*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.
Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?
The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.
These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.
Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.
These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.
Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.
*If you need something to steel your spine in the face of progressive authoritarianism, watch “Seabiscuit”.
Last night, as I routinely do, I watched the nightly news by flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The first two infuriate me and the third revs up the infuriation about the other two. I normally break away from it by seeking something else as food for the soul. Lo and behold, from our downstairs rec room came the sounds of my wife and son watching “Seabiscuit”. I thought what a great idea since I haven’t seen it for a long time. So, I streamed the film from the beginning. It’s a great movie.
It is a perfect accompaniment for an escape from the discontents of our time, and a perfect lesson for us in our troubled times. The arc of the story has the additional advantage of being true . . . for the most part. The New Deal hero-worship by historian David McCullough’s voice-over was a bit much. The fact is, the New Deal made many people feel better as it kept them in misery. But the story, the story. The script artfully blended the lives of three broken people – Tom Smith, Charles Howard, and Red Pollard – brought together by a broken horse.
Trainer Tom Smith with Seabiscuit.
Seabiscuit wasn’t so much broken as rejected. He didn’t fit the expected profile for a racehorse – like many of us who don’t fit the expected mental profile of our rich, fashionable, insulated, and lacking in self-awareness “social betters” by rejecting their chic and foolish ideas. He lacked, as they say among horseracing connoisseurs, “conformation”. He didn’t look like a racehorse. He was short, had awkward legs with knobby knees, and was gimpy in his walk. To boot, he was lazy, temperamental, unpredictable in performance, and hated training.
And he became a hero to the “forgotten man” in a decade of troubled times. The “forgotten man” isn’t the one exploited by FDR in the 1936 campaign for political purposes: the man, in Roosevelt’s words, “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The real “forgotten man”, according to economist Amity Schlaes, was the working men and women who ended up paying for the largesse that was distributed to the constituents of FDR’s New Deal coalition, and beginning the political practice of using taxpayer money to build political power. Actually, both versions flocked to a horse who bucked the preferred look of the privileged class, as most of his fans did.
Seabiscuit with jockey Red Pollard.
The horse’s fan base is more like today’s “smelly Walmart shoppers” than the student bodies and alumni of prestige colleges with their fat trust funds. Princess Diana was garishly and undeservedly given the moniker of the “people’s princess”. In contrast, the “people’s horse” was a title rightfully earned by Seabiscuit. His following grew so much that by the time of his five-year-old season in 1938 he drew enormous crowds. In the seven years after his retirement to his death, he had 50,000 visitors.
Seabiscuit fans who came out to see him race.
The thing about Seabiscuit is that he had “fight”. It’s a word in disrepute among today’s self-appointed gatekeepers of thought after its use by their bogeyman Trump on January 6. The word simply means the well-spring to rise to a challenge. Some people call it grit; others associate it with courage and determination. Whatever it was, he had it, and it was admirable and inspirational. It’s something we’ll need to resist the hegemony of our malignant and politically-connected cultural elites.
Seabiscuit crossing the finish line ahead of War Admiral in the 1938 match race.
Trump is a special taste for a special political and social pallet. His ability to inspire didn’t reach beyond his tranche of the electorate. “Inspiration” isn’t a word that I can easily associate with him. “Dogged” and “fight”, yes. Seabiscuit had all three.
See the movie, even if it might be for the third time. It’s the perfect salve for those anxious about the gauntlet that the cultural left from their exclusive estates and seats of power are setting before us. Seabiscuit’s “fight” is a lesson for us 70 years later.
Are we irreparably divided? When deeply divergent cultural assumptions lie at the root, we could very well be heading for disunion. The only question is, will it be “soft” (peaceful) or “hard” (violent)? Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary, comes down on the side of disunion, but it’ll be a “soft” one to him. I’m not so certain, but I hope he’s right if we are to have one.
