Monthly Archives: July 2016

07.13.16
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“Blacks? They Love Me. Blacks All Love Trump.”

Consolidating the African-American vote.*

Trump, to O’Reilly:

Asked what he would say to African Americans who feel as though the system was biased against them, Trump drew an analogy with his own campaign.

“Well, I’ve been saying, even against me the system is rigged,” Trump told O’Reilly. “When I ran for president I could see what is going on with the system, and the system is rigged.

“I can really relate it very much to myself.”

So sayeth the man who has been bailed out of every spectacular failure, every collassoal money loss, and who has used every trick available only to the rich to stay our of debtor’s prison and, indeed, make even more money. The system is rigged against him. He can relate.

In other news, Trump is polling at 1% with African-Americans.  And that’s Trump-outlier Quinnipiac, which has him at 33% of Hispanics, which is…not generally considered accurate. So I’m guessing 1% was as low as they could go, after getting a thumbs-up from Dennis Rodman, who wasn’t even asked. He just showed up.

It gets better!

Donald Trump is wildly unpopular among young adults, in particular young people of color, and nearly two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 30 believe the presumptive Republican nominee is racist.

Of course, as Twitter has shown us time and time again, believing someone is racist and believing that’s a bad thing are not always hand-in-hand, even distressingly among younger people.  Still, it doesn’t seem like there are enough.

That’s (note: above quote) the finding of a new GenForward poll that also found just 19 percent of young people have a favorable opinion of Trump compared to the three-quarters of young adults who hold a dim view of the New York billionaire.

S that’s reassuring at least. It’s sort of like when Adlai Stevenson was told he had the support of “all thinking people”, and he replied that while that was great, he needed a majority (how did he not win, again?). Except it’s the opposite, and can make us all feel a little better.

 

*Dennis Rodman is one of my favorite basketball players of all time. No disrespect intended.

07.13.16
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Trump’s “Moment of Silence” Lies on Dallas Shooter: Race Baiting Coming Loose and Dangerous

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Not Bobby Kennedy

On April 4th, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was set to give a speech in Indianapolis, to a largely black crowd, most of whom had not yet heard that Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down earlier that evening, shattering the last dreams of peace. If you listen to the speech, you can hear the shock and anger and despair billowing through the crowd as he breaks the news. He goes on the speak of love and anger, of violence and forgiveness. To quote him that night:

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

And now Trump, last night, in nearby Westfield, to a crowd that was, I am assuming, not mostly black.

“The other night you had 11 cities potentially in a blow-up stage,” he said. “Marches all over the United States—and tough marches. Anger. Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of silence for him. For the killer!”

There’s a lot going on there. Look at how he conflates the Black Lives Matter marches, post-Dallas, with the killed. They were “started by a maniac”. This is more than just saying that BLM should stop all activity in the face of the slaughter, as if injustice went away. That’s a common tactic. He’s not even saying that Micah Johnson was inspired by BLM: he’s saying BLM was further inspired by him.

That’s dangerous. Just as dangerous is his entirely bullshit claim that some people asked for a moment of silence for the killer. As TPM explains, this wasn’t even the only time he said it that day. He mentioned it to O’Reilly as well.

“It’s getting more and more obvious and it’s very sad, very sad,” Trump went on. “When somebody called for a moment of silence to this maniac that shot the five police, you just see what’s going on. It’s a very, very sad situation.”

So this isn’t an accident. TPM said “There were no media reports about anyone calling for a moment of silence for gunman Micah Johnson, though groups from Congress to the New York Stock Exchange held moments of silence for the victims of last Thursday’s mass shooting. Searches on social media for people making such calls also came up short.”

Now, maybe someone somewhere said something that only Trump was privy to, but even so, why bring this up? What purpose does this serve except to further stoke white anger and the law-and-order backlash? It seems likely that it is made up, like his “thousands of Muslims” celebrating 9/11, and it is cut from that same cloth. It is meant to stir up racial hatred and anger, and he knows that facts won’t matter. It’s a lie that can be repeated. And if someone dredges up some dark corner of the internet or some random tweet that makes it seem almost plausible, well, all the better for him. If they can’t, no big deal. It’s already out there.

