As Certain as Death and Backlash

Newspapers have what they call the advanced obituary; prepared obits for the aging or ill figure of repute ready to go, once the subject does. This of course risks the embarrassment of a hoax or mistake causing a premature obituary, but remains a necessity. The practice has long been taken as comically ghoulish, but I see it as the ultimate in respect. I wish there was an obituary (glowing preferably, but not necessarily) out there waiting for me! Alas.

I believe I’ve identified another, similar need–for the advanced backlash report. As Mark Steyn noted (so many terrorist attack/anticipated backlash cycles ago it’s making me nostalgic):

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s columnar wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline: “British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.”

Until Islamic terror becomes a thing of the past there will be a need for documenting the fears of anticipated backlash. What socially responsible journalist wants to find himself tasked with producing hundreds, or thousands, of words of plausible paranoia ahead of a treacherously short deadline? I am here to help. I believe the advanced backlash story could lend itself well to a simple template form requiring little more than the addition of names and dates. The form might go something like this:

 As [Western city] mourned today, Muslims fear backlash and increased Islamophobia as result of yesterday’s attack on [Western target*] which killed ___ and injured ___.

“These attacks have nothing to do with Islam,” [Muslim spokesman] of [Muslim advocacy organization not yet revealed to be funding terrorists], speaking in Urdu, said today. “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. These men are not true Muslims.”  

Far right fringe groups immediately seized on the attacks for political opportunity. “This should bring home to us the necessity of addressing the problem of Islamic terrorism,” [fascist poopy-head] of [sinister right-wing organization/political party] said today. 

Muslims have long faced discrimination and poverty in [country under assault]. “This should wake us to the problems of discrimination and marginalization in [country under assault],” said [sociologist with either Muslim or hyphenated last name] of [university/Soros-funded organization]. “We have ignored the reality of Islamophobia for far too long. People must not blame all Muslims for this attack. It’s important to note some of the strongest condemnations of the violence have come from Muslim leaders themselves.”  

etc.

*form not valid for attacks on non-Western targets

No True Muslim

The “No True Scotsman fallacy” goes like this:

Smith: All Scotsmen are loyal and brave. 

Jones: But McDougal over there is a Scotsman, and he was arrested by his commanding officer for running from the enemy. 

Smith: Well, if that’s right, it just shows that McDougal wasn’t a TRUE Scotsman.

This is idiocy

Just as convention about racism and sexism is supported ultimately by a variation on the fallacious appeal to consequences–if racial or sexual variation in behavior and aptitudes were real it would be bad (or lead to bad things), therefore it (or race itself) does not exist–so too is the “not all Muslims” reflex something that any thinking person, regardless of opinion, should reject.

As one famous Muslim said:

Social justice warriors: all the intellectual depth of a Muhammad Ali, without the humor.

Slick Nick

Nick Kristof is an earnest if clumsy defender of Islam, using one  example of barbarism to obscure another:
“Some read the Quran and blow up girls’ schools, but more read the Quran and build girls’ schools.”

Way more, even! Take that, Islamophobes! Islam, meanwhile, shifts nervously in its seat, wishing he had kept incinerated schoolchildren out of it. With friends like these…

plus ça change

Investigators, as a rule, have a respect for their own prejudices, and dislike to make known to others a knowledge which has brought pain to their own minds. Like the Brahman of the story, they will destroy a fine microscope rather than permit their co-religionists to know that they drink living creatures in their water, or eat mites in their fruit. The motto of such people is, “If truth is disagreeable, cling to error.
Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, Thomas Inman, 1869

President Ferguson’s Opus

Named after film director Ernst Lubitsch, a “Lubitsch moment” is when a film encapsulates its entire story or theme in a moment that can be as brief as a single line or pratfall. Hope and Change just had its Lubitsch moment:

With his own complicity in the crisis and commitment to the myth of white racism from which it springs, has a president ever been less suited to his moment than this one now? Not since George W Bush fumbled through his first public remarks on 9/11 have I seen a leader with less moral authority. W’s sin was his callow ineptitude, stunningly revealed in crisis. He had no business being president. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been thinking long and hard about just this, America’s race problem. And there he is, at once complicit in and impotent before violence he will not condemn without qualification. His sin is duplicitous, and also revealed in crisis. He too has no business being president.