Terry Teachout
At work are two radically different notions of human nature. On one side lies the near perfectibility of us and our socio-economic-political arrangements. Indeed, a fixed nature is far from their imaginations. This leads to an endlessly meddlesome state. Space is left open in their intellectual firmament for all kinds of socialism: aggressive and velvet glove. In this social scheme, at the top of the governing pyramid is situated people like them, people whose status stems from paper credentials like college degrees and certifications. Today, this crowd increasingly comes with these ontological beliefs in tow.
Obama’s “pajama boy” from the 2010 publicity campaign to pass Obamacare.Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., 2008. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
On the other side of the cultural divide, we find those more traditionally inclined and the belief that human flourishing requires self-reliance and virtue. Yet, human nature is punctuated with a dark side. Therefore, all-powerful directorates will be populated with agents of a flawed nature like the rest of us. Spending 17-19 years in classrooms won’t change our basic makeup. Lord Acton’s famous quip about the possession of great power accessing our darker side is very relevant here.
Well, some of you might minimize the disagreement as only a difference of opinion. You’d be wrong to trivialize the estrangement. It’s fundamental to the difference between gun confiscation and a Second Amendment, abortion as infanticide and limiting it to the first trimester, free college and personal responsibility for your career path, environmental totalitarianism and environmental prudence, economic growth and the “new normal” of stagnation, religious liberty and state invasions of the pulpit, education freedom and the government classroom monopoly as a lefty finishing school, identity favoritism and equal opportunity, etc. Hardly trivial, this is existential.
In October 2015, Houston’s progressive mayor, Annise Parker, ordered the city’s district attorney to subpoena the sermons of selected pastors whom she suspected of using the pulpit for political purposes.
How did we get to this impasse? I think that the growth of government and its dependencies has seriously eroded the basis for our civilization. But also state-love has seeped into the subconscious of our media-saturated metropolitan areas. It began as a pervasive ethos in our faculty lounges. From there, it was evangelized to succeeding generations. I know of its prevalence as a 30-year teaching veteran in our public schools.
Unexamined lefty assumptions in our citified blue dots have provoked the chasm. Don’t be a bit surprised when you learn that people outside the blue dots have noticed. They have, and are justifiably horrified.
Church in Boston, Massachusetts @mattbannister via Twenty20
I’m constantly reminded of the general wrong-track numbers in opinion polls even when economic conditions have been improving. Why does there seem to be a nagging sense that things aren’t going well? Two books make a mighty attempt at an answer: “Dignity” by Chris Arnade (a self-described socialist) and “Alienated America” by Tim Carney (commentary editor of the Washington Examiner). Both books elucidate the deep social ills that accompanied the absolute deterioration of civil society in areas frequently referred to as “left behind”. The problem is far, far more than economic. The accompanying review of the books presents the case.
Why the rise of Trump and a resuscitated loony left with a home in the Democratic Party? I’ve heard some Trump supporters call for a government takeover of health care, adopting the nonsense language of turning an economic good or service, governed by scarcity, into a “right”. The loony left is the loony left, always has been, and has an off-the-shelf answer for all that plagues us: big, centralized government; it’s the Progressive way. The two elements have a nexus.
The roots of the current fascination with big, omnipresent government – or looking for saviors in large personalities on the public stage – may be found in the decline of something vital for personal well-being according to Arnade and Carney. Some call it civil society. Others, like Carney, refer to “social capital”. Both recognize the critical role of church, an institution beleaguered by the rising tide of secularization, another by-product of Progressivism. In so doing, the props of connection and support in the vast array of personal social networks have collapsed, leaving behind alienated folks in the vast stretches of the poorer sections of flyover country and young people facing declining opportunities. In our time, the default answer is a savior (Trump, Bernie, the nitwit Squad), vapid sloganeering (“Make America Great Again”, “Structural Racism”, “Make the rich pay their fair share”, “Equal [fill in the blank]”, “There are no illegal immigrants”, and so on), and the elevation of government as a super daddy and mommy. Church and family are replaced by commissars.
I support many of Trump’s initiatives, but he, like Bernie and the nitwit Squad, come to think of it, might be a sign of the times.
