As the Philly police department scrambles to find the last of three men who shot and killed an officer during a robbery, the NRA has already come out against any restrictions on the bullet-proof vest piercing semi-automatic rifle with which he was shot.
I have one piece of advice for citizens who are outraged as this country becomes a coast-to-coast shooting gallery: Bring the War Home to the Warmakers.
The Warmakers are the NRA and the weapons manufacturers that support them. Home is their offices, gun-manufacturing plants, and the gutless state and federal lawmakers who supposedly "support the second amendment."
But in a video and computer age, simply marching, holding signs and lobbying legislators isn't enough. Instead, new avenues of protest need to be explored. They involve disrupting day-to-day activities.
I take some of my ideas from Rutgers University students in New Jersey. In response to a racial incident, a few students sat-in center-court at a nationally televised basketball game. In response to the Iraq War, some decided to block the four-lane highway that leads in and out of New Brunswick, where the main campus is located.
The response and media coverage was much greater than if they had, 60s-style, simply occupied the Administration building. That response was of course greeted partially by booing from the stands from people who wanted to see a basketball game. And blocking traffic is never popular with people simply trying to get somewhere.
Nevertheless, they got attention.
I recommend, therefore, a few strategies to deal with with the NRA, a death-cult organization to which even liberal politicians must now bow and scrape before.
1) Blockade the entrance to their shiny offices in suburban Virginia.
2) Somehow block eastbound traffic on Interstate 66, which runs next to NRA headquarters. To counter angry motorists cries (and middle-fingers), simply point at the massive building that's been paid for by blood and murder.
3)Non-violent resistance to arrest, though violence unfortunately gets more media attention.
4) A photo-collage of those killed, like the AIDS quilt. But it is hard to find public land in the suburbs for demonstrations. This also might not be a good idea since so many pictured would be black and Hispanic.
5) Hypocrite-baring. Bring guns to the Capitol. When the police say that guns are illegal in the halls of Congress, have a list of pro-gun lawmakers and ask why such controls are enforced in their offices and workplaces, but not for other people.
6) I don't know much about gun-manufacturers in the US, but each plant could conceivably be blockaded all at once across the country.
7) Symbolic gestures. On the Washington mall, carry toy guns en masse together to see what people's response would be. Then burn the fake guns. You could also build a memorial with bullets, for everyone shot in the last year. Notice I said shot, not killed, because the numbers would be much higher.
8) After much protest, become the voice of compromise. Call for an end to handguns, but allow people to keep hunting guns for, well, hunting, and for defending their homes. These guns are much less easy to disguise than a handgun.
That's all for now. Viva la revolution!
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
I shoot, therefore I am (not)
It's not OK to shoot anyone once late at night anymore - it's not enough.
In Newark, a gun battle between a teenager and a man broke out this Sunday in broad daylight. A total of 18 shots were exchanged between the two, with the teenager running and cradling his wounded arm while continuing to pursue and shoot at the man. The teenager, incredibly, fell to the street right next to his assailant, but kept right on firing, 12 shots in all, before staggering to his feet and collapsing again a few feet away. Both of the the shooters died.
I know what some people are thinking (if you're out there at all): Let them rot in hell together. It was in Newark, both guys were into the drug economy somehow, and both had long criminal records. It's a societally-designated free-fire zone, though only three blocks from the mayor's home.
But while I was in Boston last summer, a teenager got up from his seat one afternoon on a subway car, walked out to the platform at a stop, then turned around and fired at the teen he had been seated next to. In Philly someone was shot on a crowded bus, and deliverymen and utility men have been shot and killed as well. All in front of sometimes dozens of witnesses.
Some Penn professor explained that the shooters are exacting revenge, in 60s-style language, on "the establishment" or something like "the social order."
Since when are delivery and utility men anybody's idea of the top of the socio-political pyramid? They bring delivery of the basics to people who can't afford them. At least Obama, in his remarkable speech on race, acknowledged that legitimate fear of the underclass should not be labeled racist.
But it is the intimidation of witnesses that is most worrisome. At least The Times got a witness employed by a grocery store to give a description of the scene. The reporter also got "'a resident" to comment without his name. "If you open your mouth around here, someone will shut it for you," the nameless man said.
