I mentioned yesterday that I was blue. Here’s one of the reasons for it. I don’t see any way for what’s been going on to turn out well. It won’t turn out well for people who live in cities and in particular it won’t turn out well for blacks who live in cities.
My views on the American Civil War and the Confederacy are pretty harsh. Four of my great-great-grandfathers (at least) served in the Union Army during the Civil War. Two of them died young of the privations they experienced during the war, impoverishing their families for generations. I grew up in walking distance of a Civil War battlefield. You could kick up old musket balls was as easy as digging your toe into the ground. Walls and fences had bullet holes in them. When I was a kid there were still people around who remembered the Civil War.
I don’t have any fondness for the movie Gone With the Wind—it paints far too glossy a picture of the antebellum South as does the book. I saw the pre-civil rights era South. It was terrible. I don’t know why the statues of Confederate generals weren’t taken down fifty years ago.
But if statues or other commemorations of Washington, Jefferson, or Grant offend your sensibilities you really owe it to yourself and the rest of us to find a country with a history more to your liking. You can hardly open your wallet without gazing at a commemoration of a slaveowner. The Confederate generals are dispensable but Washington and Jefferson aren’t.
And why stop there? Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were not a bit better. Their records speak for themselves. Harry Truman’s family were known to be Southern sympathizers (they were Kentuckians). Jimmy Carter’s family owned slaves and his great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy. His celebrated peanut farm, just 20 miles from Andersonville Prison, was built on land from which the Creek Indians had been forcibly ejected. Some of Bill Clinton’s ancestors fought for the Confederacy, too. If you seriously hold the view that history taints you forever, I see no way you could vote Democratic.
The immediate effects of the violence that has broken out in Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Davenport, Philadelphia, and dozens of other cities will be to make the lives of the people who live in the neighborhood even more difficult than they were before. It will become harder to buy food and pharmaceuticals. Farther down the line big companies are unlikely to invest stockholders’ money in those neighborhoods.
Even farther down the line real estate values and, along with them, the tax base will erode. I’ve heard that 20% of all homes in Minneapolis were newly listed for sale within a week of the disturbances there. It’s hard to see how the cities most affected will survive without property taxes or sales tax. There’s a lot of talk about police reform but reform costs money.
Cousin Grant’s fall from grace is made even more troubling in that we know nothing about his owning a slave other than the manumission filings in which he freed a slave. One can speculate on the whys and wherefores, but most likely he owned him to free him.
He hired free blacks to cut wood for him to sell in the city and paid the same wage as whites, which angered people that either wanted the free blacks to leave or to maintain themselves as a cheap underclass of labor.
Hiram Ulysses Grant? white wasn’t he?
No, does not end well. Target has closed 170 stores in the roughest states.
N.Y. police chief had to hold a press conference because a BLACK suspect survived a choke hold, he tried to bring up the 100 shootings in the city in May and the 72 in the last week alone. No one cared. BLACKS want to be left alone, and damn the consequences. Integrate that society.
How about this. Break up law enforcement by borough. Elect police chiefs every four years. No appointments. Let them have the law enforcement they vote for, and use federal funds to help relocate those who will want out.
My dad told me his grandfather (my great-grandfather) pointed to a corner in St. Louis where he used to see Grant selling firewood.
BTW at the present rate at which people on the South and West Sides are killing each other, Chicago’s 2020 homicides will probably exceed the number in 2017, the largest number in decades and possibly of all time adjusted for population.
“killing each other”
And whether we approve of it or not, that’s freedom, and freedom is messy. We should stay out of their way.
Police involved killings in Chicago were 23 in 2011 (37 wounded). Last year there were 6 (6 wounded), which might be what it turns out this year. Over the last six years, I’ve watched various attempts to reform the police and maybe they’ve worked, or maybe its just random fluctuations, maybe cops are backing away more from risky neighborhoods or maybe simply the realization of the ever-presence of video has changed how cops “police” themselves
Four years ago Radley Balko wrote that he believed “a high percentage — well more than half — of shootings by police are both legal and justified.” My fear is that we are close to reaching the best we can do in law enforcement, because the police will never be perfect and many of the risk factors have to do with poverty, domestic violence, gangs, drug/alcohol addiction, and mental illness.