Did you hear what the governor (Washington State) and Dem presidential aspirant, Jay Inslee, had to say on Monday about the “deplorables”, aka Trump supporters? He called them people from “non-enlightened area[s]”. What are they “non-enlightened” about? Why of course, it’s the chic hobby horses of the beautiful people: something called “implicit bias”, the climate-change apocalypse, and Green New Deal Stalinism. More directly, he connected the word to the hidden bigotry of “implicit bias”, a form only perceived by mystics on the Left, like him. Interesting.
Bigotry exists in America. Dah! And it exists in many places, including the heads of Washington State governors. A bigot can have “non-enlightened” thoughts about more than skin color and mosques. Sometimes, it can be directed at people who like a good macro-brew, NASCAR, pickup trucks, and live in farm country. My guess about Inslee is that his blue-collar familiarity is limited to SNL skits – or at least he became that way.
Inslee and company don’t hesitate in slamming folks who don’t accept their poorly-thought-out ideas. If he can’t find racist actions in an opponent’s behavior, then he’ll do a whirlybird incantation on their opinions with the magical words “implicit bias”. Thus, any view that runs counter to three-quarters of the ladies on The View is contorted into the Left’s long list of isms and phobias.
Bigotry reigns supreme, and it is abundant in our cultural “commanding heights”, to borrow from Lenin (which the Dems are fond of doing anyway).
Californians in November meekly went to the polls to shoot down an attempt to lower their gas taxes. Over the recent number of days, rural and blue-collar French hit the streets of Paris to riot against a 5% increase in taxes on gasoline prices already exceeding $6/gal. The contrast is striking (no pun intended).
Why the outburst in Paris? The citizens in the countryside and the blue-collar middle class are tired of shouldering the burden of the climate-change fixations of their urban and wealthier “betters”. “Climate change” is more than a scientific matter. It’s code for the fixers in the nomenklatura/academy alliance, buttressed by the upscale elect and their fashionable beliefs, to manipulate the lives of those not so privileged.
So, we get with the French a replay of 1789; while in California, docility. Interesting. Will the meek inherit the earth, or will it be adult firmness? My bet is on “meekness” till it becomes unbearable.
Viva la gilets jaunes (yellow vests)! But put a hold on the violence.
I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.
The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.
No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.
The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.
Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.
Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.
An accidental meeting on a forest road with a semi-Californian/Montanan – he spends his winters in California (understandable) – showcases much that has gone astray in the America of today. Our biggest threat doesn’t arise from material circumstances but from what rolls around in our heads. Occupying the synapses are an excess of unexamined assumptions and the crazes that they feed.
Let me explain. While riding our ATV’s through the forests near our property, my wife and I came upon a man on a motor-bike. Pleasantries and friendly conversation arose. It turns out that the man haled from Redding, Ca. He had few nice things to say about the winters and complained of the shrinking longevity of restaurants in the area. I mentioned that we had lost our appetite for our native state after one of many recent visits. Prohibitions, high prices, and petty annoyances – the plastic bag carousels are empty at the stores for instance – have soured us.
He complained about the plastic litter in a feeble defense of the ban. I don’t think that he, and many others, connected the dots between the propensity for prohibition and the new feudalism that is taking shape in the so-called golden state. Many off-the-cuff reactions to a hypothetical evil produce unexpected effects. Too much plastic bag litter? Ban them. Too many poor people? Tax the rich. Don’t like carbon? Command people to put solar panels on their roofs or punish them with high utility bills – or both. Don’t like suburbia? Strangle it in a maze of land-use controls. The only problem is: growth suffocates; the middle-class flees; and the cost of living inflates. The result is a new feudalism of the hyper-rich in their manorial enclaves surrounded by a growing low-wage servant class.
As for the limited restaurants in our area, our friend showed no acknowledgement of rudimentary cause-and-effect. Enterprise has been suffering in industrial and rural America for quite some time. Take away the primary industries – mining and lumbering in our case – in those places dependent on them and poverty, meth use, and social chaos erupts. Tourism is a very poor substitute.
