Forgive me if my tone is a bit angry, but Senator Obama is jumping up and down on my last remaining nerve ending. I have long since lost all patience for upper middle class black men who get up in front of black audiences and tell them that the reason black Americans are disproportionately poor and disproportionately in jail is that there's something wrong with black Americans. This crap was getting old already before even Dr. Cosby went out on his national tour on the subject; after being hectored by Bill Cosby for years on this same, tired, old lie I long-since had no patience left for it by the time Barack Obama started in on it. And when he gives it twice in as many weeks, unless I lose track of time again?

Look. I'm told in the news stories about his NAACP convention speech that when he got to "the responsibility speech," the crowd started cheering louder and louder. What I sincerely hope that that crowd was cheering for is their (I think, mistaken) idea that since surely Senator Obama actually knows the truth, what this part of the speech means is, "and I know what lies to tell white America to trick them into voting for me." Whenever I bring up topics related to this, that's what some Obama volunteer from somewhere on the Internet rushes into my blog to reassure me ... as if the prospect of my candidate lying to me were somehow reassuring.

Anyway, I'm not surprised that the cheering was muted for the first 2/3rds of the speech. Skim it yourself, and you'll see it's the same old Democratic boilerplate. It really can almost be summarized as this: the Republicans told us they had a better idea than the New Deal, so we tried it, and found out that it sucks, so let's stop doing things the Republican way, and go back to what worked before. Good enough. And he's right about that, and it's why I'm still voting for him. Probably. That is, as long as I keep reminding myself, to paraphrase the legendary "wit" of Donald Rumsfeld, you go into the November elections with the candidate you have, not with the candidate you wish you had. That's the only way I can tolerate voting for a man who keeps giving this speech ...

"So yes, we have to demand more responsibility from Washington. And yes we have to demand more responsibility from Wall Street. But we also have to demand more from ourselves. Now, I know some say I've been too tough on folks about this responsibility stuff. But I'm not going to stop talking about it. Because I believe that in the end, it doesn't matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose, or how many government programs we launch – none of it will make any difference if we don't seize more responsibility in our own lives.

"That's how we'll truly honor those who came before us. Because I know that Thurgood Marshall did not argue Brown versus Board of Education so that some of us could stop doing our jobs as parents. And I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere. That's not the freedom they fought so hard to achieve. That's not the America they gave so much to build. That's not the dream they had for our children.

"That's why if we're serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our own lives, our own families, and our own communities. That starts with providing the guidance our children need, turning off the TV, and putting away the video games; attending those parent-teacher conferences, helping our children with their homework, and setting a good example. It starts with teaching our daughters to never allow images on television to tell them what they are worth; and teaching our sons to treat women with respect, and to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one. It starts by being good neighbors and good citizens who are willing to volunteer in our communities – and to help our synagogues and churches and community centers feed the hungry and care for the elderly. We all have to do our part to lift up this country."
-- Barack Obama, Speech to the 99th Annual Convention of the NAACP, 7/14/08

... instead of the speech I wish he'd given:

"But even after we do all of those things, I can not promise you that the American Dream will work for all black Americans. Still, I am here to tell you that if it doesn't work, neither will anything else. Everybody in this room knows, even if too few people in America know, that every 10 to 20 years, another batch of swindlers comes along with a new lie, steals everything that black Americans have saved, and gets away with it clean because so far, no court has ever convicted, no legislature has ever been outraged; as long as when any scam collapses, if it's black America that disproportionately gets the shaft, justice has never been served. And like everybody in this room, I know that that, not some dysfunction of our families, is why generation after generation of young black men, after watching their fathers and uncles and grandfathers get humiliated over and over again, want to think that they should try some alternative to the American Dream, like professional sports, or professional music, or organized crime. And we have got to make it clearer to them than we have ever done that the odds there are even worse. Not one black man in 100,000 who tries will ever make even a middle class living off being a celebrity or a gang banger; it just doesn't work.

"Nothing works reliably in America but the good old fashioned 17th-century American Dream, and we have got to keep reminding them, and each other, and every new immigrant, and every American of this amazing engine of personal and national wealth. Stay in school as long as you can. Get the best grades you can, and stay out of trouble. Get married and stay married. Take any job you can get, work hard and reliably at it, and go the extra mile. Spend as little as you can, save every penny you can, and invest it in only two things: not jewelry, or fancy cars, or expensive shoes and clothing, but your neighborhood, and your own kids' education. And if you do these things, you will get ahead, and your kids will get farther ahead than that. No other way of life you can try can offers you anything like the odds of the American dream.

"But you have also got to tell them, to make sure they know, what no school will tell them: every 10 to 20 years, another swarm of white people in ties will come along with a seductive new lie called 'the next big thing' or 'the new economy.' They will explain to you in words so sweet that the reason the white people are wealthier than you is because they knew to invest early in this 'new economy.' Friends, when that man darkens your door, that is Satan himself talking through him. Treat him accordingly, and then pray your hardest that none of your friends or family members listens to his lies. Because if they do, then only a couple of years from now, you're going to lose everything you saved bailing them out after he's long gone, and their money is gone, and this 'new economy' is revealed to be what it has been every 10 to 20 years since Emancipation: a pyramid scheme that is running out of suckers, or else they wouldn't be peddling it in the black neighborhoods.

