American Democracy: Quick! Call A Priest!

American democracy has been in critical condition for at least twenty years now. (I'm being generous. Before that there was about half a chance in hell of turning the whole thing around.) The 2016 election precipitated a crisis, and the entire enterprise has been institutionalized and on life support since the spring of 2017. All life signs are very low at this point. There is a desperate hope that the approaching mid-term elections may provide some relief, but if (when) that hope fails we must prepare ourselves for the worst.

Day by day, no one would be surprised if all of the life-lines went flat and the body issued a death-rattle.

American Democracy had a difficult beginning. It was initially presented as a dream, based on a hoax, and all wrapped up in a joke.

The dream was equality and the rule of law, government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

The hoax was that only the white, male, propertied interests would possess this equality and control the government.

The joke was slavery; forgive me this crude analogy. About eighty years of institutionalized, constitutional chattel slavery made a mockery of all of the pretty words in our founding documents. Everything that has happened to black Americans since the alleged abolition of slavery has only reinforced the joke.

The dream, against all odds, took on a life of its own and was nurtured in the hearts of common citizens over the decades. People who were not in on the hoax made great progress against great resistance. The greatest advances came under circumstances that will be familiar to any student of history. Periods of progress came on the heels of destructive societal catastrophes, like the economic upheavals of the 1830s, the 1890s, and the 1930s, and the Civil War and World War II. The period between the late 1940s and the 1970s was the Golden Age of equality and the closest approximation of cooperative, representative government in America's history. Even the descendants of the former slaves made great advances in that halcyon period. In those years, we achieved our lowest level of income insecurity, and common working people achieved the highest standard of living and the greatest security of any working class in history.

It's all gone now, of course, as democracy itself lies on its hospital bed, dying.

The hoax has consumed the dream by now, with the still largely white, male, propertied class sucking all of the financial air out of the room, leaving less and less for the rest of us. The dream continues to exist only as a lullaby that is sung to very young children. It also exists as an echo in the minds of older Americans who remember the good times and refuse to believe that it has all gone to hell.

The hoax was strengthened over the years by the invention of various business and financial structures, like banks and corporations (all of which have the Constitutional rights of people, yes, I know, it's stupid, but it's true). The propertied interests now get all of the new money and most of the old money too. Before long they'll have all of the money. The middle-class is a poor, dead thing, and most people are losing quality of life day by day and experiencing deepening insecurity in all categories.

Only the joke has thrived in the interim. After the abolition of slavery itself, America began a frantic search for mechanisms that would recreate the conditions of slavery while not technically violating the new laws. These would include voter suppression laws; share-cropping; Jim Crow laws; segregation; denial of education; the list would be longer if I were better informed or more academically minded. That was all in the early days of post-slavery.

More recently we have added mass-incarceration, falling predominantly on black Americans, which brings along with it the voter disenfranchisement of convicted felons. That's along with all of the creative new ways to deny the ballot to black Americans in general. These are not as obvious as the earlier efforts, but they are very effective.

Three-hundred-and-fifty years after the institution of slavery in the American colonies, and one-hundred-and-fifty years after the discontinuation of the practice, a black man still cannot get a break in the good old U.S. Of A., and is, in fact more at risk of losing his life by being shot on sight by a policeman than at any other time in our history.

We are so close to the post-democracy period of American history that we can clearly see the outlines:

*Debt slavery

*Lower levels of property ownership

*High levels of monetized incarceration

*Greater health insecurity

*Greater retirement insecurity

*Higher rents

*Higher taxes, fees, and fines on working people

*Lower international prestige and power

*More and militarized police presence

*More homelessness

*Reduced educational opportunities

*Continuing elections that mean less and less

*The criminalization of everything

*Less privacy

*Reduced access to courts

*Greater wealth inequality

*More shared housing

*Fewer food choices

*More politicians telling us how great it all is and how lucky we are

In other words, the current process of every good thing winding down and slowly disappearing will continue. In the midst of a great deal of prosperity for fewer and fewer Americans, the rest of us will sink into increasing squalor and filth.

We asked for it, and we got it.

What have you got to trade? Canned food? Cat oil? People with a good commercial sense can do well in a society based on barter.

A New Kind Of Hanging Out

I copied this out of an article that was shared on Facebook: 20th Century Photos of People Holding Record Albums or something. This one spoke to me.

This was almost certainly taken in Vietnam in the late 1960s. I was in the service myself at the time, the U.S. Navy. Nothing fancy, just a deck-ape driving a pickup truck. These fellows look like they know each other pretty well, and they get along. Just knocking back a few Pabst's and Bud's, and listening to a little Brother Jack McDuff. This was pretty new stuff for the times. I don't have any pictures of myself, but I was in this situation many times.

I can tell you, a lot of black guys were surprised to find white guys that had interests in common with them and wanted to hang out. And a lot of white guys were surprised to find out that it was so easy to hang out with the black guys. A lot had changed after WWII, and it took some catching up with. It all seemed very natural to me, and these guys seem to have taken to it like ducks take to water. We might have been the first generation that could manage it so easily. Some of us, maybe many of us, but not all of us. I took some flack from the more reactionary white fellows, and guess who stood up for me? That's right. I remember everything, and I still appreciate it.

It's been a few steps forward and a couple of steps back since the 1960s, and I don't know if it's really any better now as far as race relations goes. Maybe a little bit better. I hope so. It's not so hard, you know. We all put our pants on one leg at a time (read: we all have jobs; families; friends; interests; bills to pay; troubles; successes). As Rodney King said so eloquently, "why can't we just get along?"

Who's Afraid Of A Cocaine Negro?

Everybody’s afraid of something, and different cultures have different patterns tracking these fears.  Some societies are very sensibly afraid of the true threats in their situation, while others ignore the true threats and are mostly afraid of imagined threats.  Guess which group includes America?

I’ll help you out:  America is preoccupied with imaginary threats.  Real threats are ignored or glossed over.  Americans should be very afraid of traffic, for instance.  Traffic accidents kill many tens of thousands of people every year in America.  But no, not so scary.  After all, lots of people live all their lives and never die in a traffic accident!  Same with gun accidents and gun violence.  Both things kill loads of people in America, world record breaking numbers of people.  Again, people’s main concern seems to be buying and carrying as many guns as possible.  Obesity?  Watching the news from around America it is obvious to me that people have no fear of obesity.  People ignore these real threats while they walk around in absolute terror of real or imagined things that represent little or no threat at all. 