There is no way to overestimate how dangerous this kind of rhetoric is. It’s not even a dog whistle. It’s pure division (while of course decrying division). It’s absolute race-mongering, and would make George Wallace proud. It’s appealing to the darkest heart of America. It’s jamming a knife in a suppurating wound, just to see what will happen.

You can’t get further away from Bobby Kennedy, and not just due to Kennedy’s eloquence and Trump’s monosyllabic turnip-truck pratter. (“Aeschylus? Good poet. Not great. Not classy.”) One man speaks to the best of America hoping to be worthy of it. The other speaks to the worst, hoping to drag us down daily into his despair, hoping to forever lost wisdom under the vengeful eye of a graceless god.

07.13.16
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Ding Ding Ding! Dow, S&P 500 At Record Highs: Economy Totally Great!

Twitter Goes Public On The New York Stock Exchange

The problem with capitalism isn’t so much that it has winners and losers. That’s a problem, of course, but with a strong social safety net, and an eye toward social, economic, and environmental justice, it’s most ill-effects can be negated. That this is more common in the breach than in practice doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

The problem with modern capitalism isn’t even that there is a sector of it controlled entirely by the skittery greed of hyperactive man-children who do nothing but make and lose money by swapping paper. In any society, you can have a clique of gamblers.

No, the problem is that so much of the economy revolves around, and is in fact dominated by, this skittery greed, this reckless gambling, this enormous creative and computative power dedicated toward gaming the system, boosting the fortunes of a small number of shareholders, and powering stock at the cost of any workers. It’s a problem because the markets have a deep impact on the way the economy is perceived, and the way it acts.

Look at right now: the DJIA and S&P 500 are both at record highs, and that’s good. It’s amazing it can happen with an anti-business socialist in the White House, you know? The problem is thinking that this in and of itself is the indicator of a sound or sustainable economy, or a just one.

The soundness is evident by the market fluctuations. A few weeks ago, things seemed bleak, as reactions to Brexit sent the market into panic. But now it has rebounded, or, as CNBC said, “as fears eased over Brexit and Japan signaled more economic stimulus.” Many are crediting the new stability in Great Britain, as Theresa May is today becoming the new Prime Minister.

Now…did the markets think that wouldn’t happen? That they would be without a Prime Minister forever? Conversely, do they think that the worst of Brexit is over, just because they’ve gotten over the initial yips, even though the impact has barely begun? Do they know that a object still exists when it leaves their line of vision?

That’s sort of the point. “Markets were shaken today following turmoil in the Middle East, sun rising in east.”  It’s not the market isn’t reacting to real things. It is (oil prices, company losses, etc). It’s that it is reacting often insanely, with short-term thinking, and in a way that impacts the broader economy. The problem isn’t that the market reacts; it is that we react to it.

Our economy is tied up inextricably with gamblers who are concerned with short-term profit, and so many businesses are geared toward appeasing them. You could lose your job to make a shareholder another buck. If a mouse sprints across the trading floor you could lose your pension. It’s an insane economy, and the more you think about how precarious it is, the more terrifying it gets. I won’t pop champagne to celebrate new highs, but I might drink it to be able to sleep.

 

07.12.16
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A few thoughts on Mike Pence, Veep

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If you are quiet, you can hear the youth flocking!

So the speculation tonight is reaching a fever pitch that Donald Trump is going to go with Mike Pence, the Indiana governor, as his VP pick. They are having a joint rally tonight, but Trump isn’t announcing him. Honestly, I’ll believe it when I see, and that it isn’t happening tonight is, to me, a sign that it might not. It’s just too…Indiana for Trump. There’s not a lot of pizzazz here, is there?  A VP announcement of a boring Indiana dude in suburban Indianapolis? In Westfield, home of overpriced malls? I guess it’s tacky enough, and Trump should have some good feelings for Indiana, which is where his dark path became inevitable.