"And that's why, as your President, I will make absolutely sure that the Justice Department investigates those who peddled the last worthless dregs of the 'teaser rate' home loans on massively overvalued, essentially worthless homes, who sold you loans that they knew you'd never be able to refinance or pay off, because they didn't want your loan payments, or even your house after the 'gotcha' in that paperwork sucks all the savings you have out of the bank; they wrecked your life for one more loan origination fee. They were willing to destroy two million Americans' lives for a relative pittance, because they were that sure that the country would let them get away with it as long as so many of the victims were black. That has got to end. I can not promise you that I can get you back your money, although I promise you I will try. I don't even know if I can promise that I can save the houses you invested in, although with the help of Democrats in Congress, I will move heaven and earth to try. But while I'm trying to do those things, what I ask from you in return is that you learn to recognize a pyramid scheme, and you teach your children not to fall for them either, so that the American Dream can work as well for black Americans as it has always worked for all other Americans."

I can dream, can't I? This is the man who told me "there is nothing false about hope."

But I do know this: I will never again let pass the lie that it's black Americans' fault that they keep giving up on the American Dream until I start seeing racist scum "investment" peddlers serving hard felony time. Or as the authors of Get Your War On put it four years ago, before the latest round of outrages, when we still hadn't done anything yet to any of the scamsters behind so many completely worthless dot-com stocks, and Bush still thought he was going to get away with destroying Social Security:

On August 28th, all the way back in the year 2000, the Missouri legislature decided to settle the argument once and for all over whether or not racist cops were pulling over non-white drivers just for the "crime" of being non-white and driving a car. Every year since 590.650 RSMo (2000) was enacted, every police agency in Missouri that makes even one traffic stop during the year has to submit a simple little form for every traffic stop to the Missouri Attorney General's office: race and ethnicity of the driver, whether or not they were searched, whether or not contraband was found, whether or not the driver was arrested. Back in 2003, they revised the form slightly. So this year's report, the 2007 Missouri Racial Profiling Report, gives us five consecutive years of data measured by the exact same methodology, a really good basis for comparison. Let's look at some numbers from those years, shall we?

The disparity index measures how much more or less likely someone is to be pulled over, by race. That is to say, it compares the number of them who were pulled over, to the number of them who would have been pulled over if all ethnic groups had been pulled over at the same rate. For example, where it says that whites in 2007 were -5% disparity, it means that 5% fewer whites were pulled over than statistics would suggest if everybody were pulled over at equal rates.

	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
White	-3%	-3%	-3%	-5%	-5%
Black	+36%	+34%	+42%	+49%	+58%
Hispanic	+5%	+7%	-3%	+9%	+0%

Furthermore, of those who were pulled over, the search rate measures, in actual percent, what percentage of cars driven by someone of that ethnic group were searched by police. The form does say why the vehicle was searched: because the cops saw contraband in plain sight, because they were arresting the driver anyway and performed a search as part of the arrest, a "Terry stop" search, or whatever; I don't have those numbers from the executive summary online, sorry; apparently only the Attorney General's office has them?

	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
White	6.91%	7.03%	7.03%	6.86%	6.86%
Black	12.44%	12.02%	12.52%	13.06%	12.26%
Hispanic	13.73%	12.93%	13.91%	14.74%	14.96%

Ah, but you might well suggest, maybe the cops have a reason to search black-driven and brown-driven cars more often than white-driven cars, because the cops know that black-driven cars and brown-driven cars are twice as likely to be carrying contraband. That seems unlikely; I would predict that the numbers would be roughly identical, since the gold-standard SAMHSA study insists that white, black, and brown Americans use illegal drugs at roughly the same rate, and would therefore probably be carrying contraband in their cars roughly equally often. But, why speculate? We have the numbers to compare. The contraband hit rate measures, of the cars that were searched, what percentage of the searches actually found illegal weapons, illegal drugs, stolen merchandise, or other evidence of a crime:

	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007
White	23.19%	22.43%	23.60%	21.61%	23.01%
Black	17.47%	15.33%	18.61%	18.72%	17.60%
Hispanic	14.62%	14.36%	14.52%	14.35%	14.40%

Huh. Looks to me like the cops are searching the wrong cars. They're searching roughly twice as many cars (per capita) driven by black or brown drivers, when the white cars they search turn out to be roughly half again as likely to have crime evidence in them. Consistently. For five years in a row.

After five years, with the reports having been available year after year after year, there can not be a police officer in Missouri who doesn't know that if he thought he was more likely to find drugs or illegal weapons in cars driven by non-whites, that's bigotry, not fact. In the face of that repeated demonstration, these numbers only make sense, so far as I can tell, if what you are seeing measured in the search and contraband rates above is nothing more nor less than the "Terry stop" effect: the fact that there are some perceptibly large number of cops all over Missouri who'd like to unconstitutionally search every vehicle they see for contraband without the niceties of a warrant, but who know that juries will laugh at them if they say they felt threatened by all but the most threatening of white drivers.