Americans are afraid of shark attacks, even though most of them never swim in the ocean.  Americans are afraid of being hit by lightning.  That fear is much more reasonable, but still only a remote possibility, unless you’re a telephone lineman or something.  About five hundred people a year get hit by lightning in America, and about ten percent of those people die, but almost all of them worked or took recreation outdoors for long periods of time.  These are the silly examples.  Others are not so silly.

Americans these days are afraid of terror attacks.   Since the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack this behavior has been actively encouraged by the Federal government.  Not that people seemed to require much encouragement to be afraid.   This is about as silly as the fear of lightning strikes.  In reality, these so-called terrorists have managed to kill very few Americans since that one, early home run.  Most years terrorism runs a poor second to lightning.   Mostly these terrorists kill each other, or innocent people of their own religion, or American soldiers that we send to kill terrorists.  It’s a case of the fear only hastening the result that was feared in the first place. 

Many of America’s pet fears are very abstract.  People are afraid of immigrants.  They are afraid of gay marriage.  They are really, really afraid of socialism.  They are afraid of God, which they suppose is a good thing.  They are afraid of the Federal government itself!  They are afraid of the United Nations and FEMA.  Liberals; science; the Enlightenment; Humanism; anything “secular;” evolution; all of it.  The one thing that most people are not afraid of is Global Climate Change, because they are convinced that it is a hoax.  That would be a good thing to be afraid of, but most Americans prefer to be afraid of the imaginary hoax. 

Right up there in the abstract realm is America’s long, intense love affair with being afraid of black Americans.  We should be spending more time examining this fear, because its disastrous effects are much in the news these days.   Black men are killed out of proportion to their population statistics in encounters with police, or vigilantes masquerading as police, or just private citizens, a vast catalog of Jeez-Louise!  Did you see the size of him?  And he was black!  I was afraid for my life!  Thank God I had that gun on me.

I should mention that it’s not only black men.  Black women get killed for little or no reason too, by frightened non-black civilians or police.  My advice to black women motorists who break down out where there’s no cell phone coverage:  don’t be knocking on doors looking for a good Samaritan.  Just wait it out. 

There’s nothing new about this fear of black Americans, nothing new in the least.  It probably started within fifteen minutes of the first boat load of slaves to reach Charleston.  Someone there, among all of the greedy slavers and the merely curious, must have thought:  those poor buggers, they’ll slaughter us if we give them half a chance.  Over the centuries our treatment of them has mostly gotten only worse, and even in our Twenty-First-Century the horror of it has moderated only slightly.  Americans are still sure that black Americans stay awake at night to dream up ways to get back at the white man, either by scamming the government for a ”handout” or by outright violence.  It’s all poppycock, of course.   Black Americans have, if anything, shown more forbearance than any group of victims in history, seeking only to live and work in peace and with some dignity.

This filial attitude on the part of the blacks has only been answered with lies, terrible calumnies and brutal violence.   Black Americans spent the years immediately following the Civil War kind of catching their collective breathes and figuring out how to navigate their new situation.  By the early Twentieth Century, however, they had some wind in their sails and they were starting to make their presence known in American culture.  They did this in ways that were predictable, like the entry of blacks into the sport of boxing, and in some ways that were just magically delicious, like the invention of jazz.  This new participation in American culture should have been appreciated, but it was not.  This new cultural assertiveness did not go unnoticed by officialdom, and the response was anything but appreciative.

The Harrison Act, which criminalized narcotics, was passed in 1914.  Up until then you could just cruise down to the local apothecary and buy whatever you wanted, as much as you could afford.  It had come to people’s attention that blacks were among the customers, and non-blacks found that thought disturbing.  As long as it was just white old Uncle Joe taking something for his headaches it was fine.  Real newspapers all over the country came alive with stories of “negro cocaine fiends,” and ridiculous stories circulated describing the imaginary crimes and capabilities of these monsters.  Jazz musicians were a particular bugaboo.   Why, they play this ungodly, foreign music while they’re high on marijuana!   Who will protect us from these hopped up hoards?  Somebody came along pretty soon.

Prohibition ended in 1930, eliminating the need for a Department of Prohibition.  In response to this imagined negro drug problem a new Federal Bureau of Narcotics was formed, with Harry Anslinger as its head.   Harry had some powerful misconceptions about drugs, particularly concerning the power and the dangers of marijuana, and he had a powerful prejudice against blacks, particularly jazz musicians.   Why, didn’t you know that smoking marijuana slowed down the very perception of time and placed its users in some kind of alternate reality where morals just flew out the window?  That’s why jazz is so disorganized and discordant!  To Harry, jazz sounded like pagan jungle rituals.  I’ll bet he enjoyed imagining what terrible stuff they got up to out there in jungle/jazz land. 

In 1939 Billie Holiday started singing a song called “Strange Fruit,” which is about lynching in the South.  It was, and it remains, a powerful protest song, a cry for justice.  Billie was already a highly regarded and well compensated musician, and Mr. Anslinger, and others no doubt, felt like she had some nerve to complain, that she was being ungrateful and, well, uppity.  She obviously needed to be taken down a peg.  Over the next fifteen years they succeeded in taking her down quite a few pegs, they succeeded in fact in causing her death.  From the evidence, it appears that they were proud of their efforts in protecting the (white) American people from Billie Holiday. 

To clarify that this was a racist effort aimed at protecting society from specifically black drug “fiends,” we need only contrast the Fed’s treatment of Billie Holiday with their treatment of Judy Garland.  Judy was as big a drug addict as Billie.  In fact, Judy was probably a bigger drug addict, because she had more money and a more sedentary lifestyle.  Anslinger made a special trip to California to meet with Judy personally, explaining to her that it would be better if she got off the drugs.  He spoke of her in glowing terms as a wonderful woman and a cultural asset.  He met with studio bosses too, counseling them to be gentle with their wayward star and help him in doing what they could to help her kick the habit.  She, of course, switched to pills and booze and everybody was happy. 

Billie, on the other hand, was seen as a filthy, drug-addicted jazz miscreant who needed to be hounded, set-up, brutalized, framed and incarcerated even if it killed her. 

So it’s no surprise that “Black Lives Matter” is still a controversial stance to take.  Many people obviously still don’t think that black lives do matter.  That it’s nothing new should not surprise us either.  Anybody who’s been paying attention knows that the good old days were nothing of the sort.  America’s fear structure needs a major overhaul, especially America’s fear of its black brethren.  Whatever you call it, the War on Drugs, Law and Order, the War on Crime, talk of Handouts, Takers, Thugs, anything Urban, it’s all the War on Black Americans, and I for one am sick of it.  I’m such a sweet man and it all makes me look very, very bad!  So let’s cut it out.

