Category Archives: culture

Some Thoughts on President Obama’s Remarks on the Zimmerman/Martin Case

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I’ll leave aside President Barack Obama’s segue into his hobby horses of gun violence, the role of government in self defense (which is, of necessity, first and foremost a personal matter), and how government should manage how we think about things.  I’ll just comment on his remarks about race and the Zimmerman acquittal.

The following excerpts what I believe to be the relevant parts of his speech [emphasis added] (the full transcript of which can be found here, via The Washington Post).

Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.  And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that—that doesn’t go away.

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store.  That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.  That happens to me, at least before I was a senator.  There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.  That happens often.

And you know, I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida.  And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.
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And so the fact that sometimes that’s unacknowledged adds to the frustration.
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We need to spend some time in thinking about how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys?
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…figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society[.]

Is this following, door locking, elevator nervousness, etc occurring at the same rate today that it was 35 years ago, with no improvement?  Locks, mechanically, are a whole lot quieter today than they were 35 years ago, and many (most?) cars today lock their doors as soon as they’re put into gear or start moving the first time; I have to wonder whether lock-clicking even is audible on today’s streets.  Regardless, is this behavior really occurring today unabated?  I’ve not seen any of this in the (very thoroughly integrated) stores, or elevators, or streets—or restaurants or any other public spaces—I frequent; although I certainly did see much of this 35 years ago.  But then, I’m just a pasty white guy….

Obama speaks of the inescapability of a history of 35 years and more ago.  He talks of the inescapability of a history of nearly two generations—and more—ago, as though today’s children still are trapped in the past of their grandfathers.  Yet, what’s also, if not more so, inescapable is that men also can bring to bear the fact of great improvement in relations over these 35 years.  It’s also inescapable that blacks can—and do—recognize that not every ruling—legal, economic, or otherwise—that goes against a black man or in favor of a white or Hispanic man must, perforce, have been a racial ruling and not an honest one.  For Obama to suggest otherwise is to demean the intelligence and maturity of the “black community.”  Indeed, adding to frustration levels on this matter is his, and his liberal confreres’, insistence on wallowing in that history (which roughly coincides with the last time Obama actually was in the world before entering the cloisters of legal academe and politics) as though it were the present, rather than moving forward.

No, the history of blacks and of black treatment is not the present.  Certainly there remains racism—but today is radically different from the general history of 35 years ago that Obama insinuates remains the present.  Yes, he did pay lip service to change with his stock phrases concerning progress made; he offered them as an afterthought at the end of his remarks.

Regardless of any of the foregoing, though, is the appropriate response to following, to door-locking, to nervous purse-clutching to attack the one behaving inappropriately, to “ground and pound” that one?  Is Obama suggesting that 35 years ago—or today—he could have been the one assaulting a man whose behavior offended him?

Then Obama asked that we think about how to bolster and reinforce African-American boys.  How about, instead, thinking about how to bolster and reinforce American boys?  And American girls?  (This, though, is not done by government involvement with our children, rather by government working to protect the economic and moral environment so as to let local communities bolster and reinforce families.)

Along these lines, on the subject of his last question quoted above: one way—the best way—to help “African-American men” feel they’re a full part of “this society” would be to stop holding them separate from society and to stop singling them out for special treatment (vis., “African-American men” instead of American men (who happen to be black), or making exceptions for them because of a history that is increasingly less related to the present, or affirmative action programs).  Let them actually be a full part of society.

Finally, what does our President see when he looks out over the audience at any of his speeches?  A sea of Americans, who happen to have a variety of ethnic heritages?  Or a collection of distinct ethnic identities who happen to have American citizenship?

What Was He Thinking?

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Attorney General Eric Holder said this at the annual NAACP convention on Tuesday:

There has always been a legal defense for using deadly force if—and the “if” is important—no safe retreat is available.   But we must examine laws that take this further by eliminating the common sense and age-old requirement that people who feel threatened have a duty to retreat.

Say what!?  What age-old requirement?  Whence this?  Has he never read John Locke?  Does he think Locke wrong?  If so, based on what?

Has he never read US law?  Does he think US law is wrong?  Oh, wait….

What logic of his underlies this outlandish claim?

If we retreat when we have the means to resist, all we do is reward the criminal for his crime.  Our right to our lives and our property create in us no obligation at all to retreat, or to cede them to another solely on the basis that another wants them more than do we.

On the other hand, if “we” have a duty to retreat when threatened, surely “we” includes that threatener: he has a duty to retreat if we threaten him.

