A Warning

 The RNC this week brought us a number of good speakers and speeches (and a few mediocre ones). Alice Johnson, who was pardoned by Trump, was very good.  She came across as warm and genuine and I really connected with her.  Tom Cotton, who I generally cotton to (sorry for the bad pun), was stiff and robotic and was not as persuasive as some of the high school debaters I sometimes judge.  Ann Dorn was the most compelling.  Her presentation on the murder of her husband during the riots, and the kind of person he was, choked me up.  Poor Ben Carson followed and I couldn’t even focus on what he was saying because my emotions were still raw from Ann Dorn’s speech.

But probably the most poignant was Maximo Alvarez, the Cuban immigrant warning about the dangers of Communism. 

As we watch Antifa/BLM burn, loot, tear apart our cities and threaten people, roll out a guillotine and pelt police officers with bricks, frozen water bottles and other things, it is apparent that a majority of these people are young white suburban kids in their 20’s.   This begs the question of who parented these beasts and who educated them.

Alvarez offered a first hand account of what the horrors of Communism are all about, the false promises that quickly give way to repression and shortages, followed by beatings, torture, murder and death. 

The reason we have the Marxist Antifa/BLM rearing its ugly head is that there aren’t many guys like Alvarez around anymore.   It is the first hand accounts of the terrors of Communism that have kept it at bay, but as those voices age and die off, the reality of it fades into history.

I saw it first hand with a close friend of mine, who is Ukrainian.   His parents fled Stalin’s starving Ukraine.  His father fought against the Communists and was part of the resistance after his best friend was shot in the head in front of him.  He hid in sewers and ditches as the Communists hunted him like an animal.  He eventually made it over to the U.S. (later requested to be buried with his fellow freedom fighters in New York).  I attended the funeral of my friend’s mother a couple of years ago and was shocked to learn that each and every one of the grandchildren were Bernie Sanders supporters.  Two generations after their grandfather was hunted, his own grandchildren are now comfortable with socialism.

I strongly suspect that this is being played out all over the country.   We are 30 years removed from the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The people that actually experienced the terrors of Communism are fading away and the first hand accounts are now too far removed.  The people in their 20’s didn’t get to hear grandpa’s and grandma’s messages about the beatings, the disappearances, the killings.  So they are once again seduced by the siren song of  Communism and the demonization of “the rich.” 

Mr. Alvarez’s speech is a warning that needs to be heeded.

Likewise, I received this message from a young friend of mine in Venezuela last spring when I told him that there was a Socialist movement brewing in America:

“Incredible.  Someone like Maduro? A socialist? I hope the majority of the American population knows the catastrophe of socialism.”

I’m not sure we do anymore.  I am hoping that people like Mr. Alvarez will wake us up.

Five Inexorable Trends

 

There seems to be a debate going on as to whether there will be a “new normal” or whether we will ever “get back to normal.”  Many conservatives reject the notion of a “new normal” but the reality is that the COVID19 pandemic revealed fissures in our society and widened them as ice does to cracks in the sidewalk in the winter.  This post will enumerate some of those trends and, while I will not go into them in depth (those will be for later posts),  I will lay out what I think will be front and center issues over the next decade or so. 

1.      De-urbanization.  Many big U.S. cities were struggling with financial issues at the start of this, but the riots and looting in places like Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, Seattle and, especially Portland severed the basic social contract—individuals give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for protection from the State.  The governments of these cities demonstrated that they were no longer interested in protecting citizens from criminals that would damage and steal their property and present a physical threat to them.  Pandemic also taught us how to work remotely and get reasonably efficient at it.  As populations shrink, left wing mayors will go to their default tactic of raising taxes, which will hasten the decline.    I see a massive population shift not just to the suburbs and exurbs but to rural areas over the next decade or two.

2.      Decoupling from China.  U.S. businesses and consumers got hooked on cheap Chinese goods and the Chinese labor market.  Hundreds of private equity firms boasted double digit returns over the years by buying U.S. companies, leveraging them and then outsourcing the manufacturing to China.  The “experts’ said that a wealthy middle class would emerge in China and eventually demand more freedoms.   The reverse actually happened.  China now has a president for life, runs concentration camps for the Uyghurs unspeakably violating human rights, has bulldozed over Hong Kong’s autonomy, exchanged fire with India, and is threatening Taiwan.  Our universities are infested with Chinese spies.  Yes, we got cheap consumer goods for awhile.  But we had our industrial base gutted, our intellectual property stolen and its lies and coverup in Wuhan has cost the world economy trillions.  We woke up to find 80% of our drugs manufactured in a country whose regime would show no hesitation to use that leverage to hold our population hostage.    To his credit, Donald Trump saw the Chinese threat early and began to push back on it.  It will take some time, but COVID19 will be seen as the precipitating event that began the Great Unwind between the U.S. and China.