Of course, Pence is still what all the smart set is speculating, and with good cause. Pence is the choice to reassure people that Trump is on the straight and narrow, and will pick someone who knows Washington, and can get things done. He’s the guy to make Trump seem like a normal candidate, who can be trusted. A few thoughts on that.

  • I know that thinking Pence provides balance — in this case emotional and experiential balance — makes sense, but is that what makes anyone on the fence about Trump? Is there someone out there thinking “Well, I agree with everything Trump says about Mexicans being rapists and about how with him we’re going to start winning so much we’re gonna puke our friggin guts out, but I want someone with him who can be a solid congressional liaison.” I suppose that person exists, and that Luntz will find him, but still…
  • That said, the fear is that the media will start treating Trump like a normal candidate, even though they’ve made tentative steps toward showing that he is equal parts wildly unqualified and dangerously fascistic. They’ve been looking for an excuse to make this a normal race, god knows. And if there is one thing Trump knows, it is how the media works. He knows that this would be a great way to play them.
  • Still, not exciting, right?
  • And not exciting in a very exact way: the base likes Pence, because he hates taxes and gays with equal fervor, but the base isn’t leaning toward Hillary. You aren’t going to sway youth or immigrants with someone who has the grim mien of Palpatine’s dad.
  • Yeah, the gay thing. Pence is so anti-gay that he managed to make NASCAR anti-Indiana, and just avoided Wal-Mart’s wrath. NASCAR and Wal-Mart! They are both on the Indiana state flag!
  • Yes, I know, NASCAR vs Indy Car, etc. NASCAR is very big in Indiana now. You get my point.

So yeah, overall, I don’t think Pence is a particularly good pick. The people who it will sway are, I think, virtually non-existent. It won’t help him crossover very much. I don’t know if Pence has the chops to stand up to the national spotlight, anyway. It will just highlight the incredible anti-gay coalition, including James Dobson and Michelle Bachman, he’s assembled around him. It would be a dumb pick. So please don’t actually take this as a prediction that he won’t.

So, maybe, Marsha Blackburn? That would be outstanding.

07.12.16
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The South China Sea And the World Order: The Chinese Response Will Tell Us A Lot About the 21st Century

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I don’t need to explain any of this, do I? Image from Foreign Policy

Here at Shooting Irrelevance, we’re mostly concerned with the growing contours of a post-state world, if not a de jure one, then at least a de facto, as the system is pulled apart by dislocation and globalization. That said, we’re not there yet, and in many ways are still a long way from it. There are a few countries who can still impose their will on the world, for better and for worse, and to varying degrees of efficiency. The US is the main one; Russia, for all its cracks, is another (though I think the impositions are largely just to paper over those fissures).  And then there is China, who is seeking to reshape Asia and global trade to its benefit.

China received an expected blow today from the International Court of Arbitration in the Hague, which ruled that it did not have the right to shipping lanes in the South China Sea. Based on dubious ownership claims of atolls and sun-bleached lifeless rocks around the Philippines, China has claimed historic right to them for their navy and fishing vessels, blocking Philippine ships and obstructing trade. The decision, which is binding (both countries are signatories to its statute) said that China didn’t really have a historic claim to the Philippines, and should back off.

This is important. In addition to saying that little rocks give them sovereignty and historic claim, China had been building little islands and claiming that they had the right to own territory within a 200-mile radius, as the Law of the Sea dictates. Obviously, that was a clever way to gobble up territory and to control some of the world’s most important shipping lanes. They have done the same in the East China Sea, as part of a very long-standing plan to control the waters around them. In building massive ports throughout the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, China is looking to create a trade-based maritime empire backed by a growing navy.

