Refund the police? Prefund the police? Confound the police!

Jean Cocteau, "Le Barman du Boeuf sur le Toit" (Bartender of "The Ox on the Roof" aka the Nothing Doing Bar), from Cocteau's scenario for a ballet to the score by Darius Milhaud, via Musica Brasiliensis. In the course of the scenario, if memory serves, there is a police raid, and the bar swiftly turns into a bucolic, innocent "milk bar" (section in slow waltz tempo with massed polychords around 7:00 to 9:20) and the baffled police leave them alone, after which the samba music starts up again.

Here's the thing. People want police. They do not want police who commit crimes. They do not want police who are on the take. In particular, they do not want police who kill children, or anybody. White people don't really want police to kill black people, though they often don't mind as much as they should. They want police who are good, and protect them from crimes. Black people want police to protect them from crimes too—that was a major impetus behind that famous crime bill back in 1994, that the African American community in cities wanted more police than their local governments were willing to pay for. 

Stingy local governments run by white people were shorting Black neighborhoods of policing, out of what was sometimes known in those days as "benign neglect", or maybe not so benign. They just didn't want to spend the money, and some people thought the federal government ought to pitch in. That was the reason a crime bill existed.

As it turned out, the crime bill did indeed provide enormous federal funding—for 100,000 cops. But it did nothing to ensure that the new cops in the inner city neighborhoods had any understanding of the neighborhoods they were going to be working in, and led to a lot of cops acting like occupying forces of a foreign invasion, some corruption, and quite a bit of violence. That was not a good thing. (The other aspect, the Republican part of the bill as it were, the new rules on criminal sentencing, the absurd differentiation between smoked cocaine and snorted cocaine as different kinds of "crimes" and the "three strikes" rules inviting states to adopt them, were a different kind of problem, though by no means a less serious one.)

Literary Corner: Gothic American

 

Garbage truck outside Kenosha courthouse. Photo by Chuck Quirmbach via WUWM radio. I like the way the background hints that the square may not be a burnt-out wasteland, though the treatment of the truck itself was clearly pretty terrible.

Interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox, Emperor Trump took a deep dive into Gothic narrative, of all things. Fiction has always been an important element of his work, of course, but mostly in the uncomplicated form of news items ("Portland has been burning for many years, for decades it's been burning"), scientific reports ("Paint is not—paint is a defensive mechanism. Paint is not bullets"), and of course the first-person memoir. This new venture, the painstaking construction of an atmosphere of dread in which his characteristic vagueness heightens the tension, is pretty remarkable:

Big Damage

by Donald J. Trump

"Who is pulling Biden's strings?"
                —Laura Ingraham

People that you've never heard of.
People that are in the dark shadows.
They're people that are controlling
the streets. We had somebody
get on a plane from a certain city
this weekend. And in the plane,

it was almost completely loaded
with thugs, wearing these dark
uniforms, black uniforms, with gear
and this and that. They're on a plane!
I will tell you some time, but
it's under investigation right now.

But they came from a certain city,
and this person was coming to the
Republican National Convention,
and there were like seven people on the
plane like this person, and then a lot of
people were on the plane to do big damage.

Mustache of Radical Love

When Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, gets depressed (I think of it as getting back on his meds) he can get insightful: today, on the subject of the bizarre war between the Department of Homeland Security and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon ("Trump's Wag-the-Dog War"), though he's still pretty crazy:

Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to “wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home. Be afraid — he just might get his wish.

Trump's told us all about how he hates endless foreign wars, but he's not opposed to domestic ones.

Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”

These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

Necessary Trouble

One of the things I don't feel I'm hearing in the tributes to Representative John Lewis, who died yesterday of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 80, is his role as the spiritual heir of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as the apostle of nonviolence.*

Not just a spiritual discipline but an effective weapon for change, of course, for which the training was practically military (as he explained in this interview with Krista Tippett)

And we had a teacher by the name of Jim Lawson, a young man who taught us the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. We studied. We studied what Gandhi attempted to do in South Africa, what he accomplished in India. We studied Thoreau and civil disobedience. We studied the great religions of the world. And before we even discussed a possibility of a sit-in, we had role-playing. We had what we called “social drama.”

And we would act out. There would be black and white young people, students, an interracial group, playing the roles of African Americans, or an interracial group playing the roles of white. And we went through the motion of someone harassing you, calling you out of your name, pulling you out of your seat, pulling your chair from under you, someone kicking you or pretending to spit on you. Sometimes we did pour cold water on someone — never hot — but we went through the motion.