Recommended reading: 

The Hunting of Billie Holiday, by Johann Hari (Politico dot com)

No Man's Land, by Eula Biss, (The Believer Magazine, believermag.com) referencing The Culture of Fear, by Barry Glassner.  

Why Are Police Acting This Way?

I happen to like police.  They seem to me a lot like baseball players, members of an exclusive club, children who never quite grow up.  They live in a parallel universe boys club with different rights and privileges than normal people.  They find their comforts and their rewards in a manner that is very different from the rest of us.  I do, however, find them to be generally honorable, and likeable.  I still think so, but something has changed. 

Not a day goes by now without our being informed about some police action somewhere going terribly wrong.  A SWAT team somewhere serving a warrant injures a child; more or less innocent people, mostly black, are shot, choked or merely beaten senseless in events ranging from traffic stops to simple encounters on the street; dogs are shot; shots are fired into vehicles almost willy-nilly; the serving of warrants is now a military style operation.  What, pray tell, is going on? 

I still like police in general, but it does seem that many of them are being carried away on some kind of emotional wave.  What kind of wave?

My Formative Years

My attitude towards police was formed in my youth, like most people’s.  I grew up in a working class neighborhood of New York City in the Fifties and Sixties.  Some of my neighbors were policemen; many were the fathers of my friends.  Over the years I had my share of interactions with the NYPD, my share and more.  It all went very well. 

This was the old time white New York, and if you were white you received a certain amount of consideration.  So there were the usual traffic stops:  riding a motorcycle with no helmet; making a right turn on a red light; going through a red light; making a left turn on a red light into a one way street.  I never got the ticket, not once.  I was scolded and reminded of the consequences, and finally the cop would, with a wave of his nightstick, tell me, “get the fuck out of here.” 

In my late teens we’d get taken on by police sometimes driving around in the middle of the night.  Parked on a dark street, police would want to know what we were doing.  It was a fair question, what we were doing was illegal, although it was quiet and non-threatening.  I was unfailingly polite, and nothing ever came of it.  Once we were stopped and vigorously searched by drug enforcement police (NYPD) after we stopped and knocked on the side door of a house that had been raided, resulting in a seizure of several pounds of marijuana.  We were clean; they let us go.  That was a close one.  Never any trouble though, and there was generally a reason for the police interest. 

I saw police in other situations as well.  Coming to a house or apartment in response to some kind of call the police followed a simple script.  First, the knock on the door, an earth splitting blast, usually with the butt of a nightstick.  Two police would enter, one waving the stick and the other hanging back with his hand close to his gun.  The cop with the stick had a few preliminary questions:  whose place is this?  Who else is here?  Are there any weapons in the apartment?  Where’s the kitchen?  (There are knives in the kitchen.) What’s the problem?  If everyone was sober and reasonable, the police would settle down immediately and try to be helpful. 

Nothing to hate about any of that.  The NYPD were very reasonable, as long as you were white, anyway.

Those Police Were Not Always Benevolent

 They could get rough sometimes, even with white boys.  We kind of asked for it, we were a bunch of hell raisers.  Shoplifting was involved; we fought at the drop of a hat; boys got stomped; cars were stolen; drugs were purchased, sold and used; underage drinking was common.  We might be visited by police if we were just hanging around on some corner of town.  If one of us was impolite to the officer, they might receive a poke with the nightstick.  My friend Tommy got a poke in the solar plexus one time that dropped him like a bad habit.  (Tommy should have known better, his father was a cop.) We could understand that and we couldn’t complain.  We were out looking for trouble, waiting for a soda or beer delivery truck with an incautious driver or something.  One friend of mine was loudly drunk after midnight one time and was taken to the police station.  Whatever he said to the police, or however he was acting, it was enough to get him thrown down a flight of stairs with his hands cuffed behind him.  Luckily he was so drunk that he only dislocated a shoulder.  We understood that too.  We knew that some of us would be police someday, and that we’d probably do the same.

The Old Time Black Experience

I know that it was rougher, even back then, for black boys.  The rough treatment was probably about the same, but maybe with a little more fury.  The black boys were probably more likely to get arrested if they were caught drinking in the park.  (For us white boys, the cops just took any remaining beer and told us to clean up and “get the fuck out of here.”)  I think that the big difference was that the black boys were much more likely to get set up for something that they didn’t do. 

From George Whitmore, Jr. to Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, police seemed to think that in the interest of rapidly solving crimes it was generally best to grab some semi-plausibly guilty black male and get him to confess somehow.  Somewhere between lies, coercion, and beatings, police got confessions from a lot of black men who feared that they’d get more time if they didn’t cooperate. 

Even for blacks, though, it was the nightstick or fists, and not the fifty bullets or a choke hold that they are likely to encounter today. 

As regards the black community, these tactics were a continuation of an older pattern of keeping black Americans in their place, wherever that was thought to be at the time.  It was a step up, too, because one of the older techniques was lynching.  Lynching was often arbitrary and almost always fatal; fisticuffs and wrongful incarceration are slightly to be preferred, I suppose.  Where there’s life, there’s hope. 

Today’s news headlines indicate that the pattern has swung back to fatal solutions, usually based on either, “he fit the description,” or “the officer feared for his life.”  It’s one small step for a police officer, but it’s a giant leap backwards for American society.

Can We Talk About This?

Our news these days comes in a “battle of the echo chambers” format.  You love America, or you hate America, etc.  Either you hate immigrants and want them all to leave, or you love immigrants more than you love America and want to turn the country over to immigrants.  All of the middle ground has become no-man’s land.  Regarding this new police behavior, as in all other matters, the discussion has become instantly polarized.  We must be either blindly supportive of police, out of some kind of love or respect, or we are anti-police and we do not value police lives.  How stupid is that?

Police violence is now a problem.  Isn’t it more reasonable to acknowledge the problem and discuss ways to achieve some relief and put in place some kind of accountability?  To do so is in no way equivalent to being anti-police or devaluing police lives.  Who is served by adopting the position:  my police, right or wrong? 

This failure of discourse is even worse than that.  Does anyone think that it’s a good idea to set up the dichotomy of blacks v. police?  One must somehow be either for police or for blacks?  This would add a dimension of evil to the simple stupidity.  Not to mention that many police are black, and many of the victims of this new police enthusiasm for unthinking violence are, let’s say, not black.  Police forces, in urban settings at least, now feature considerable diversity, and from the news reports it seems like we’re all in the crosshairs, regardless of race.  There’s a racial element to this problem, the horror is falling on black Americans out of proportion to their numbers, but it’s not the whole substance of the matter. 