Many of these ruminations were kept to myself. He did say that he didn’t like mining for its scarring of the land. I responded with the obvious: without it, he and I wouldn’t be on our vehicles. He dismissed the claim with a cursory, “I’ll buy it from China”.
There you have it. Don’t think of employing our own people; export our wish-fulfillment to foreign lands; and don’t give a second thought about the repercussions. As long as the consequences are invisible to us, and we remain ensconced in our comfortable illusions, all is right with the world. Right?
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
Most Oakland Raiders sit during the national anthem on Sunday Night Football, 9/24/17.
The NFL player protests, Black Lives Matter, the “blue” cocoon, Trump’s SOB’s, and the 1947 movie “Boomerang!” came to mind during the sit-ins by half-million-dollar-per-year protesters Sunday, September 24.
The first three on the list are animated by a faulty postulate: American law enforcement is riddled with racism. It’s the “cause without a cause”. In this case, “cause” being a premise without some relation to facts .
The slander has its biggest and loudest following in urban and academic centers, the so-called “blue” precincts. It has spread beyond the street and campus into professional sports – who, by the way, are centered in “blue” America – and earning the ire of a huge part of the fan base in “red” America and President Trump.
As for the movie, “Boomerang!”, it reminded us that “justice” is the ultimate goal of all legal proceedings, and hopefully resistant to mobs inflamed by falsehoods (more about the movie later). Real justice is an inconvenience for those in a hurry to hang a few cops. Now, professional athletes are getting sucked into the sordid enterprise.
So, in the end, we have the NFL tarnishing its reputation, players heightening their profiles as political firebrands, fans registering disgust, and all because of a demonstrably false proposition. Don’t expect justice here … but reckon a humbling decline in the once-vaunted NFL.
It’s a lesson for all high profile sports: Don’t insult your fans!
A good chunk of sports fans might have a very different take on issues like policing the streets of many of our wannabe Kabuls and Baghdads. Your average fan sitting in font of his big screen TV on Sunday afternoon probably doesn’t see the world like your typical Sociology professor or average campus SJW (social justice warrior), and for good reason. The alleged racism in police departments, so readily accepted in faculty lounges and by impressionable college sophomores, isn’t supported by the facts.
First, crime, like wildfires, isn’t evenly distributed. Local circumstances produce divergent results, without ever getting into the racism of the “man”. Certain areas of the country have a fecundity for crime as areas of thick forests produce a fire season. An infamous example is LA’s “death valley”, South Vermont Ave. Read the captions. (1)
Since 2007, 61 people have been killed on a two-mile stretch on or near South Vermont Avenue between Manchester Avenue and Imperial Highway. The area is the border of the Westmont and Vermont Vista neighborhoods.
L. Christopher Caver Jr., 38, shows a scar on his stomach, a result of a 2012 shooting when he was hit seven times inside his car. He has lived in the Westmont area of South L.A. for more than a decade.
People hang out in front of a pawn shop along Vermont Avenue and 83rd Street in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.
A woman and child walk down an alley between 93rd and 94th streets in Westmont. The 1.8-square-mile area has seen 100 homicides in the last seven years.
A German shepherd stands sentry in the front yard of a home in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.
“I’m just fed up in this area,” said Aaron Eden, 38, about crime in his neighborhood. His house has been broken into twice, the Westmont resident said.
Some self-styled crusaders of justice cite deceiving statistics to hold up the edifice of rampant racism. Weaknesses in their assertions abound. For instance, their comparisons of crime to population over a broad space hide a serious problem in certain sectors. The overall crime number in a specific locale may register no concern since the good numbers coming out of some neighborhoods depress the frightening stats emerging from others. Examine the maps for New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee. (2)
Source: City of New York crime map
Source: Chicago Tribune
Source: Milwaukee Police Department
The theme throughout is the same: the highest crime rates occur in the locations with the highest concentrations of poverty. These areas correspond with the greatest assemblage of ethnic and racial minorities. The higher the incidence of crime, the greater the opportunity for run-ins with police for people of a particular hue who predominate in these places. We have a crime problem within certain sectors of our population, not a police problem.