If this kind of urban terrorism is allowed to go unchecked, it ultimately results in a severe diminution of the very idea of democratic law enforcement, as people barricade themselves in apartments and profess to have seen nothing about a crime to police, though it obviously happened right in front of them. People living in constant fear will understandably accept any kind of law, so long as it frees "decent people" to live and go about their business unafraid. I've often wondered what people who call police fascist or racist would do if they encountered real state-sponsored terrorism. Drug dealers would be shot on site by police or the army, with no questions asked. Addicts would be rounded up and sent to concentrations camps, they way the Nazi's did.
Ultimately, as Jane Jacobs noted, it is not for the p0lice to truly control disorder. In a functioning urban area, the shopkeepers patrol and clean the area in front of their stores. Tenants look out their windows and upbraid rowdy or disruptive people (like I was in college), with the sense that police will back them up. Jacobs called this self-policing system "eyes on the street' in close-knit urban neighborhoods.
As for the police, they must get out of their air-conditioned or heated cars and walk the beat on foot, so that they get to be a known, benign presence. This is in contrast to what is called "stranger policing," where the cops only respond to emergencies and success is measured in response time to a crime, not on preventing it in the first place.
It's difficult not to lay some blame at the feet of video-game makers, and games like Grand Theft Auto. Most people can simply call it fantasy, but in the inner-city it's more like target-shooting practice.
In Newark, a gun battle between a teenager and a man broke out this Sunday in broad daylight. A total of 18 shots were exchanged between the two, with the teenager running and cradling his wounded arm while continuing to pursue and shoot at the man. The teenager, incredibly, fell to the street right next to his assailant, but kept right on firing, 12 shots in all, before staggering to his feet and collapsing again a few feet away. Both of the the shooters died.
I know what some people are thinking (if you're out there at all): Let them rot in hell together. It was in Newark, both guys were into the drug economy somehow, and both had long criminal records. It's a societally-designated free-fire zone, though only three blocks from the mayor's home.
But while I was in Boston last summer, a teenager got up from his seat one afternoon on a subway car, walked out to the platform at a stop, then turned around and fired at the teen he had been seated next to. In Philly someone was shot on a crowded bus, and deliverymen and utility men have been shot and killed as well. All in front of sometimes dozens of witnesses.
Some Penn professor explained that the shooters are exacting revenge, in 60s-style language, on "the establishment" or something like "the social order."
Since when are delivery and utility men anybody's idea of the top of the socio-political pyramid? They bring delivery of the basics to people who can't afford them. At least Obama, in his remarkable speech on race, acknowledged that legitimate fear of the underclass should not be labeled racist.
But it is the intimidation of witnesses that is most worrisome. At least The Times got a witness employed by a grocery store to give a description of the scene. The reporter also got "'a resident" to comment without his name. "If you open your mouth around here, someone will shut it for you," the nameless man said.
If this kind of urban terrorism is allowed to go unchecked, it ultimately results in a severe diminution of the very idea of democratic law enforcement, as people barricade themselves in apartments and profess to have seen nothing about a crime to police, though it obviously happened right in front of them. People living in constant fear will understandably accept any kind of law, so long as it frees "decent people" to live and go about their business unafraid. I've often wondered what people who call police fascist or racist would do if they encountered real state-sponsored terrorism. Drug dealers would be shot on site by police or the army, with no questions asked. Addicts would be rounded up and sent to concentrations camps, they way the Nazi's did.
Ultimately, as Jane Jacobs noted, it is not for the p0lice to truly control disorder. In a functioning urban area, the shopkeepers patrol and clean the area in front of their stores. Tenants look out their windows and upbraid rowdy or disruptive people (like I was in college), with the sense that police will back them up. Jacobs called this self-policing system "eyes on the street' in close-knit urban neighborhoods.
As for the police, they must get out of their air-conditioned or heated cars and walk the beat on foot, so that they get to be a known, benign presence. This is in contrast to what is called "stranger policing," where the cops only respond to emergencies and success is measured in response time to a crime, not on preventing it in the first place.
