Strange fruit
Posted inPolitics: National

Strange fruit

Little_Rock_integration_protest
So this is what post-racial America looks like.

Businesses are burned and looted in a black suburb, not by white supremacists a la Tulsa's Greenwood in 1921 but apparently by some residents a la Watts in 1965, only this time in suburbia.

The spark was a grand jury declining to indict the white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man. Other outrages gained national attention. Among them, New York City police wrestling a black man to the sidewalk and his death following a "chokehold" and a Cleveland officer shooting and killing a 12-year-old black boy with a pellet gun.

All the progressive Web sites and MSNBC programs are unanimous in their verdicts: the police are at war with unarmed black men and black communities. Indeed, the police are dangerous to American society. Traffic and ratings increase with the coverage — the visuals are great, as are hashtags such as #HandsUpDon'tShoot and #ICan'tBreathe.

Protests against "police violence" repeatedly disrupt the downtowns of progressive cities. Again, great visuals. They are largely peaceful, so far. The grievance is that this injustice is obvious and intolerable. 

Meanwhile, progressives are dealt their most devastating electoral defeat since the 1920s. From the U.S. Congress to most statehouses, political control is even more in the hands of those who see none of the above as serious problems.

At the risk of being crass and reductive, many are supporters of a new Jim Crow. What is undeniable is that the new entirely reactionary Republican Party's "platform" was opposition to the nation's first black president. It succeeded largely because of an irrational but instinctive backlash against him in the majority white electorate. The same happened in 2010.

Welcome to post-racial America.

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Who mourns for Dayton?
Posted inPolitics: National

Who mourns for Dayton?

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When I moved to Dayton, Ohio, in 1986, it was the first time I lived in a real city. It was far smaller than Phoenix or San Diego, the then sleepy but populous places I'd been, but it seemed bigger. I lived in a leafy city neighborhood of old houses and took the bus to work. The downtown was a compact mass of skyscrapers held in a bend of the Great Miami River. The newspaper was there, in a lovely old building enchanted by history, with a newspaper bar right next door and a bustling historic domed arcade across the street. Two department stores were a block away. Across the square was the old courthouse where Lincoln had spoken. Nearby, a jazz club.

The economy was robust. The "Rust Belt" was reinventing itself as an innovative superpower and Dayton was no exception. While National Cash Register had shut manufacturing of the old machines — a trauma affecting thousands — it had become a successful global computer giant. Mead, the paper company, was headquartered in a downtown tower and starting a data operation that became LexisNexis. Dayton had the second largest concentration of General Motors employees in the world, and its factories were being retooled and reinvented, often with UAW bosses as leading innovators. Hundreds of suppliers provided well-paid, high-skilled jobs that were as productive as any in the world. The airport hosted an airline passenger hub for the best-run carrier in America, Piedmont, as well as a freight hub for Emery Worldwide. For a kid from the West, this introduction to the Midwest was a heartland epiphany.

Those assets are almost all gone now. And when I wonder why Ohio seems so crazy — how it could have voted for Bush in 2004, if indeed it did; why it fell for Hillary's Wellesley girl Norma Jean routine; why it could now be a tossup for McCain (?!). When I wonder all these things, I think about Dayton.

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