As ever in this age of Donald Trump, politicians and journalists are reducing the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday to a debate over Mr. Trump’s words and intentions. That’s a mistake no matter what you think of the President, because the larger poison driving events like those in Virginia is identity politics and it won’t go away when Mr. Trump inevitably does.Still more.
The particular pathology on display in Virginia was the white nationalist movement led today by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke and Brad Griffin. They alone are to blame for the violence that occurred when one of their own drove a car into peaceful protesters, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.
The Spencer crowd courts publicity and protests, and they chose the progressive university town of Charlottesville with malice aforethought. They used the unsubtle Ku Klux Klan symbolism of torches in a Friday night march, and they seek to appear as political martyrs as a way to recruit more alienated young white men.
Political conservatives even more than liberals need to renounce these racist impulses, and the good news is that this is happening. The driver has been charged with murder under Virginia law, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened a federal civil-rights investigation and issued a statement condemning the violence: “When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.” Many prominent conservatives also denounced the white-nationalist movement.
Mr. Trump was widely criticized for his initial statement Saturday afternoon that condemned the hatred “on many sides” but failed to single out the white nationalists. Notably, David Duke and his allies read Mr. Trump’s statement as attacking them and criticized the President for doing so.
The White House nonetheless issued a statement Sunday saying Mr. Trump “includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups” in his condemnation. As so often with Mr. Trump, his original statement missed an opportunity to speak like a unifying political leader.
Yet the focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left. The politics of white supremacy was a poison on the right for many decades, but the civil-rights movement rose to overcome it, and it finally did so in the mid-1960s with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s language of equal opportunity and color-blind justice.
That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.
The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.
A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.
Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause, though as President he now has a particular obligation to renounce it. So do other politicians. Yet the only mission of nearly every Democrat we observed on the weekend was to use the “white supremacist” cudgel against Mr. Trump—as if that is the end of the story...
The planet has become radioactive. Humans — or, the creatures that were once humans — live on a shelf suspended above the soil, their skin nearly translucent and tattooed with the literal stories of their own existence. There is only one person who can save them from a brutal overlord — a child soldier, destined to become a martyr to the cause of existence. This is her story; this is The Book of Joan (source).
Burt Reynolds on the cover of today's @LATimes Calendar Section (yes I still read it lol). #Hollywood pic.twitter.com/M2CT3p4LeB
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 13, 2017
The country was two years out of Vietnam and still bruised by Watergate when a wise guy in a Pontiac Trans Am roared through a movie that celebrated and poked fun at Southern culture with the affable charm of a moonshiner whispering tall tales in a roadhouse on a humid night.RTWT.
“Smokey and the Bandit” is 40 years old, a raucous good ol’ boy tale that made Burt Reynolds a brand and left the screen crackling with country music, CB radios, car chases and the irascible and out-foxed Sheriff Buford T. Justice, played with gun-toting aplomb by Jackie Gleason. The movie is the South winking at itself, playing stereotypes for humor and laughing along at caricatures. It was a blockbuster.
It arrived as America was drifting from the turbulence of the ’60s and into the shaken aftermath of a misbegotten war in Southeast Asia and the disgrace of President Nixon’s resignation. “Smokey” was a salve, a lightweight rush of steel, beer and corny one-liners that epitomized an escapist (some would argue vacuous) pop culture as it raced through a land that flew the Rebel flag and strummed tunes of Dixie.
That folksy if simplistic notion drove other films and TV shows, including “The Dukes of Hazzard,” but Hollywood’s light-heartedness often belied the South’s deeper conflicts and scars over racism and civil rights in an often brutal history. That vexed legacy has been roused in the recent backlash over HBO’s “Confederate,” a proposed alternative history series that reimagines the South seceded from the North during the Civil War and continues to practice slavery today.
The cultural battleground the South has become also complicated portrayals of white working-class men who felt isolated and disenfranchised at a time of shifting demographics and technologically driven job markets. The country, many of them felt, was slipping beyond them, misunderstanding their pride and insecurities while turning them into punchlines and cautionary tales. Reynolds, who grew up in Florida, said he was long disturbed by films that mischaracterized the South.“Lots of movies ridiculed Southerners, and I resented them,” Reynolds, 81, wrote in his 2015 memoir “But Enough About Me.” “I wanted to play a Southern hero, a guy who was proud of being from the South. … Most of those folks are middle-of-the-road, not left or right. They believe in God, they work hard, and they love their country. They’re the people I grew up with, and I like them.”