So now we have an international tribunal saying that China needs to slow down, at least in one crucial area. Needless to say, the official Chinese response is that this is unfair, the court is wrong, they are biased, etc. The question is what their official response will be. It’s neighbors, especially Japan, are worried. The Guardian captures a slightly contradictory response.

The Communist party mouthpiece newspaper the People’s Daily said in an editorial that the tribunal had ignored “basic truths” and “tramped” on international laws and norms. “The Chinese government and the Chinese people firmly oppose [the ruling] and will neither acknowledge it nor accept it,” it added.

Speaking to reporters Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said: “Chinese people will not accept the result and all people around the world who uphold justice will not accept the result.”

“Now the farce is over it is time to get back to the right track,” Wang added, hinting that Beijing would now be willing to enter into negotiations with the Philippines “over the South China Sea issue”.

This strikes me as sort of important. The Court didn’t rule that the Chinese had no right to fish there; just that they had no historic claim of domination. So it appears to be a hinge moment for China’s 21st-century idea of power: do they use their vast economic might to enter into what could be very fruitful negotiations with a country clearly within their sphere of influence? Or do they ignore the ruling, and carry on, confident that the US will not interfere too much, being unwilling to risk war with one of its most important trading partners.

There is a lot to parse out here, and I am not really the man to do it. China, in terms of trade, needs us to a mutually-dependent degree. Their Navy, while growing more powerful, would still be completely outgunned in a war with the US. It’s a situation no one wants. What I’m interested in is how China decides to act in the 21st-century, a century which they seem to believe, understandably, is theirs, and it is not a coincidence that the Phillippines are a flashpoint. If I were China, the statement by John McCain and Dan Sulllivan this morning would be particularly enraging. They are excited and particularly chest-thumpy.

“With today’s award, China faces a choice. China can choose to be guided by international law, institutions, and norms. Or it can choose to reject them and pursue the path of intimidation and coercion. Too often in recent years, China has chosen the latter. The world will be watching to see the choice China makes.

“The United States must continue to be clear and consistent in its policy to oppose unilateral actions by any claimant seeking to change the status quo in the South China Sea through the use of coercion, intimidation, unilateral declarations or military force; prevent any other country from exercising its rights to the resources of the exclusive economic zone; engage in any reclamation activities in the South China Sea; or militarize any reclaimed features.

“In light of the findings of this ruling, we expect that the United States military will continue to fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows, as we have done in the Western Pacific for more than a century.

This is rich, of course. How dare China attempt a pseudo-colonization of the Phillippines in disaccord with international law. It’s been ours fair and square for over 100 years, when we took it over and brutalized it after beating the Spanish in a phony war! What right do they have?

Honestly, John McCain talking about how China has to be guided by “international law, institutions, and norms” is rich enough, but especially when talking about the Chinese not using unilateral action in the South China Sea. After all, US colonization of the Phillippines is essentially what made us a global empire, and set the stage for our “winning” of the 20th-century. This supercilious tongue-clucking when someone is trying to do the same thing at the dawn of the 21st must be maddening.

And that’s why I think this is an important moment. Does China continue to seethe under the anti-colonialist lectures of the US, listening to us say that the Phillippines have the only right to control their sea lanes, which are actually controlled by us? Do they use more negotiations to try to make the balance more equitable? Or do they now risk a confrontation, hoping a distracted and divided America might back off?

I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like the time when China is forced to put up with US hypocrisy in the region is coming to an end. I don’t say that this is a good thing; the world won’t be better off with Chinese dominance. I also think outright war is, thankfully, a very very small possibility. It’s just clear to see that the 20th century is clearly and finally coming to a close. What happens next will help to determine how the 21st one goes.