And the roughly 50% higher rate of getting pulled over if you're black than if you're any other ethnic group, including Hispanic, a rate that got consistently worse over time? That's racism, pure and simple. Somebody from the US Justice Department should be going over these reports jurisdiction by jurisdiction, identifying the worst offenders, and putting every cop in those jurisdictions under a microscope until they figure out who the bad apples are and yank their peace officer licenses (at the very, very least). This report's been being compiled, these departments have known they were under observation, for longer than I've shown above; the actual raw data goes all the way back seven years. Seven years after being put on notice, and they're still pulling over tens of thousands of black drivers per year for driving in Missouri while black? That's flatly inexcusable.

P.S. Let me remind you that the statistics in this journal entry were compiled for the state with the lowest per-capita statistical disparity in the nation between black incarcerations for drugs and white incarcerations for drugs. (Refer back to my journal entry for May 19th.) I despair to think what the search and contraband numbers by race look like across the river, in the second-worst state, or for that matter anywhere else.

This link's been sitting on my desktop for almost two weeks now, constantly reminding me that I wanted to bring it to your attention and say a thing or two about it: Eric Eckholm, "Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests," New York Times, May 6th, 2008. It's based largely on a newly updated report from Human Rights Watch, Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, and its main conclusion, as reported by the Times, is that "large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates" (emphasis added by me).

I emphasize the end of that sentence because most Americans who get their news from television take it for granted that this is not true, but you can look up the numbers yourself in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's recurring reports. This paragraph in the Times was a major breakthrough of reality into most people's racist fiction; I've heard it claimed that it's the first time a major newspaper in the US has admitted, above the fold, that blacks and whites use illegal drugs at basically identical rates.

Now, here's the fascinating thing that I didn't know until I saw it in the Times: this is a more localized problem than I ever guessed. In every state for which they were able to get data, black drug users are more likely to go to jail than white drug users. But the level of the disparity varies from a low in my own home state of Missouri of 2.7 to 1, to a high in Wisconsin (of all places) of forty two point four to one. The comments to the Times article include a lot of speculation, only some of it at all informed by facts, as to why the disparity is so wide. One plausible hypothesis about Missouri's numbers is that it's the result of a very high profile campaign against both marijuana and methamphetamine by the state police in (very, very white) rural south-central Missouri bringing up the arrest rate for white drug users. One hypothesis that I find equally plausible about Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, knowing what I know about Illinois politics, is that one of the things that makes Illinois' rate the 2nd worst in the nation (23.6 to 1) has to do with the fact that the state police and the feds both almost completely ignore down-state Illinois (almost entirely white outside of the East St. Louis area), that all the police resources are up in (more racially mixed) Chicago, so there are no state or federal cops to bust the vast majority of Illinois' white drug users who live in nearly-all-white rural counties. Anyway, the actual results are in a table in the report I linked above, but to give you a taste for it, here's the Times' map:



Oh, and I can't resist saying it, but isn't it just fascinating overlaying that map with the map of the states that Hillary Clinton won?

I got distracted by an argument that I'm working very hard to stay out of, to not get dragged into, in somebody else's blog. So distracted I couldn't get anything productive done last night. Fortunately, I have something to offer you that's on a subject near and dear to my heart, and at least as good a read as anything I've done: Kai Wright, "If They Are So Scared, How Come We're The Dead Ones?," TheRoot.com, 4/28/08. This subject needs to keep coming up until everybody, especially everybody in law enforcement, smartens up about it.

I really wasn't going to, but ended up too lazy and tired Friday night to change the channel and thereby not watch a mediocre-looking documentary that was showing on MSNBC called "Meeting David Wilson." The premise was mildly interesting. Young black college graduate from Newark named David A. Wilson, wannabe documentary film-maker, taking some time off to fiddle with the genealogy fad, found out that by coincidence the last slave owner to own a direct ancestor of his was a guy named David Wilson; records from the time describe him as the wealthiest tobacco farmer in the county, one of the wealthiest in all of North Carolina. Then a spot of weird luck put him in touch with the current owner of the ruins of that plantation ... a late-middle-aged white guy whose name turns out to be David B. Wilson. Turns out that David B. Wilson's great-great-grandfather was the guy who owned David A. Wilson's great-great-grandfather.



Part of the documentary, the mildly interesting parts, are about David A.'s meeting with David B., then the get-together between David A.'s family and David B.'s family. But to pad it out to an hour, or because he thought it was an interesting question (I couldn't tell you which), before the first meeting David A. Wilson and one of his white friends each took out video cameras to interview people at random, him asking black people what would you say if you got a chance to meet the heir to the family that owned your family back then? And his white friend asking white people, of course, what would you say to someone who wanted to meet you because your family used to own his family? The thing is, like almost all man-on-the-street interviews, the fatal flaw of this part of the documentary is that none of the answers are particularly coherent. None of the people who were asked had ever put any thought into the question before they were surprised with it. So unsurprisingly, none of the answers were terribly deep, or terribly interesting. For what it's worth, about half of the black interviewees felt that David A. Wilson was owed some kind of an apology by David B. Wilson, but only about 1 in 10 brought up the subject of any kind of reparations.