Hard to recall, but the initial appeal of Barack Obama to whites was largely as someone who would, with “soaring oratory” and personal example, reconcile blacks, finally, to America. It wasn’t spoken outright, but the feeling wasn’t that whites had to brought to the table, but blacks. He was supposed to be ideally suited to the purpose, as first black president. Nixon went to China; Barack would go to black America. Obama’s enthusiastic white supporters should feel betrayed. It’s obvious now he never intended to move black America one stubborn inch toward reconciliation.

But even if Barack Obama were capable of a road-to-Ferguson conversion to the truth–the persistence of white racism is not the problem; the persistence of black dysfunction is–he would still make a lousy witness.
Just as the content of his speeches and writing have gone largely unexamined by his celebrants, so too has his style. His recurring habit of juxtaposing his opponents’ views with his own to lend the appearance of reasonable compromise renders his speeches flabby and even more platitudinous than they already are. Hardly what the country needs when coming to the realization that long-held convention is dead wrong.

What’s called for is probably impossible–telling the truth. How do you tell a people they are poorer because they are less industrious, they are jailed more because they are more criminal, they fail at school because they are less intelligent? How does one broach that subject? What you saw tonight was a president lamely trying to walk back his demagogy of the past months and re-set the expectations of all those whose wrath he’s done so much to encourage–what is needed is a leader who might, somehow, begin the process of walking back the narrative and expectations of past decades, regarding black achievement and racial equality.

But the spectacle of watching the president resort to his hoary “on this hand then the other” water-treading bunkum: “…there are ways of channeling your concerns constructively and channeling your concerns destructively…”
alongside a shot of an intersection under siege a la Florence and Normandy; it’s hard not to feel contempt.

Cuando los cerdos vuelan…

The New York Times discovers, like hipsters discovering something that’s always been there, a non-kitsch, adult approach to understanding the immigration question (kind of hard to keep up the act when gang-bangers are popping caps offstage):

It would seem to be a worst case that opponents of the Obama administration on immigration had long forecast: An illegal immigrant — one who had been deported twice, yet returned to the country each time — is accused of killing two Northern California sheriff’s officers in a six-hour shooting rampage Friday. 

The suspect led the authorities on a manhunt through two counties. After he was booked into the Sacramento County jail, federal immigration authorities used his fingerprints to identify the man, who gave his name as Marcelo Marquez: They said he was Luis Enrique Monroy Bracamonte, a Mexican who lived without papers in this country for more than a decade after he was deported in 1997 and again in 2001 because of drug- and weapon-related arrests. 

“This case shows that our laws are not being enforced, and there are tragic consequences to not enforcing them,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, a group that advocates tougher immigration controls.

I was surprised to find this prominent on the website. Less surprising is the appendage:

 A version of this article appears in print on October 29, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Immigration Laws Facing New Scrutiny After Killings. Order Reprints|Today’s Paper|Subscribe

Thanks for Everything, F— You

The Nazis and the old Soviet Union assigned political officers to military units to enforce ideological conformity. The Stasi was legendary for getting civilians to inform on each other for the slightest breaches of ideology–what we would call political correctness.

Needless to say, we would never do any such thing. We don’t need commissars to keep us in line. The elite polices itself and us, without prompting, and their purview, as they would have it, extends to everything. There’s a whole genre now in journalism dedicated to denouncing any found “lack of diversity”; not just in a given field or organization, but in our hobbies and associations (even bird-watching is under watch).
 Of course it isn’t homogeneity but whiteness that bothers them. Spike Lee once said America is so racist we think three black guys standing on a corner constitutes a riot. That was a long time ago. Now we’re so anti-racist we think three white guys working in the same room constitutes a hate crime in progress (but not everything is changed: the brothers are still on the corner and white guys still do the bulk of the work).
A related sub-genre was created by an enterprising writer in analyzing the effectiveness and aesthetics of that now familiar entertainment, the public apology. He should have quite a career ahead of him.

So it’s unsurprising that an Intercept scribe interrupted his anecdote about how the late Washington Post editor Bill Bradlee gave him a break when he was a young ambitious reporter to question the man’s integrity in doing it and genuflect to diversity from graveside:

 I am sure my cause was helped by the fact that I was young and white and male, the kind of object that older editors who are white and male tend to have a biased soft spot for. This is why it’s good we don’t have as many Ben Bradlees these days; the mirroring and replication of a dominant culture is weaker now. Which doesn’t mean we’re in a universally better place; we have a lot of editors who are more cautious than they should be (patriarchy replaced by management culture), and a large number of top slots are still filled with guys (yes, including at The Intercept). It’s hard to believe that gender played no role in the firing of Jill Abramson at The New York Times.