The Bankrupt Race Card
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The Trayvon Martin case is a wholly familiar one to
residents of any major urban city. If you live in
Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, then it's only a
matter of time until an incident between a law
enforcement officer, or more rarely a civilian
defending himself, and a member of a minority group
flares up into a citywide grievance theater complete
with angry reverends on the steps of City Hall,
women with stony faces holding up banners calling
for justice and a media driven debate about police
tactics and racism.
This sort of thing happens with depressing
regularity in cities where even the most liberal
residents have to choose between police overreach
and being murdered. It never leads to meaningful
debate or a resolution, instead it peters out with
the best actors in the grievance theater picking up
money and influence, the media selling a few more
papers or ads for nasal polyp relief on the drive
time news and everything going back to the way it
was.
The grievance theater is never really about the
specific case, the specific shooting, it's about the
links between the social problems of the black
community, the compromises of civil liberties
necessary to keep entire cities from turning into
Detroit and the inability of the media to address
the sources of crime as anything but the phantoms of
white racism. It's about a black leadership that is
more interested in posturing as angry activists and
shaking loose some money, than in healing their own
community's problems. And so the same story repeats
itself again and again without an honest dialogue or
anything meaningful coming out of it.
But grievance theater has been going national. It's
no longer just extraordinary cases like Bernie
Goetz's Death Wish moment on the number 2 train that
briefly catch hold of the national conversation. The
obsessive coverage of the so-called Jena 6 case, an
incident of so little internal meaning, signaled
that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would no longer
just be able to drive a local controversy, they now
had the freedom to drive national controversies any
time they wanted to.
Trayvon Martin is their big moment. It's no longer
just grievance theater being used to influence the
political fortunes of a municipal election, the way
that Howard Beach was used to bring down Mayor Koch
and replace him with the execrable David Dinkins.
Now it's being used as part of a presidential
campaign on a national level.
The fortunes of too many black politicians have been
tied to white guilt and black rage. The worst sort
of black politician channels black rage to score
points with black supporters while playing on the
guilt of white voters, promising to heal the social
conditions that bring about that anger and protect
them from its ravages. But never before has that
game been played out of the Oval Office.
The last two Democratic presidents were Southern
governors, but the current occupant is a veteran of
the corrupt urban political machine where there are
only two games in town and when the money runs out,
this is the one you play. The money is running out,
the polls are running down and accordingly we have
been treated to an episode of grievance theater,
with our beloved leader in the role of healer and
inciter.
Obama helped Al Sharpton achieved an unprecedented
national profile in order to marshal that part of
his base which cares less about jobs, than about
finding someone to blame. The Trayvon Martin circus
is a bullhorn urging that all of us, black or white,
to stop focusing on the economy and start focusing
on race.
It's Community Activism 101 to divide and conquer
the electorate by breaking them down and feeding
local anxieties, whether it's about birth control or
racial injustice. And it's a win-win for Obama, who
at worst gains a distraction from economic turmoil
and a few thousand guilty voters and at best, upends
the national dialogue by asserting the dominance of
the racial narrative. While his associates wield the
bullhorns, he carefully plays healer and if there is
violence, then his currency as racial healer
increases.
What does it say about America that what was once a
form of political theater rising out of the grimy
urban blocks of the failed city is now a national
art form? Nothing good. A local dysfunction has
become a national dysfunction, not because every
city has become New York and Chicago, but because
the people at the center of power hail from New York
and Chicago.
Our racial dysfunction has always been secondary
to our political dysfunction and now our political
dysfunction is second to none. We have the best
government that Warren Buffett's money could buy and
that ACORN's election fraud can achieve. And we have
a national government that is starting to look like
the dysfunctional urban governments at the center of
the grievance theaters.
Chicago nearly went bankrupt in 1930. New York
nearly went bankrupt in 1975. But states have bailed
out cities and the federal government has bailed out
states. When there isn't enough money to keep the
dysfunctional political machine built on corruption
and subsidies going, there's always some larger
entity to foot the bill.
The problem with this current government is that
it's operating at the federal level and there is no
longer any larger entity to foot the bill. All the
shopworn radicalism, the cries about making the rich
pay their fair share, are old hat. The rich and the
upper middle-class can pay more, but there's no
amount of money that will cover a government that
spends money as if there is no tomorrow.
That is the lesson that has yet to be learned from
the cities whose dysfunctional politics have been
transplanted to the national government. Along with
the politics has come the grievance mob, the outrage
machine, the outpourings of self-righteousness, the
class warfare fought by corrupt pols and the rest of
the bread and circuses show that have blighted the
American city for a century and a half.
Grievance theater isn't about race, it's not about
slavery, police brutality or separate lunch
counters, it's about power and money. Black
politicians are not fundamentally different from
white ones. They have more in common with their
white colleagues than they do with their own
communities. The only difference is that they are
playing with the race cards they have been dealt.
The ghetto didn't evolve naturally, it was created
through a web of national and local government
regulations that played with real estate, social
welfare, voting districts and the manufacturing
sector to achieve the desired results. We don't have
to have ghettos, we have them because at one point
they were convenient for a number of political
interests and because they were the unintended
side-effect of a number of socialist policies.
The ghetto farms black communities for votes and
more importantly for subsidies. For every dollar
that is taken to help minorities, a penny goes to
the problem and ninety-nine cents goes to the
hucksters, the administrators, the bureaucrats, the
wives of influential pols hired on massive salaries
to oversee some aspect of the program, the experts
who monitor compliance, the affirmative action
contractors who charge four times as much to build a
school or provide meals, the unions who have the
exclusive right to service the program, the
slumlords who administer affordable housing and
finally the politicians who have the money kicked
back to them by all of the above.
When you look closely at where the school property
tax money goes, why health care is so expensive and
why so much money has to be spent on housing, a big
chunk of it goes here. It's the hole in our budget
ozone layer and it can never be filled, because it
is designed never to be filled. For a sizable number
of influential people, both black and white, the
black community's social problems are a cash cow.
The grievance theater is their way of collecting
protection money and making sure that no one pays
too much attention to what's really wrong.
The problem isn't limited to the black community.
The same phenomenon crosses over different minority
communities and some white ones as well, but the
race card is still the best card in the deck. It
carries too many emotional triggers, too much guilt
and too much hope not to use it over and over again.
The moral power of the civil rights movement still
isn't exhausted as long as hopeful white people
smile at the sight of a black man in the White House
as if his political power testified to their
innocence.
But the power can only be retained through
constant indoctrination in the rituals of guilt,
through repetitions of the grievance theater which
reminds us that national bankruptcy is a small price
to pay for peace, that we will be better people and
a better nation if we vote for Obama against our own
economic interests. Grievance theater takes many
forms, but its elemental form is the street
production that the Trayvon Martin case has brought
us.
Grievance theater, like light-hearted musicals is
one of those forms that works best when the economy
is bad and everyone has trouble making ends meet.
But while people voluntarily go to see musicals, or
at least they used to, they have to be dragged to
attend the latest grievance theater, the production
numbers broadcast live on CNN and MSNBC, the
programs printed in every paper that still hasn't
gone out of business, and breathless announcements
of the latest developments broadcast in between
Dunkin Donuts commercials.
The local productions of grievance theater have gone
national and we are all compelled to watch it play
out. No matter what happens to George Zimmerman or
what we learn about Trayvon Martin, the country has
been turned into unwilling participants in a
national drama that places a distorted idea of race
at the center of our identity for the benefit of the
same hucksters and politicians who have destroyed
the city and are hard at work destroying the
country.