Late in their getting-to-know-each-other process, David A. asks David B., entirely hypothetically, what he would say if the subject of reparations came up? Turns out that David B. had never put any thought into it, either. He gave a lame-sounding answer that he obviously sort of remembered from hearing somebody say something about it on TV or the radio, with no particular confidence or conviction, something about how much better off the descendants of slaves are now than their distant relatives in former slave-selling towns in Africa are, to which David A. gave a canned (but not any more convincing) angry retort about how if it weren't for black slaves, white people in America wouldn't be any better off than anybody in Africa is right now. And that's the part I've been thinking about, in my spare minutes this weekend, off and on ... because if you look at this documentary, and think about the relevant history, you can see with your eyes that it's just not true. How so? Here:

David B. Wilson takes David A. Wilson on a tour of the old plantation, abandoned and in ruins because the property is basically worthless. We see the "mansion" of "the wealthiest tobacco farmer in the county," remember supposedly one of the wealthiest in the state, and you can see that by modern standards it's barely bigger than the average middle-class house: call it 8 to 10 rooms, maybe a scootch over 2000 square feet, no indoor plumbing. Out back are the crumbling, ivy-eaten ruins of three (or maybe four) one-room barracks for the field slaves, 10 to a building. So at the time of emancipation, this is what the wealthiest tobacco farmer in the county had to show for the work of three generations' worth of 30 to 40 employees? Employees that he didn't have to pay, didn't have to provide any health care or benefits to, barely had to feed? But maybe you're thinking that obviously, without the slaves to work it, that original David Wilson cashed it out, invested it in something that surely must be producing wealth today, right? Turns out: no, not so much. On the contrary, his son was the last guy to own the house; it got condemned and boarded up not long after he inherited it, because the family was in bankruptcy.

Our day's David B. Wilson grew up on a tiny little farm that his grandparents had built up from nothing, is the first of his generation to find work off of that tiny dirt-poor farm. And even though his yearbook shows a heck of a lot nicer-looking high school than the one that David A. Wilson went to in the (then) insanely awful slums of Newark, unlike David A. Wilson, there was no thought of David B. Wilson going off to college. No, what he has to show for three generations of his family's effort of rebuilding after the bankruptcy of their slave-owning ancestors is ... a medium-sized barbecue restaurant that he's very proud to have started himself. So let's face it, if David A. Wilson had been serious about demanding reparations from the family that inherited all of that wealth that his ancestors had made for them, at the end of a whip, for free -- what was there for him to take? And divided up across the 40 or so relatives who showed up at that meeting of the two Wilson families, if the law would somehow let them take David A. Wilson and his family for every penny they have, how much would each of them have to show for their ancestors' century of work -- less than the price of a 10-year-old high-mileage used car, I'm thinking. Which got me thinking: that's all their ancestors' century of work achieved? That's all their former owners have to show for it?

But you know what? It plays out across the whole region of Dixie, too. I've seen a fair number of old Confederate mansions, and none of them was all that impressive. And most of the land they were on was lost in bankruptcy not long after the Civil War. Which got me thinking of Ken Burns' documentary on World War II, because one of the things he mentions in there is that in the cities of the south like Montgomery, Alabama where they did a lot of the manufacturing for the Arsenal of Democracy, they practically had to rebuild these "major southern cities" into real cities from scratch, blowing them up to 10 times their pre-war size and population and giving them their first 20th century amenities 50 to 100 years after everybody in the north got them, and almost all of it funded by taxes paid by northerners. Why? Because the whole south was, and if you think about it apparently always had been, just that broke.

And trying to figure out how that could possibly be true, how a century's worth of work by 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 slaves could have produced so little lasting wealth, it occurred to me that there's another example in this hemisphere, an even bigger one: the entire Spanish Main, everything from Mexico to central South America, which the Spanish Empire also carved up into plantations that were the model for America's southern plantations, with roughly similar slave populations to do roughly the same work. The difference there is that in much of Latin America, emancipation has still not come; the same black-brown families are still owned by the same white families, who still control them by owning the land they live on and every bit of property they rent and every morsel of food they can get. And when you look at the fabulous wealth of the wealthiest Latin American white corporate oligarchs ... it's pretty pitiful. They've had at least one more century of slave labor invested in their countries, and they don't have any more to show for it, mostly, than poor barely-working-class David B. Wilson does.

Which, I guess all I can say by way of closing thought, makes slavery even more tragic than most of us have ever thought. Several centuries of degradation, pain, humiliation, rape, murder, and unrewarded back-breaking toil at the end of a whip, all that suffering and all those deaths, and none of it even achieved anything, none of it left much of anything to show for it. I guess it turns out that when you don't have to pay someone what they're worth to get their work, you just don't end up putting them to much of any actual productive use after all.

OK, I made time this evening to sit through the entire 38 minute speech, "A More Perfect Union," that Barack Obama gave in Philadelphia on Tuesday. I found much to admire in it. I heard things in it that I need to think long and hard about. Based on what I'd heard about the speech, I was prepared to be deeply enraged at what has been described, not entirely unfairly, as telling black people that white people have a right to be angry, too, that he legitimized, and defended, the anger of white bigots over affirmative action. I was fully prepared to blow a blood vessel over that passage -- but I didn't, quite, and that's remarkable. Me of all people, who has exactly mathematically zero patience left for white people who claim that they're the victims of "reverse discrimination," who has had it entirely up to fucking here with white people who claim that they didn't get any advantages that black people don't get ... he gave me pause. He showed me exactly who's been lying to them, who told them that, reminded me why they really don't know any better, made it harder for me to hate everybody who says those fucking stupid stupid fucking things. And that's remarkable.

