Winter in (Black) America

Few had the insight into that peculiar experience that is the Black American experience that Gil Scott Heron possessed. He died May 2011 and the social networks were abuzz with people who likely heard none of his music, and if they did, understood little of it. Mr. Scott knew the Blues and understood Jazz, which means he knew what it meant to be Black. His music and life was almost a perfect analogy of post 1960’s Black America.

While Mr. Scott’s and my political differences make it unlikely we were looking at this from the same perspective, it is clear he also saw an intractable decline on the horizon in America especially in Black America. This “Winter” the brother speaks about, in his best song Winter in America, features us gunning each other down, seemingly without pause. I won’t give into media sensationalism and ignore the improvement in the Black murder rate in the last twenty years, but our rate of committing homicidal acts toward one another is still dizzying relative to other ethnicities and our 1950s selves.

We have assimilated into materialistic mainstream culture at a dizzying rates. Our “intellectuals” have certainly failed to live up to Harold Cruse’s ideal that dictated:

“The special function of the Negro intellectual is a cultural one. He should take to the rostrum and assail the stultifying blight of the commercially depraved white middle-class who has poisoned the structural roots of the American people into a nation of intellectual dolts… He should tell black America how and why Negroes are trapped in this cultural degeneracy, and how it has dehumanized their essential identity, squeezed the lifeblood of their inherited cultural ingredients out of them, and then relegated them to the cultural slums.”

Instead our intellectuals have done nothing more than use the suffering of our poorest as a guilt trip to leverage against whites and get themselves accepted into white institutions. With few exceptions they merely repeat and slightly refashion the jargon handed down to them by old tired Marxists and other white liberals. They rarely offer anything in the way cultural rebirth or self determination. 

As a tribe we have forgot all the traditions that sustained us during that long walk from chattel to “freedom.” Our sense of community is long gone in most places, our dedication to the institutions founded by our ancestors nil. We tend not to even get married, we have almost all of our kids out-of-wedlock, our dedication to our own families is even circumspect. Since “official” integration (where the middle class blacks chased white people where ever they went) it seems the only thing we have gained was a marginal amount of wealth, although our wealth in relation to whites remains stagnant. Yet we are happy that we are integrated. I suppose living next to white folk and being allowed into their institutions made all these declines and the impending death of our culture and institutions worthwhile to most. Hey, at least we can feel self-important for embracing diversity.

 Undoubtedly those of us who actually care about Black communities, which are way different from “the Black Community,” see these issues for what they are, dismal signs of a dying people and decaying culture. Can we be saved? I have no idea. But as Gil said in Winter in America “sister (and brother) save your soul” if you can’t save anything else.

Fittingly the great Gil Scott Heron died, May 27, 2011 (62), in the dying former capital of Negro culture and self-determination Harlem, NY. I think the griot was telling us something.

From the Indians who welcomed the pilgrims
And to the buffalo who once ruled the plains
Like the vultures circling beneath the dark clouds
Looking for the rain
Looking for the rain

Just like the cities staggered on the coastline
Living in a nation that just can’t stand much more
Like the forest buried beneath the highway
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow

And now it’s winter
Winter in America
Yes and all of the healers have been killed
Or sent away, yeah
But the people know, the people know
It’s winter
Winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting
‘Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your soul, Lord knows
From Winter in America

The Constitution
A noble piece of paper
With free society
Struggled but it died in vain
And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner
Hoping for some rain
Looks like it’s hoping
Hoping for some rain

And I see the robins
Perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching across the floor
But just like the peace sign that vanished in our dreams
Never had a chance to grow
Never had a chance to grow

And now it’s winter
It’s winter in America
And all of the healers have been killed
Or betrayed
Yeah, but the people know, people know
It’s winter, Lord knows
It’s winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
Save your souls
From Winter in America

And now it’s winter
Winter in America
And all of the healers done been killed or sent away
Yeah, and the people know, people know
It’s winter
Winter in America
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows what to save
And ain’t nobody fighting
Cause nobody knows, nobody knows
And ain’t nobody fighting