Such subtleties might not course through the mind of an athlete whose life has been spent focusing on other things. The field is wide open for pop-culture grandees or media-savvy racialists to set the tone for the ill-informed.
Some may sound reasonable like Killer Mike above, but they still repeat a now well-worn mantra of a generalized campaign of racial injustice. Rapper T.I. pontificates, “Police brutality is really just a tentacle to a larger problem — the racial divide and the systemic racism that goes on from the highest of highs to the lowest of the low of society in America.” (3)
And of course we have Al Sharpton, the race hustlers’ version of the legal profession’s ambulance chaser. Here he is whipping up the congregation after the 2014 Ferguson shooting.
For many quick to have their biases confirmed, facts on the ground can be inconvenient. As it turned out, the deceased in Ferguson was no saint (see below). So much so, Pres. Obama’s Justice department, always on the hunt for the ghost of Bull Connor or Jim Crow, couldn’t gin up a case against the officer. No facts, no case – to borrow a much abused cadence.
After Ferguson, a movement was born: Black Lives Matter. Out of the garbage can, also, is resurrected the old conjoining of “cops” and “pigs”.
Like a teen girl watching the Emmies, the fashion is picked up by the impressionable tuning in. Thus is born Colin Kaepernick as self-anointed conscience of the NFL.
Kaepernick’s infamous socks as worn during an August 2016 practice.
Former Green Beret Nate Boyer, second from right, stands next to a kneeling Colin Kaepernick during the national anthem on Thursday Night Football, 2016. (Chris Carlson / Associated Press)
The case of Colin Kaepernick is interestingly instructive. Having shown no prior desire to publicly pontificate as a SJW, all of a sudden he’s kneeling during the national anthem and brandishing cops-as-pigs socks. More than a few have speculated on the influence of his fiance/girlfriend, Nessa Diab.
Nessa Diab and Colin Kaepernick on the way to the gym, September 2017.
Most recently, she spouted off on Ray Lewis’s suggestion that Kaepernick keep his opinions private as Kaepernick was being considered by owner Steve Bisciotti for a position on the roster. She implicitly referred to Lewis as a “house negro” to Bisciotti’s slaveholder on Twitter.
Nessa’s tweet: Bisciotti/Lewis above, deCaprio/Samuel J. Jackson from “Django Unchained” below.
She’s quite the pollinating bee fluttering from the blue-dot worlds of celebrity, MTV, San Francisco, and a DJ gig at the HOT97 in New York City. She seems to have a thing for 49er players after dating Aldon Smith. She’s also fully immersed in the lingo of the left. Here she is commenting on the shooting death of Alton Sterling:
Imagine the victim #AltonSterling as your brother, father, son, cousin, friend, co-worker. You didn’t have to know him personally to feel this horrific pain. This is a MAN who wrongfully got murdered!!! Don’t let this “system” now criminalize Alton Sterling to help justify these coward actions by the police. They will try and they will also try to discredit the store owner’s account of what occurred because he’s Muslim and we know Islamaphobia is at an all time high in this country.
This kind of stuff isn’t hard to find in her social media posts.
Celebrities like Nessa Diab arrive at the 2015 MTV Movie Awards held at Nokia Theatre LA Live in Los Angeles, California on April 12, 2015.
As a Muslim and familiar with Saudi Arabia, she should be aware that her chic glam would attract the attention of the Mutaween, the kingdom’s religious police, if she traipsed around in Riyadh’s nightlife in her figure-hugging and revealing sartorial beauty.
Women in Burkas, in Mina near the Saudi holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 2011.
Bringing a Bible into the country is a crime; women can’t get driver’s licenses; and the public dress code for women centers on the burka. It’d certainly be hard for her to display her natural endowments robed like above.
You’d think that she would have greater appreciation for life in the good ol’ USA. Instead, she treats a multiracial country of 330 million experiencing the rare police shooting as if it is a hotbed of racial bigotry. She ignores the nature of life in dar al-islam (lit. territory of Islam). The lack of any sense of proportion is a hallmark of the ignorant. But nonetheless, she appears to be an influence on poor Colin.
