area is the lack of business. When Ranger was a boy he alternately worked at a corner grocer, and set pins at a local bowling alley, among other odds and ends. His peers also all had jobs, often multiple ones at any given time. There was no time to consider violence; there was too much to do. Ranger has always loved guns but he did not have his first handgun until age 21, and certainly he and his fellows never thought of shooting one another.

As a FAMU sociologist friend explained to Lisa, when blacks from the hood succeed in business, they often leave their neighborhoods versus investing in them. Upward mobility is the idea of American success, after all.

But in Ranger's Cleveland, the ethnic residents mostly did not seek to leave. Generations found brotherhood in a common background, and he idea of success was a hoped for incremental generational step upward; many of Ranger's schoolmates still live in the same neighborhoods as their parents.

Cleveland was changing by the early 60's. South of Superior Ave. and east, between 79th to 105th, had become clearly black-held terrain. At age 13 Ranger defended himself with a baseball bat from attack by an 18-year-old black teen armed with a bayonet near this area and landed in juvenile detention, until the event was adjudicated self-defense. Some ethnic neighborhoods tried to hold onto their fragment of the American dream, but Ranger's family was more typical, moving to the suburbs of 140th and Lakeshore where he spent his high school years.

Perhaps, urban blacks have missed out on some of the intermediary steps to finding social cohesion. Many were refugees from the agricultural South who sought out the same factory jobs as the low-middle class worked, and for a generation they did work side-by-side with their white counterparts. But after this first generation which straddled the 1940's and 50's, things began falling apart.

Unfortunately, the abruptness of the Civil Rights movement was operative in the break. Many black workers lacked a generational history of working in industry and riding the slow grind required to impart to coming generations the tools needed for possible escape. Instead, for many, after only one factory generation came the advent of quotas. Concomitant was the explosion of media-driven conspicuous consumption, which cannot easily be had on a worker's salary, so what's a poor boy to do?

As an aside, our town (Tallahassee) was recently reported to have the second highest crime rate in the state. Under the Tallahassee Democrat article online a commenter requested a map be given showing the areas of highest crime concentration. The following exchange occurred in response:

--Look for the Africans.

--Wait, what about the whites who commit bigger financial crimes daily?

--With evolution comes the ability to commit bigger and better crime.

This exchange illuminates one strain of thought among our citizens. Clearly, crime pays. Everyone wants nice material things.

We don't have the answer. Maybe you have a piece of the puzzle to share.

--Jim and Lisa

Détruit

--Bottle opener, from ReclaimedCleveland.com

A great empire, like a great cake,
is most easily diminished at the edges
--Benjamin Franklin

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper
--The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot

You're a scavenger, Max. You're a maggot.
Did you know that?
You're living off the corpse of the old world.
Tell me your story, Max. C'mon.
What burned you out, huh? Kill one man too many?
See too many people die? Lose some family?
Oh, so that's it, you lost your family?
That makes you something special, does it?
--Mad Max 2, The Road Warrior (1981)
____________________

Stories like this kinda warm the cockles of one's heart:

Ever wondered where those razed, dilapidated inner city buildings go after they've been torn down? Well, an enterprising woodworking company is re-purposing the materials from one-time Best Location in the Nation --Cleveland, Ohio -- and making them into everything from chopping blocks (how ironic) to beds. Maybe Motor Town -- officially facing 10,000 demolitions though the actual number is tens of thousands higher -- could be next.

From the site London Thrillist (where we saw their advert):

Taking origin to brand-new hyper-specifics is Reclaimed Cleveland: an e-furniture shop that not only builds your homegoods using materials salvaged from condemned churches, homes & stores, but also stamps each piece with the exact Cleveland address where its constituent components used to live."

ReclaimedCleveland.com -- to see how and where empire ends.

The Wasteland

A recent NYT piece on the Lumenhaus
encouraged us to ennoble this once lovely abode,
"Wrecked House"

Not a good advert for vinyl siding

Pigeon Home

"Madonna's House"

The Bottoms Up gentleman's club.
Note the Sonitrol of the 'hood: barred doors

We wonder if the Original Glorious Church in Christ
was the convention center He visited

And you thought fish fry's weren't halal?

"Tha Brothahood Barber Shop" --
in case Obama needed a little off the top

..A mile away, nice houses in a small
oasis. "Escape From New York", anyone?

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
--The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
__________________

Ranger and Obama recently shared a holiday treat since we both had the pleasure of visiting Cleveland, Ohio, Ranger's hometown. This former "Best Location in the Nation" is suffering like many other Rust Belt cities, and isn't the best for much, unless you're out to score some drugs or wish to be robbed.

Pleasure indeed! Browse our montage of Ranger's former hunting grounds, deep in the now-wilds of C-Town. None of these photos are exceptional and represent the shit-hole that is the reality of too many United States inner cities. They were all taken within blocks the two homes in which Ranger grew up.