3.      Political violence.   The normalization of political violence in America is, unfortunately, not something that is going to go away soon.  In fact, I see it accelerating.  In a couple of decades, we have gone from a society that would not tolerate “broken windows” to one that has been tolerating broken bones and broken bodies.   I am in the minority view on this, but I assert that the results of the election of 2020 are largely irrelevant now.  Here’s why.  We have elections to settle political differences.  But that is wholly dependent on the losing side accepting the outcome.   The radical left in the US never accepted the results of the 2016 election and, if Trump prevails won’t accept it now.  Outgoing president Barack Obama failed to condemn Antifa led violence following the 2016 election and  Democrats have not condemned the current wave violence and, instead, continue to refer to mob activity as “peaceful protests.”   The failure to condemn is to give it tacit approval.  As a result, gun and ammunition sales continue to skyrocket.  Political violence is here to stay and may eventually erupt into civil war.

4.      De-globalization.  In his lengthy article in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Present at the Disruption, Richard Haass spends most of it bellyaching about Trump’s disruption of international institutions, and is horrified at the notion of a second Trump term: “Countless norms, alliances, treaties and institutions would weaken or wither.  The world would become more Hobbesian, a struggle of all against all.” 

      Haass’s carping glides right over a number of unpleasant realities.   The post-WWII “order” and alignment did not adjust to facts on the ground.  Germany chose to purchase energy from its NATO adversary, Russia, and also elected to shortchange its skimpy NATO contribution.  Turkey elected to become an adversary and become the next troublemaking Islamist state.  China used its membership in the WTO to enrich itself, then abrogated its deal with Hong Kong, covered up its handling of COVID19 and established concentration camps for Uyghurs, in addition to its persistent IP theft.  The TPP was not going to fix these sins.  Like its membership in NATO, the Europeans paid great lip service to the Paris Accord, and then did not meet its goals (of course, exempting China from obligations for years).  The JCPOA provided Iran with a much needed lifeline of cash (in unmarked bills) while ensuring that the mullahs would have a bomb in a decade.  I can’t even begin to comment on the bloated, corrupt, ossified, anti-Western U.N.

       It is true enough that Trump has not gone far enough to replace some of these norms, alliances, treaties and institutions.  But many of them need to wither and die and some, like the JPCOA and Paris Accord should never have existed in the first place—at least not in their original form.

5.      Sports.  Pro sports is part of the fabric of American life and culture, but its grip on our attention has loosened lately.  Beginning with Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling at the national anthem, many longtime N.F.L. fans started to stay away.  The solidarity with the BLM movement that the N.F.L., N.B.A. and MLB showed has also soured fans on those sports.  Pandemic delivered a body blow as distancing rules have prevented fans from attending games, but I predict these sports will not fully recover after COVID19 goes away.  People use sports to escape from social tensions and stresses, and bringing politics into it kills the ardor for many fans.   It is very difficult for a working guy to hear multimillionaire athletes lecture him about his white privilege.  I believe that the place of sports in our society has been permanently altered by this.

These are the 5 big trends that will occupy our attention over the next decade or two--- or at least 4; I threw sports into the mix because it has been such a large part of our culture.    So while there will not be a “new normal,” 2020 will be seen as an inflection point on these fronts.  But the cracks were already there.  COVID19 just brought them into relief.

Death of a City

I have been going into my downtown office almost daily since June, but I now mostly drive and not train, park, do what I need to do, and then quickly leave without going more than a block from my office. But on the Tuesday lunch hour I decided to walk around a bit to see what the city’s heart looked like after months of pandemic and renewed riots and looting over the weekend.  I gripped my pepper spray tightly in my right hand and began my self-guided tour.