Tactically, I found something really, really big to criticize about it: it's an insanely lousy political speech. It violates one of the first rules of homiletics, the art of giving speeches to crowds: "Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, then tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em." There is no refrain to to his speech, no repeated line. The news media have quite rightly thrashed around helplessly trying to summarize this lecture, trying to figure out what the single most important thing in it is, the one thing you need to take away from it the most. And that was his responsibility, especially as a political candidate suddenly knocked back onto the defensive, someone who's slipped from 47% to 40% advantage in a theoretical match-up against John McCain to the exact opposite disadvantage in the latest poll. It was entirely incumbent upon him, not me, not his campaign staff, and sure as pluperfect hell not any journalist, to decide what was the single most important thing in that entire speech was and make 100% sure that we all knew it. As a political speech, it stinks on ice like week old, like month old fish.

It does have the virtue, though, of being one holy hell of a cross between a high-church sermon and a college professor's lecture. If you can free up the 40 uninterrupted minutes to watch it, you absolutely should. It's exactly everything that Reverend Wright wasn't, and isn't.

Where Reverend Wright was angry, Professor Obama is calm. That's a big damned deal right there, to my deep disgust and loathing. In America, it's okay to feel disapproval, it's more or less okay to be sad, but it is never okay to be angry. If you feel angry in America, you're supposed to take a god-damned pill to numb that anger, to numb your ability to feel much of anything, and only then (if ever) are you allowed to explain what you were angry about. (But probably not.)

Where Reverend Wright assumed that even though his sermon was being videotaped, he could count on the fact that he was speaking to an audience that knew the evidence for what he was saying, Professor Obama instead lays out examples and carefully makes the case. And that's a big deal, because as Professor Obama reminded me, this is a subject on which white America has been lied to, by their newspapers and their schools and especially their radio commentators and yes, even by their white churches ("the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning"); too many of you all, even some of you who had unusually privileged black families, just simply do not know these things.

Where Reverend Wright believed that the things that he was angry about, the things that he is still angry about, are defining characteristics of American society, Professor Obama thinks otherwise. And that's where I still have a big bone to pick with Professor, now Senator, Obama:

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change."
-- Barack Obama, "A More Perfect Union," 03/18/08

Yes. It can change for the worse.

According to the SAMHSA recurring survey, black men make up approximately 7% of all drug users in America. Because of "the 'Terry stop' problem" they make up approximately 75% of the people in American prisons for drugs. At least Professor Obama had the good grace to admit that one of the things we need to do to address the legitimate causes of black anger is "ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system," but it gets only a passing mention from him. Why? Because he's hopeful. Irrationally hopeful; he has failed to acknowledge that he lives in an America where that particular problem has gotten worse, and where the howls of white Americans to jail more and more black men are rising, not stilling. Professor Obama grudgingly and gently reminds white Americans that past racism, that past racist efforts by past corporations and past banks and past lenders kept the black community from saving up as much money as even the poorest working class family can draw upon. He didn't even spare one word about the irrefutable fact that as recently as this year, criminals in the lending system were systematically and explicitly and overtly robbing black families, by denying them fixed-rate mortgages they would have been entitled to if they were white and overtly steering them into confiscatory sub-prime mortgages. This isn't a theory, this is a god damned fact; tests were run using families identical but for skin tone, buying identical properties in identical neighborhoods, and the results were unambiguous.

Nor is it even possible to dispute that eight years ago, at exactly the point where the same kinds of white racist brokers were telling white American friends and co-workers to stop buying dot-com stocks, those same brokers were giving speeches at black churches and in community centers in black neighborhoods telling them that the reason white people were wealthier than them was that they bought dot-com stocks, that that's what the black community in 1999 needed to be doing, too. Which means that where, in the past, rapacious rich white bigots used to wait 20 to 40 years to find a new scam by which to rob the black community of everything they had saved, knowing (now, just as then) that nobody would go to jail for this because no judge approved by a white electorate and a white legislature would think it actually criminally illegal to steal all that money from the black community, now they didn't even wait ten years to let some of them save some more up before they came around to steal from them again. That's not a problem that's getting better with each generation, that's a problem that has demonstrably, after 30 years of Reaganomic corporate lawlessness under the rubric of "deregulation," gotten worse.

And I will be double damned if I know how a man in the US Senate, a man who before he entered politics worked as a community organizer in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, could not know that. And I don't know which would piss me off more: if he somehow doesn't know these things, or if he was too cowardly to tell the white people who don't know them. Maybe not angry enough to vote against him, but angry nonetheless. Oh, but wait, this is America. I'm not allowed to be angry. Uh, screw that. I'm a crazy person; I can be as angry as I want. And I think that some of you who are taking pills to make you less angry need to get off those damned pills, feel your anger, and let that anger motivate you to get out there and tell people the stuff that they don't know. Maybe if those people knew what you know, that was making you so angry you had to take the damned pills, maybe they wouldn't think you were crazy to be angry, either.

