Virtue signaling in professional sports
There continues to be no effective backlash among the citizenry against the emboldened outrage culture and liberal self-destructiveness that plague our national public culture. In the cross-hairs of new conformism today is the memory of a former middle-brow, 200-pound female radio singer who has been dead for 33 years.
Baseball’s New York Yankees, and on their heels, hockey’s Philadelphia Flyers, have both decided to stop playing Kate Smith’s famous recording of “God Bless America” before their home contests because of new attention to the old facts that Smith also recorded-- during her early career-- a pair of racially-insensitive songs-- “That’s Why Darkies Were Born” and “Pickaninny Heaven.” The Flyers-- because they had made the odd decision once of putting up a statue of Smith outside their arena-- have also removed said statue from its location. Smith can go into the proverbial trash bin of history for those who had not already effectively put her there.
I’ve decided that the sum of this pair of corporate decisions ranges somewhere on the spectrum between extremely short-sided and fucking stupid. The first of the two referenced songs was written as a satire, and was performed also by Paul Robeson, an African-American so committed to the cause of equal rights for his people during his life that he joined the Communist Party when it was considered treasonous to do so. In the latter song, presented by Smith in a 1933 film, she sings it on celluloid for “a lot of little colored children, who are listening in at an orphanage in New York City.” Both tunes were routinely performed by both black and white singers prior to World War II.
We can’t really count on the Yankees or Flyers, a pair of professional teams that, by my count, have one African-American player on their current rosters between them, to make nuanced decisions when it comes to racial sensitivity and historical context. They’re reacting from a business standpoint as safely as they can in the face of a political movement that offers anachronistic contemporary agendas that distort history, literature, and art. It costs these organizations nothing to do this.
An email from a single disgruntled fan reportedly led to the Yankees making their decision.
To pick on the team that is the more historically and culturally important of the two, it might surprise the Yankees to know that Frank Sinatra, the equally-deceased performer of their celebratory “New York, New York,” blared over the stadium sound system after each home win, appeared in black face in the 1935 Major Bowes short film
The Big Minstrel. You likely won’t see the "New York, New York" tradition end-- Jesus, I hope not-- as Sinatra is a beloved city institution in the Big Apple, whereas Smith was a Southerner-- and in respect to her already-fading memory today, disposable.
The Yankees and Flyers are acting as individual entities, with no actual concern for the wave of precedent they're participating in, but if they feel they have effectively put out the fire of outrage, they should know they are actually encouraging it to continue and to re-target. It used to be the radical right, huddled in church basements, that would obsessively scour the details of entertainment culture and make their value accusations known, now it’s the arrogant left. According to a recent poll in The Atlantic, though, 80 percent of Americans believe “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even 79 percent of those under the age of 24 agreed with that statement, and three quarters of African-Americans. It's consistent non-support, and across the board.
The Yankees were one of the very last MLB teams to field a black player. Integration didn’t take place for them until 1955, one season before Jackie Robinson
retired. The Flyers didn’t have a black player on the ice until 1974. Are they racist teams today because of their racist pasts? Clearly they'd rather have us thinking about this good will gesture and not about that. Today they are allies in the battle to stamp out bruised feelings.
Boycotts work
There lies a horrendous speed trap inside the Des Moines metro area. A very broad section of University Avenue in the northwest suburb of Windsor Heights-- with a medium to light amount of traffic at all times-- has had auto speeds held to 25 miles an hour for as long as I’ve lived here, and with several cameras installed in mobile units since 2012. New cameras are periodically being added, and during the collective timeframe of 2017 and 2018, the Windsor Heights cameras issued 73,219 violations for drivers that were at least 11 mph over the limit. That comes out to better than 100 issuances a day, and four each hour. Yes, one approximately every 15 minutes.
Fines range from $65 to up to $130 for violations inside a construction zone. The city of Windsor Heights collected approximately $1.5 million in revenue just from tickets in 2018, according to the Des Moines Register.