A little digging by Colin and Nessa would undermine their jihad. Blacks are not shot or otherwise accosted by police in a broadly unjust fashion. If anything, they are disproportionately represented in the incidence of crime, particularly of the violent kind. And their victims are disproportionately black. (6) Yes, black lives matter, and, for their lives to matter, police need to seize their assailants … who happen to be disproportionately black. No wonder the high number of police confrontations with blacks, overwhelmingy male.
Yet, in the recent high-profile police shooting cases, few have resulted in convictions of the officers. Some hustlers use the fact as conclusive evidence of something airily called “systemic” racism. In other words, these pantomimes of racial justice want convictions no matter what. If so, why bother with a trial if media buzz is enough to condemn?
Prosecutor Henry Harvey (r), played by Dana Andrews, and murder suspect John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) in “Boomerang!” from 1947.
The matter was brought into clearer focus while watching the movie “Boomerang!”. It’s the story of a prosecutor who refused to pursue charges against a murder suspect after being subjected to intense political pressure. The DA couldn’t remove from his mind the legal profession’s standards of ethical conduct for prosecutors. Put succinctly, “The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.” (7) Is it asking too much to demand a similar sobriety in the celebrity world and the media-incited mobs?
Pres. Trump at campaign rally for Sen. Luther Strange, September 22, 2017.
Well, into the frenzy jumps Pres. Trump. Echoing the thoughts of many, speaking at a campaign rally for US Sen. Luther Strange, he said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, `Get that son of a bitch off the field right now! Out. He’s fired! He’s fired!“ (8) Leaving aside the language, the sentiment has currency among many – if not most – veterans and a sizable swath of the country’s population, mostly in “red” America. Undoubtedly, the comment angered some of the marginally inclined in the locker room. So, we experienced the NFL’s own “black Sunday” on September 24. Here’s a sample.
Buffalo Bills take a knee, September 24.
Jacksonville Jaguars take a knee, September 24.
Indianapolis Cols take a knee, September 24.
Some of the Chargers resort to the old black power salute.
Several New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017, in Foxborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
It happened throughout the NFL on that day. And it drew criticism from fans.
In a debate on MSNBC between Brian Mitchell and Hugh Hewitt, Hewitt raises the scepter of the NFL losing touch with its fan base. As for Mitchell, he accepts the received wisdom of a pervasive racism. Take a look.
Some like Brian Mitchell see the players’ actions with all the integrity of The Grand Remonstrance of 1641. In 1641, the English Parliament presented to King Charles I a list of grievances, The Grand Remonstrance, which His Highness quickly dismissed. The result was over 40 years of civil war and social disruption. The players’ protest could do the same by inaugurating a civil war between the league and its fans. I don’t think the league will come out of it any better than Charles I. He lost his head.
The execution of Charles I, 1649.
The full effect of the protests will take awhile to gestate. The players have certainly displayed their right to free speech, and some fans are exhibiting the same right. Free speech for everyone, including the right to express that speech in the abandonment of the NFL. Many prescient owners and players can envision dollars whisking out of their wallets like so many autumn leaves on a windy day.
Could the NFL players’ racialized outcry have the same fallout as the 1994 baseball players’ strike on Major League Baseball? A person could argue that Major League Baseball hasn’t fully recovered from it. What waits in the offing for the NFL? Much depends on the NFL’s response to players using the national anthem as a forum to present their social and political discontents.
Entire Cowboys’ team kneels before the national anthem on Monday Night Football, September 25.
Sensing the trouble, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys knelt with the players and then everybody stood for the anthem. A compromise, but why kneel? What’s the reason for the kneeling? Is it to show solidarity for a broad charge of racism for which there is no valid proof? What’s the point?
