August 1, 2009AD
"It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous." G.K. Chesterton, THE CASE FOR THE EPHEMERAL
For all of my conscious life I have watched things being destroyed in the name of justice and freedom. Perhaps as early as first grade...
A grim thought that may confirm Mr. Chesterton's observation to which I take exception only in this: sometimes it is too hard to be frivolous; and only possible to be solemn.
Chesterton was writing about his deadline essays, mostly on the frivolous, the "timely," the ephemeral.
But there is another kind of ephemera. At the very late date for Detroit of July 30, 2009, the Detroit News expensed consideral ink for words and photos on a story about the Klu Klux Klan. It's "on the rise" and on the move "reportedly" (the News' careful qualification).
A longtime resident and small businessman who died in 1990 has been revealed to have been an active member of the Klan. In the late 20th century active usually meant that you went to meetings; exchanged casual racial, religious, and ethnic epithets -- with the occasional embarassing rant -- and then went back to work the next door along side blacks, Catholics, tribal peoples and all the other targets of your evening bigotry.
Jim Burwell was a bit different. He was -- by description if not acknowledgment -- a community activist. He tried to help black ex-cons; he drove black kids to church; he was praised by the progressive Detroit establishment, including the News, the Archdiocese of Detroit, New Detroit etc.
His membership in the Klan is confirmed by papers and even a sheet that he left behind in his business garage on Cass Avenue. The garage is now boarded up -- like much of the "Corridor." Much of the city in fact. When a million people move away that leaves a lot of empty homes and businesses and churches and synagogues, and even Klan halls.
Was Mr. Burwell a racist? A private one mostly. The article does not speculate on the why of his philanthropy toward black Detroiters. It may very well have been insurance. Break-ins, robberies, assaults were and are common. As the comings and goings (always the goings) of a series of immigrant groups and their pawn shops, liquor stores, and gas stations attests. Burwell may not have liked immigrants (the issue that has "reportedly" revived the Klan in Michigan), but he acted like one. Smarter really. Less provincial than new Americans can often be. But street smarts, as necessary as they are in our large dying, devasted, and utlimately abandoned cities, have an endgame. Cynicism.
One civil rights activist quoted in the article is a former Black Panther. The Panthers across the country have their own narrative. Lunch and after school programs for children; drugs, violences, gunrunning, and murder for their parents. Not surprisingly, the News does not touch on that history.
Except that Jim Burwell did not break the law in Detroit. He did some good things with impure motives. The article ends with his death after seeing justice done for a 20-year-old woman who was murdered by her husband. Burwell knew he had done it. The Detroit Police -- consistent with their historic 50% homicide clearance rate -- refused again and again to investigate. But, on Sept. 28, 1990, justice was done four years after the murder. Jim Burwell went to the courthouse (Justice Centers now), heard the sentencing, went to his business, and died at age 62.
Was Mr. Burwell at peace with himself and his God? No one but Burwell and his God know. But at least one murder was avenged in Detroit. That's more can be said for the numerous children shot in recent years in drivebys.
The Klan is an organization long since run to ground by various law enforcement and civil rights groups. Whatever resurgence today would be nugatory. The days of nightriders lynching black men and terrorizing black women and children are over. And if illegal immigration is their rallying cry, well it is the immigrants themselves who flood the streets by the hundreds of thousands in highly-organized demonstrations. The Klan is today, let us face it, pathetic. There is in evil an inevitable self destruction. An enemy within.
But who is the enemy of Black Detroiters now? The Klan narrative, revived at a time when the city's schools are in bankruptcy, the city council marbled with the fat of corruption, the automobile industry transformed into nonprofits, the former mayor just released from prison, and and and... This media revival is bizarre in contemporary Detroit. Perhaps it is too painful to see so much enfeeblement, so much decline in the horse you backed for so long.
To look at the city today is to see a result indistinguishable from racism. But old enemies, clear battle lines -- it is an irresistable nostalgia for old miseries. The physical decay, the dysfunctional and dirty schools, the council president on the take and facing prison -- her husband safely esconced in the House of Representatives -- the whole reliquary of failure and moral squalor requires blind devotion to what Shelby Steele calls the "cultural narrative." This narrative will not brook deviation as we saw with President Obama and Prof. Gates recently. The News may sometimes digress into criticism of "black nationalism," but in Thursday's paper, it returned to the story line. The back story being too painful.
Mr. Steele writes that of the three principles in the dramatis personae of the Harvard farce, only Sgt. James Crowley "functioned outside his cultural narrative." Could not the same be said for Jim Burwell?
The Klan is 21st century ephemera in the service of the maintaining the status quo. That requires keeping within the narrative. No matter what the cost.
As for my personal conclusion. Like some 1990s Hollywood action hero -- keep to the objective no matter how high the body count. And if not bodies, then those institutions that aimed to encourage our better selves. But the public school, the publishing industry, the law school, even the Church, have been devastated by a pursuit of justice that, like Detroit itself, can be indistinguisable from considered revenge. In the ideological triage of the bloody aftermath, the pragmatic and the cynical are blamed for accepting the terms of survival and abandoned to the judgements of the Narrative.
Sam Macomb
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