For each individual fine of $65-plus, the city pays out $26 to the speed camera vendor company called American Traffic Solutions, an Orwellian-named third-party camera and ticketing company that boasts on its website how many violations it polices each year-- more than a million, and that it “serves” more than 30 million people.
The company provides a product to city governments that does not afford those accused of breaking the law the opportunity to face a certifiable witness in court, and the company’s employees act as “scabs” of a sort also because the cameras fill in for working police officers, who, unlike cameras, expect fair living wages and competitive benefits, and are available to assist with public concerns on parallel and perpendicular streets. In 2017, a judge ordered money returned to drivers who had appealed their camera violations on Interstate 235 through Des Moines between 2013 and 2016. Judge Lawrence McLellan ruled that due process rights were denied when the City of Des Moines required drivers to go through unauthorized hearings in order to make their appeals. Sometimes the salivation for revenue gets ahead of the rights of the people. But we know this.
Well, some of us have been busying ourselves with a boycott of Windsor Heights businesses for some time. I thought my silent financial protest might be the only one out there, but Windsor Heights business leaders have now gone to the city council and demanded that the cameras be removed because they are feeling the pinch. Councilman Zac Bales-Henry, the only member of the board to vote against new camera installations in 2017 was asked about the $1.5 million city revenue last year and said, “To know that that much revenue is coming in is a little sickening.” Michael Libbie of the city’s Chamber of Commerce pointed out that the stretch of University through his town is built like a highway, between four and five lanes wide, and inviting drivers to speeds of 40 to 45 mph-- not the posted 25, echoing what many of us have been muttering to ourselves for years in our kitchens and living rooms as we open our mail, and in our beds late at night.
The National Motorists Association opposes speed cameras. They argue that photo radar is still radar, and can generate false readings. They contend that camera enforcement is inseparable from a revenue mission because it emphasizes volume. That is, it is not profitable to use photo radar on low volume/residential roads. Locations are always characterized by traffic volume. Furthermore, cameras can only make money in situations where speed limits are kept artificially low. It’s not politically acceptable to waste taxpayer money so the only option is to choose camera locations that have unreasonably low limits, then make sure the limits stay low. There is no proof that ticket cameras improve safety, despite claims often repeated by city officials that stem from the statistics being sold by companies that are also selling enforcement products. Finally, there is always a terrific delay between the alleged violation and notification, which makes it virtually impossible for someone to defend themselves, or even recall specifics of the moment in question.
The council is being forced to listen. Some members claim the cameras have worked because the number of tickets being issued has been reduced since the beginning of 2017, but the fact that people may be slowing down speaks not at all to the ethics or fairness of a speed trap, only to the general public knowledge that one exists. Each individual suburb-- each tiny fiefdom-- of a metropolitan area shouldn’t be permitted to set unusual restrictions upon certain types of roads that we are all accustomed to driving on. Safety stats are what matters, not total tickets issued, and definitely not numbers on revenues collected-- even though any fool can see that revenue is the goal.
Money talks for the city-- and for the area businesses as well. Money
walks then as well-- perhaps to neighboring Urbandale, if actions are not taken. A DM Register poll last year found that 54 percent of Iowa adults are opposed to any automated traffic enforcement cameras at all, with only 40 percent in support. Certainly more than 54 percent would back the idea that a community with
this much enforcement is engaged in a mission for something other than public safety.
The Leader
We sure missed seeing accurate headlines on Speaker Pelosi’s
60 Minutes appearance last night. The president watched her and fumed about a journalistic “puff piece” on Twitter while she attacked him, but the lede, buried, should have been her casual dismissal of the revolution that’s taking place inside her party.
She told the CBS News Sunday night program, dismissively, that the progressive wing of her caucus, described as being in open rebellion against moderates, amounted to “like five people.” As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and the progressives in question are self-identified socialists or democratic socialists, Pelosi remarked, “I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have their view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party.”
