July 26, 2009AD
"Relax, Rusty. The Republicans will betray us eventually anyway." -- Fr. Richard John Neuhaus to R.R. Reno after he agonized that the Republicans would be tossed out of Congress in 2006. Which they were.
As the left (media, academic, editorial) diverts its resources from thwarting rule of law in Honduras to the leafy upper class streets of Cambridge, Mass, it is all schoolyard memories for me.
Friends and acquaintances who have discounted my stories of the academic imperium and its commercial equivalent, the literary empire are now seeing the rare public face of the scribbling and footnoting class. Sore winners for whom no amount of fame, awards, genius grants, or book advances can soothe that suscpicion deep inside that "no one is looking at me!"
As Bill Bennett noted this week, why should Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department know who Henry Louis Gates is and what he has done.
In today's Detroit Free Press you can find an AP article that lists Prof. Gates's achievements. Among the essays and reference works and documentaries is listed -- without quote marks -- he "assembled a MIGHTY (my emphasis) team of colleagues at Harvard University." This is a news report not an editorial. "Migthy" just might qualify as an editorializing adjective. The reporter makes a slip of admiration and advocacy which, apparently, no editor caught. One doesn't ususually associate "mighty" with academics (and note, the reporter calls them colleagues, not scholars) any more than courage. My friends who have stopped reading the news altogether can only tell me "I told you so."
The spin is disorienting.
The AP piece cites some strange quotes from Prof. Gates. For example: "civil rights took us all by surprise." Prof. Gates was born two years before I was. The NAACP, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois and many others had been striving for nearly half a century before the professor was born. Truman would soon desegregate the military. Brown vs. Board of Education would be decided. I thought he was a scholar. He reminds me of those other professors who note the military service of Black men but skip over forty years of sacrifice from 1865 to 1917. (The 9th and 10th Infantry and 24th and 25th Cavalry who served in the west on in the Spanish American War.) Like most babyboomers, does the professor believe that history began after their fathers returned from the war? When the greatest generation began to sire the most ungrateful generation.
Academic myopia is common at most universities. But then there are the whoppers in the Free Press. That he distrusted the "rhetoric of crisis" and the "sweepstakes of oppression." The Wall Street Journal relates similar quotes from the professor. Yet, that is exactly what you find at nearly every university and community college in America and what you saw on July 16th on a usually quiet street in Cambridge. I received a steady diet of this in law school in the 1990s. Literally. One speaker began his talk in a class declaring (in 1992) that "there is an emergency!" No, he wasn't referring to the public schools, or the drug trade on every urban street corner, including New York's Central Park where I couldn't walk a few yards at lunchtime without being solicited, nor the murder rate, nor the abuse of women and children. No, the emergency was existential and ill-defined. Certainly not memorable.
Although the filmmaker Spike Lee has recently echoed Bill Cosby on the crises in black neighborhoods in America, neither are academics. And Mr. Cosby has been singled out for attack. Including one book dedicated to criticising the comedian and actor. By Michael Eric Dyson who is a close friend of Prof. Gates and has leapt to his defense in recent days.
No lie too big; no denial too small. This has been the pattern of the left and its auxiliaries for decades now.
The Saturday Wall Street Journal is more fair and balanced (it is owned by Rupert Murdoch after all). They also profile Sgt. James Crowley. Father, coach, defuser of tense situations, instructor on the problems of profiling. What you don't read is the courage and discipline it takes to go on the streets of many of our towns and cities now. And into too many American homes. We hear about Prof. Gate's high school protests against segregation after which the professor is proud that he and his friends were perceived as "dangerous." But there is no safer and cocooned world than an Ivy League university. Vicious and envious office politics, surely. But dangerous? How and for whom? Scores of cops die every year doing their job. And too many commit suicide or divorce or drink themselves to death. It is the impossible profession.
The Journal reports that the President has repeated a pattern traceble to the Rev. James Wright situation. Pull back, duck, let things cool off for a few news cycles. Then, default to a dramatically lit and staged "teachable moment" (the Journals quotes by the way). A moment probably to come this week. The President who sometimes seems a bit too comfortable in a job no one should get comfortable with retreats to the rhetoric of oppression with the ease of a professional. Cool outrage in contrast to that extraordinary performance on July 16th. Which, let's be blunt, was not a repeat of the history of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Except as farce.
But the president did trip on his glibness this time.
A while back an associate at First Things critized my characterization of the left as "self-dramatizing." Clearly I wasn't exaggerating. The professor's bizarre outbursts are attributable to something other than reality. Nostalgia for exciting times of the struggle; an excitable imagination bursting the restraints of tedious and repetitive scholarship.
Who is it who reduces the past to an entertaining oppression longed for in the comfort of Harvard? Those who refuse to acknowledge the evils of the moment.
The Journal notes that many Black Americans sympathize with the professor in his outrage at being arrested in his own home simply because he was contentious. I'm guessing that inner city police often forgo arresting the rude and abusive because that is all they would doing. More to the point, the professor and his defenders on the news and editorial pages seem unaware of his unconscious resort to one of the basic principles of English Common Law. That is, a man's home is his castle. Soon-to-be- Justice Sotomayor claims to be unfamiliar with this in regard to Second Amendment Rights (as if the Bill of Rights came from nowhere). I can attest that may be because English commmon law is no longer taught in law schools. Mentioned perhaps. Dismissed certainly. Sneered at in offguard moments. There's a new law in town. So you and your mother better watch out.
Ironically, the English Law Lords reaffirmed this principle only last year. Perhaps, in part, in reaction to Kelo v. New London which attempted to expand eminent domain to increasing profits for those with friends in city hall who wanted to increase their tax base at the expense of a perfectly fine and well tended working class neighborhood in Connecticut. Whose offense may have been not to be Bridgeport or New Haven.
To expect gratitude for the efforts of those who came before is to ignore what academic America and its upper class cheerleaders are all about. Prof. Gates is ungrateful for his power, his money, his status, his friends at the very top of American society, his fame (limited though it once was). He is also ungrateful to English Common Law which did not invent slavery and, in fact, created a space for its end. Twice. If only in an Empire that once spanned twenty-five percent of the globe.
Perhaps Prof. Gates seems to care what the unread masses think of him. But he cannot deny that institutional America and its ruling classes sympathize with him or are intimidated by him and who and what he represents. The results being the same.
The Wall Street Journal has no qualms with labelling bigots and extremists those Americans who want to expand ordered liberty beyond business contracts and upper middle class neighborhoods to an orderly southern immigration as well. The Journal's op-ed page has been conspicuously silent on the riots in the Chinese West as well as the blood-letting on our southwestern border. And although they defend India they never reported that in recent elections Hindu extremists, who encouraged the attacks and murders of Indian Catholics, were voted out of office. India: One. China: Zero.
I don't like being called a racist because I believe in rule of law and Burke's ordered liberty. Especially when the namecalling comes from the Wall Street Journal. I don't like being called a bigot because I am a conservative Catholic. Especially when the insinuation comes from Holy Orders and the Episcopacy.
As the freedom buses roar east to defend gated communities I won't be run down again.
The conservative media itself seems liberated by the Obama Effect. All Those People that they tolerated to get a Republican president and Congress elected can now be tossed under the bus. In homage to a former candidate for the President of the United States. Everybody wins.
Just as Father Neuhaus predicted.
Sam Macomb
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