Sunday, July 20, 2008

The Natives Are Restless (by Phila)

A spectre is haunting Santa Monica. Austin Hill explains:
While speaking with a friend who is a yacht broker in the affluent Santa Monica coastal region of Southern California, I asked “what do people in your circles have to say about the presidential election? Are they even talking about it? What do they say?”

“Yes, people are talking about it” my friend assured me. “It’s assumed that Obama will win. But if he doesn’t, there’s a fear that South-Central LA will erupt in riots, kind of like what happened after the trial of the cops that beat Rodney King in 1992.”
Not surprisingly, this confirms what Hill already suspected.
I see it in email messages from readers of this column. I hear it from listeners to my own talk radio program at Washington, DC’s 630 WMAL, and the many other talk shows I guest host around the country.
I suppose there'd be no sense in asking black Americans whether they intend to riot if Obama loses; they're hardly likely to be as honest and forthcoming as a white Santa Monica yacht broker. Besides, even if they answered in the negative, we all know how...impressionable they are; if they see a couple of their peers rioting, they won't be able to help themselves.

Obama knows this, of course, and that's undoubtedly why he's taking such pains to rile 'em up:
Think about it. On both implicit and explicit levels, Obama’s rhetoric suggests that the annoyances, the risks, the hardships and insecurities of your existence are the result of various injustices done to you, and that he alone can correct those injustices.

If a business executive earns exponentially more money than you do, this is an injustice and he will correct it. If you bought a house and are now having difficulty making the payments, this is an injustice and he will correct it. If you do not have “free healthcare,” this is an injustice and he will correct it. The fact that nuclear weapons exist in the world is an injustice, and he will correct it. If you purchased toys imported from China that turned out to be defective, that is an injustice and he will correct it (yes, he actually delivered a speech entitled “Safer Toys For Our Children” in Iowa last December, two days after Christmas). And if you believe, as he apparently does, that “rich people” just simply “have too much already,” well that is most certainly an injustice and he will correct it.
I'd be overjoyed if all this were true. But as far as I know, Obama isn't offering "free healthcare." Nor, sad to say, does he intend to send a cadre of Kalishnikov-wielding class warriors 'round to Ira Rennert's place. His campaign rhetoric on nuclear weapons is heavily qualified, and seems to me to favor redundant deterrence for the foreseeable future. While he did complain about "defective" Chinese toys, he's certainly not alone in that; even the Toy Industry Association has requested better regulation.

But facts are stupid things. When it comes to questions of race, we must be guided by fantasy: Obama is promising "his people" that they'll be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon, and we know what'll happen when he's rejected by real Americans for being a Muslim-Hindu-Marxist firebrand: days and nights of rioting and looting, during which no decent white woman will dare to venture out of doors. Four out of five yacht brokers agree!

Though Hill never uses the phrase, it seems clear that the problem here is the same sense of "black entitlement" that has congested our ghettoes with Welfare Cadillacs and our Ivy-League schools with sullen Ebonics majors straight outta Compton.
[I]t’s not difficult to imagine how anything short of an Obama presidency could be viewed by some in America as yet another injustice. And if Obama’s inevitable destiny is disrupted by something so trivial as the American electorate, this could be deemed an injustice that trumps all others.
I'm sure it's not difficult to imagine. I'm sure it's much easier than imagining that Hill's casual, basically approving invocation of racial animus and paranoia in "the affluent Santa Monica coastal region of Southern California" might undercut his theory that injustice is something blacks have invented to excuse their own failings. Like most racial theorists in his "circles," Hill demonstrates what he sets out to deny.