It was a brilliant late summer day, warm and dry, the kind of day that normally draws throngs of workers out of their cubicles out on their lunch break to stroll with the tourists taking in the city sights.  But not today.  Today, the streets were nearly empty, though, sans a few mostly masked people scattered here and there and beggars posted on nearly every street corner and in front of every Dunkin’ or Starbucks that was opened, their zombie-like appearance and the scene conjuring up images of the dystopian Will Smith film I Am Legend.

I walked toward State Street (that formerly Great Street), past the trash in the streets and the boarded up storefronts and office buildings.  Many stores still had unswept piles of shards of glass in front of them.  There was little traffic and the stillness at midday was unsettling.  It was more like an early Sunday morning than a midday, midweek scene in the loop.   I finally made it over to Michigan Avenue.  Several buildings were boarded up, and many of the retail stores.  I walked past the outdoor tables of the restaurants that would normally be fully occupied with a line waiting to get in on a gorgeous day like today.  Sadly, as I passed by each one, they had no more than one or two tables taken.

I turned down Michigan Avenue, walking toward Pauline Books and Media, the Catholic bookstore operated by the Daughters of St. Paul and braced myself for what I was about to see.  The good sisters were looted the last time around and I fully expected to see shattered glass, and statues and books strewn about.  As the store came into view, I was overwhelmed with emotion to find it intact.  This time around, the looters bypassed the store.  Nothing had been touched.  All of the statues and crucifixes were safe in their glass displays.  Not a book was out of place.  I chatted with one of the nuns and she said that an alarm went off but it was for something else and they prayed and prayed.  I bought a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions and some bookmarks and when I checked out, one of the good sisters talked to me about God’s grace.  Ironically, I had attended Jennifer Frey’s lecture on Flannery O’Connor’s vision of grace in A Good Man Is Hard to Find earlier this year, about how somehow we find grace and redemption in the darkness.  (Here it is if you are so inclined   https://www.lumenchristi.org/event/2020/02/flannery-oconnor-vision-of-grace-jennifer-frey).  The brief conversations with the sisters have given me a lot to think about after seeing the results of the nihilism and destruction that has been wrought upon the city.    At least the Catholic bookstore was spared in this city with such a strong Irish, Polish and Hispanic Catholic backbone.

But that island of hope cannot mask the reality of a dying city.  Macy’s has given notice that it is abandoning Water Tower.  Navy Pier, a premier tourist attraction has announced that it may close.  The looting damaged the Ronald McDonald House.  Of course, we hear almost nightly new stories of the terrible violence in the city, the murder of children, the carjackings, the hold ups.  With murder and mayhem all around, Mayor Lightfoot announced the establishment of a “statue review committee” to determine which statues are offensive, begging the question of why the concern over inanimate objects when black children are being slaughtered each weekend.

As I toured the wreckage, the reality began to sink in, that this great city will never be the same.  Carl Sandburg’s City of the Big Shoulders has been reduced to a slightly upgraded version of Mogadishu.  The Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads, and Freight Handler to the Nation is now a shadow of its former self, less safe than Kigali, Rwanda.

The runoff of population that was already underway and accelerating with the threat of Pritzker’s “Fair Tax” will turn into a flood.   Baby boomers that looked forward to downsizing and living in a condo downtown to enjoy the culture and restaurants have taken that off the table.  Dinner and the Lyric Opera or Chicago Symphony loses its appeal if there is a real threat of a carjacking awaiting you.

O’Connor’s short story involves death and grace and I urge you to read it—it’s very short and meaningful.   I am desperately searching for God’s grace in this--- the death of a city.  I have had to write several eulogies and tributes over the course of my life for individuals that have passed from the scene.   Soon it appears that I will have to write one not for just a person, but for an entire city, a city where I have very deep roots (part of my family has been here since the Great Chicago Fire).   My tour was like seeing your once robust, lively father hooked up to monitors and breathing tubes in the hospital in his last days.   It is almost incomprehensible that he is in this state, helpless, hanging on, never to be the person he once was.  Like a person that eventually concedes to disease, injury, and bodily breakdown, this city’s body is collapsing under the weight of decades of corruption, graft, gangs, and violence. 

This is what the death of a city looks like.

 

 

Childrens' Lives Matter

The world is in turmoil over pandemic and perceived racial inequities, and once these things calm down a bit, Greta Thunberg is sure to surface again and wag her finger at us for not doing enough about climate change.  While media, sports and Hollywood are obsessing over “racial injustice,” age injustice towers over racial injustice as a problem in our society.