But at bottom, the way of love:

Social Justice League

Via Washington Area Spark. Note it was a multiracial crowd.

While Monsignor Douthat urges the Marxists supposedly betrayed by the Democrats to join up with his own white-power movement, if that's what he's really up to, David Brooks continues with the simpler task of sketching out the Democratic Party he'd enjoy voting for, which would be more attentive to his particular sensibilities, and less distracted from what he regards as the Big Issues ("America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once: This is not the time to obsess about symbolism"):

1. "We" are losing the battle against Covid-19;
2. "all Americans but especially white Americans" are rapidly learning about the struggles involved in being an African American;
3. the American public is "vehemently rejecting" the Republican Party under Trumpian leadership;
4. American cultural institutions are being taken over by the "quasi-religion" of Social Justice, which sees history as "essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of which are oppressed", and speech as "a form of violence that has to be regulated"; and
5. we might be on the verge of a severe depression.

These five changes, each reflecting a huge crisis and hitting all at once, have created a moral, spiritual and emotional disaster. Americans are now less happy than at any time since they started measuring happiness nearly 50 years ago. Americans now express less pride in their nation than at any time since Gallup started measuring it 20 years ago.

Points 1 and 5 are real problems, though I think Brooks is too pessimistic about the first—it's not a battle with an enemy that can win—the virus can either run out of hosts to infect if we're all dead, or find a way of carrying on without killing us all, but it can't declare victory and occupy a throne somewhere; there's an other side that we'll all reach sooner or later, some of us sooner because we're willing to change our behavior, others not. Governors Abbot, Kemp, DeSantis, and Ducey certainly seem to be losing their wars. but they're against the Democrats and the citizens, and I hear Abbot is starting to negotiate for peace. On the last point, Brooks is too optimistic: this is a very bad economic crisis, and it will take a lot to emerge from it. 

Moderately Woke

Drawing by David Levine, 27 October 1983.

I'm not annoyed by the main idea of David Brooks's contribution to the Juneteenth commemorations, ("How Moderates Failed Black America"), indirectly evoking Dr. King's frequently quoted castigation of the white moderate in the 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

But that isn't the sort of thing Brooks is talking about at all; 57 years and practically all of his own life later, it still hasn't occurred to him that African Americans might wish to act in their own behalf instead of waiting for the gentry to take care of them. What he's sort of apologizing for is the failure of white moderates to come up with a working plan for liberating black people, unaware that they could find it preferable to get some cooperation in the project of liberating themselves:

Is the Coronavirus Winning? Or Are We?

Trump's new fence has become a democratically created memorial on Black Lives Matter Plaza. Photo by Brian C./Popville.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, chronicles the sad story of "Why the Coronavirus Is Winning", step by step from the error of liberals to the error of liberals:

In the first stage it was liberals and portions of the public health establishment (including, fatefully, key decision-makers in New York City) who treated the virus as something to “be spun or narrativized away,” trying to define the real contagion as xenophobia or racism rather than the disease itself.

By the time this effort at reality-denial collapsed, the baton of narrative delusion had been passed to President Donald Trump, who spent crucial weeks behaving as though the power of positive thinking could suffice to keep his glorious economy afloat.

Art of the Possible

This kind of thinking from one of my Rose Twitter friends, speaking of Real Leaders, annoys me so much:

The guy who have Strom Thurmonds eulogy is not going to be the most progressive.

— Who will police the police? (@JinxSocialist) May 27, 2020

The piece is not about the "guy" it's about the party. If you want to be a leftist you should obsess less over personalities and pay more attention to institutions and structures.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 27, 2020

I was going to let it go as a little emoprog venting, though, until I saw the same tired personalization coming from the bothsiderist right, or self-denominated center, in the person of horserace commentator Matt Bai, who's anxious to "defend" Biden from the charge of being a revolutionary, in the Washington Post, which adopted him as a columnist (to fill the gaping hole in the inanity department left by the departure of Chris Cillizza, I guess) in January:

For the Record: Colloquy

The makers of this window need to use this in their ads. Gotta give the person credit for trying. And knowing when to give up. https://t.co/xAlIQipz4R

— Writing Our Destiny in Hand Sanitizer and Booze (@planecrazy) June 1, 2020

Pleasant chat on the crisis with the artist formerly known as Thornton:

White lefty academic basically saying that the fires are being started by people like him. I think he’s right. https://t.co/iYVOj56ln5

— Henry Porter (@HenryPorters) May 31, 2020

to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

Sadly, no, it sucked. But the young well-protected white folk--I like to think it's mostly from private colleges--think they missed something great.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 31, 2020

