July 25, 2009AD
The Obama Effect probably isn't visible to those who think exclusively in terms of identity triumphalism. That is, race, gender, sex and trailing far behind, class.
But, it's there. Coming to Detroit in 2011 is the Catholic Council. It is less a response to the Catholic Left's bitterness toward yet another orthodox pope (Green or no), than to this new President. The Voice of the Faithful, Catholics for Choice (aka Catholics for NARAL ProChoice America) among others will be meeting in this dying city to promote an agenda fresh from mid-20th century America world of big cars and bigger computers. Policies and theologies whose failures big and small are etched in pain and failure and empty parishes across decades of the Good Riddance Century will be trotted out like a sunken-backed Triple Crown winner past his stud life.
At work, supervisors and managers, not to mention vps et al are more rude and arrogant than ever. Despite quarter after quarter after quarter (years in fact) of not making a profit. The company is suspended for now between tight credit markets and virtually no takers on an effort to sell the company last year. But the election success is their success no matter how bad they are at their jobs.
At the Free Press and Detroit News -- also inching toward non-existence -- writers and editors blame the problems of the state and her hollowed-out cities on "the religious right." Anyone who believes that there is One Establishment, One Party, and One Corporation can be forgiven for that simple-minded paranoia when, left and right, our media speak with a uniform sarcasm and contempt that would embarass a British peer. At the "conservative" News, Lesbian Reporter and Columnist Deb Price -- her self-reductionism -- exploits being on a first-name basis with the President who at press conferences actively seeks her out: "Deb, Deb, are you there Deb?" as he made much show of recently. That all important two percent demographic...
So, successes or failures aside, the President has empowered and inspired the faithful.
The Prof. Henry Louis Gates spectacle is simply the latest test to see if the media and academia (Acadamedia?) will feel comfortable enough in power to let the facts speak for themselves.
Score on a Pass/Fail grading system: Fail.
Speculations on Prof. Gates' experience are as predictable as an episode of Law and Order. Michael Eric Dyson lays the professor's humiliation at the feet of being Housed While Black. Others follow with Educated While Black, Upper Class While Black, -- to which I'll add being Clueless While Black. Stanley Fish whose condescension is bottomless concurs with Mr. Dyson. He tells a 20-year old story of Prof. Gates buying a large house with his first tenure job (at 37 by my count) and is mistaken by southern workman as a servant (Servant? are Servants common among academics?)
The arresting officer Sgt. Crowley, he just can't win. He is accused of being "uncomfortable" around black people of higher class and income and therefore aggressive and hostile. Or he is accused of being a traitor to the Working Classes by harassing black folks for Rich White Folks. No one in these blogs and opinion pieces mentions that Sgt. Crowley teaches at a police academy. On racial and ethnic profiling no less.
As for Cambridge: black mayor, black police chief, black prosecutor... an embarassment of facts for a privileged class who are incapable of embarassment or shame.
Resentment of uppity black men is, as even Prof. Fish acknowledges, common even among black adademics without Prof. Gates credentials and achievments -- mostly in service to keeping black Americans Black and American women Women etc. Resentment is a natural state of mankind. Envy is a sin, I believe. Sin is the state of man. The Church, not as old as human slavery or tribal slaughter but older than virtually every other institution in America, is familiar with what humans can do when improperly motivated. Human nature being out of fashion in fashion conscious Media and Academia, her wisdom is the embarassment that cannot embarass.
As a white straight Catholic working class male with BA and JD degrees and a blue collar job with commensurate remuneration, I have an experience a week. Mostly with people who support this president even as his policies and words as president compare unfavorably to his content-free eloquence on the campaign trail. I was stopped by a cop in a mixed race neighborhood (which he continued to refer to as exclusively Black). He stopped me in the middle of street. Did not allow me to walk to the sidewalk with my bike. Frisked me. Dumped my backpack. And then and only then when he realized he had made a mistake -- while a crowd gathered -- he left me in the middle of street and drove away without an apology. I suppose I could have accused him of being a Traitor to his Class. But it is just as likely that his upbringing, unlike mine, was comfortably middle class. Was I angry? Yes. Have I forgotten that incident of seven or so years ago? Obviously not. The difference is that I have more of an idea of what a cop deals with than 99 percent of the media and the academics who spin for it.
Three years working in an emergency room provided memories I'd sooner forget. Police deal with people at their worst and at their lowest. There are other memories, younger memories. I emailed the chief of the Cambridge police department. I expressed my support and sympathy. I also told him that as a boy, the police often came to our house when things got so out of hand that my oldest sister had to call them to prevent emotions and actions from becoming a lifetime of remorse. Cops see it all. And like Sgt. Crowley, have to control themselves. Laconic and without expression, a child sees men who don't seem to care. A man understands that after years of domestic disputes, suicides, child abuse, infanticide... (Just recently -- a little girl who was buried alive an died by swallowing dirt; an 11 year old black boy who committed suicide.) Sympathy or Empathy require acknowledging suffering other than our own and by people other than Our Own. So does living beyond the age of fifty. There's a reason why most cops want out after twenty years; why cops commit suicide; why they are rough and vigorous in protecting themselves and brother and sister officers.
Only an academic like Prof. Gates could live to the ripe age of 57 and learn nothing and feel nothing about men and women who are the thin blue line not only between chaos and order, but between hope and self-destruction.
YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE writes Black Woman American writer Connie Briscoe. Well, Ms. Briscoe and Prof. Gates, your blues ain't like mine either.
But beneath the blues-I-could-not-possibly-understand is shame. Because Black middle and upper class America have abandoned the men and women who are stopped for driving while Black or walking while Black or selling drugs to children while Black or abusing other students while black who are also black (why that eleven year old boy hung himself in his bedroom). Black leadership in this country has failed. Its failure is subsidiary to the institutional failures of the left, but it is failure no less.
Prof. Gates and his President engage in an old tactic of the left, ideological triaging. It's why the News and Free Press blame evangelical Christians, orthodox Catholics and conservative Jews for the mess this state is in. It is why Prof. Gates' moment of humiliation -- and believe me, I feel his pain -- is more important that the hell of our inner city streets and schools. Black children don't make the cut; they don't get the emergency attention. It goes to the Gates and Jacksons and Sharptons ad nauseum.
The President is now in trouble. His much-touted "judgement" and eloquence have failed him. The police don't like being called stupid. (Remember, these guys are almost as class conscious as the woman who teaches contract law or Shakespeare -- at least that's what the monographs tell us) And, they have a union. I'm not a big union guy -- that's another story -- but they do get heard. Unlike the individual. Unless you've got friends at the Boston Globe and on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The media will now spend the rest of the summer trying to make the public forget a 57 year old man who acts like an exhausted grad student or spoiled Bloomfield Hills teenager. They will cover up for the President as well. That's their job. He's their Iraq. They created him. Now they have to save him.
Sam Macomb
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