May 24, 2009
"We have film of you in your basement giving food and water to a woman who lost her Free Food card."
"But she was starving senator."
"[in Kennedy accent] That's her trip."
-- from Waiting for the Electrican by the Firesign Theatre
In Chicago this week, community activists, including James-Brown-wannabe Fr. Pfleger, are petitioning the President Obama to DO SOMETHING.
These pleas come from Michelle Obama's Real Chicago, the South Side. After Katrina, the residents of New Orleans made huge signs -- HELP US! -- meant to be read by news helicopters. In Chicago, Fr. Pfleger and Mark Allen and Spencer Leak Sr, a funeral director who has buried ten children, are encouraging residents and sympathizers to wear pins and t-shirts, and put up signs that display the symbol of distress: an upside down American flag. It may be yet another opportunity to abuse the flag, but the situation dramatized is real and horrifying. Even if only the media is noticing.
Since the fall, 37 Chicago students have been shot to death. Last year the number was merely 21. This year in the Los Angeles school district which has twice the number of students, there have been 23 student deaths. Acceptable and not nearly so bad, at least as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
As with the the Firesign Theatre's fictional Irish American politician, the White House has suggested to Chicago's only authentic neighborhood that "the people have to take ownership" of the problem. "Ownership" is one of those dayglo, tie-dyed, psycho-babble words from th 1970s. Like having one's very own "trip." But as with much of the alternative culture's enlightenment, beneath the peace and love is something more akin to Ayn Rand or Marine boot camp. Suck it up. Why are you bothering me with this?
On its face, not entirely bad advice. Of course, the WH spokeswoman, Valerie Jarrett, also assured the Real Chicago that stimulus money for law enforcement was on the way. The Government requires not only your hope and cooperation, but your passivity in the face of crisis.
And there's the heart of the matter. The progressive project based so much on assignment of guilt and blame and judicializing politics has left much of the inner city civic culture atrophied by hope and its unrewarded patience. Like so much of the Obama administration's world changing, lifesavers are handed out with free weights. The drowning all the more cruel because it happens close to the surface; within sight of rescue. Just enough hope for bouyancy; just enough hope for despair.
Not surprisingly, the story is viewed differently dependant upon economic status. Middle class blacks aren't wearing upside-down American flag pins. They are "protective of the president" as one Chicago resident told the Wall Street Journal. The don't want to air dirty laundry in front of a larger America -- an America, by the way, no longer mostly white, but asian, african, middle-eastern, eastern european, hispanic. America keeps changing; Black America, even with its exploding middle class, does not.
Fr. Pfleger and Mark Allen, both identified as community activists and friends of former Chicago politician Barack Obama, provide redundant proof of Gov. Palin's comparison of community activism to the hard work of running schools, providing safe streets, raising children -- the Real America, if the First Lady doesn't mind my poaching her rhetoric of raised consciousness. Pfleger and Allen have, literally, a single bullet theory. In their magical thinking, all that is required in More Gun Control.
As I've bored friends too many times to count -- Southeastern Michigan is surrounded and infiltrated with hundreds of thousands of guns and gun owners. They're call hunters and collectors and sportsmen (and women) and, to my knowledge, not one has committed or been accused of committing a single drive by shooting resulting in the death of a child.
Valerie Jarrett's cold comfort is emblematic of the progressive coupling of personal indifference and global compassion. The politics of Hope, Change AND Despair.
Children are dying in Chicago. And LA and Philadelphia and Compton and Oakland and Baltimore and Washington D.C. And, right here in Detroit. In Detroit we've expanded the franchise to pre-schoolers playing safe within the home. A kind of deadly Head Start.
And, as promised, the President has not lost his cool. God forbid that he should show a little passion, a touch of human frailty, a moment normal frustration. Occurances frequent during the previous administration to which the President continues to assign its daily portion of guilt and blame and pitilessness.
The South Side of Chicago is another civic Katrina. Signs and symbols and hope are substitued for the work of Burke's "little platoons." As John McWhorter noted after the hurricane, so many black Americans seem to have lost the survival skills that kept them alive and going during slavery and Jim Crow.
As I write, the President seeks yet another Supreme Court justice who will accelerate the elevation of the Judiciary over parents, business, mayors, city council, state legislators, governors. A Constitution meant to protect the civic vitality of city hall, the PTA, the Church and state houses will itself continue to atrophy before the empathetic decisions of the Justice.
If Michigan's Gov. Granholm is on the Supreme Court short list, Americans must understand it is because, from the Obama Administration's point of view, she is a success, not a failure. Michigan continues its road to civic demoralization as taxes are raised, middle-class affirmative action is pursued and, inevitably the towns and cities empty and the best and brightest depart for Anywhere But Michigan. Few will stick around in hope for the handful of Culture Jobs -- best boys and grips and latte schelpers in Michigan's "film industry."
For Detroit, as well as Chicago, Hope isn't audacious. It's deadly.
Sam Macomb
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