Can we talk about this? 

Police, And Others, Are Afraid

I think that it’s clear that some police are overreacting out of fear.  They’re not the only people that are afraid, but we’re talking about the problem as it relates to police.  In the case of the police, the fear is not unreasonable. 

Much of police work involves simple, repetitive tasks.  Police serve warrants; they respond to silent alarms; they answer domestic complaints and noise complaints; they perform traffic stops; many such things.  In past times, none of these activities were likely to result in the police getting shot. 

Now, all too frequently, police knock on a door and are met with gunfire.  American citizens themselves have become much more prone to fearfulness and violence.  This may indeed be more of a white problem than a black problem.  Consider the anti-government crowd, who have been responsible for many individual murders of police, and others, and who can even take the credit for a few mass murders by explosives.  (Timothy McVeigh is the poster child.)  How about the Sovereign Citizen crowd?  They don’t recognize government authority at all and have displayed a willingness to kill police in order to try to spark a revolution of some kind.  Not to mention various militias out in the woods on military maneuvers preparing for a zombie apocalypse or a U.N. invasion or something.  Many of them are anti-government too.  The American citizenry in general is heavily armed and increasingly driven by fear.  Fear of something, or generalized fear of everything at once.  There’s a lot of hair triggers out there, and often the police find them first, and frequently police die in the event. 

Police these days have every reason to be afraid when they start their shifts. 

The Result

Somehow the result has been that the now common violent overreactions on the part of police fall mainly on black Americans.  If police are afraid generally, that is largely justified.  If police have become more afraid of blacks in particular, there is no justification for that.

Blacks, like Jews in many prior scapegoat scenarios, are being blamed for the dangers facing police far out of proportion to any reasonable analysis.  This fear of blacks makes police trigger happy in situations where the people being taken on are black. 

There is no doubt that many black people, mainly but not all black men, are being killed unnecessarily and without any rational justification.  Many of the victims are totally innocent, they’re just shopping at Walmart or returning home with take-out.  Some are guilty of something, but not guilty of anything that justifies the use of fatal force.  It is a great shame, and a big problem for America that this blacks and police problem has been allowed to get so far out of hand.  It is a problem that needs to be addressed quickly and urgently.   Black lives matter; police lives matter; people are dying.  That’s the very definition of an urgent problem.

Race is involved, and racism is probably a factor, but racism alone does not completely explain the phenomenon.  Police are now in the habit of applying unreasonable force to individuals who get on their radar.  These individuals may be possible lawbreakers or just people passing by, and they may be black, white or other.  Police are being killed for the perceived status crime of being police by shooters of different races.  Federal agents fare just as badly.  My strong hunch is that most of the ambush killers of police and Federal agents are white anti-government types.  Police of different races have been killed.  It’s just a mess in every direction. 

It’s American society that has the fear problem, and fear of blacks and fear of police are only two aspects of it.  Two out of many, like considering only two facets of a diamond. 

We should be discussing these things.  What are people afraid of?  Are the fears reasonable?  Can the fears be mitigated?  Can they even be controlled?  What do people need to learn?  How can they be calmed down?  Who are the individuals or groups who are encouraging people to be afraid?  What can be done to stop this senselessly violent behavior on the part of not only police, but also of ordinary citizens?

Well, something sure needs to be done.  We’d better get started.   It won’t help if you just go to Facebook and click on, “Share if you love police, and appreciate all that they do for us!”  This is going to take some real effort.


Vocabulary tip for my English Learner friends:  "to take on . . ."

 When police approach someone, to talk to them, or give them a traffic ticket, or arrest them, any time that the police will not take a turned back without offense, they are "taking him on."  There's something that they want, and they mean to get it.  That's what it means as it relates to police anyway.  There are other meanings.

The White World

The world has changed considerably since I was born.  The United States, in particular, has changed, and more dramatically than most countries.  I’m a Baby Boomer, born in the years immediately following World War II.  The old world, the world as I first encountered it, now exists only in memory.  You could call that old world “The White World.” 

After World War II the population of America was still under two hundred million people.  On the last day of the war, there were twelve million men and women in the armed forces.  That figure includes many black Americans, but they were not allowed to participate fully in the war or to share in the glory of winning it.  All through the war, and immediately thereafter, the military was segregated, with blacks relegated to working as transportation laborers.  World War II was the last white war. 

In much of the United States, Jim Crow laws enforced an apartheid system that kept American blacks almost invisible at the margins of society.  The rest of the country was not much more welcoming to blacks.  In cities large and small, across the north and the mid- and far-west, blacks had their neighborhoods and whites had theirs, and the two rarely met. 

Consider Major League Baseball.  Up until about the year that I was born, the major leagues were white only.  Two leagues, sixteen teams, white, white, white.  Blacks had the Negro League, among other organizations.  Most fans knew that the Negro League had a very high standard of play, but it didn’t occur to many white people that the black players should be integrated into the majors.  Negro League players suffered from much lower salaries and lived in conditions that were often dreadful. 

Consider the city of my birth: the great city of New York.  New York at the time was over eighty percent white.  The remainder were black, Hispanic, and Chinese, in that order.  The Hispanics were almost all Puerto Ricans, with a few Dominicans thrown in the mix.  And no need to say, “Asians.”  Our only Asians in those days were Chinese, with maybe a handful of Filipinos.  Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Chinese New Yorkers had their own neighborhoods, frequently separated from white neighborhoods by some physical barrier, like an industrial area, or a river, or a big road.  Virtually all of the police were white in those days, and all of the firemen, and almost all of the city officials.  My own isolated working-class neighborhood of 30,000 people had exactly two black Americans (an older married couple who worked nights and kept to themselves), one Chinese family (they owned the laundry!), a few families where only the mom was Puerto Rican, and at least one Filipino family.  That was the “The White New York.”

Origins

It is tempting to think that the United States began as a white country, a white Christian country.  It could certainly be argued that it was.  There was, however, a lot more diversity than most people care to recall.

Those American colonists/citizens had emigrated from numerous European countries.  Those countries, in Old Europe, had been rivals and adversaries in war for centuries.   In the colonies these immigrants often sought to live in communities of their countrymen.  Some states, like New York and Pennsylvania, had large German communities; New England was home to many Frenchmen; New York had been a Dutch colony and Dutch immigrants continued to be drawn there; many Irish went to the southern states as indentured servants, or otherwise.  Many cities had newspapers in several languages. 