 

 

 

 

07.11.16
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Reacted to the Gun: Yemen and the US; National Security and the Illusion of Exceptionalism

 

Pictured: Lunatics

Pictured: Patriots

 

Back when I was writing more or less exclusively about Yemen, the same conversation would always come up: “I’ve heard that there are so many guns in Yemen, and like, people just carry them around.” And that’s true! Yemen is a country completely awash in guns, and it was not uncommon to see people carrying rifles in the streets of San’a. Old rifles, generally, and rarely loaded, but yes. It’s something you got used to. The point of the question was generally not curiosity, but a way to explain how violent and dangerous and maybe even primitive a land it was, one ruled by savage bloodlust.

You clearly see where this is going. The person who asked was nearly always American, and my followup would be “yeah, by a lot of estimations Yemen has the second most guns per capita in the world!”, the first, of course, being America. But that’s where there was always a disconnect. Regardless of how the person I was talking to felt about gun control, there was never an idea that it was a similar thing. They had too many guns and that’s why it was so violent. We just have a lot of guns, is all.

Global Gun Policy Comparisons

A few notes on this graph from CFR. The last Small Arms Survey was in 2007. Some more recent estimates have US guns per capita at an incredible 112.6 guns per person, though the actual amount of gun owners has decreased. Just more people with an absurd amount of guns. Yemen has a wide variance, with some estimates putting it at 2nd (54.8 guns per capita) and others considerably lower.

I feel that people may be realizing just how insane this is getting, which the last terrible week may have shown. When Philando Castille was shot by a police officer, he was (reportedly) carrying a weapon he was legally allowed to. The officer, by way of exoneration, said through his lawyer that he was reacting to the “gun, not to race.” You can quibble about the role race played in how that gun was reacted to (spoiler: probably a lot!), but the key is the gun.

“Reacting to the presence of that gun” could be our national motto. We saw it again in Dallas, where protestors, enacting their legal right to armed carry, added to the confusion of an active shooter situation. This makes the incredibly difficult job of a police officer even tougher. How are you supposed to determine, in the moment, whether a person is a “good guy with a gun”?

For that matter, how are we? A couple of years ago, a man in Georgia went to a park with a Little League game, waving around a gun and bragging about how it was legal, and there was nothing anyone could do.

“Anyone who was just walking by – you had parents and children coming in for the game – and he’s just standing here, walking around [saying] ‘You want to see my gun? Look, I got a gun and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ He knew he was frightening people. He knew exactly what he was doing,” said parent Karen Rabb.

Rabb said that the man’s intimidating behavior panicked parents causing them to hustle children who were there to play baseball to safety after the man refused to leave.

After deputies arrived, they questioned the man who produced a permit for the handgun. According to authorities, since the man made no verbal threats or gestures, they couldn’t arrest him or ask him to leave.

(Again, if the man was black, he’d be dead, but move on). This is insane. Unless and until he started shooting, there was nothing anyone could do except hope this man wasn’t a murderer. That’s where we all live now. We are all on the front lines. We’re all at the mercy of chance, hoping we don’t get shot. We’re all just reacting to the presence of a gun.

But what does it all mean?  We’ve talked a lot about how our devotion to guns is a reflection of a violent national character — we’re a country whose national symbol of freedom, for many, isn’t the founding documents or the broken chains of even the Statue of Liberty, but a tool designed by man to kill other men. More than that, I think, the mere presence of so many guns has a distorting and fearful impact on who we are. It’s hard to go out to dinner without thinking, in the back of your head, that this is a great spot for a mass shooter, whether they are pledging allegiance to the Caliphate or just the voices in their head. I think it makes us more savage.

It makes us less safe, and makes us feel less safe. There are people who carry, and feel a little more secure, but really: if you actually felt secure you wouldn’t need to. And yes, in an era of global terrorism, nowhere is safe, but getting shot is far more likely to happen here, for no reason, not even a sick and twisted justification. Just because someone falls asleep angry every day and wakes up exhausted and has access to guns.