It's difficult not to lay some blame at the feet of video-game makers, and games like Grand Theft Auto. Most people can simply call it fantasy, but in the inner-city it's more like target-shooting practice.
Friday, May 2, 2008
No Borough for Old Men
It is, above all else, a hard landscape. Hard stone ridges and valleys between. Seven-story yellow-brick apartment buildings scaling the heights, like faded rock mesas in the Southwest, overwhelming their narrow streetscapes.
Taking the elevated number 6 train to Fordham Road, the city had decided to paste stickers over the windows of the many abandoned buildings. A flowerpot and other domesticated emblems hiding the gaping holes behind them for commuters in both rail and car.
Getting off at Fordham Road. Thousands of shoppers moving up and down the wide street, which at the time was considered the borderline between the South Bronx and the better districts to the north. Noise, insults, and come-ons in Spanish for both consumer and merchants. Nobody paid me the slightest bit of attention.
I turn off the road and past a security guard. Immediately greeted by rolling green lawns and lush, leafy trees, a mostly Gothic campus so shockingly and immediately bucolic it is used as a stand-in for an Ivy League university in car ads, or so my friend told me.
Our adventures usually took us to the neighborhood just north of the campus where many young Irish lived. Crowded, lively bars, immediately friendly to you, especially if you were associated with Fordham, at the time a buffer zone between south and north Bronx.
Fast-forward about 10 years, and those bars had become isolated Gaelic outposts, ready to be taken over by the relentless tide of Hispanic migration.
"It's all gone to shit," said one of the few older men in one of these taverns. Only real Irish place left in the Bronx was Woodlawn, past the subway's end. Ireland, as we now know, has become "The Celtic Tiger," actually drawing in many more migrants than it churns out, for once in its sad, ever-gloried-in-song history.
A last memory of my friend at Fordham. We went to Sunnyside in Queens, also an Irish haven. The Irish were playing heavily-favored Italy in the World Cup in soccer that afternoon. Much to everyone's astonishment, the Irish won, 1-0. The crowd rushed outside and took over the street in pint-smashing celebration.
It's too bad to remember too much just yet.
Taking the elevated number 6 train to Fordham Road, the city had decided to paste stickers over the windows of the many abandoned buildings. A flowerpot and other domesticated emblems hiding the gaping holes behind them for commuters in both rail and car.
Getting off at Fordham Road. Thousands of shoppers moving up and down the wide street, which at the time was considered the borderline between the South Bronx and the better districts to the north. Noise, insults, and come-ons in Spanish for both consumer and merchants. Nobody paid me the slightest bit of attention.
I turn off the road and past a security guard. Immediately greeted by rolling green lawns and lush, leafy trees, a mostly Gothic campus so shockingly and immediately bucolic it is used as a stand-in for an Ivy League university in car ads, or so my friend told me.
Our adventures usually took us to the neighborhood just north of the campus where many young Irish lived. Crowded, lively bars, immediately friendly to you, especially if you were associated with Fordham, at the time a buffer zone between south and north Bronx.
Fast-forward about 10 years, and those bars had become isolated Gaelic outposts, ready to be taken over by the relentless tide of Hispanic migration.
"It's all gone to shit," said one of the few older men in one of these taverns. Only real Irish place left in the Bronx was Woodlawn, past the subway's end. Ireland, as we now know, has become "The Celtic Tiger," actually drawing in many more migrants than it churns out, for once in its sad, ever-gloried-in-song history.
A last memory of my friend at Fordham. We went to Sunnyside in Queens, also an Irish haven. The Irish were playing heavily-favored Italy in the World Cup in soccer that afternoon. Much to everyone's astonishment, the Irish won, 1-0. The crowd rushed outside and took over the street in pint-smashing celebration.
It's too bad to remember too much just yet.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
A Drunken Coney Island of the MInd
There were just two of us, or maybe three. All around 20 years old, and addled with Testosterone. We charged out of the Corner Bistro and started running all over the parked cars on Jane St. Few car alarms around then. Nonetheless, a woman raised her second-floor window and told us to shut up. The shock was too much for even desultury, mandated "fuck you's."
