UnCivil Wars

Glenn Beck is having a rally in Washington today. It is the anniversary date of a Martin Luther King rally in days of yore. Al Sharpton is having another rally there. He accuses Beck of trying to hijack the civil rights movement.  Beck's crime is that, unlike King, he wants to reduce the power of the federal government. Shocking, eh? Frankly, the civil rights movement should have had a bullet put to its head a long time ago. It has become a grievance protection racket that encourages irresponsibility, soft tyranny and government dependence. (Not only for blacks but for all the subsequent victim groups that have taken up their model.) It allows people like Al Sharpton to be taken seriously rather than put in the stocks, where he'd be kept in any civilized country. Nuff said.

Came across a startlingly titled book the other day, Negrophilia: from Slave Block to Pedestal.  The author, a Black American man, Erik Rush, points out the bizarre reversal of how Blacks are now assessed in America. His is a more rabble-rousing version of The Content of our Character by Shelby Steele, who pointed out how Whites try to buy moral absolution and racial innocence by giving Blacks license and deference. One of the results is that both groups conspire to prevent Blacks from being individuals. It's how the Race Game --and game it is-- is played now.

I note in the Washington Post's story about the rally that they describe the crowd as being "overwhelmingly white" and "mostly from the Midwest and South."  This is MSM code for "racist yokels". I am pretty sure than once I would have simply accepted that as true. People from the most cosmopolitan city in the world can be as astoundingly parochial and fearful of exotic strangers as people who grew up in the Mission district.

I am curious if the Post could point out how many countries there are in the world which provide both a great deal of freedom and a decently prosperous and safe life to most of their citizens, that are not "overwhelmingly white"?

I can think of one*, maybe two.

Maybe, just maybe, Whites are not the problem.

I have used an insight of maverick post-Jungian thinker James Hillman. He suggested that when a group makes something of a fetish of a particular value or attitude, it is likely that their shadow issue is its opposite. A secularized Jew who hates Christians and their "Christianism", he pointed out, rightly, that the religion of love and unity seemed to have a hard time precisely with...love and unity. A lot of Jungians use this idea --one Jung himself described-- in a hamfisted and predictably cartoonish way to establish a kind of adolescent moral equivalence between competitors they don't like.

I have applied it to America in noticing our choice of name: The United States of America. It is the "United" part which interests me, since it is very clear that bringing together disparate and competing interests has been a fundamental issue of ours from the beginning. The 13 Original Colonies mostly thought of themselves as independent countries and it took a mammoth effort to get them into a single harness. The Civil War revealed the power of their original disunity. I do not think that it solved the problem, even when the country was massively more homogeneous by race and religion than it is now. Keeping the States united is an ongoing task and one that I do not believe has a fatedly happy outcome. It may be the natural skepticism of an older man who imagines a kind of pristine time prior to his own --I don't think I subscribe to anything quite so simplistic. But it seems to me that America has been developing another non-military civil war for the last forty five or fifty years.

I've listened to Beck, and I've listened to Sharpton. And I'd rather live in Glenn Beck's America than Al Sharpton's any day of the week.

*And at least one of those had its governmental structure imposed on it by White people.