Got Paranoia? Street Fighting Edition

One thing that's not being said sufficiently on the subject of the ongoing protests over the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd: nonviolence isn't easy. It's a discipline, and it takes serious training such as used to be offered in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Council. It's also been a policy from the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, but commentators don't always seem to have gotten that, for some reason suggested by Touré in 2017:

If BLM being described as nonviolent sounds strange to you, then you’re probably watching too much Fox News. The movement has been wildly misunderstood partly because of how it’s caricatured and demonized by right-wing media. “We absolutely don’t consider Black Lives Matter a hate group,” says Heidi Beirich, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, which tracks hate groups. “Black Lives Matter is not a racist group; anyone can join. It’s a movement to expand civil rights for the oppressed in this society. It’s a peaceful protest against oppression. There’s simply no equivalence between Black Lives Matter and a hate group. It’s truly offensive to equate them.”

The policy of nonviolence is shared by BLM activists around the country. “I refuse to cede the moral high ground to the supremacy we fight,” says Brittany Packnett, an activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero, which aims to end police violence. “We don’t need to become that which we are fighting.”

Also, BLM isn't necessarily organizing this week's demonstrations, and even when it is, as in Los Angeles on Thursday, it isn't necessarily in control of the enormous crowds of untrained sympathizers. Including, I'm sorry to say, an awful lot of white kids with good-hearted intentions who don't know what they're doing or how to do it and who consistently seem to be getting overexcited and breaking and burning things, and giving evidence to a rightwing suspicion that "Antifa" is in charge (they can't imagine any of the black participants being in charge) or dark allegations, reminiscent of Ross Barnet or George Wallace, of "outside agitators".

Annals of Culture Change: Kaepernick to Bannon

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoIt pic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

I think the Kaepernick news, if true, that the Nike company is using the otherwise unemployed quarterback and effective protester against police brutality against the black community as an ad model, is very cool.

It looks like former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick is starring in a new ad campaign for Nike. He shared an image on his Twitter Monday of a close-up of his face with the words: "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything." Nike's Twitter account later retweeted his post. Nike has represented Kaepernick since 2011, but hasn't featured him in ads for two years...

Not, I mean, that it's going to convince me that Nike is the corporation that will save the world from not having nice corporations, though for all I know the long struggle to get them to provide decent working conditions for the people in developing countries who make their products may well have paid off to some extent—Wikipedia's bibliography on the subject pretty much comes to an end in 2011, but includes an article from 2018 reporting (on the basis of research published in 2009) that

Woke af

Drawing by gackhammer/Imgur.

adjective, Slang. (often used in the phrase stay woke)

2. actively aware of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those related to civil and human rights:In light of recent incidents of police brutality, it’s important to stay woke.He took one African American history class and now he thinks he’s woke.
3. aware of the facts, true situation, etc. (sometimes used facetiously):The moon landing was staged. Stay woke!A tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. Stay woke.

(via dictionary.com)

"Hey, black people? David F. Brooks called, he said he wanted to borrow one of your words for a minute."

"Which one?"

"Ah, 'woke'."

"The fuck, again? Last time he did that he got it filthy and I never did get all the stains out."

Brooks Gets Woke

Pre-woke David Brooks contemplated unpatriotic Colin Kaepernick back in the old days, last September. Image credit Getty/Thearon W. Henderson/Bryan Bedder/Salon.

Verbatim David Brooks, "How Cool Works in America Today", July 25 2017:

The modern concept of woke began, as far as anybody can tell, with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu. The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Embrace it or not, B.L.M. is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that, as far as anybody can tell, the modern concept of woke began with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, when Badu uses the phrase "I stay woke" throughout the 2008 song "The Master Teachers", according to Wikipedia, it "does not yet have any connection to justice issues", which does not sound precisely like the modern concept (as opposed to 2012, when she began using it along with others in connection with social and racial justice as well as to demand freedom for the then jailed Russian singing group Pussy Riot); second of all, also according to Wikipedia,

Hi, it's Stupid

A happier Dallas protest moment, September 24 2015, from NBC-DFW.

Back in the day when Left Blogistan was just a couple of mud huts and a stray cow, and I was a dumbstruck lurker, there used to be a poster at Kos (I think, even that detail is getting vague) calling himself Stupid, who would always begin, "Hi, it's Stupid to say..." and go on to say something so naive and helpless that none of the smart and savvy news junkies was smart enough to think of it. As in—

Hi, it's Stupid to say there's something left to be learned from the horrible events in Baton Rouge and St. Paul and Dallas over the past week. We know it all already, don't we? And yet nothing changes.