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Mad Men was a depraved and decadent show that gave us an incredible portrayal of humanity

The AMC television series “Mad Men” came to a close this past Sunday. After eight years, the critically-acclaimed show culminated in a dreamy reairing of Coca-Cola’s famous “Buy the World a Coke” ad from 1971. Critics panned it, but I saw the scene as a fitting end for a show about America’s cultural declivity into the hell of moral relativism. In its prime, the sentiment of the sing-songy Coke ad was nice, but the idealism of the post-1960s was too infantile to work, as we now know four decades later.

Within the show’s context, the ad didn’t represent world peace. Rather, it was one of the resolutions sought by the show’s main characters. It was the end product of protagonist Don Draper’s journey to the pits of sorrow and back. To use the cliché phrase, it also represented the End of an Era (the show’s timeline spanned from 1960 to 1970). Though the series finale was ambiguous and not entirely conclusive, “Mad Men” as a show contained some of the hardest lessons learned in life. In between the drinking, impropriety, womanizing, scams, backstabbing, and licentiousness, there were acute moments of actual humanity.

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The Butcher Doctrine

CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM

To: The office of the President
Cc: The office of the Sec. of State; the office of the Sec. of Defense; the office of the Chief of Staff
Bcc: The office of the Sec. of the Interior; the office of the Sec. of Homeland Security
Re: The present discontents

Dear Mr. President:

It is a great disappointment to me that no one in your administration could have foreseen the development upon which you’ve called me to advise. But far be it from me to accuse anyone of being willfully misinformed of the present state of the country they are tasked with running, and far be it from me to set a distinguishing line between relevance of and distraction with expansion-friendly policies outside of its borders. They always tell us we never stop learning, I guess they just left it to us to find out just how hard the lessons get.

On the other hand, the striking subtlety of the development of the crisis is rather unique. It seems even residents of the states in question did not take notice when display of the stars and stripes was re-raised under or replaced with state flags on all public buildings, or that some of those state flags had been markedly redesigned. Nor, it seems, did they bat an eye at the third party waves that swelled in their midterm elections. And they practically shrugged off decrees “nationalizing” the pharmacies, flouting drug laws, FDA regulations, and any vestige of education reform in equal measure. I suppose it was when the tire road blocks went up on their sections of the interstate highways that things started to look off. Or perhaps it was that YouTube video of that cardboard cutout of you being dragged by a pickup truck, being shot at with crossbows, and then roasted on a spit. No one was taking over the post offices so no alarm bells—literally or figuratively—went off. If this is a phase, as some pundits are suggesting, it is looking to be a drawn out and expensive one.

But these things you already know. You ask for advice on dealing with them and you shall have it.

First let me dispel any anxiety you may have that I or anyone else question your confidence or abilities. Clearly this is not the case. Yes, I didn’t actually vote for you myself, but clearly many others did. Every four years American voters go into the ballot booths, their minds alight with fires consuming every corner of the nation, and look to determine which of the two most credible candidates will extinguish them most ably. A clear majority left it to you to be the extinguisher. And no doubt for your part were you imagining yourself extinguishing those very same fires, perhaps even practicing Rooseveltian turns on your iPhone on the campaign bus. This is natural for every American, whether candidate or voter. The overlap here is very rare and would be precious if it didn’t feed into this particular problem.

America’s history is chain-linked with destruction-redemption narratives. If it is not a trait unique to us it is certainly a habit. This puts pressure on a chief executive to distinguish him or herself in the pantheon of his or her predecessors. It sends Presidents off on hunting expeditions for the next great nation-defining existential crisis, or worse it attracts singularly obsessive sociopaths to the office. These Presidents, however, are a few and privileged sort. For the rest of them, crises come with the timing of their stays. There is a reason, for instance, why James Madison is chiefly remembered for fathering the Constitution and why James Buchanan is barely remembered for anything at all. Your administration is being defined on this line as I am writing. Since subversion of the union is your crisis, I suspect people have been directing you to look to Lincoln. I would advise that you look carefully.