This refusal to look at the impact being flooded with guns has on our national character is the dangerous side of American exceptionalism. It’s easy to look at Yemen and assign a national characteristic based on loosely-understood ideas about gun culture. I think taking any one thing and making it as synecdoche is foolhardy, but there is something there. It is there a little in Yemen (tribal culture is inherently more a negotiating one than a violent one, but revenge always has to be in the toolbelt). And it is here in the US.

We aren’t immune from history. It shows in our borders (having migration issues a mere 100+ years after mass annexation is not unusual!), and it shows in the way we react to the physical presence of guns. But we refuse to have an actual national examination. It’s easy to say “Yemen has guns and so it is violent”; but we have a lot of trouble doing it here, a country that is way more gun-heavy and death-ridden. It’s the same mentality that says torture is OK if the US does it, because our inherent goodness alchemizes war crimes into justice. It’s this inability to look nward, this blithe shattering of every national mirror, that I think more than anything is responsible for our decline.

07.11.16
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A Quick Follow-Up To Deliberately Missing The Point

Times: 

John Jay LaValle, the chairman of the Republican Party in Suffolk County, N.Y., said Mr. Trump had been “on message and extremely focused” in the Saturday gathering.

“Mr. Trump has decided to deal with it head-on, like he does with all issues,” Mr. LaValle said.

“People are starting to see we have very serious threats around the world, and even some social unrest in America that, quite frankly, this administration is not keeping a handle on.”

Trump! 

Look what is happening to our country under the WEAK leadership of Obama and people like Crooked Hillary Clinton. We are a divided nation!

“This un-American Kenyan anti-colonialist terrorist-loving fist-jabbing Jay-Z-liking Mexican coddling real racist isn’t leading his cop-killing, thuggish, also real racists into unity and harmony with us. Divisive! Sad!”

07.11.16
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Missing The Point on Race Isn’t A Bug; It’s A Feature

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Breaking: this man has stupid things to say about race.

There may be no bigger example of deliberate and pernicious point-missery than the fake controversy around Black Lives Matter. At this point, anyone who says, “well, actually, I think all lives matter” is purposefully ignoring that “all lives matter” is the very point of BLM, in which the “matter” is doing the real heavy lifting. Indeed, the pseudo-ecumenical sophist is doing nothing more than maintaining a brutal status quo, in which black lives, especially black male lives, matter very little.

The thing is, that’s exactly the point. We saw this over the weekend, where many of the usual suspects followed the lead of Joe Walsh, only a little more toned down. (except, sort-of-interestingly, Newt Gingrich, though Pierce puts to rest the idea of Newt, man of reason.) There is perhaps no more surprising headline than the one in the Times this morning: “Rudolph Giuliani Lashes Out At Black Lives Matter.”

Giuliani has spent an entire career playing fast and loose with race and with white backlash. Anti-homeless and anti-squeegee campaigns were signifiers: you can take New York back (and make it great again). His police force saw many instances of shocking violence, and most of the steps that made the city safer were the result of positive action taken by his predecessors. That isn’t to say he didn’t do anything well, but his form of local authoritarianism was always more than slightly-tinged with race. Now that he is clearly never running for anything again, since America made it clear in 2008 that simply having been mayor on September 11th doesn’t qualify you for the big job, he’s free to unfurl his proudest banners.

“When you say black lives matter, that’s inherently racist,” Mr. Giuliani said in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That’s anti-American, and it’s racist.”

…

“They sing rap songs about killing police officers, and they talk about killing police officers, and they yell it out at their rallies and the police officers hear it,” he said.

Right, the raps! The rap singers with their rap songs!

Actually, you know what? While it’s always fun to make fun of people who say things like “they sing rap songs”, it’s actually sort of important, and not just because Giuliani is out of touch (as, to be clear am I). This is also deliberately missing the point, and doing so in a way that shifts responsibility. The anger inherent in some music is a reaction, not a cause, but it serves the purposes of race-baiters and reactionaries like Rudy to pretend otherwise.