Presumably it was either Fox News or someone at Hillary Clinton's campaign who only just discovered that many of the sermons from Jeremiah Wright, the pastor who converted Barack Obama from atheism to Christianity were video recorded and are available online. Having seen them, they want everybody to see them, because it is 100% clear to them that the man was insane. They also take it for granted that when you hear what the man had to say, you'll also conclude that the man was insane. And, in fact, judging by Friday's news cycle, they were right about this; even Barack Obama himself has claimed that he strongly condemns some of Pastor Wright's statements, and did the rounds of every major news analysis show Friday night to make sure that everybody knows that he doesn't agree with what's on those clips.

I watched a bunch of those clips.

Jeremiah Wright is not insane.

He does, however, know a lot of things that fall under one of the main categories of Forbidden Lore: your own country's historical misdeeds. And by the public's standards, repeated exposure to Forbidden Lore has driven him "insane." As a matter of fact, I've heard nothing so far from pastor Wright that I haven't said myself. Most of it, in this blog. If you have been reading this blog for a long time and paying attention, you should be able to defend every single one of them. None of the history that pastor Wright talked about in those video clips, or that I've talked about in this blog, is particularly secret. The parts that once were, those secrets got "blown" at least a decade ago. Nor is he in any legal trouble for saying them, nor I for writing them, and neither one of us are going to end up in Guantanamo Bay for calling them to your attention. No, what makes these things "forbidden lore" is that they're the kind of things you think, mistakenly, that your newspaper, your TV news shows, your history teacher, and so forth would have told you about if they were true. So they must not be true.

That all those people would have "conspired" to keep you in the dark about history that you really ought to know about if it were true seems implausible to you. And if it were an overt secretive conspiracy involving all the people who ought to have told you these things and didn't, yes, it would be a logically impossible conspiracy. Some people do get obsessed with trying to figure out how such a conspiracy could have really worked, come to really foolish false conclusions, and actually make themselves not just socially insane but actually clinically insane, paranoid psychotic, looking for evidence of the vast conspiracy that made so many people lie to them. But no actual conspiracy is needed, not when everybody in America who counts as "sane" shares one important common interest: they want you to be proud of your country, and they think that means that you have to be proud of everything America has ever done or else you won't be. So if there is anything they know that they know would make you ashamed of your country if you knew about it, they mostly won't tell you. The reason that none of this stuff stays secret is that there still are journalists who merit the name, in America and elsewhere, who think that you can still be proud of America and what it stands for but you need to know this stuff. All of it's seen print, at least once. But the public, who just plain don't want to know it (there's that "forbidden lore" angle again), stayed away in droves, and those who accidentally heard it forgot it as fast as possible, so that they can stay "sane."

One more thing about this caught my attention. Here's one of the things that Senator Obama said about this in his appearance on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Friday night. (If you're looking at the video clip on the Countdown website, which thanks to MSNBC's crappy web design I can't link directly to, it starts at roughly the 4:40 mark, to about the 5:25 mark.)

Now, one thing that I do hope to do, is, to use some of these issues to talk more fully about the question of race in our society. Because part of what we're seeing here is, Reverend Wright represents a generation that came of age in the '60s. He is an African-American man who, because of his life experience, continues to have a lot of anger and and frustration, and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation, partly because I benefited from the struggles of that early generation. And so part of what we're seeing here is a transition from the past to the future. And I hope that our politics represent that future.

You know that argument that came up in black America, egged on by right wingers, over whether or not Barack Obama is "really black enough" to represent black America? If Barack Obama thinks that the only black men in America who grew up being called niggers were the ones who grew up in the 60s? If Barack Obama thinks that the only black men who get pulled over for Driving While Black and get patted down by police everywhere they go are those who grew up in the 60s? Then maybe he did grow up in a privileged (and largely outside-the-US) environment. Maybe the man really does need a wakeup call. Maybe he doesn't need to be repudiating Jeremiah Wright. Maybe Jeremiah Wright needs to be repudiating Barack Obama. Maybe Reverend Jeremiah Wright has more call to be ashamed of Barack Obama than Barack Obama has to be ashamed of Reverend Wright.

Because unless he's pandering to white ignoramuses who think that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to blame the CIA's illegal war in Nicaragua for the crack cocaine epidemic, that he's "obviously insane" to think that the US's own CIA were the ones who originally trained al Qaeda and the Taliban in terrorism and sponsored their terrorist attacks against the then-pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to think that Hillary Clinton can't fully understand the indignity of being called a nigger the whole time you're growing up or the indignity of being constantly pulled over and searched by police when you're doing nothing wrong because those things have never happened to her, that pastor Wright is "obviously insane" to think that America will be judged harshly by God for explicitly racist drug war policies, unless the people who think those things are people that Obama is dishonestly pandering to in order to allay their bigoted fears? Then that man needs a good, hard wake-up call. Because if he agrees with white ignoramuses and bigots that those ideas are all "crazy" and that only "crazy people" are angry over them, then I'm not ashamed of Obama for what his pastor preached, I'm ashamed of him for not believing it when he was told.

(Damn it, I didn't set out to be famous for writing about race. Telling the truth about race in America is turning out to be my version of taping bacon to the cat. One of the things that's driving up my in-bound link count lately is the last set of things I wrote about race in America. And in every single blog that linked to it, the commenters on those blogs have entirely justifiably pointed out that none of what I'm saying about race is new, or original, or even particularly controversial to professional historians. It saddens me that so many people think it is. To quote a line from one of my all-time favorite comic book limited series, Steve Darnall and Alex Ross's U.S., when a dilapidated and confused Uncle Sam asks a symbol of black America why he's tormenting him with memories of American slavery and racism, "Because you need to know! That's why! Because you have a tendency to forget these things.")