Although all of these immigrants were white, and Christian, they were a very diverse lot.  Consider the fact that many of them had come to America in the first place because they adhered to some dissenter form of Christianity which was not tolerated in their home country.  They came to escape religious persecution.  There were more than fifteen Christian denominations represented in the colonies, maybe many more if you count them all, and they were often quite hostile to each other.   These religious groups also tended to form communities.  Maryland was the “Catholic” colony, in Maryland only Catholics were eligible to become public officials.  In many other colonies, Catholics were forbidden to become public officials.  Think of the poor Quakers!  And the Jews!  Only New York would have them, and in the case of the Quakers, not in the city itself.  The Quakers were allowed to form their own small community on the nearby north shore of Long Island (the town of Flushing). 

Of course there were some “others” among the colonists, the slaves certainly, some free blacks, the Indians, but the diversity was mostly among the whites, and only whites had power.  It was very different from old Europe though.  In France, for instance, all of the local white people were French, and Catholic.  America was a much more diverse place, from the very beginning. 

Even the white world of my neighborhood was far from monolithic.  When I visited the homes of my friends, their parents and grandparents may have been speaking Italian, or German, or Russian, or Czech, or Hungarian.  Whites all, but diverse in a typically American way.    

It was white people holding the power though, that's the point, throughout the period ending around 1950. In the early days of America the holding of power was exclusive to W.A.S.P.s (White Anglo Saxon Protestants), and they dominated the whites from "less desirable" backgrounds.  In the fullness of time the circle of white power spread outwards to include more and more kinds of white people.  That’s the process that continued until it included many people from well beyond the circle of whiteness.  It’s only natural! 

Who Cares?

I, for one, am not nostalgic for The White World.  I don’t miss it one bit.  So who cares?

The Tea Party crowd seems to miss it.  When they say, “take back America!” does anyone imagine that they mean anything but take it back from these coffee colored heathens who have invaded our shores?  And take it back from those uppity blacks who now seem to be everywhere.  Black police, blacks in baseball, blacks in the army, blacks in the Navy (and not just as cooks!), even a black president.  Who do they think they are?  And all of these immigrants, from countries that not many people had even heard of until recently.  Uzbeks!  Eritreans!  Where are those places anyway! 

This Tea Party thing is made up almost exclusively of white people who are my age or older.  They feel a sense of loss about the new diversity.  A loss of power, a loss of privilege, a loss of prestige, the loss of their position at the forefront of American society. 

The Diverse America

Some people’s nostalgia, wishing, and hoping notwithstanding, the White World is gone now, well and truly gone.  It lives on only in the hearts of a few people who will be dead before you can say Jackie Robinson. 

The new reality in the U.S. is wild diversity.  New York now is only fifty-something percent white.  Asians, from every Asian country, make up almost ten percent.  Puerto Ricans have been joined by people from every Spanish speaking country.  Africans, South Asians, Central Asians, New York is now home to all of the peoples of the world, and most neighborhoods are blended.  My old neighborhood now includes many Asians and lots of everything else too.   In Los Angeles it’s the same, there are a million plus Koreans alone, and every country is represented.  The high school that my son attended had 3,500 students, and school records included the languages spoken in their homes, eighty-five different languages.  Major League Baseball now includes not only black players, but also Hispanic players and players from Japan and Korea.  The services are fully integrated, up to and including the ranks of the general officers.  Our total population is now over three hundred million people.

This diversity is the great strength of America, its ace in the hole.  In no other country can people arrive from anywhere in the world and become thoroughly, culturally and politically, naturalized in only seven years or so.  Power sharing is not yet equally distributed among the different groups, but it is continuing to broaden its base.  There’s been progress. 

So, the White World, R.I.P.  Or should I say, “good riddance.”  

The Triumph Of Self-Censorship

Discretion being the better part of valor, I wrote a blog post this week and decided, oh! Hell no! can’t post that! 

It concerned the recent frisson around Donald Sterling and Magic Johnson.  There were two main points, one mild but rather controversial and the other one heartfelt and also rather controversial. 

As I was writing about Donald Sterling, I kept expanding the disclaimer to avoid misunderstandings regarding my motives.  I’m no apologist for racism, and whatever the man has actually said there are many in a position to know who firmly believe that the man has some funny ideas on the subject.   Mostly because too much of a disclaimer is often a sign of guilt, or at least a sign of a guilty conscience, I decided to forget it. 

Magic Johnson was the object of the second point.  My feelings about Magic are on record herein, and they haven’t changed.  (An old post on the subject, “Magic Johnson Is Not Who You Think,” has had ten hits in the last week, since he’s in the news and all.) 

But people obviously love Magic, people including Anderson Cooper.  They love Magic with an uncritical love that borders on adoration.  Maybe it’s not my place to explain to people just how cosmically wrong that is.  I don’t have to join them in their worship, but neither do I have to rub my opinions in their faces.  It would just make me look like a cranky outlier.  Let people be people, let them have their heroes.  Worse people than Magic Johnson have huge fan bases.  He did beastly, reckless things, but at least he’s no O.J.  So forget that one too. 

Former President of France Nickolas Sarkozy once told another head of state that he had just “missed out on a wonderful opportunity to shut up.”  Self-censorship can be your friend!  

Scoobie's Discovery: Adventures In Race Relations

Discovery is that part of a law suit where the two sides exchange information and prepare their cases for trial.  There’s written discovery, that’s a big part of it.  Depositions are involved too, showing up in person and answering lawyers’ questions. 

Scoobie was a client of ours, a plaintiff in a personal injury case.  “Scoobie” is not his real name, he actually went by the nickname of another beloved television character.  He was a hard guy to get ahold of, and the office had had no success in getting in touch with him about the discovery process.  Without his cooperation, the case would be dismissed.  No one else involved wanted to deal with it.  Let it blow up, there’s no money in it.  He’ll screw up the case somehow, it might as well be now.  Besides, a jury would hate him.  That was the thinking. 

Scoobie was a young man with a poor education and no job, and no prospects. 

I said, I’ll take care of it, no problem, I’ll go get the family to help me find him.  The address was a large but inexpensive home in a new development in the Eastern Empire of Los Angeles, in San Bernardino County.  It was a large, loosely connected, extended family consisting of a matriarchal grandmother and lots of children, grandchildren and cousins, aged from grammar school to adult men and women, a real houseful.  It was an African-American family. 

I got to the address at about 10:00 a.m., unannounced, ready to devote all day to it.  A large, powerful man opened the door.  He was initially very suspicious.  I am never offended by this.  In fact, I recommend that all black Americans be suspicious of any white man that they don’t know, and most of the white women too.  Was I police?  A parole or probation officer?  From Children’s Services?  Once I had convinced him and another adult man that I worked for Scoobie and was trying to help him get some money that was coming to him they invited me in and introduced me to grandma.

