CSotD: Nits, and larger beasties, Picked
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Start here: It seems that the Border Patrol officers may have only been whipping their horses, not the refugees they were attempting to herd like cattle. Which isn’t the same as saying it didn’t happen, but conceding a reasonable doubt.
On the other hand, the people insisting it didn’t happen are often the people claiming Biden wants an open border, and that’s clearly untrue.
On the other other hand, Biden’s continued enforcement of Trump’s policies, specifically Title 42, is coming under White House review, so we’ll call the whole thing a tie, pending further developments.
There are enough other things we can disagree on.
One thing that came out of the Haitian confrontation was a quote about “That’s not who we are,” and Marc Murphy begs to differ.
It’s an excellent refutation of the absurdly idealistic view of American History that, as noted here in a couple of recent posts, James Loewen decried in “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”
I felt Loewen made a good point about the celebratory, triumphalist view of American History, but that he over-corrected a bit too much the other direction, and I see some nits to pick in Murphy’s parallel argument, too.
We’re since renounced most of the actions he depicts, and some were denounced when they occurred. We killed 750,000 or so young men to dispute the righteousness of slavery, and Abu Ghraib surfaced as the focus of criminal investigation.
Still, Murphy is correct that we have shown deep flaws in the past, and to say this or that particular outrage is “not who we are” is naive. We have faults that we need to recognize, not deny.
Which, it’s crucial to note, goes against the only history some states are allowing teachers to teach.
But, for all our faults, Darrin Bell (KFS) makes an accusation that is absolutely unfair.
He’s repeating something that’s been circulating on social media, but political cartoonists are supposed to be journalists, and he should have followed the old dictum, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
No matter how attractive the proposition, a quote that contains not one but two elisions definitely demands due diligence. To be fair to Bell, his cartoon was drawn before Politifact completely upended the charge, but they didn’t dig up anything someone else couldn’t have.
The quote was not simply truncated but was taken wildly out of context and Biden was, in fact, explaining why we need to care about Haiti.
Bell may have been innocently duped by the deliberate liar who launched this phony quote, but, again, he should have checked it out. Cynicism can be a trap.
As Murphy says, we should not ignore our flaws, but there’s a difference between the way James Loewen denounced the cheerful morality tales in high school history texts and the near-glee with which Howard Zinn pointed out every zit, pimple and carbuncle, as if faults were all we had to show for 250 years of existence.
The question of “who we are” doesn’t yield to simple answers, in part because we’ve never broadened it to include everyone, not just the majority.
This has always been a problem, but, now that Tucker Carlson and other white supremacists overtly declare that WASPs are the only true Americans, there is a moral imperative to address inclusion boldly and openly.
Good intentions, however, must always be tempered with facts and context.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two Bulls is correct that violence against indigenous women seems to go unchecked, both in the US and Canada. It’s an issue that combines race, resources and isolation, along with some sovereignty issues, both formal and informal.
None of which excuse it, but they do help explain it, and, while excuses are why nothing gets done, explanations can spark solutions.
But here’s a major, major point:
We should not mistake national coverage for caring.
How many, for instance, of those 2,700 murders and homicides are unsolved? And how many of the “unsolved” are cases in which the perpetrator is known but there isn’t enough proof to convict?
This is real life, not a TV cop show where cheap-ass security camera footage can be sharpened to reveal license numbers and DNA is scattered everywhere.
I covered a murder where the police knew who did it, but it took nearly three years to put the guy behind bars.
At one point, I told one of the Troopers that the suspect had moved. He chuckled and said, “Oh, we’re keeping a very close eye on Mr. LaGasse.” As indeed they were.
I doubt the case got any coverage beyond Maine, and little enough beyond our county. But national coverage would not have made the slightest bit of difference.
I saw another case in Northern New York of a missing girl — white but not wealthy — who did get on America’s Most Wanted, whereupon mountains of useless tips and idle rumors poured in from around the country.
Still, the case went unsolved for several years, until the guy robbed a local bank with his girlfriend, who flipped on him to reduce her own sentence.
The body was within a few miles of where she’d disappeared; The only thing the national hoopla had produced was ratings.
I like Adam Zyglis’s cartoon, because he’s right that some cases get massive publicity while others do not, though I’m inclined to agree with Kearney that Gabby Petito had already generated interest in her doings before she disappeared.
Moreover, with John Walsh no longer a ratings champion and both Stranger Danger and Satanic Panic less popular fads these days, the issue of who gets the Natalie Holloway/Gabby Petito/Madeleine McCann treatment is as much a matter of social standing as it is of race.
“Them as has gets” applies to publicity as well as it does to other things in life.
Perhaps it helps to consider this:
Nicole Brown Simpson was blonde, white and rich, while Breonna Taylor was none of those things.
Their deaths both got national publicity and nobody went to jail for either.
But only one seems likely to change our system.
Assuming we can be persuaded to focus on what really matters.
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