Seeing as how you—and several other candidates you defeated—announced your candidacy on April 2015, amid the 150th anniversaries of the Confederate surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, that legacy could not have been far from your or any other hopeful’s mind. But in your position you’ll need to search within yourself to see if you’re able, and not just willing, to meet the demands of a Lincolnian situation. Lincoln was a remarkably self-aware dictator, but he was a dictator all the same. He stretched the role of the executive beyond previously accepted confines. Under his leadership, the side being rebelled against was more radical than the side rebelling. The self-inflicted cosmetic surgery of that war was almost Ballardian really. Beneath his soothing, merciful rhetoric lays the longstanding trauma of his victory. The federalized republic is no less fictive than Westeros compared to the centralized superstate that has since emerged. To modern Americans, the indivisibility of the country is fact; its continental contours are granted; executive power is enshrined; they themselves are willingly chained to its ground in binds of satin.

Lincoln’s America has been one with a ferocious hunger for changes social, cultural, ancestral, and material, held together by his sentiment and his war’s trauma. If those seem like unworkable contradictions for a country as vast as ours that’s because they are. Congratulations, Mr. President, the trauma has been overcome, and the darkness has fallen on your watch. At least you have some choice in whether it shall be followed by dawn or by pitch blackness.

The situation, then, calls for a solution of Lincolnian magnitude, and here you can be the first President to actually not make the error of confusing Lincolnianism for simply repeating what Lincoln did but on a larger scale. The Civil War was a transgressive act; your policy for wringing order out of disorder must be also.

Allowing for secession is out of the question. Forget the Supreme Court; the American people will not tolerate any state or region to leave the Union. There would surely be a new name for the panic to be felt by those Americans who still believe in the enforced neighborliness between the states. The armed forces will be stretched to their limits containing both your own citizens and the rebelling citizens.

Unilateral expulsion, on the other hand, is an untried but far worthier alternative. If there is nothing in American history on which to found its logic we, like some of our federal judges, can look to other nations for precedent. Many forget that Singapore came into existence by being expelled from Malaysia. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are the results of a bitter but amicable “divorce.” Even if the partition of Northern Ireland was almost entirely out of Ireland’s hands, lifting it through consent alone seems ever more remote. It can, and in this case, must be implemented here. You would do well not to expel all the conflicted states, perhaps one or two at first, maybe those with the least to be gained from you resource-wise if you’re not feeling too risky. This will send the message to the rest of them of your seriousness, and also prevent them from confederating. They will own their resources, they will own their social and economic conditions, they will own all the military equipment we gave their police departments that they would surely use against us if we came to blows.

Your authority grants this, and your resolve in doing so will decide how easily it can be questioned. The object of your conflict, if one has not yet been determined, is preservation of individual life and property. You yourself once tweeted that “America is the first power in history motivated by a desire to expand freedom rather than its own territory.”

A great President distinguishes him or herself from a caretaker President by being less concerned with reelection prospects and more concerned with being the last President, period. If this policy makes you just that, there’s little that can be done besides owning up to it. Encouraging and preserving harmony between current and former Americans is the task left to you, whether you want it or not. They will, in all likelihood, stand athwart you, and vanquish you, hopefully in just the polls. They will demonize you and try to erase your very being from its history. They will call you “America’s butcher,” though that is still a notch up from “American butcher”. If dealt with properly, with mercy and self-awareness, this will subside. Lincoln will have been overcome by a new New Birth of Freedom. And after a long line of American Churchill aspirants, an American Gorbachev is preferable to, say, an American Humungus.

[Author’s note: this piece was adapted from an entry of my newsletter, Black Ribbon Award, which you can subscribe to here, if you’re so inclined.]