It’s part and parcel of the execrable and odious charge that BLM is “inherently racist.” Saying that they shouldn’t stand up and say “our lives matter too” puts the onus back on the black people to accept what is happening to them, to accept a country that for hundreds of years has enslaved, hanged, oppressed, segmented off, red-lined, unjustly incarcerated for cheap labor, and murdered black lives. And well yes, as Giuliani and others point out, more black lives are taken by other black people, that’s also the point. We treat that as something terrible happening in some blighted community, and not as a national fucking tragedy. Not as something inherently wrong with America, but just with black people, who usually don’t live near the rest of us. We take a tongue-clucking anthropological remove, and then get offended when a movement demands of us not to.

This demand to get back in line is seen in other examples of point missing, like when Dan Patrick, Texas’s lunatic Lt. Governor (which seems to be the breeding ground of horrible people), said this:

“All those protesters last night, they ran the other way, expecting the men and women in blue to turn around and protect them. What hypocrites,” Patrick said on Fox News. “I understand the First Amendment. I understand freedom of speech, and I defend it. It is in our Constitution and is in our soul, but you can’t go out on social media and mainstream media and everywhere else and say that the police are racist or police are hateful or the police are killers.”

That’s perfect: the BLM protesters are hypocrites because they expect the police to do their jobs at all times. They expect to be protected by the police when there is danger, but also expect not to be unfairly harassed or arrested or beaten or murdered. Pick one or the other, hypocrites!

It’s easy to make fun of Patrick. But he’s not wrong, per se: he’s articulating a very clear worldview. If you are black, you should always listen to the police. The responsibility for your safety is in your hands, and that is unquestioning obedience. That’s the code. Police have power over all of us, but especially if you are poor or a minority. Then they have life and death power, always, and you have to respect that, and fear it, and don’t expect to change anything. When they say shut up, you better not think they said stand up, because then you’re dead. If you want even the barest modicum of protection — if you want police to do their jobs — then the price is unquestioning subservience, no matter what.

Again, these aren’t bugs in the thinking. It’s the whole point. For a lot of right wingers, the point of the police is to keep Them from Us, using whatever means needed. Reaction to that injustice is a deliberate provocation, and should be quashed. (This attitude is not the case, I should say, for the huge majority of the police, as you can see in the reaction in the Giuliani story).  That’s their story, and it is an American story. I won’t return the favor and say that’s just a right-wing problem. It’s part of our eternal and inescapable tragedy.

07.08.16
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The Dallas Backlash: Joe Walsh Makes It All Clear

H/T Slate

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I wasn’t calling for violence, against Obama or anyone. Obama’s words & BLM’s deeds have gotten cops killed. Time for us to defend our cops.

Joe Walsh is a dimbulb Tea Party punk who briefly became the face of yapping white suburban anger in Northern Illinois in 2010 before being put back in his place by Tammy Duckworth. He’s the voice of those who think that police don’t have enough power, who thinks that anyone of color who looks askance at a cop is a thug who deserves to get shut down, and who, it goes without saying, defends traditional family values.

The collar counties in Illinois go through spasms of reaction, like the seismic reverberations of white flight. Walsh rode that wave until it broke, but these horrible shootings (which now seem to be the broken reaction to police-based murder) are tailor-made for a racist like him. He’s one of those goons (who are also the entirety of the FOX News lineup, all of talk radio, and like 80% of elected GOP officials) who have wanted to bury Black Lives Matter since it came up, because an organized effort and consistent spotlight on systemic injustice makes them uncomfortable. It’s far better to imagine it a violent militant movement, with gun-toting cop-killing rapists around every corner. This plays right into his hands.

It also plays into the hands of Donald Trump, who has tried to rally the “Law and Order” white reaction to his side, with some success. Expect failed authoritarians like Rudy Guiliani to be all over tying this to Obama, and of course to Hillary, for not “defending cops”, as if anything Obama has ever said about it has been untrue.