Age injustice?  Yes, age injustice.  Age injustice runs counter to the American Dream and we are failing on several fronts.  You see, the American Dream goes something like this—you come to this country, or you come from very modest means and you suffer the indignities of a marginal existence, doing crummy, low paying jobs day after day, without complaint, so that your children can receive a decent education and have a better life than you had.  Perhaps they can get into a profession, have more control over their lives, live in a better neighborhood, afford a real therapist instead of the local bartender. 

After the Manchester bombing in May of 2017, I wrote a blog post that excoriated the West for not doing enough to keep our children safe (.http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2017/05/our-children.html)   Last autumn, I wrote a post entitled Bloody Fall, in which I highlighted the murders of 4 young high school and college girls of different races last fall (http://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2019/12/bloody-fall.html).

Things have not gotten better.  Of all the stresses that are affecting our society, our failure to put our children first, to have enough of them,  to protect them, to nurture and educate them, to allow them to have a childhood worries me a great deal.

After the Manchester bombing, I was concerned about Islamic terror. But it turns out that most of the terror is coming from within our own population.  In Philadelphia, 100 children under the age of 18 have been shot so far this year.  In Chicago, 38 juveniles have been killed so far this year.  Shootings are up 53% in New York, with many children as victims.  Similar increases are occurring across the U.S.  The shootings affect those families and the friends of those kids, depriving them of the magic of childhood.  One Chicago Public School has lost 3 players to its football team to gun violence.  As I asserted after the Manchester bombing, a civilization that will not do what is necessary to protect its young from physical violence is in serious trouble.

The management of our schools during this pandemic is another indicator of putting children last.  Teachers unions across the country have demanded that they not be required to teach in person due to COVID19.   And most districts caved, even though numerous studies have shown that the risk of transmission of COVID19 by children is not significant. We do know that remote learning is ineffective, especially for special needs children and lower income children.   The cost to these children is incalculable.  Many will never be able to make up the loss in math and science.  The psychological costs of social isolation are beginning to pile up.  Yet the unions remain intractable.  In a different era, we took on risks to ensure a better life for our children.  But not this generation. 

A monumental debt burden is the legacy we are leaving to our children.  The national debt is at $25 trillion and rising.  State governments like Illinois are leaving the next generation an unmanageable debt level.  And this is on top of a burgeoning debt load many individuals took on to get a college degree.  This is unconscionable.  Instead of leaving them something in the will, so to speak, we are consuming their future earnings, their future wealth, their future opportunities.  Neither of our political parties even talk about it.

Finally, there is the sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and sexualization of children.  Incredibly, much of this has been perpetrated through institutions.  Yes, there has been the coverup by the Catholic Church.  But we have also had the UN involved (Peter Newell, the top UN childrens’ rights official was just jailed for sexually assaulting a child).  We had the incredible scandal at Michigan State with Larry Nassar that resulted in the resignation of MSU’s president and charges brought against the athletic director.  The details of Epstein’s island are unfolding with the implication of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton.  Libraries across the country have been hosting Drag Queen Story Hours.  Hasbro just released a troll doll that giggles when you touch it in its private area.  The New York Times has been running op-eds suggesting that pedophilia is not a criminal act but either a treatable condition or a sexual preference.  The liberals’ open border policy conveniently ignores the widespread child sex trafficking that goes on.  There are many tentacles to this, but the bottom line is that we are permitting the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and continue to normalize pedophilia.  This needs to stop and it needs to stop now.

Racial injustice is infinitesimally tiny in the West.  Age injustice is the elephant in the room.  Our inability and unwillingness to sacrifice for, and protect our children is unconscionable. Our recent riots are a ruse.  We should be rioting over how we treat our children.

 

Criminal Inversion

Two weeks ago, we observed the 51^st anniversary of man’s first landing on the moon.  Neil Armstrong first set foot upon the moon on July 20, 1969, followed by Buzz Aldrin (who I had the pleasure of hearing speak a couple of years ago at the Printers Row Lit Fest) while Michael Collins circled above, waiting for them to reunite and ferry them safely home.  The moon landing was one of America’s singular achievements of the 20^th century and all of America was transfixed by this scientific, engineering and, yes, government accomplishment.