You mean that the West Village was not our drunken Disneyland? That real people actually lived here? The best parts of the West Village look like a stage-set, with perfectly proportioned townhouses and angled streets. It never entered into my drunken mind that actual human beings lived there, instead of actors playing a role.
Later, you would spot a bunch of rowdies being loud and stupid, and figure that they were the equivalent of white trash who had come from Jersey on the PATH train. You couldn't believe that you had once been like them.
We never, though, participated in the wooos! That seemed to be the call of the meathead. Check out Hoboken near the train terminal and you will hear, far and wide, this buttheaded screaming into the night. How something so obviously dumb have any attraction to it?
If there was a Wikipedia entry on it, it might read something like this:
wooo! or alternately whoo! is a commonly expressed cry of the weekend night by young men who have drank too much alcohol. Whether this barking idiocy actually attracts women is unknown, but everyone in the partiers general area hates their guts while they grow their beer guts. Whoo! is commonly found in Cancun on Spring Break, financial service workers in New Jersey and the eastern Upper East Side, and all areas near frat houses.
Wait! Someone just tossed me a Coors Light. I too can have a good time now, since as every sports ad will tell you, or strongly suggest, you can't have fun without beer. Whoo!
You mean that the West Village was not our drunken Disneyland? That real people actually lived here? The best parts of the West Village look like a stage-set, with perfectly proportioned townhouses and angled streets. It never entered into my drunken mind that actual human beings lived there, instead of actors playing a role.
Later, you would spot a bunch of rowdies being loud and stupid, and figure that they were the equivalent of white trash who had come from Jersey on the PATH train. You couldn't believe that you had once been like them.
We never, though, participated in the wooos! That seemed to be the call of the meathead. Check out Hoboken near the train terminal and you will hear, far and wide, this buttheaded screaming into the night. How something so obviously dumb have any attraction to it?
If there was a Wikipedia entry on it, it might read something like this:
wooo! or alternately whoo! is a commonly expressed cry of the weekend night by young men who have drank too much alcohol. Whether this barking idiocy actually attracts women is unknown, but everyone in the partiers general area hates their guts while they grow their beer guts. Whoo! is commonly found in Cancun on Spring Break, financial service workers in New Jersey and the eastern Upper East Side, and all areas near frat houses.
Wait! Someone just tossed me a Coors Light. I too can have a good time now, since as every sports ad will tell you, or strongly suggest, you can't have fun without beer. Whoo!
Harlem: 2 Tough 4U?
Most of the time the topless double-decker tour bus chugged its way along 125th Street without incident. We passed peacefully through Harlem's main street and then it was down Fifth Avenue, crossing the great sociological divide of E. 96th Street, where luxury condo owners can look right into the public housing projects smack up against them (and vice-versa).
Then there was the black Isrealites and the mooning.
For anyone who hasn't encountered these loons (they used to be around Times Square all the time), the black Israelites are a textbook example of mass psychosis. They believe (I think) that they were the original Jews, the original chosen people. Since they are always shouting into a bullhorn, I could never tell what exactly they wanted. Israel back to its "original" owners? A land where they could get paid for shouting at people? Government money for them to shut up, for chrissakes?
Anyway, the bus stopped at the corner of 8th and 125th and they unloaded on the tourists, shouting "Crackers" and "Uncle Toms" and various other garbled epithets.
The tourists were terrified, while I tried to explain that everyone in New York knows these guys are deluded and basically harmless.
As we pulled up to out stop at the Apollo Theater, a quiet Southern black couple asked me if it was OK to get out there. "We're from Virginia, we're not used to this," they said. So it fell on me, blond-haired and blue-eyed, to assure them that the "Capital of Black America," was perfectly safe for black people. The Israelites were a few blocks back by then, and so was the guy that mooned us from his window.
In the paper today I saw that the City Council has voted yes to "upzoning" 125. This is despite the shouting from the balcony of protesters who fear the strip will become another Duane Reade-infested Condo-land. The strip is ugly but lively now, but the pressures on Manhattan real estate are just too much for nothing to change.
When Grey Line began running bus tours through Haight-Ashbury in the 60s, the residents would sometimes run alongside holding up mirrors. This is of course what you try to avoid as a guide: turning a neighborhood into a human zoo. My solution is usually to bore the tourists with architecture and planning instead of pointing at people. Most of the time.