The whole thing rests on a premise without much of a foundation. Indeed, it’s cause without a cause. To be clearer, it’s a political movement without much justification. Thus, any compromise gives credence to a sham.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“South Vermont Avenue: L.A. County’s ‘death alley’”, Nicole Santa Cruz and Ken Schwencke, Los Angeles Times, 1/19/2014, photos by Genaro Molina, http://homicide.latimes.com/post/westmont-homicides/
“The Debate Over Crime Rates is Ignoring the Metric That Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality’: Focusing on the neighborhood level is the best way to understand violence in America. Here are six charts that prove it.”, Daniel Kay Hertz, The Trace, 7/25/2016, https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/crime-rates-american-cities-murder-inequality/
“T.I. speaks out on police brutality”, Deena Zuru, CNN, 8/14/2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/politics/ti-us-or-else-movie-police-brutality/index.html
“CLASSY: Kaepernick’s Girlfriend Compares NFL Owners to Slaveholders, Ray Lewis to ‘House Negroes'”, Eliot Hamilton, The DailyWire, 8/3/2017, http://www.dailywire.com/news/19319/classy-kaepernicks-girlfriend-compares-nfl-owners-elliott-hamilton#
“The lies of Black Lives Matter”, Kelly Riddell, The Washington Times, 7/18/2016, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/18/lies-black-lives-matter/
“Criminal Justice Standards; Prosecution Function, Part I, General Standards”, https://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#1.2
“Trump Calls on NFL Owners to Fire Players Who Kneel During Anthem”, Daniel Politi, Slate, 9/23/2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/23/trump_calls_on_nfl_owners_to_fire_players_who_kneel_during_anthem.html
Politically-inspired murder has spasmodically erupted throughout history, especially from the late 19th century to the present. Lately, it appears to be a more frequent guest to our political struggles. Intemperate discourse is all-too-common. Ramped up rhetoric, fueled by claims of vague and impersonal harms, has found expression in thuggishness, and even murder. Welcome to Charlottesville on August 12.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of the modern era. “The propaganda of the deed” (meaning: violent action as the catalyst for revolution) was all the fashion in anarcho-socialist circles at the turn of the 19th into 20th centuries. Assassinations, bombings, and robberies were the preferred means of activism of a violent element in Europe and the U.S. The mayhem was one of the prime motives for the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920’s.
The assassination of Pres. McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in New York, 1901. He would be executed in the electric chair later in the year.
Luigi Galleani, anarcho-socialist shortly before his deportation in 1919. He was a loud and frequent exponent of the “propaganda of the deed”. Carlo Budda, brother of terrorist bombmaker Mario Budda, once said of Galleani, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw”.
The Wall Street bombing of 1920, killing 30 people, was carried out by Galleani’s followers.
Individual and group violence has continued apace. Some of it spontaneous; some of it premeditated; and some of it less fatal, as in mere bullying and assault-and-battery. College campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge have become noted for the Antifa goons patrolling the corridors of higher learning.
More recently, taking it to new heights, was James Hodgkinson in his hunt for Republicans on June 14. On Saturday, August 12, James Alex Fields, Jr., plowed his car into crowd of counter-protesters killing one and injuring 19.
James Alex Fields, Jr., and his damaged car.
Are we approaching the Vietnam War era’s daily mortality counts? On the one side we have the wickedness of the tiki-torch carrying white thugs. Aggrieved by the alleged oppression of whites, they are on hair trigger for violence. On the other, we have the ready-made insta-mob of the consortium of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, et al. The scene is starting to resemble post-WWI Weimar Germany with its street battles of left and right gangs.
Berlin street fight scene between Nazis and communists in the early 1930’s.
It’s sad that both sides seem to be taking their cue from ISIS in Raqqa. The left had their Raqqa moment in June. The right’s imitation waited till August. The similarities are striking. Like ISIS defending their caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq, Hodgkinson preferred gunfire. Fields adopted the Nice and London method of political expression by simply smashing people with a vehicle.
It’s also sad that we have a president that can’t rise above any personal slight, no matter how slight, during these moments of sorrow. His combative nature muddies any attempt to have us rise to the “better angels of our nature”.
Mr. President, drop the twitter feed!
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death: How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a ‘tragic, tragic weekend.'”, Joe Heim, Washington Post, 8/14/2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.6ee9f78a1d31
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