She was sitting in a recreation room, in some kind of huge Barcalounger, and I never saw her get up.  There was seating for at least fifteen people, and many children and teenagers were present.  The TV was on.  She sized me up and quickly accepted me at my word, and then I was in.  A pair of young men materialized.  They were very interested in the proceedings.  We sat around discussing strategies for finding Scoobie, and since the young men traveled in the same circles as Scoobie they were full of ideas. 

They figured that I would never find Scoobie on my own, so they offered to come with me.  I was delighted because this seemed to offer a real chance of success.  They thought that there was a good chance that he was at the home of one of his girlfriends, and they knew where several of them lived.  Along the way we could just ask people for possible leads.  They were really enjoying themselves, it was like playing detective. 

 

Scoobie was at the home of the second girlfriend that we checked.  He was a husky, Geri-Curled twenty-five year old, with that devil-may-care, always cheerful attitude that I have noticed many times in young men in his milieu.  Having given up on education and the job scene, and fully expecting to go to prison someday or get shot, he was well adjusted to making the best of everything that was available to him.  He and the cousins spoke a semi-dialect that was not quite Black English, but not quite standard either.  They were easy to understand though, and they were smart guys so they understood me just fine.  Having gotten acquainted, we all went back to the family home. 

I had brought along the written discovery, so we set up at the dining room table and got started on that.  Along the way a lunch of fried fish was prepared for everyone in the house.  It was cooked by the big guy who had answered the door, he was about thirty-five years old and he didn’t say much.  It was served in a paper towel, to be eaten by hand.  Delicious, by the way.  I ran the situation down for Scoobie and he agreed to be more cooperative in the future.   We had a date for his deposition the following week, and he promised that he’d show up.  I made sure to get as many phone numbers as I could in case we had to look for him again. 

He did, in fact, show up at the lawyers’ office for the depo, and he was on time.  One hour early, as I had instructed him, so that we’d have time to prepare.  One of the girlfriends drove him.  I used the common lawyer’s technique in these depo preparations.  You don’t want to just feed the client lies to say at the depo, you can’t just feed them a script, but you want them to say certain things and avoid other things.  You don’t want them to actually say out loud truthful things that you would then have to tell them, please God, don’t say that.  So you say, here’s how these things go, and launch off into some hypotheticals, if this is what happened, it’s bad, if this is what happened, it’s good, if someone says something like this, they’ll probably win.  “Just tell them what happened.”  I always threw in a “if I kick you under the table, shut up.”  Many people just ignore you, but some bright lights internalize your hypo’s very quickly and do a great job of incorporating the good points into their answers.  Scoobie was one of the good ones. 

To win his case, we would have to show that the landlord at the apartments where he had fallen down the stairs had prior knowledge of the dangerous condition.  This is never easy.  I had mentioned this, but I never feed him a particular strategy.  At the perfect time, he dropped in that he had told the super at the apartments about a loose railing on several occasions, but the super had just blown him off.  I had no idea whether this was true or not, but he said it on his own initiative so my conscious was clear, and my actions were ethical according to the rules.  He described running up the stairs and the railing coming loose in his hand, causing him to fall backwards.

He totally aced the depo, and he showed that he would be a great witness for himself if the case went to trial.  Before we left the building after the depo, the lawyer called me into his office and we settled the case right there. 

This was treated as some kind of miracle of mine back at the office. 

These were typical events  in the life of a lawyer in Los Angeles, and another episode in the adventures of a simple man trying to figure out race relations in America.  

Profiling And Prejudice

We hear a lot about profiling these days.   Not so much about prejudice anymore.  Some say that prejudice is a thing of the past in our “post racial” world.  My own feelings are well known:  post racial my bony old white ass. 

Prejudice is “pre-judgment,” and that is what is at the heart of all profiling, isn’t it?  And profiling is still with us, big time.   Whether the official profiling that is found in the “stop-and-frisk” policies of many big cities, or the more personal style exercised by the various vigilantes in the news, profiling is experiencing some kind of Golden Age. 

Mostly, this is a bad thing, but prejudice is often a necessary and valuable life strategy.  Take snakes, for instance.  How many of us have the talent and experience that would be required to judge them all as individuals?  It’s best to treat them all as though they were poisonous, to pre-judge them all as dangerous creatures.  It’s not so easy when it comes to people. 

Black Prejudice Against Whites

This one is like the snakes, I think.  It might be fair to assume that the worst could be true.   American blacks, after all, were transported to America against their wills by white people; they have been tormented, oppressed and discriminated against to one extent or another for hundreds of years without a break, again by white people.  Not only insult, but also injury, torture and even death were involved, “are” in fact, involved.

So who can blame blacks who choose to approach any encounter with a white person as dangerous?  Not me.  I am just thankful that most American blacks are graceful and dignified about it all, tempering this reality-based prejudice with a generous spirit.  I would say that for most of the black Americans who feel this particular prejudice it is seen as a “rebuttable presumption.”  The white stranger may initially suffer from the prejudice, but most blacks will immediately begin a search for evidence upon which to base a more particularized judgment.  This is a kindness, and I always appreciate it. 

I have watched this process many times, first hand.  I drove cabs in the early ‘70’s in New York.  Late one summer afternoon/evening I got lost in Harlem.  I found myself on a dead-end street, all of the buildings were run down, abandoned and boarded up.  The only people around were a group of black teenagers, eighteen to twenty years old I’d say, sitting on a stoop.  I stopped to ask directions. 

They immediately judged me, they profiled me based on the color of my skin.  I had pulled over to the curb and rolled the passenger side window down, but before I could say anything they were all in my face.  “What the fuck do you want?”  “What, you think we’re all dealers?”  Like that, they assumed that I wanted to buy drugs. 

“No man,” I said, “I’m just lost!  Which one of these streets goes up the hill?”  (I was trying to get up to Washington Heights, to upper Broadway.)  They all relaxed and became friendly immediately.  No apologies were offered, but some of them smiled and talked to me and others began to discuss the best way to accomplish my goal.  I got my directions, thanked them, and moved off.  A presumption had been rebutted, quickly and gracefully. 

White Prejudice Against Blacks

This one is much more problematic.  It lacks the basis in reality of the prejudice in the other direction.  Mostly, it is based on fear, misinformation and outright lies.  And don’t forget statistics!  Some prejudiced whites never tire of bringing up crime statistics to justify their obvious distaste for blacks.  It is always valuable to recall the words of old Ben Disraeli, one of the more memorable prime ministers of England, who said that there were three types of lies:  lies; damned lies; and statistics.