Armstrong’s death, like his life, was observed in a rather low key and modest fashion.  It was reported in the news and PBS ran a special on his life, but his modest funeral service was attended by a few hundred people and he was buried at sea with little fanfare.  There are only a couple of statues of him – one at Purdue and one at USC (thankfully, not destroyed yet).   Armstrong was truly an American hero, an iconic and yet modest man that risked much to do what America asked of him (the lunar module had only about 15 seconds of fuel remaining when it set down on the lunar surface).

Fast forward about a half century to the funerals of George Floyd.  His death came at the hands of an overzealous rogue police officer with a string of complaints of rough treatment of citizens.  But Floyd himself had quite a record of criminal behavior, imprisoned for 5 years for assault and battery of a pregnant woman.  His run in with Chauvin arose out of passing counterfeit money and he had fentanyl and meth in his system.  However the trial of Chauvin turns out, the fact remains that Floyd was not someone you would want as your neighbor. Yet Floyd’s passing was marked by 4 funerals, a gilded casket, wall-to-wall news coverage and sobbing and wailing by liberal politicians.

The contrast between George Floyd’s funeral with Armstrong’s memorial service couldn’t be more stark.  In 50 short years, this is where we are.

The criminal inversion has been brewing for some time.  Barack Obama gave it legs by claiming the police acted “stupidly” in the arrest of Henry Louis Gates and then welcomed Black Lives Matter into the White House with open arms.

Like most really bad ideas, the criminal inversion—lionizing and freeing criminals and punishing law abiding citizens began in the university system.  It began at Oberlin College where the local bakery had 3 black youths prosecuted for shoplifting.  The university began a campaign to drive out the bakery, organized protests and canceled its contract with the bakery, claiming the bakery was “racist.”  The bakery sued for libel and obtained a $25 million judgment (reduced to $11 million).  The Gibson’s Bakery case was really the first significant case of an attempt to turn the victim of a crime into the perpetrator.

But with pandemic and the George Floyd incident, things have rolled downhill very quickly.  While prison reform was passed,  COVID19 gave progressive (read: Marxist) politicians the excuse to empty prisons.  Bail reform and feckless prosecutors like Kim Foxx declined to prosecute cases.   And then with the George Floyd incident, the insane “defund the police” movement gained traction, with New York, Minneapolis, Portland and other cities substantially reducing resources devoted to policing (Chicago had quietly done this over time) with a concomitant spike in violent crime.

The citizenry noticed when, during the pandemic, criminals were set free and rioters were let loose to wreak havoc, smash retail establishments and steal goods, while normal, law abiding citizens were arrested at beaches, playgrounds and parks for violating social distancing rules.  Local governments gave protesters a free pass to gather in masses while ordinary working people were forbidden to attend church services.

In Atlanta, the police officer that shot Rayshard Brooks after Brooks stole the officer’s taser and fired at him was charged with felony murder.  Brooks, like George Floyd was lionized by the press and even some politicians like Indiana senator Mike Braun.  ABC wrote a glowing profile of Brooks, calling him a “dedicated family man” even though he beat his wife and child and had multiple felonies on his record.

Most egregiously, the McCluskeys of St. Louis were charged with a felony for the unlawful use of a weapon when they responded to a mob that had broken down their gate and threatened to overrun their home.  None of the threatening mob was charged.   And now there are reports of prosecutorial misconduct as there are allegations that the prosecutors office tampered with Mrs. McCluskey’s gun to make it operable (it was heretofore inoperable).

Beginning with the Obama administration, there was a concerted effort to degrade police officers, distort the true incidents of police brutality, and criminalize the police and private citizens while at the same time liberating criminals through “criminal justice reform,” low or no bail and the pretext of COVID19 risk (while placing the risk of criminal behavior on law abiding citizens).

What’s behind this?  Nothing less than the wholesale destruction of American society.  Saddam Hussein emptied his prisons on the eve of the U.S. invasion figuring that dispersing criminal elements would make the country ungovernable by an occupying force.  The Radical Left is using the exact same tactic to fracture American society.  By demonizing the people whose job it is to keep the peace and freeing and lionizing those that would do us harm, they are making our society ungovernable.  If this continues, only a totalitarian right or left leader will be able to regain control, and the Radical Left is betting that it will be the latter.