Pete Davis on the Soul of Facebook Venting

Over at the porch:

“Perhaps we see in those upsetting anecdotes a post-Protestant demon — social sin peeking out from behind the social order. Perhaps the tension that must be vented is our uncertainty in the presence of such sin: Am I going to be tricked by this evil or am I going to be aware enough to see it at work? Am I going to become part of it or am I going to reject it? Am I on its side of the great divide or am I on the side of the redeemed?

Facebook venting resolves this uncertainty. By pasting a link to a news story and properly identifying the social evil at work – “This is racism!” “This is bigotry!” “This is evil!” – you stand at the digital altar and testify to your awareness of social sin. By ranting against the news story, you validate that you have rejected this sin, broadcasting that you belong among the redeemed. When you click submit, your uncertainty about your moral goodness is temporarily washed away: you can proceed with confidence that you are one of the elect. …

Of course, the reality is that we cannot be deeply involved in addressing every social ill that bothers us and we are still going to be tempted to rant on Facebook when we see upsetting news. For such moments, here’s an idea for an alternative form of Facebook venting: the next time we want to release the tension from an upsetting news story, we should (1) take time to find and research a person or organization actively working to heal the underlying social ill about which we are upset, (2) donate $5-10 to them and then (3) post about their work and our donation to them.”

Big government and economic development

Noah Smith has an interesting piece on big government and economic development. Namely, there is a strong correlation between the size of government and economic development. The bigger the government, defined as government spending as a percentage of GDP, the richer the country. This relationship is fairly strong. Take, for example, the Economic Freedom Index published by the Fraser Institute. The index is constructed by five metrics, size of government, property rights, sound money, international trade, and regulation. Of these, four are strongly positively correlated with GDP per capita. One, size of government, has a negative correlation.

The point being, the typical libertarian story about the importance of government spending on economic development is false, or at least, incomplete. Noah, however, then makes a common error. He confuses size of government with strength of, government. State capacity, as it is commonly described in the economics literature, is not necessarily defined by government spending as percentage of GDP. Think of state capacity as the ability of a state to get things done. Singapore, for example, has a great deal of state capacity, yet the size of government is small compared to other developed countries, 17% compared to 40% for the UK.

It is possible to have a small government that is strong, a big government that is strong, and a small government that is weak. It is very difficult to have a big government that is weak. This is because a weak government is unable to tax enough of the economy for it’s spending to qualify as a big government. This dynamic creates a bias where big governments are going to be relatively well off because they have strong states which boost economic growth.

I also think Noah is mistaken when he identifies public goods as the reason big government is necessary. Examining America’s budget, it is clear only a fraction of it is spent on public goods in the traditional sense. The big ticket items, military spending, social security, medicare, are not public goods. The latter two are transfers, and America’s military spending does not count as a public good (for Americans at least). Even railroads, which Noah mentions and are generally considered to have been one of the most transformative innovations, only increased GDP in 1890 by 2.7%. Given that rich and poor countries are separated by wealth magnitudes of 30 or more, a 3,000% increase, it would take 1200 public goods on the order of railroads to account for the disparity in wealth.

A more plausible explanation for the importance of state capacity is free trade, though in a fairly roundabout way. States are better thought of as a coalition of different interest groups. In the middle ages, this group was a number of local lords, princes, etc. Each of these territories would impose a small tax. Even though each tax was small, the sum was large, making trade prohibitively expensive in many cases. State capacity is important because a strong state would be able to crush these local taxing authorities, creating an internal free trade zone. Britain, for example, had higher tariffs than France during the first half of the 20th century, when the industrial revolution began. Britain’s advantage was far freer internal trade.

In the modern world there are no longer local princes and lords. There are largely analogous actors though. Latin America, which I am more familiar with, has extremely strong unions. Mexico, for example, only recently eliminated the practice of buying and selling teaching positions. This was heavily protested by the teachers union. These interest groups protect their rents, ensuring low economic growth. A weak state is dominated by these interest groups. A strong state is able to overcome them.