White people are not as quick to look for evidence that the presumption may be, in individual cases, mistaken.   Somehow they are more content to remain with the generalization, which they seem to find comforting. 

White Prejudice Against Whites, Or Anybody For That Matter

Lots of white people are so paranoid that they don’t trust anybody at all. 

I am reminded of the shops on Madison Avenue.  In the streets numbered in the thirties and forties there were lots of small shops featuring a mixed bag of vintage goods.  “Used,” you could call the stuff.  Ear-rings, watches, clothing, jewelry from costume to real.  Quite affordable, some of it, I bought a couple of things there in the ‘60’s.  By the early ‘70’s, all of these stores were profiling customers. 

Every single one of those stores now sported a sign on the locked door that said, “Out To Lunch,” or maybe “Back In 20 Minutes.”  There was now a door bell on all of them too.  They were in there, the shop people, but they would only open the door for a man/woman couple, or a woman, or a group of women.  I’m sure that there were race-based criteria too, but I have no information about that.  If I rang the bell, however, someone would just smile and point to the sign.  No single men, or pair of men, were admitted. 

Like the snakes, I could be harmless or I could be life-threatening.  I could be a legitimate customer, or I could be some kind of pistol-packing junkie overdue for a cloud nine experience.  Better to be safe, even if you lose some business.  Profiling is like that. 

Moral: It’s All Bullshit

Let’s face it, we all pre-judge people and things, all the time.  Some people’s experience and temperament may lead the behavior to be reinforced.  My own temperament led me to see that the pre-judgments were so often wrong that the entire enterprise was useless. 

Back to my cab driving days, there was one occasion where I was absolutely sure that I was going to get robbed.  It was almost two a.m., I was driving back to the garage on Northern Boulevard in Queens.  I was stopped at a light, and a twenty-something Porto Rican guy came out of the dark entrance to a closed shop and quickly climbed into the car.  He spoke in a low voice, kept his face in the shadows, and gave me an address that I knew was on a dead-end street of mostly factories.  I considered driving to the Elmhurst police station, but I figured no use getting shot for nothing, see how it plays out and just give him the money if he wants it.  We got where we were going.

All of a sudden, the guy comes to life.  “Thanks for picking me up!”  He was sure that at that hour he’d end up walking.  He’d snuck into the car because he was sure that any taxi driver would be profiling him and passing him up, maybe a couple of them already had.  He gave me a big tip, even. 

That did it for me, after that I have tried never to pre-judge.  I’m on the “let’s see how it plays out” program, and it works okay for me.   

"Race In America" Update: Charles Ramsey Edition

Several young women were freed today after being held captive by a "quiet man" in a nondescript house in a run-down Cleveland suburb for almost ten years.  A forty-something black man named Charles Ramsey was instrumental in the escape.

Charles is a very articulate man in his way, the way of someone who has not received the dubious benefit of an advanced liberal arts education.  Very brave too, at first he thought that he was witnessing some kind of domestic violence situation, big trouble to get involved in those.  He went ahead and helped her out of the house anyway.  Upon leaving the house, Amanda Berry jumped into his protective arms. 

"I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl runs right into a black man's arms."

He got that right, didn't he?  It tells you something about the state of race relations in America.

Charles Ramsey seems like a nice guy all around, and he really has that clear understanding of the current state of race relations in America that is very common in the black community.  At one point during his on-camera CNN interview, a police siren whooped in the background.  Charles alerted at the sound and appeared for a moment to be preparing to run away.  Who could blame him?  I'd bet that at least a couple of the police at the scene took some convincing before they believed that he was a hero and not some kind of criminal associate.

Look for the good: the young women have been set free and a black man is a hero.  Thanks for that.

Black History Month: The Bedford Incident

To paraphrase the State of the Union Address, "the state of black America is still pretty miserable."  The current situation of race relations, far from being "post-racial," is still rife with prejudice, misunderstanding, and irrational fear.  Post-racial, my ass.  Small steps are still being taken though, as they have been for a long time.

Some of these small steps have occurred in the entertainment community, mostly in the areas of the music and the movie businesses.  One of these small steps was "The Bedford Incident."  (Put the bedford incident in the word search for my original post to see a more complete description of the movie.)

(NEXT DAY NOTE: I left out sports.  I write these things quickly, but upon reflection maybe I was right to leave it out.  The small acts furthering brotherhood were more subversive, I think, in music and in the movies, like this "Bedford" thing. They were more like intellectual challenges, gauntlets thrown where safety could have prevailed .  I recall the integration of sports as being accomplished grudgingly, not so much a step forward as a realization that a step needed to be taken.  Okay, back to the show.)  

Sidney Poitier was cast as a photographer "embedded" with an American destroyer crew on patrol in Arctic waters, tracking Russian submarines.  The great thing about this casting is that there is nothing at all about his character that is race-specific.  No mention of, not even a hint of his blackness.  I'm sure that the script was written assuming that a white actor would play the part, and then no changes at all were made to the script after Mr. Poitier was cast in the role.  This was pretty remarkable in my opinion.

It gave American viewers, at a critical point in race relations (1965), a chance to see a black man accepted as a high-level and successful professional photographer in a very natural way, to see him interact with the crew as an equal, with no discomfort attributable to his race.  Now we might take this for granted, but if we do I believe it owes to the debt we have to brave people who made casting choices like this when it was not easy to do so.

Keep taking those baby steps, America.  "A journey of a hundred miles . . ." you know, the first steps thing.  

Black People In Thailand

No, I don’t mean “black” in the local sense, which merely means “copper colored and darker than the usual Thai person.” I mean Black in the American sense of the word, the people that were once referred to as “Negroes.”

Black Americans are as rare in Thailand as hens’ teeth, but there are many, many Blacks in Bangkok. My neighborhood in particular features a great number of Blacks. Africans they are, many are students at the two local international universities, but not all. A business in the area just started a professional football team and seems to have hired all Africans to man it, they have been installed in my condo building. Then there are the “businessmen,” boy to the cops keep an eye on them, businessmen my ass.

Disclaimer: You don’t see many of Americans in general over here. Some American ex-pats, true, but most of the White people that you see are tourists and very few of them come from America. Do Americans take vacations anymore? Only the Europeans can afford to go somewhere for a few weeks at a stretch, and a trip any shorter than that is bloody inconvenient when the travel time is twenty-four hours or more in each direction, and then there’s the jet-lag.