This has been a populist riot, in the Jacksonian sense. People saw the video and were enraged, not necessarily in the sense of lynching, though one wonders if in time the police officers would have been hung up or shot. The riots broke out because the legal institutions had lost legitimacy — the police, the lawyers, the courts, and the politicians. This type of protest perpetuates violence and property damage because the rioters see the system as rigged to benefit themselves at the expense of others; they take back for themselves and destroy from the others.
More than one supporter of the riots downplayed the damage to black-owned business by claiming that most of these businesses were owned by outsiders to the community. Like foreigners? From a Jacksonian perspective, the community is the only legitimate source of using violence to protect those within the community; not the national guard (and arguably not the police, though they arose in response to Jacksonian disorder). Purging foreign elements from the community include past historical figures that are alien now.
To me the worst case scenario is going to be if the cops that killed George Floyd are not convicted, probably because the investigation was compromised and rushed by the riots, and it starts all over again, but worse.
So I think those were very balanced comments, Dave. I ask the hooligans, what next, eliminating Mt Rushmore? Its insane.
My issue with all of this is the notion that the current movement has anything to do with race. Its just the vehicle to foment discord over capitalist and anti-capitalist issues. Both you and PD reference the Chicago situation. Black lives don’t matter one whit to these people. The ability to capitalize on racial issues to further their cause is paramount.
I’m blue, but perhaps for different reasons. The inability to see the obvious, to call out the perpetrators and their accomplices in the media for stoking the fire, can only be attributed to 1) stupidity, 2) willful blind partisanship, 3) 15 year old level naivete, or 4) being in league.
Now that will make you blue. Maybe I need to put Miles Davis on tonight………
All BS, any reasonable people left, this is Dunkirk. Go, Go, Go now.
“…..haven’t you heard, its a battle of words, the poster bearer cried. Listen son, said the man with a gun, there’s room for you on this side….”
I hope Dave will humor me. It seems to capture in some respects where we are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIkgDUEVt3Y
I don’t even think it’s capitalist vs. anti-capitalist. I think it’s rent-seeking.
Abraham Lincoln:
” . . . whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual.”
“the police will never be perfect”
While they will never be perfect they can still get better. Do away with no knock raids, the War on Drugs has failed, eliminate or minimize chokeholds. Still, your idea holds and I think everyone knows that. What is asked for is not perfection but that parties be treated equally. When you torture someone to death over almost 9 minutes on video it should not require riots to get arrested. Anyone else who does that gets arrested immediately. While every other conservative in the US concentrates on shootings and deaths what say we stop the beatings and excessive use of force?
If there is anything about which to be depressed it is that probably nothing really changes. We get to have race riots again 20 years from now after another public killing or beating.
Steve
‘When you torture someone to death over almost 9 minutes on video it should not require riots to get arrested’
Chauvin and Co got fired and charged because of the piece of video evidence in the public domain (I believe we have yet to see an unedited version of the whole video from start to finish). The riots are simply an excuse to stick it to the Man and foment terror. The vandalistic reaction to Floyd’s death is comparable to me dinging your car in a fender bender and you responding by torching my car with me in it before I even have a chance to exchange insurance information with you.
Chauvin and the other cops being fired and charged should have been the end of it. No rioting should have been necessary and at worst they should have stopped once charges were filed. Ellison has likely ensured that Chauvin will probably be acquitted, which will cause more riots, but that event is in the future.
I think rent seeking is a far, far too naive interpretation. I doubt most of the rioters understand the concept of rent seeking.
They don’t want money. They already have funding. They want a fundamental change. To socialism or communism. They are zealots.
We as voters are going to have to choose. Its our responsibility. Intellectualizing goes nowhere.
And now Shaun King, the male Rachel Doezel, is calling for all statues of ‘white Jesus’ be demolished.
