Tuesday - June 02, 2020

Good Writing

I found City Journal this morning after thinking of the “four boxes” relative to this national rioting thing, (the four boxes being the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box, ) which made me think of Kim Dutoit, the patron saint of so many right leaning blogs, and knowing that he is once again writing although I rarely visit anymore, I clicked over and found the gist of the post I made earlier. OK, I snagged a lot of it. Samizdat-ism. Afterwards, I started reading some of the essays at City Journal, and linked to the States’ Rights one below. 

POINT: Here’s another one, about the rioting and the breakdown in law an order, and how it’s been a long time coming, excused or not ...

On the other hand, the Civil War analogy seems too linear, too coherent, too automatic—a cliché, even. The current outbreak of protests and riots feels like something else—like a sudden, comprehensive event of physics or meteorology, a perfect storm of perfect storms, multilayered and interpenetrating and simultaneous.

The motives at work in the disturbances are mixed and contradictory. So are the moods—a wind-shear of psychologies and attitudes: hysteria, grief, anarchy, frolic, spectacle, revolution, a fest of selfies against a backdrop of flames. Anarchists out of Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent trade germs with angry blacks and young whites on skateboards or $1,900 bikes. The deadly serious and the deadly unserious appear side by side in the performance.

Unfortunately, a crowd on the march does anger better than it does grief. An angry crowd tends to become a mob, and a mob tends to smash windows, to loot and burn. If that happens, whatever blameless emotion may have prompted the protest in the first place is corrupted into mere power. A mob, turning abusive, will, ironically, imitate the abuse of power that the demonstration was called to protest in the first place. On the other hand, if your intention is to destroy American society, then what’s the problem?

COUNTERPOINT:

The extent to which high elected officials in New York City are willing to excuse the mobs burning and looting the city, and attacking its police officers, is shocking. Even Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is taking enormous heat from the Left for his supposed hard line on policing the “protesters,” makes a point every time he opens his mouth of embracing their demands for “change” and acknowledging their “deep pain.”

Enough already. Peaceful protesters have had several days in which to make themselves and their concerns heard about the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. The Antifa hooligans firebombing police vehicles, and the looters gleefully grabbing sneakers, are not only not in mourning, they are having a party. This is a perverse holiday for them, one to which the liberal leaders of our city pay obsequious deference.

...

New York City’s political class is up in arms today—but not because criminals and arsonists are holding the city hostage. Instead, they’re alarmed because President Trump has pledged to restore order. Any New Yorker who wants safety and order must see de Blasio and the rest of the city’s leadership as abject failures during this crisis. Those who believe, on the other hand, in the transformative potential of chaos should be grateful for his leadership.

[ PS Mark Levine is a two faced hypocrite. ]

There’s many paragraphs more at the links.

Other essays there point out that voting Progressives into office leads to all kinds of problems, from increased crime, to homeless camps full of drugged out street poopers, to frustration in the police departments, to pandering socialist attitudes, to rioting and looting. What we are seeing today is what they have worked a generation to build.

Good writing is always worth a read and a think, whether you agree or not. Which implies it’s worth talking about too. Check it out, talk it out.

Posted by Drew458     on 06/02/2020 at 10:17 AM   
Filed Under: • CULTURE IN DECLINE • Disasters •  
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