Cab Drivers

Africans come in many varieties, and most of them are perfectly reasonable people.  There are some countries in Africa though where the people have some funny habits.  Evidently those countries are well represented in Bangkok.  Just ask any Bangkok cab driver, he’ll be happy to share some of his experiences. I never bring it up myself, but every few months a driver will see Blacks on the street and spontaneously start to complain. “They just get out and run!” is a common one. “They hand you some bills and one in the middle is folded over!” is another. “The fare is eighty-five Baht and they throw forty Baht at you on the way out!”

No surprise then, that many drivers will not stop for Blacks. On the surface, this is like the situation that obtained in Old New York back when I was driving cabs. (Not guilty, me, I stopped for everybody.) This is very different though, because here the terrible side effect of this prejudice is that American Blacks, and they do exist here, are being tarred with the same brush, and without having contributed to the problem in any way. For that matter, most of the Africans in Bangkok haven't contributed to the problem either.  My friend Professor Salifu (Mali; PhD German Linguistics) would, I think, put his hand in a fire before he tried to cheat anybody. It's always the few that ruin it for the many. 

I always take the time to explain to the drivers that American Blacks are not like Africans at all anymore, and certainly not like these rude Africans.  They’re much more like Americans in general. With probably a greater feeling of worker solidarity if anything, and no shortage of fair play in their hearts. In my experience, which I share with the drivers, Black workers were better tippers than rich White people in New York, and maybe even more appreciative of the ride than White workers because they were a little surprised to be picked up in the first place.

It is hard from a distance, however, to differentiate an American from an African, or tell what is in the heart of any individual. Even for me, and I know what to look for. Many African men, I can tell you, will leave the house in outfits that no self-respecting American Black would wear to a rock fight. Hard to pick it all out driving down the street. To a Thai cab driver the challenge of telling them apart is insurmountable. It’s a shame.


Black American Expats

I know that they exist. I’ve heard of some; I’ve seen others. Sorry to say that I have no friends among their number, but like I say, they’re very, very rare. The guys that I occasionally see who appear to be American don’t, I’m sure, want me running up to them asking, “are you American?” Perhaps, dear reader, you could introduce me to one?

From what I’ve heard, Thai society affords them the status of “Americans,” minus the qualifier “Black.” As though a rich foreigner was a rich foreigner, irrespective of the color of his skin. If Thai women discriminate against black skin it is in such small numbers that it doesn’t seem to hurt the Black man’s chances in the least. Even the Africans are considered prosperous, they made it over here didn’t they? They’re paying tuition at an international university, aren’t they? Americans even more so, we are all considered prosperous-to-rich.


Free Advice, Worth Every Penny

I’d recommend it, I would, to my Black American compatriots. Anyone with a bachelors’ degree can easily get a job teaching English over here, for about a thousand dollars per month, which is enough to live on very well in Thailand. People are very nice, a few words of Thai and a genuine smile buy a lot of good will in this country. If my experience is any indication, I can tell you that I feel less alienated here than I do in our own miserable country. At least here I am actually an alien. Who knows? It could work for you too.

American Exceptionalism For Dummies

Here’s some news that you can use, so don’t snooze, ‘cause you might lose. Beware of exceptionalism in all of its forms, because nothing good can come of it.

If one group is exceptional, it makes it too easy to define down the rights of members of other groups, and then to deprive them of those rights. We can see some of this going on already, if we are in the mood to be honest.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how America is a very special place, and it is too, in its way. America has a lot to recommend it, that much is true. For one thing, it’s one of the few countries in the world where being a citizen fails to inform the listener in the slightest regarding the racial and ethnic information of the citizen. That’s a wonderful thing. It allows anyone in the whole, wide world to come to America and become a citizen within five or eight years, and once they get that paperwork in hand they are as much a citizen of America as Thomas Jefferson’s descendants (Black or White). Remember though, there comes a time to draw the line.

Some people are insisting that America was ordained by God for some unique, higher purpose, usually a purpose that is connected somehow to their own agenda. The idea is that America has a special relationship with the mysterious supernatural entity. Some of these people are politicians, some are religious leaders. I don’t know about you, but I don’t put much stock in either group. This beloved-of-God thing is where I would suggest drawing the line.

Mostly it just smacks of elitism, the idea that one particular country is better than the others. I say country, but you could just as easily say race, nationality, religion, culture, or language group, or you could separate out by height, hair color, fashion sense, or musical ability. There are all kinds of groups that get this oh! so special feeling about themselves. They have in common that they are all wrong.

It’s okay to feel this feeling in your own heart, but it’s never a good idea to go shooting your mouth off about how different you are from other people, or how much better you are. “In your heart,” that’s the ticket! Keep it to yourself.

It is possible that the Irish have a secret hunch that they are the people, of all of the earth’s people, that are the most beloved of God, but they are not demonstrative about it, generally. There’s a fine joke that I believe illustrates the Irish character regarding their particular take on exceptionalism. It’s a Pat and Mike joke from the days of the great ethnic Vaudeville comedians:

Pat was walking down the street and he ran into his friend Mike. “So Mike,” says Pat, “I hear you were at Flanagan’s wedding.” Mike says, “sure and I was.” “And,” says Pat, “I heard that you were the Best Man!” Mike stiffens up and says, “that’s a lie!” Relaxing a little bit he adds, “but I was as good as any man there.”

That would be a good attitude for Americans to adopt towards the world. It would be a great attitude for each of the racial groups in America to adopt towards the other groups, that would be a cool breeze right there. We’re not better than anyone else, but we’re as good as anyone. I could subscribe to that.

The Twentieth Century was full of countries that thought that they were so far superior to other countries that they felt thereby entitled to subject the other countries to their will, permanently was the goal, and they actually tried it and it got a lot of people killed, sometimes just to be rid of them and make room for more of the superior group. Exceptionalism led quickly to eliminationalism. That was some of the wrongest shit in the long history of the world, and that’s a tough list to top.

So maybe that’s not a good road to start down.


Last Word

Many of the people who are telling America these days that Americans are somehow exceptional and that we have a God ordained duty to spread our philosophy all over the world are big-time, evangelical Christians. While you Americans are being flattered by them in this way, you should recall that these are the same people who think that only a small number of people who are totally devoted to their particular narrow stripe of the religious spectrum are going to ever get to that Heaven that they aspire to. They believe that almost everybody that ever lived, and damn near every single person now alive, will go to hell for being insufficiently like themselves.

So while they’re flattering you with all of this exceptionalist talk, bear in mind that they are much more exceptional than you, and that you’re going to hell. You’ll be lucky if they say thanks after they have what they want from you, probably your vote.