May 8, 2009
"Hooray for our signs..." Some forgotten song from the Sixties...
I know one black conservative personally; all the others -- Sowell, Williams, Riley -- are mediated.
I thought he would be relieved, maybe heartened, by the election of Dave Bing as mayor of Detroit. He was neither. The gist being, the civic rot is too deep; the institutional dysfunction too corrosive. Perhaps like many in southeastern Michigan, he dreads the spectacle of a Conyers/Cockerel smackdown for president of Detroit's city council as will be luridly covered by national media with an outrage as genuine as a call-girl's orgasm.
He also may have had in mind a new low for the city -- a voter turnout of fifteen (15) percent. The 25% who elected the "hip hop" mayor now looks a robust number. Almost approaching a real civic culture.
But he seemed to believe what he said: "bulldoze and start over." Since almost no one showed up, why bother. Of course, that 15 percent probably represents the politics of obstruction that is all that's left of the civil rightsism.
The Detroit News -- which two weeks ago referred to the "genocide of the minds" of city children -- was hopeful that Mayor Bing would focus on doing things, actual acts in real time in the real world. Not the virtual civics of the Somehow/Some Way party now running Lansing and Detroit.
But Bing and his city face a irreconciable conflict. What Bing needs to do is incompatible with what the city's establishment and shrinking voter and tax base voted for on November 4, 2008. By necessity, Mayor Bing cannot govern the city as President Obama now governs the country.
Pres. Obama has capitulated in full to the teachers unions (all unions in fact); Mayor Bing must confront and defeat the unions if the genocide of the minds is to end. He won't; it won't. In fact, the Obama mandate means he cannot govern at all.
So what did the voters of Detroit elect Mayor Bing to do? The Detroit News seems to think the priority is addressing a 300 million dollar budget defict (a number now dwarfed in the minds of most Americans by the fiscal gigantism rising from the White House and Capitol Hill). Deep down, even the News may believe, as Detroiters do, that checks will be written, money will flow and, as with his waitress, Obama will assure the city that "we straight." There will be an unending Jubilee term that will forgive all debts, all acts of commission and omission that have led the city -- and many like it across the country -- to a present state of red-faced denial. Denial of incompetence, irresponsibility, corruption, complacency. The moral high ground of the sixties has collapsed into an urban holler of ragged and barefoot triumphalism. Proud of being proud.
The city and the country are now at the mercy of the party of Somehow...Some Way. Somehow, some way we'll teach children to read. Somehow, some way the small bodies of black children will no longer be sacrificed to the lawless driveby shooters and the institutions and media who defend their rights and photoshop away their bloody wake. Somehow, some way the slumped-in-front-of-the-TV residents will begin to shoulder the necessary if tedious burdens of citizenship. Burdens that can no longer be forestalled by "marching, marching, marching" as Rep. John Lewis continues to proselytize decades after winning whatever is possible from marching, marching, marching. Civic cultures are not built by busy work or sentimental rhetoric, or by wearing colored ribbons or sweating through "fun runs." You can't "walk for..." fill in the blank: safe streets, decent schools, reliable city services, business-producing policies, meritocracy. It takes courage, brains, and showing up on time with something in your hand other than yet another sign.
The Justice Mission isn't working. It hasn't worked for decades.
So, I can no longer listen to the whine of the blues or the rote ecstacy of gospel. Their narrative truth and esthetic value have deminished as the politically and economically ascendant have fled the consequences of the civics of self-righteous exhibitionism. All eloquence, all symbolism, all the time.
It just isn't working anymore and an esthetic dryness has set in. Hollywood cues outrage and moral superiority with a blues and gospel that can no longer bear the message.
So my blues are for the blues. I flee the blues to Bach or Beethoven or Gorecki or Purcell or Vaughn Williams. I try to refresh myself with the possibilities offered by the past. Because the moral exhaustion of the present offers no future at all.
Sam Macomb
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