Racist Persecution Persists

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Now the racist persecution begins because of a politically incorrect verdict in a Florida trial.

Former Obama adviser Van Jones declared that “racism won” in the trial of George Zimmerman.

And

Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse fired off an incendiary stream of tweets late Saturday night suggesting that racism and politics prompted the jury to acquit George Zimmerman of all charges.

And

[From an NAACP petition] Attorney General Eric Holder [t]he Department of Justice has closely monitored the State of Florida’s prosecution of the case against George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin murder since it began.  Today, with the acquittal of George Zimmerman, it is time for the Department of Justice to act.

Presidents and a “Nation of Laws”

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President Barack Obama says, in the wake of the Zimmerman acquittal, that “we are a nation of laws.”  He says this against a backdrop of having chosen to selectively enforce (i.e., not enforce at all) immigration law is it applies to certain groups of illegal aliens, of having chosen to selectively enforce (i.e., not enforce at all) critical portions of his Obamacare law, having chosen not to pursue legal cases against those pleading out to voter intimidation, and so on.  In truth, he’s not alone in this—most American Presidents have chosen not to enforce this or that law, or this or that portion of a law.  This is done because a given President thinks it’s a bad law, it’s bad public policy to enforce it at this time, it’s bad politics to enforce it at this time, it’s….

This selective enforcement comes despite what Art II, Section 3, says about the President’s duty vis-à-vis Federal law:

…he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed….

There isn’t a caveat here, nor any wiggle room: the President must enforce Federal law.  Period.

What’s a President to do, then, when confronted with a law he (lately) believes illegitimate, or no longer useful, or…?  One way is found in the way some unions (especially police and traffic controllers) occasionally object to a bad contract or bad contract clause: strict, no exceptions enforcement of traffic law or aircraft separation in the two cases suggested.

Especially when confronted with a recalcitrant Congress, what better way to point up the absurdity of a bad law than to strictly enforce it?  Civil disobedience points up such absurdities through the protestors’ deliberate, noisy disobedience of a law and suffering the consequences, with those consequences emphasizing the absurdities.  Presidents have no option for civil disobedience; however, they can achieve the same emphasis, as police and air traffic controllers have demonstrated, by moving in the opposite direction.

What’s Up

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…with this?

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Ms. Salecl, at the fast food chain Subway we have to make half a dozen decisions before we can finally enjoy our sandwich.  Is that what you mean when you speak in your lectures about the “tyranny of choice?”

Salecl: I try to avoid places like Subway, and if I end up there I always order the same thing.  When I speak about the “tyranny of choice,” I mean an ideology that originates in the era of post-industrial capitalism.  It began with the American Dream—the idea of the self-made man, who works his way up from rags to riches.  By and by, this career concept developed into a universal life philosophy.  Today we believe we should be able to choose everything: the way we live, the way we look, even when it comes to the coffee we buy, we constantly need to weigh our decision.  That is extremely unhealthy.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why?

Salecl: Because we constantly feel stressed, overwhelmed and guilty.  Because, according to this ideology, it’s our own fault if we’re unhappy.  It means we made a bad decision.

Say, what?  Whose fault is it, then?  Who made the bad decision for us sheep?  Government?  A neighbor, sticking a gun in our ear?

She went on in this interview:

Salecl: …I don’t criticize political or electoral freedom, but capitalism’s perversion of the concept: the illusion that I hold the power over my own life.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But I do have that power.  I can decide for myself what I want, even if the thought stresses me out.

Salecl: Not at all.  A friend, who’s a psychologist, told me about a patient once: a woman who was well educated, had a good job, a house, and a loving husband.  “I did everything right in my life,” said the woman.  “But I’m still not happy.”  She never did what she herself wanted, but what she believed society expected from her.

And whose fault was that?  Oh, wait….

She repeated her theme in a TED presentation:

In our post-industrial capitalist age, says Salecl, choice, freedom and self have been elevated into an ideal—the ideal.  But the flip side are increased feelings of anxiety, guilt, and inadequacy at facing the possibility of not “making it”—that is, not reaching the ideal.  What’s strange, says Salecl, is that increasingly people turn this anxiety inward, indulging in self-critique, rather than social critique.  Ultimately this has made us unable to move toward social change; our abundance of choices has made us politically passive.

Leave it to a Liberal, politically passive and entirely dependent on a Know Better Government to tell him what to do, to be so confused by the choices available to him that he’s uncomfortable with them.  And then to project that weakness onto everyone around him.