He continued: “But Billy Bob Thornton had the last word. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘down South, we consider “Smokey and the Bandit” a documentary.’”
Being a Jewish fella, I don't hold much brief for white supremacists and neo-Nazis. But until this Saturday, I hadn't seen a lot of them around lately. And I've been going about the country quite a bit for the last couple of years, hitting roughly half the states, including some like Mississippi where the Klan was once riding high.Still more.
I'm happy to report that on my visit to the black-owned Two Sister's Kitchen in the capital of that state, Jackson, blacks and whites were both equally, and contentedly in my eyes, braving the criticism of their cardiologists for what is reputed to be the best fried chicken in town. I recommend it wholeheartedly (no pun intended).
Nevertheless, the types who surfaced in Charlottesville on Saturday are certainly human beings of the most repellent and disgusting sort, murderous too -- pretty much violent, evil sociopaths. I wouldn't mind if they were all rounded up, put in a space ship, and sent on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri.
But how many of them are there really in this land of ours and is this an epidemic?
Well, it's hard to tell because statistics are scant and various organizations have their reasons for inflating or deflating the numbers. But we could start with the History Channel (history.com), which informs us that the KKK, at its height in the 1920s, had four million members. Since the population then was just over one hundred million, that's close to four percent of the country -- in other words, really bad. There were a helluva lot of murderous racists around.
By the 1990s, however, the same source tells us the Klan was down to a paltry 6,000-10,000 people creeps nationwide. Has it gone up since then? Hard to say, but if so, not much.
Well, okay, the Klan, although it's the most famous and features the ever-popular David Duke, is not the only organization of wretched white supremacist nut cases. There are a number of others. So for the sake of argument, let's say there are as many as 100,000 white supremacists in America today. (This is undoubtedly a vast exaggeration, but let's use it, as I said, for the sake of argument.)
Meanwhile, since the 1920s, our population has more than tripled to some 325 million. Using the figure of 100,000 white supremacists (not many of whom made it to Charlottesville fortunately), this puts the percentage of white supremacists in the U.S. at a puny 0.03%. Terrible people, yes, but no epidemic by any stretch of the imagination. By way of comparison, an estimated 3 billion pizzas are sold every year in the U.S. There's an epidemic.
More to the point, are there more of these white supremacists than members of the equally violent and disgusting Antifa movement? Again statistics are hard to come by. (Both sides like to wear masks.) But I tend to doubt it. If anything, Antifa has been far more active, until Saturday.
ICYMI: "Going for the best bday nap EVER... & then I couldn't sleep. Afraid of FOMO! #blessed #grateful … https://t.co/IK1KUAHwCX
— Angie Harmon (@Angie_Harmon) August 13, 2017
You reap what you sow...https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/LeDmkXhwaz
— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) August 12, 2017
SEATTLE — The Angels have reached a notable, although meaningless, moment.More.
They are currently sitting in the second wild card spot, after running their winning streak to five games with a come-from-behind, 6-3 victory over the Seattle Mariners on Saturday night.
“It gives us a little taste of what’s left to come,” Jesse Chavez said.
The Angels have taken the first three games of this series against the team that was leading the race for the second wild card when it began. The Mariners were since passed by the Minnesota Twins, who also lost on Saturday to allow the Angels to pass them both.
At 60-58, the Angels still have 44 games to play, which is why being in playoff position now means little.
Asked if there was any small significance to draw from the standings now, Manager Mike Scioscia said flatly: “No. Nope. We’ve got a game tomorrow.”
To JC Ramirez, the standings don’t mean as much as the way the Angels are currently playing. They have now won 11 of their last 15 games.
“You’ve seen the tough season we’ve been through and now we finally gained that spot,” Ramirez said. “People that weren’t hitting are now hitting. People who weren’t pitching very well are now doing good. This is the kind of team we are. This is the kind of team we were supposed to be since the beginning of the season.”
The characteristic that has been on display most lately is a penchant for late-inning heroics. They scored the decisive runs in the eighth and ninth innings in all three victories so far in Seattle. And in the past two games, they overcame seventh-inning deficits, of four runs on Friday and two on Saturday...