Note the house with the pigeons rooting in the exposed eaves. People were seen drinking out of paper bags at noon on porches with plywood-covered windows. We doubt Mr. Obama's motorcade passed in front of those ghetto homes. Those people are passed by on the roadway of life.

Please realize that Pigeon House or Wrecked House are not anomalies; the detritus follows each street, for endless blocks of downtown. The outliers are the very occasional well-maintained homes, usually inhabited by some equally very old-timer.

One's attentiveness to home maintenance is not rewarded in these now-slums, however -- one house had a For Sale sign of $19,000, and it is highly unlikely they will get their price before the rats devour whatever's left of the wiring.

You read horrified about people in Iraq living with only intermittent electricity? It is not unknown in your own country -- the U.S. -- for people to live without heat and cooling, and even water, either intermittently or as a lifestyle. We are not talking only squatters, nor are we talking the new Green-elite or the Amish, who engineer a livable existence sans many amenities (but not without water.) Note that most of these houses have satellite dishes and open windows, suggesting occupants. (For those who can afford something, one may be able to live with intermittent utilities, but mustn't go without satellite.)

Our politicians seem to wear blinders to a reality that is a stark as anything in Baghdad. They ignore the plight of a blighted America, functioning under the false belief that the U.S. has the wherewithal to continue its pretensions to world interventions and occupations.

Our leaders are living like it's still 1950, when the Best Location had almost a million citizens and was a thriving hub of manufacturing activity. Today's ghettoized Cleveland has lost almost all of its manufacturing and half of it's citizens. The factories are razed or shuttered, moldering in decay where they stand in mute testimony to a once-great nation.

The citizens too occupy a 1932 economic time warp, sadly, even they forgoing their own better interests, reacting mainly to meaningless, hot-button drivel topics like who's going to hell for being gay or Muslim. (Our average citizens are probably not much different from average citizens everywhere, but it is leadership and infrastructure that makes the difference.)

We get what we deserve, save for the innocents, like children.

Dire Straits

It's just a flesh wound
[said the Black Knight, after his appendages had been lopped off]
--Monty Python and the Holy Grail

__________

An addendum to our disdain with all of the political front runners voiced in the previous Hobson's Choice:

It is the false banner flown by all of the rightness of democratizing the (heathen) world, albeit not spoken that directly, while ours melts before us. Their willingness to ride in the bandwagon of a meaningless war. Oh, they'll shift tactics and maneuver elements here and there, but none of the frontrunners have challenged the essentialness or constitutionality of the entire fiasco.

One example, in the memory of Perry Kucinich: In 2004, the Vice Presidential debates were held in Cleveland, Ohio, Ranger's hometown and a blighted city if ever there was one. What transpired among those bright talking heads? A debate that did not address the distress surrounding them.

Ohio was the key state in GWB's reelection, but the Democratic Party lacked the political savvy to drive through municipal Cleveland and show the degradation of a principal American city.

Cleveland's needs have primacy over and precede the needs of Kabul or Baghdad, yet both parties ignore this reality. Is it so derelict that it seems easier to tote materials across an ocean and a continent to build a shining city elsewhere? Add any of the Rust Belt American cities and you have a dire problem on your hands.

It is a problem which exceeds the results ever to be returned on the $2 Trillion+ Phony War on Terror (PWOT©). And it perdures.

As it was in 2004, so it is in 2008. Some in the MSM have noted this odd exclusion -- "Americans don’t need more denial" (The Economy and the New Year.) America's economic woes do not follow the maxim on the plaque at my dentist's office ("Ignore them and they'll go away.") The dollars will, but not the lacunae left behind by their absence.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) has accused Bush of complacency (Bush Upbeat About Economy):

"You have got a major financial crisis. You have got a major mortgage and home-value crisis. You have rising energy and health-care costs. And, for the first time since the Depression, a negative savings rate," Emmanuel said. "Outside of that, [Bush] wants to tell you everything is okay."

The WaPo article continues, "(T)he president has been careful to voice empathy for the average worker. 'I'm concerned about the fact that Americans see their costs going up,' Bush said yesterday." What does he do with that "concern"? Perhaps he just counts his blessings that he need not feel the pinch.

We understand what has happened to the public, to a degree. The Bush presidency, following demoniacal Rovian guidelines, has effectively blinded the electorate to their own better interests in favor of grand ideas which benefit them not a whit, but which are executed behind their aegis.

In a 2007 Vanity Fair interview, Rove gave his favorite quotation:

"I like the one that used to be the motto on the unit coin of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse: “Be prepared! Find the bastards. And pile on!”

He applied this approach to the American people themselves. Rove was highly prepared with a charismatic agenda, he found a base (= "the bastards"), and piled it on.

It is a winning strategy, until you've got no more to pile on, that is.

--Jim and Lisa