Then there was the black Isrealites and the mooning.
For anyone who hasn't encountered these loons (they used to be around Times Square all the time), the black Israelites are a textbook example of mass psychosis. They believe (I think) that they were the original Jews, the original chosen people. Since they are always shouting into a bullhorn, I could never tell what exactly they wanted. Israel back to its "original" owners? A land where they could get paid for shouting at people? Government money for them to shut up, for chrissakes?
Anyway, the bus stopped at the corner of 8th and 125th and they unloaded on the tourists, shouting "Crackers" and "Uncle Toms" and various other garbled epithets.
The tourists were terrified, while I tried to explain that everyone in New York knows these guys are deluded and basically harmless.
As we pulled up to out stop at the Apollo Theater, a quiet Southern black couple asked me if it was OK to get out there. "We're from Virginia, we're not used to this," they said. So it fell on me, blond-haired and blue-eyed, to assure them that the "Capital of Black America," was perfectly safe for black people. The Israelites were a few blocks back by then, and so was the guy that mooned us from his window.
In the paper today I saw that the City Council has voted yes to "upzoning" 125. This is despite the shouting from the balcony of protesters who fear the strip will become another Duane Reade-infested Condo-land. The strip is ugly but lively now, but the pressures on Manhattan real estate are just too much for nothing to change.
When Grey Line began running bus tours through Haight-Ashbury in the 60s, the residents would sometimes run alongside holding up mirrors. This is of course what you try to avoid as a guide: turning a neighborhood into a human zoo. My solution is usually to bore the tourists with architecture and planning instead of pointing at people. Most of the time.
MLK - Boulevard of Broken Screams
Found back in the vaults:
A lot of people know the comedian Chris Rock's joke about the Martin Luther King Boulevards that inevitably seem to run through the worst part of whatever city's ghetto where they've changed the street signs and little else.
In the joke, a friend who's lost calls Rock and says he's on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and what should he do? "Run!" shouts Rock.
This week was the 40th anniversary of MLK's death, and TV obligingly played clips from the civil rights movement in the South. No diminishing this man's accomplishments and the role he played in finally desegregating the South: he is truly up there with Gandhi in actually living the philosophy of non-violent resistance. His legacy brought the South into the 20th century, and a nation closer to its ideals of freedom and justice for all.
But:
It sometimes seems that King is white America's token Negro. His memory is invoked constantly by the media, who rightly believe that King speaks to our best selves as a nation. However, it often seems like there were no other black men of consequence in American history or society.
No W.E.B Dubois. No Frederick Douglass. No Marcus Garvey. No Richard Wright (author of Invisible Man) or Langston Hughes. And certainly no Black Panthers or Eldridge Cleaver ("Soul on Ice").
This generation of ghetto youth seem to care little of civil rights icons or anyone else but the present of rap, sports, and movie stars. In Washington, everyone has long gotten over the terrible irony of teenagers shooting each other at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Boulevards in the Anacostia section of the city.
To today's inner-city youth, who are Malcolm X and MLK but some old guys in a distant, black-and-white TV past who dressed in coat and tie, like a white businessman? What do they matter when one is constantly in fear of lethal violence?
King himself had problems relating to young ghetto black men when he came up to Chicago for a 1968 march that featured bottle-throwing white youths telling him to go home. They didn't want to integrate with what they saw as ghetto dysfunction: drugs, crime, random violence etc.
Northern black youths were already so disaffected that Malcolm X at his most radical, if anyone, appeared to be a better fit to them.
So the second part of King's dream, for a society of economic equals, has never been realized. Young inner city black males have never been brought into the mainstream, both culturally and economically. There is hope that an Obama presidency would have the moral high-ground to finally begin to address the nation's biggest social problem. However, the mere presence of a black president would do little to to convince those in gangs and protecting their turf with weapons to throw them down.
Constantly invoking a civil-rights icon like King is not likely to do anything for them either. Society needs to make some tough decisions, like banning most handgun sales (rifles and other weapons permitted because they can protect a homeowners property and are difficult to conceal).