Except it does, you know. What I've been learning, listening to the radio all morning (including a wise Mayor Bill de Blasio on his weekly call-in on WNYC):

Friday cheap shots: Baseless Rhetoric

Image via the Toms River Patch.

Now we know what the price of Christie's Trump endorsement was: cash (via WNYC).

At a rally of about a thousand people at the armory in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, Thursday, Governor Chris Christie introduced the guest of honor, saying: "Let me bring you the next President of the United States, Donald Trump!"

But this was no ordinary political Trump rally. Tickets cost $200 a person, and the money was used to pay off Christie’s debt left over from his presidential campaign.

WNYC's Matt Katz says that with about 1,000 people attending the rally, that went a long way toward wiping out Christie's $250,000 debt. And that wasn't all. 

"Before the event, Trump did a roundtable fundraiser that cost between $20,000 and $25,000 a person, There were about 18 people there," Katz said. "That money was actually used to pay off Bridgegate lawyers that the state Republican party had hired after they got hit with subpoenas more than two years ago. There’s a half-million dollars owed to those Bridgegate attorneys. And now, thanks to Trump — who six months ago campaigned against Christie by saying he knew about Bridgegate — that debt is mostly paid off."

And what Trump gets out of it is a representative of the "conservative establishment" he can victimize in public, to his (pained) face:

And this week in #BlackLivesMatter...

Akai Gurley. Photo via New York Times.

Chauncey de Vega reacted to the sentencing of Peter Liang, the Chinese-American NYPD cop who just got five years of probation and 800 hours of community service for his homicidal misconduct causing the death of an entirely innocent and unarmed black man in a dark housing project staircase, Akai Gurley, and I thought, because of my contact with the local Chinese community, I should try to communicate something of their point of view on the case, so I left the following comment:

#BlackLivesMatter, still

Samuel Dubose, via NBC.

Something that struck me this morning from the NPR coverage of the murder of Sam Dubose, the Cincinnati man who was being busted for a missing front license plate and ended up getting shot to death because a cop felt insufficiently respected, enough that I ended up transcribing it off the audio; an interview with the head of the national Fraternal Order of Police, Jim Pasco, objecting to the murder charge against the cop, toward the end of the segment:

the ground has shifted let's face it prosecutors are sensitive to the mood of the community

it goes to show that to whatever extent people thought that prosecutors were necessarily going to protect police officers couldn't be more wrong in fact in this case it doesn't appear that he is willing to give him the presumption of innocence

#BlackLivesMatter

What I can't get out of my mind from the audio of the Sandra Bland tape (I haven't watched the video, I don't think I need to): it's harrowing, like a miniature play by August Strindberg, in the tranformation of the cop from cool-neutral and bureaucratic to freaked-out monster, while the victim remains the same, irritable and not very accepting, as you can understand. My inner racist is whispering, well, he's being respectful, he's being courteous, and she's not taking it. Though of course why should she? He has no reason to pull her over in the first place, no reason to arrest her, no reason to make demands on what she does in her private space.

It's that his politeness is a fraud from the start, based on his confidence in the power relations, that he's entitled to do with her whatever he wants. He thinks he's being a good person because he's not doing it with an angry voice, or because he's not hitting her. He thinks he's very patient and forebearing, and what freaks him out is that she's not impressed. His need to humiliate her is so great, and just keeps getting greater until it explodes. 

#BlackLivesMatter

Via Quickmeme.

A line from Rich Lowry on the Confederate flag debate quoted by Edroso has been sticking in my head since midweek:

The fact is that if anyone banging on about the Confederacy at the moment on Twitter were born in the 1840s in the South, outside of a few select areas, they, too, would have fought for the Confederacy. (UPDATE: It should go without saying that this isn’t true of blacks.) That should lend a measure of modesty to this debate.

"Anyone other than about 40% of the population who I assumed were of no interest when I wrote this up but apparently some anal-compulsive readers thought they should be mentioned."

This is why we need to say that #BlackLivesMatter, because #AllLivesMatter needs a footnote:

#AllLivesMatter (UPDATE: It should go without saying that this is true of blacks.) 

It should go without saying, and maybe one day it will.

(Also: The idiocy of the argument, a classic example of the "if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle" fallacy, should really go without saying, but I don't want you to think I missed it; to say nothing of the sheer falseness of Lowry's assertion, as noted in the comments: in that war of brother against brother there were plenty of southerners who fought for the Union, as well as northerners who supported the rebellion, and to suppose otherwise is to show basic historical illiteracy.)