What this does is allow any talk of black rights or black lives to be smothered in a sea of righteous anger. Your concern for your lives, it will essentially be said, is costing other people their lives, and their lives are, need we say, more worthy. They are the ones that matter.

Or, as Tommy Craggs said, ” A lot of subtext is going to become text in the next few days. Seems only right for Walsh to have gotten us started.”

Obama, and by connection Hillary, are “to blame” for this because they recognize that things aren’t right, and that we have a long history of violence toward black Americans. Black Lives Matter is hated because they refuse to conform to the official story, to the legend of justice. That’s why they have to be smeared. They have to be discredited. The mythology can’t stand up to the light.

The story is that official unwillingness to sweep police violence and the pervasive violence and injustice against the black community under the rug is un-American, and dangerous. Both might be true, but that tells you more about America than anyone is comfortable with.

07.08.16
by

Angry Blacks, Angry Whites, Angry Muslims: The Howling Madness Grows

 

Image from LA Times

 

As of this moment (7:15, CST), there hasn’t been anything released on the suspects in the coordinated attacks on Dallas police last night during an anti-police-violence protest that left five officers killed. Right now it seems like there are three possibilities, which puts us at a possible hinge moment in our violent history. This could be one of those days that we look back on as definitive: the anger and wild yawning vacuum that is swallowing this gun-drowned country might be on the verge of overtaking our history.

As we said after Orlando, “not politicizing” a tragedy is insane. The murder of black men by police is political. Protests are political. Anti-police violence is, in a grotesque way, political. We are human actors in a political society, which is why it is important to think about the implications of this violence.

  • Black Protestors. Even if they had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter (and they wouldn’t in any real sense, since that is not a militant movement), it would be tarnished forever as a cop-killer one, or at least cop-killer adjacent. Their real concerns, the absolute reality that black lives don’t matter, that black men especially are seen as expendable, the daily thrum of both major and petty injustices, will be drowned out in a sea of blue.
  • ISIS “inspired”. It’s not impossible to think of a way that actual ISIS would benefit from this, as a racial violence and backlash in America just makes us seem more decadent and broken (correctly!) and might help with recruiting, or at least more inspiration, but that’s the most far-fetched scenario I can think of. It might be an “inspired” shooting, like Omar Mateen in Orlando, but the coordination would be surprising for a lone wolf-style attack. That’s not to say that it is impossible for multiple people to coordinate even in the absence of central guidance, but I would be surprised. Needless to say, the ramifications of this would be terrible. We’d devolve into full-panic-mode, and without steady hands from the President and both candidates (um), you could see an even more massive rollback of civil liberties.
  • White nationalists/wingnuts. Remember that the white nationalist/pro-gun/militia movement has always been a weird chest-thumping mix of pro-veteran and cop but anti-law and anti-government. There is a strain that thinks killing police is a necessary way to overthrow the state; the police are, after all, tools of the elite. It may also be people just hoping to start a race war- the RaHoWa. If this is the case, we may actually have a conversation about guns and the anger that is consuming this country, and driving one-half of our politics.

There’s no question that, human tragedy (and ongoing, daily, human tragedy) aside, this will be ugly, as ugly as anything we’ve seen in many years. People will find a way to blame whom they want regardless (Black Lives Matter forced cops to gather in one place because of their protests- it’s their fault!). And we’ll continue moving down a bloody path, where what binds us together seems irrevocably frayed, or worse, proven to have been a lie all along. We have a thousand different narratives, and they don’t seem to connect anywhere. The narratives meet like crashing fairy tales, the old ones, in an intersection of gnarling wolf-teeth and wilding violence, of children being sacrificed to dark mythologies and the only lessons learned are those of fear. Our national story is becoming a burning marching band playing a ragged and pained Sousa as they march off a cliff into a frothing sea.

I feel that everyone is uneasily “rooting” for the shooters to be aligned more or less with their political opposition. That is in an of itself a damning enough statement of where we are as a country.