Thank Prime for local journalism. It's been starved half to death, but it's not all the way dead yet. The "I-Team" investigative journalism unit of KSDK-TV 5 (NBC) ran one more really, really good story on Cookie Thornton's suicidal assassination attack on Kirkwood, Missouri's city hall tonight: Leisa Zigman, "I-Team Obtains All of 'Cookie' Thornton's Tickets," KSDK-TV, 2/27/08. It fails to answer one or two questions, something the reporters and anchors themselves admitted on the air. But between the budget constraints of journalism, and the limitations of the information that can be gotten out of relevant witnesses, this may have to be as much as we're going to know for now.

KSDK-TV filed a request to Kirkwood City Hall for, and got, every single citation that Kirkwood ever filed on Cookie Thornton or on his business, CookCo Construction. They then read and studied every single on of those citations, and armed with what they learned, went and asked very pointed questions of Kirkwood city attorney (and Thornton survivor) John Hessel. Based on eyewitness accounts received from Meacham Park, KSDK's reporters went after all of this to try one last time to answer the most important question of the whole tragedy. Were Cookie Thorton, his family, and his neighbors in Meacham Park right to believe that Cookie Thornton was singled out for abusive harassment by the Kirkwood city government?

Their single most interesting finding astounded almost everybody. Only a couple of people actually knew this, I know, but it's so important it blows my mind that nobody brought it up in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. From the story:

"In the past 12 years the City of Kirkwood issued 79 citations to Thornton. ... In 1996, the city issued four citations. In 1997 it was six citations. In 1998 Thornton received only one citation and in 1999 he received two. In that four year period, Thornton paid about 1000 dollars in fines. But in the years 2000 and 2001, the city issued 59 citations to Thornton. ... In May, 2001, a St. Louis County Circuit Court Judge found Thornton guilty of every violation filed. She fined him more than 11,000 dollars. They were fines Thornton never paid. The following month, the tickets increased. On June 22, 2001 Ken Yost, the Director of Public Works, one of five people Thornton killed, personally wrote four tickets. ... Four days later, Thornton received eight more tickets. ... [Then] According to Hessel a decision was made to halt all tickets. ... Public records show, in 2003, 2004, and 2005, Kirkwood did not issue one ticket to Thornton. Since 2002, he received a total of six citations." (Emphasis added by me.)

In an on-air interview, Hessel gave ambiguous and conflicting answers about why the harassment started, whether it was initiated by the city on their own first, or if the city was only responding to complaints from one or more of Thornton's neighbors. But unless they can show even one white contractor in Kirkwood who was treated the same way when he didn't immediately pack up his business and leave town, they still have something important left to explain, because the evidence is clear and unambiguous: for a span of roughly one year, the city of Kirkwood, and specifically one of Thornton's targets that night Public Works Director Ken Yost, absolutely was trying to put him out of business in an over-the-top campaign of harassment.

If it were anybody else, I'd be willing to believe it was just a personality conflict. These things happen. Some local official shows up on a guy's property, makes an impolite demand, makes threats, the guy who's being threatened loses all ability to think rationally (which is what happens when you threaten people), both people end up shouting at each other, and they declare informal war. It happens. What I'm having a hard time imagining, though, is that this is what happened with Cookie Thornton, because of one thing that literally everybody who knew him has said: before this all started, Thornton was the nicest, most sweet-tempered, most generous, kindest guy in all of Meacham Park. Someone who got along with everybody, black or white, young or old, rich or poor. So if that initial attempt to get Thornton to clean up his business enough to get the neighbors to shut up, and to get the necessary permits and variances, resulted in the kind of all-out war that those citations document, that initial meeting has to have been disastrous. And this being Kirkwood, and this being Meacham Park, I still think the most obvious explanation why, all the way back in 2000 this one Meacham Park businessman got (apparently) singled out so hard is that he was a black man with a semi-successful business, and some racist white official felt that he didn't need to negotiate with, discuss anything with, or defend anything to a black man, that when a white government official speaks, it is up to the black man to shut up, grovel, and obey. If there's another reason instead, the burden of proof is on Kirkwood to show it.

But the last and most fascinating part of this is this, as I emphasized above from Zigman's story: Kirkwood had already backed down. At least, most of the way. We know that they were still refusing to negotiate the permits and variances Thornton technically needed, because plenty of witnesses have told reporters about Thornton's increasingly desperate attempts over the years to get onto the necessary City Council or City Zoning Commission meeting agendas. And because Thornton's credit records are protected by privacy laws, we may never know if the City of Kirkwood was still trying to collect on the tens of thousands of dollars of fines from back then, or if six years later those unpaid fines were still wrecking his credit rating. Maybe that's something the city never thought of, never realized how badly that would hurt a small businessman when they decided to de-escalate. As far as Hessel and the city were concerned, when they stopped writing those tickets altogether in the summer of 2001, this should have been all over, and Thornton shouldn't have had anything left to complain about.

