A HOPELESS RIOT

Barack Obama gave an address at the Hampton University Annual Ministers’ Conference on June 5.

I’m not going to go into it exhaustively but one thing caught my attention. He speaks of the 15th anniversary of the Los Angles riots and reports that he remembers “the sense of despair and powerlessness” that fueled it. That same sense of hopelessness surrounds many communities today, he goes on to say.

It occurred to me that the most significant riot, then and now, was the Watts rioting of 1965. It took place – as mentioned in recent Posts – within days of the triumph of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1965 into law. The long and arduous struggle to fulfill the promises made to America’s blacks finally bore fruit a century later. In that stupendous Moment of July 1965 the country (minus the Southrons) experienced the successful conclusion of a refreshed struggle for black civil rights that had been building throughout World War Two (then less than two decades before) and most vividly in the decade of TV coverage between Rosa Parks’s refusal to go to the back of the bus and LBJ’s signing of the Act.

That ‘Moment’ in 1965 had to be – both in the short term and the long term perspective – one of the most hopeful in American history. All Americans could rejoice in the Act and black Americans could now contemplate a future far richer than any previous generation of blacks in the country. And yet within days Watts erupted in the most violent and sustained riots in modern American history. And that outbreak was followed a series of urban riots (distinct from antiwar protests) that surpassed in duration and intensity anything ever seen here, lasting through the ‘long, hot summers’ of ’65, ’66, ’67, and (arguably) into ’68.

The LA riots of 1992 failed to surpass the Watts riots in the sense that Americans had seen this type of thing before. But the two (sets of) riots were similar in that each took place at what was a Moment of great hope: in ’65 for ‘the negro’ and for America, and in ’92 for America and the world. When we look at that Moment in 1992 it seems weirdly counterintuitive: decades and dozens of billions had been spent in special programs and practices domestically, and just months before the riots the USSR itself had fallen without war – yielding a horizon of almost inconceivable progress and prosperity for America and world.

The L.A. police of the day certainly behaved in an unlovely fashion, and on national TV, but then Rodney King was – in the event – a rather unlovely gent himself, although nothing justifies lusty police indulgence in sidewalk ‘justice’.

I don’t pretend to have any or ‘the’ answer as to what caused any of these riots. But the list of causes most surely has to involve something(s) besides ‘hopelessness’. Or instead of it.

Certainly, the timing of the Watts riots not only raises large questions as to causation but also generated its own consequences that extended far beyond matters of ‘race relations’ and ‘black issues’. Coming as they did almost instantly after the passage of the Act – such a huge risk for the Democrats as a Party – the riots had at least two vast effects.

First, politically, they frightened the Democrats so terribly that the Party desperately sought votes en bloc. This led to the Party’s addle-headed embrace of any and every ‘Identity-revolution’’ that appeared; and since the PR elements of each Identity’s Advocacy began to deploy the Israeli schematic outlined in the previous Post, then the Democrats effectively welcomed the vampire of a very un-democratic, indeed anti-democratic, process and praxis in through the door, over and over again (contributing hugely to what Al Gore now terms “the strangeness of our national discourse”). And also politically, the Democrats embraced Israel as much as an enticement to domestic votes as to counter Soviet influence in the oil-rich Middle East.

Second, the Democrats accepted the utterly unshakable but also utterly unsayable commitment not only to the State of Israel (and without a Treaty to publicly formalize things) but to the unspoken proposition that ANYthing that State did in the pursuit of its interests was both justifiable and good. This seemed innocuous and ‘symbolic’ enough for a short while at the beginning, especially since Israel was at the time both ‘powerless’ and a ‘victim’ (or heir to the Victimery) of the Holocaust. But by the time of the USS Liberty incident and into the inevitable Palestinian push-back and Israeli counter-push-back of the early 1970s this stance had pretty much married the U.S. to … not a corpse certainly, but to a rather rambunctious, self-willed and not-altogether nice Israeli tomboy.

And in 1991, with the long dreamed-of and hoped-for dissolution of the USSR, with the half-century-long threat of atomic war thus dissolved, the USA was constrained to see itself through the eyes of its ‘ally’: as a nation ‘surrounded’ by the probability of ‘immediate destruction’, the only response to which would be the assertive cultivation of its role as Sole Hyperpower in foreign affairs and as a wary, suspicious potential victim of obstructive, distracting treasonous dissent in its domestic affairs. And perhaps as the pre-emptive aggressor who would secure the best assets of a dwindling world resource, and protect its smaller ‘allies’, and ‘make the world safe for democracy’ all in one slam-dunk, bravura performance.

It is certainly curious to go back to the 1960s and review the laudable, hallmark American Jewish concern for minorities and its concomitant and understandable support for a reduction in the ‘Christian’ presence in the public sphere (not only in Christianity’s acidly queasy fundamentalist mutation but even the mainline-church variant). And then to observe the Israeli lobby’s robust but theologically illogical embrace of the Neocons’ Fundamentalist allies in the 1990s. Politics makes strange religion.

Was the Democratic Party in LBJ’s time so thoroughly rattled by the almost unthinking and certainly unpredicted violence of the Watts riots that it desperately forged (unofficially) a pact of steel with the State of Israel that has locked it (and Us) into the Middle East even unto the toils and turmoils of the present day?

Did Watts play a role in that?

In order to understand our present foreign policy, and in order to understand how Our politics and society ‘work’ nowadays, as well as to grasp the dynamics of the black community with the larger national society, We need to look carefully and think things through. These matters are too important to be left to self-serving platitudes.

Which is not in any way to minimize the ongoing development of the African-American community within the national community. But Accuracy and Truth – as We have learned in Iraq – is utterly essential to success in the affairs of this world. It was not lost on the French that the famous ‘Theory’ of the 1950s, quickly expatriated until adopted by the Advocacies over here, was a creature of literature departments, not of science departments and not of the ‘real world’. The presumption that there is nothing that cannot be ‘changed’ by changing the perceiver’s perception – that everything important and vital in an individual’s and a nation’s existence can be changed because it’s all in our head and we can change that – has been hugely oversold.

Imposing upon Us a crash-immersion in Theory was a second powerful source of the Political Correctness that has rendered Us now so immature as a People. It had to be a ‘crash course’ because the Democrats were desperate for votes, revolutions are always impatient (as a matter of self-preservation), and nobody was really sure if the ‘solutions’ being implemented were really rationally and logically connected to the probability of a successful outcome. No kicking of tires could be permitted. If they told you that on a car lot you’d walk away forthwith. But it works differently, they would like Us to believe, on a ‘national’ level; everything’s on the level … if you just hold your head the right way. Yes, and didn’t all those Five-Year Tractor Plans and Seven-Year Cement Plans work gloriously?

But thirdly, Watts gripped the freshly-beating heart of America and almost stopped it. If something that had been so good and so long brooded into existence, at great cost in sweat and tears and blood, could evince so instantaneous and violent a reaction, then what had We done wrong or failed to take into account?

We didn’t ask that question then; We didn’t ask it on that afternoon of the Mission-Accomplished soap opera, when the first ‘post combat’ American deaths were reported – as if by inadvertence – on the inside pages. We ignored Reality and thus passed up Our chance to influence it; and now it’s mutated under the power of other forces acting upon it unchecked, and We must face what We would rather not.

This is a Moment of Truth. Let Us enter into it with at least the same amount of energy that We sent our soldiers to enter into Iraq. We and the world shall be the better for it.