I’m increasingly thinking they are actively trying to overthrow the Republic before the November election, or make it so chaotic to force mail-in ballots only. That’s a recipe for the greatest election steal of all time, bettering anything the Daley machine ever did. You don’t even need to add votes, all you have to do is just set aside mail from known Red districts and voila a landslide for the Blues.
Woudth that you would express such concern over blacks slaughtered on the streets of the cities every day steve, in numbers that dwarf, simply dwarf, any police killings.
I can’t take you seriously as anything more than a cheap and immoral political shill until you express such sentiments.
Once again, if black lives matter, go to the issues that can make a dent in the issue, not the politically opportunistic crap. We all know there are bad cops, and issues, but when the kill ratio is a hundred (or more) to one you are just pissing in the wind for political purposes.
I agree. One thing to add. Liberals are saying the federal government should pass another stimulus package which should be targeted to state and local governments. I don’t see while the feds should bail out local governments that let rioters damage their tax base.
“Woudth that you would express such concern over blacks slaughtered on the streets of the cities every day steve, in numbers that dwarf, simply dwarf, any police killings.”
Ahh, the old internet game. If you dont claim to care about A then you cant care about B. What BS. Anyway, for the record it is awful that so many black people are being killed every day. often/moslty by other black people. (See, all you had to do was ask.) I hope that we can solve that problem. I think part of that problem is the police. In Chicago police tortured people for years. Oddly enough, this is an idea you conservatives cant seem to grasp, that has lead to black people not trusting the police very much. Then add in the fact, it is a well documented fact, that police are more likely to use not necessary force against black people, and more likely to arrest black people when they commit the same crimes, and it makes it even more likely that black people, minorities in general, wont trust the police. If black people can trust the police, then I hope those shootings decrease.
Note that I am not saying that is the only thing that needs to be done, but it would be a start.
“Chauvin and Co got fired and charged because of the piece of video evidence in the public domain”
After the riots started. If you tortured someone to death in public and it was on a video how many days do you think it would take to get arrested? Maybe half an hour? I think they would probably have ended up arrested anyway, but given how many times police have walked after killing unarmed, non threatening people I can certainly see how it looked like it could happen again. Look at all the posts you saw on blogs where you had people defending the killing.
Steve
and about which I have complained for years. Note, too, the basic problem. Police officers involved in the crime continue to receive public pensions. Elected officials who, if they weren’t involved, were in a position to have known about the situation and should have known, were returned to office again and again and are now being paid public pensions. Meanwhile the people of Chicago are paying damages to people who’ve sued the city over the misconduct.
“while the feds should bail out local governments that let rioters damage their tax base.”
The Federal Reserve is already buying state and local government bonds; the Fed will never “call” in those loans. So I think local governments can rest easy no matter how damaged their tax bases get.
Whatever grievances have made BLACK peoples violent and unpredictable, all I can do is recoil from them.
The violent white clansmen are an historical excuse for this generation of violent entitled BLACKS to behave in a way that makes them the new version of the old problem.
What are you gonna do? Move in next to them?
No, you’ll keep your mouth shut and list your home.
Until they impel a flight from the dollar, at which point we’re all in the soup.
“The violent white clansmen”
Chicago police torturing people was a lot more recent than the Klan. Look it up. The name Abner Louima mean anything to you? Read this. Actually, look up ass rape and NYC police. Seems to be a favorite topic. Note that the officer tried to claim the guy had consensual sex and that is why his insides were torn up. So an encounter with the police ends up with a broomstick shoved violently inside you. How eager are you to call the police in the future?
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/05/nyc-m31.html
Steve
I continue to worry quite a bit about the future of this country. One question I always try to ask is “how does this end?” and the trendlines all point to bad outcomes IMO. Destroying institutions in the name of self-righteous political expediency is the order of the day and becomes a vicious circle.
I think if one is looking for historical analogy then 1930’s Spain is a good approximation of where I think we are headed once our institutions cease to hold legitimacy.
I’m having a hard time accepting regular homosexual conduct, let alone what you describe Steve.
Why in the world promote it?
Me? You are the one condoning police behavior.
Steve