Wow, and look who speaks definitively for it? She believes she does, and not them, even though she maintained her grip on the leadership of the majority party this past winter seemingly at their mercy, and now for how long? When I ran for Iowa statehouse in 2008 as a member of the Iowa Green Party against an incumbent Democrat, I remember telling voters at an Iowa CCI (Citizens for Community Improvement) forum that it didn’t matter what my progressive, incumbent opponent
promised as a priority of his office. What mattered was the priorities of his party’s leadership. He argued for radical prison reform in the state, for example, but that issue didn’t matter to Democratic leadership at Iowa’s Capitol then, nor to the Democratic Party when taken as a whole, and sure enough, 11 years later, we’ve still seen nothing resembling progress or change on that issue. It has never even been raised to the level of public debate.
This is how the process works. The incumbent leadership in Washington always argues that we should trust that they know best how the proverbial sausage gets made, and Pelosi is chief among the leaders in constantly making that claim. She went on to tell
60 Minutes very specifically, “By and large, whatever orientation (House Democrats) came to Congress with, they know that we have to hold the center… that we have to go down the mainstream.”
And pray tell, Nancy, where is the center? Where is the mainstream? Can you feel it shifting under you?
Bipartisanship at work
The Trump-irrationality caucus inside the Democratic party now takes to MSNBC to nurse its wounds and rebuild its credibility after its three-year Russian conspiracy misadventure comes to an end-- hopefully, for progressives. The Special Council did not find the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, had conspired or coordinated with the Russian government, and with that, I point out that I don't get enough credit for always being right. As focuses shift, two of our shining-light, first-term Congresswomen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Ilhan Omar (MN) have signed on to a bipartisan letter to the president praising him for ending the U.S. troop involvement in Syria.
Thirteen senators and congresspersons in all, led by Republican Rand Paul and Democrat Ro Khanna, signed the letter, which also points out to its readers that Congress never approved the introduction of U.S. military forces into the conflict to begin with. In violation of the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, President Obama made the decision to engage the U.S. military starting in 2015. The group of lawmakers also wrote that they hoped the ordered withdrawal that's under way would be a model in Afghanistan as well.
This is the type of legislative action that gets you labeled unpatriotic by the military industrial state and its stenographers in the traditional media. President Trump's own party chastised him when he made the surprise withdrawal announcement in December. The Republican-led Senate voted to denounce his plans to withdraw back in February. Sponsored by the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the resolution passed 70 votes to 26. Trump's Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned his office over the plan.
Nearly every president has violated the War Powers Act that passed near the end of the Vietnam War, the piece of legislation designed to curtail executive authority and put it back with the branch of government assigned to it in the Constitution. Reagan did this in El Salvador and Lebanon, Clinton in Kosovo, and Obama in Libya and Yemen and Syria. There is stronger bipartisan support for Trump to end the U.S. involvement continuing in Yemen. It was galvanized publicly by the Saudi Arabian murder of a U.S. journalist.
What's peculiar is how few signatures Paul and Khanna managed to gather from Khanna's party. One year ago, Trump was launching air strikes against the Assad government in Syria, and while most establishment Democrats were following the script of the military state and applauding the strikes, their statements were tempered. House leader Pelosi wanted a "comprehensive Syria strategy." Senator Schumer said that Trump "has to be careful about not getting us into a greater and more involved war in Syria." Senator Warren reminded the president that "the Constitution gives Congress the power to authorize military action." Senator Booker said he was "deeply concerned that President Trump continues to conduct military operations without any comprehensive strategy or the necessary congressional authorization." Hillary Clinton's 2016 running mate, Senator Kaine of Virginia, said upon the airstrikes that Trump's decision to launch them "against Syria without Congress's approval is illegal."
All five of these lawmakers should be ecstatic that U.S. involvement is ending there, if not still concerned that the president never bothered to get their approval in the first place, but I am unaware of any comments from them in confirmation. None of them are signatures on the letter.