It also needs some kind of program for those without a high-school education, to open up pathways to economic independence, independent from the drug trade. My mother always said that public policy should imitate what rich people do, since they have the financial freedom to do exactly what they want. In the case of ghetto teens, that would mean sending them away to a prep school, just like the rich. These institutions would have to have strict controls, because otherwise they would become simply juvenile halls, with all the intimidation, gangs, and violence that these teens are supposedly getting away from. A few demonstration programs in the 1960's during the summers became basically that and were quickly de-funded.
Just a suggestion.
....you might see me, as a tour guide in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. Take a sometimes twisted ride through these three cities and elsewhere. Life in the Northeast Corridor at the turn of the century, complete with observations on the serious, the idiotic and the mind-numbingly mundane. Plus excruciating naval-gazing and suicidal tendencies (read my blog or I'll kill myself).
So climb aboard, and mind your head.
A lot of people know the comedian Chris Rock's joke about the Martin Luther King Boulevards that inevitably seem to run through the worst part of whatever city's ghetto where they've changed the street signs and little else.
In the joke, a friend who's lost calls Rock and says he's on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and what should he do? "Run!" shouts Rock.
This week was the 40th anniversary of MLK's death, and TV obligingly played clips from the civil rights movement in the South. No diminishing this man's accomplishments and the role he played in finally desegregating the South: he is truly up there with Gandhi in actually living the philosophy of non-violent resistance. His legacy brought the South into the 20th century, and a nation closer to its ideals of freedom and justice for all.
But:
It sometimes seems that King is white America's token Negro. His memory is invoked constantly by the media, who rightly believe that King speaks to our best selves as a nation. However, it often seems like there were no other black men of consequence in American history or society.
No W.E.B Dubois. No Frederick Douglass. No Marcus Garvey. No Richard Wright (author of Invisible Man) or Langston Hughes. And certainly no Black Panthers or Eldridge Cleaver ("Soul on Ice").
This generation of ghetto youth seem to care little of civil rights icons or anyone else but the present of rap, sports, and movie stars. In Washington, everyone has long gotten over the terrible irony of teenagers shooting each other at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Boulevards in the Anacostia section of the city.
To today's inner-city youth, who are Malcolm X and MLK but some old guys in a distant, black-and-white TV past who dressed in coat and tie, like a white businessman? What do they matter when one is constantly in fear of lethal violence?
King himself had problems relating to young ghetto black men when he came up to Chicago for a 1968 march that featured bottle-throwing white youths telling him to go home. They didn't want to integrate with what they saw as ghetto dysfunction: drugs, crime, random violence etc.
Northern black youths were already so disaffected that Malcolm X at his most radical, if anyone, appeared to be a better fit to them.
So the second part of King's dream, for a society of economic equals, has never been realized. Young inner city black males have never been brought into the mainstream, both culturally and economically. There is hope that an Obama presidency would have the moral high-ground to finally begin to address the nation's biggest social problem. However, the mere presence of a black president would do little to to convince those in gangs and protecting their turf with weapons to throw them down.
Constantly invoking a civil-rights icon like King is not likely to do anything for them either. Society needs to make some tough decisions, like banning most handgun sales (rifles and other weapons permitted because they can protect a homeowners property and are difficult to conceal).
It also needs some kind of program for those without a high-school education, to open up pathways to economic independence, independent from the drug trade. My mother always said that public policy should imitate what rich people do, since they have the financial freedom to do exactly what they want. In the case of ghetto teens, that would mean sending them away to a prep school, just like the rich. These institutions would have to have strict controls, because otherwise they would become simply juvenile halls, with all the intimidation, gangs, and violence that these teens are supposedly getting away from. A few demonstration programs in the 1960's during the summers became basically that and were quickly de-funded.
Just a suggestion.
....you might see me, as a tour guide in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. Take a sometimes twisted ride through these three cities and elsewhere. Life in the Northeast Corridor at the turn of the century, complete with observations on the serious, the idiotic and the mind-numbingly mundane. Plus excruciating naval-gazing and suicidal tendencies (read my blog or I'll kill myself).
So climb aboard, and mind your head.
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