The racial situation is getting so charged that even intelligent people are failing to find an adequate tone. The usually brilliant Ta-Nehisi Coates has come out with the following disturbing slip of the tongue:
For activists and protesters radicalized by the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, this weekend’s killing may seem to pose a great obstacle. In fact, it merely points to the monumental task in front of them. Garner’s death, particularly, seemed to offer some hope.
I love Coates’s journalism but I can’t make myself go on reading. (I know he didn’t mean it the way it sounds but it still came out like this, and it sounds absolutely horrible.)
And then there are individuals who are trying to use tragedy to promote their writing careers by publishing screeds like the following one:
You are not going to stop. We understand that. Your inability to share and your fear of retribution goads you to try even harder to solidify your power. Making us, from America to Australia to West Papua, dependent upon you for food, (terminator seeds, anyone?) water (a commodity?), and a place to be, (What? You say you ‘control’ this land? But I live here!) Pushing your doctrine-driven education, not for the wonder of knowledge but to corral us into a self-defeating way of life that serves only you. Fomenting fear and hatred and violence because it pays so well. (And is so effectively distracting.)
I believe that it was an enormous mistake to attach the murder of Michael Brown to the very silly narrative of bad, mean, “militarized” police forces. Wafer wasn’t police, Zimmerman wasn’t police, and there are many other killers who weren’t police. This isn’t about police or anybody’s unresolved Daddy issues. This is about racism.
Now a murderer goes and kills two police officers because we were all collectively so freaked out about what was actually going on that we substituted what was happening with an extraneous narrative. Yes, the murderer would have killed no matter what anybody else did. Still, the officers are dead and we are all now engaged in a debate of how everybody feels about police, which ultimately is about nothing other than the degree of everybody’s psychological health.
Now everybody can publicly indulge in the delightful exhibition of their psychological wounds. “Police can do no wrong” and “police are all evil” are not opposing positions. They are actually exactly the same and stem from a single root. What people who are making both statements (or any variation thereof) are actually saying is, “My father complex is so problematic that it makes me want to explode from the inside!”
Trayvon Martin is dead. Michael Brown is dead. Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu are now also dead. But the esteemed public is still in the grip of its father complex and can talk of nothing else.
Clarissa's Blog 
Now that reads: “The response to Garner’s death…”
LikeLike
Good. Because the original version looked horrible.
LikeLike
Clarissa, sorry I missed you the other day, but can we talk on skype again some time soon? I really need to ask you something.
LikeLike
I’m not getting father complex vibes off of the first link. Rather I’m getting “let’s react to someone else’s reaction” ad infinitum. I do agree that people like hooking the latest news into their overarching narrative of the world regardless of fit or facts. By the rubric of “politically motivated cop killer” everyone should be chanting Christopher Dorner’sname because he left behind a manifesto detailing his grievances with the police. And yet, I’ve heard no mention of it, mainly because those events happened over a year. This latest murderer strikes me as completely unrelated to any cause and more like a suicide-by-cop guy who just latched onto the latest news after attempting to kill his girlfriend.
LikeLike
No, the quotes were simply an example of misguided writing.
LikeLike
For those with political motivations, there are also the anti-government, anti-police husband-wife militants who gunned down the cops in Nevada earlier this year (their rhetoric was “don’t tread on me”). http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/09/justice/las-vegas-shooting/
Also, in Pennsylvania there was a “survivalist” who shot state troopers, though it isn’t clear why (maybe again, he sees himself as a rebel against the government more generally).
LikeLike
This is what I was talking about when I made mention of subjective and objective morality in one of my videos. Subjective morality says, “How do I feel about the police?” Objective morality is as remote from “how do I feel about this?” as possible. People need to be educated that their feelings do not really matter. Of course they matter to them, but not to the objective morality of the situation.
LikeLike
In reality, if the course of justice is going to be based on people’s collective maturity, we will never have justice — not slowly and not fast. Instead we will have various manifestations of childish idealism, followed by disappointment at the way the world works, followed by harshness.
LikeLike
It’s why feminism doesn’t work any more as a system of solidarity, because It has reduced itself to pure subjectivity. NOW, subjectivity may be a good thing to acquire if one has not developed any of it yet, but to resort to pure subjectivity is undialectical. The whole refrain, “Well your feminism and your patriarchy may be different to mine, therefore I cannot help you!” Is a feature of this reduction into childish idealism, followed by harshness against those who do not support one’s own, personal agenda.
By the way, and on topic, somewhat, I put together my Pops’ memoir last night (which I received via dictation, journalistic probing, etc.) and he will get to make amendments and emendments, but talk about a rigid morality and walking in lockstep. Unfortunately, today’s feminism is no corrective for this, but rather (as the article above implies) the mirror image. If you want a system that will do absolutely nothing about extreme patriarchy but will obfuscate the issues and wallow in childish idealism followed by harshness, please given contemporary feminism a run for its money!
Anyway, it’s all done now.
LikeLike
Welcome to the desert of the meta-narrative.
LikeLike
“This is about racism”
It’s actually about people getting riled up by what the media chooses to cover. White on black murder rates are actually quite low (lower than black on white murder or same-race murder rates).
You’d never know that from the US media, but it does seem to be the case.
LikeLike
This is all widely know. But people are angry about the impunity with which a murderer kills an unarmed child in broad daylight and suffers no punishment. To the contrary, the murderer gets a huge cash bonus. That’s what makes me angry.
LikeLike