Is that why Thornton pinned all of his hopes on his lawsuits against Kirkwood and crashed so hard when the last lawsuit was dismissed, because he saw it as the only way to repair his credit when the city was refusing to discuss it with him? Or is this really just pent-up rage that simmered all these years in the mind of a man who was convinced that he did everything that white America has ever asked anybody to do, festering anger six and a half years later over an insult he was given for being a semi-successful black man? We'll probably never know. I guess that all we can know is that whatever the heck was going on in 2000 and 2001, why ever a handful of Kirkwood's elected officials took on this one popular Meacham Park former star athlete and semi-successful small businessman, whoever actually started it, they and he paid for it with their lives. Whether or not Kirkwood stays at war with Meacham Park, Cookie Thornton's private war is finally over.

(Previously: "Meacham Park Terrorist's Suicide Attack on Kirkwood City Occupation Government," 2/8/08. "Kirkwood and Meacham Park from 1853 to 1990," 2/10/08. "Ethnic Cleansing Does Not Condone Terrorism: Kirkwood, Meacham Park, and Cookie Thornton," 2/11/08.)

Want to do something really important about racism in this country, particularly about deteriorating relationships between police and black men? There's a problem we've got that's pretty nearly insoluble. I've been busting some serious skull sweat over this one for over a year now, since I first started to realize what this one particular part of the problem might be coming from, and I'm stumped. But if we as a nation don't find a solution to this problem, it may yet get to the point that Spider Robinson used to fret about in his writings, the day where black and white America can no longer live together in peace at all. First, let me lay out the problem, then let me go over some of the obvious things you might suggest we should try and why they won't work.

Let's start with something that almost everyone who teaches law enforcement knows, and that almost everyone in black America knows, and that at least some cops know, and that you probably have heard but don't think about much. There is a "gold standard" ongoing scientific study of Americans' drug use, an almost impossible to criticize, widely recognized recurring survey by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the US Department of Health and Human Services. As a former mathematician myself, I can tell you that the methodology of this study is bullet-proof. And one of its rather important and too-often over-looked findings is that there is no statistically significant difference in drug usage patterns between blacks and whites. None. So since black male drug users make up roughly 6% of the drug-using population, then if both black drug users and white drug users were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced at the same rate and in the same way, one would expect that black males would make up 6% of those in prison at any given time for drug-related offenses. The actual number is closer to 75%.

How did we get to this point? Three words: Terry versus Ohio.

Way back in 1968, when the "War on Drugs" wasn't even a glimmer in not-yet-President Richard Nixon's eye, the Supreme Court ruled that any time a police officer is interacting with a member of the public and feels unsafe, whether they've arrested that person or not, the officer is entitled to make the other person submit to what is called "a Terry stop," to pat-down the outside of their clothes looking for any easily detectable evidence of a weapon. The Court has subsequently ruled that if a Terry stop turns up any evidence of another crime, even if it's one the officer had no reasonable expectation of finding and there was no grounds for a search warrant, that evidence can be used to arrest someone for and convict them of a crime. So if you get pulled over for a traffic stop, and the cop decides that you might have a gun or a knife on your person, and he wants to make sure you don't, and he pats you down and finds no weapon but does find a crack pipe with crack residue, or a bong with marijuana residue, or if while he's patting you down a little baggie or square of foil falls out of your clothes and lands on the ground, that's evidence that's okay to use against you in court, even though it was found without your consent to a search and without a search warrant.

And who are cops most afraid of in this country, even the ones who think that they aren't racist at all? Black men. Even the black cops are mostly only afraid of black men. As I've said before, it's our national shame. No, really. If you see someone getting patted down for weapons (anywhere outside of a TSA security checkpoint), I'll bet you 6 to 1 it's a black man. If you tell me first that the person who is being searched did nothing suspicious and was polite to the officer, but still got patted down for weapons, I absolutely guarantee you it was a black man. And Terry stops are where nearly all drug investigations and arrests begin in America. So "everybody knows" that almost all of the drug users in America are black men (even though that's completely false). Think that isn't reason enough for black men to be angry? Think that anger doesn't make them even scarier? Think that steadily escalating fear of their anger doesn't make the cops even more likely to search them for weapons? We're in a spiral here, and it goes to a very ugly place.

And that even assumes that everybody involved has good intentions. We don't know what percentage of the police force are bigots who would plant evidence on a black man if they didn't find any. But we know that number is non-zero. And have reason to believe it's dangerously large. This, more than anything, is why the idea of any American being searched without a warrant from a judge based on sworn eyewitness testimony sufficient to total up to probable cause is on the short list of things that the Founding Fathers fought to the death to prevent.

But you don't even have to assume that race is the bad reason. Every cop who's ever worked narcotics knows that if he could just come up with some way to search people, he'd find people with drugs. He knows that if he searched 10 people chosen any old which way at any given time, one of them would be carrying drugs. But the only warrantless search he can do is a Terry stop. And what's going to happen to him on cross-examination if he tries to say to the jury, with a straight face, that he was worried that a 60-year-old breast cancer survivor might have a knife? What's the jury going to say when he says that he thought that corporate lawyer in the $3,000 imported Italian suit was going to pull a gun on him -- never mind that that's the guy who probably has the most drugs on him? Which is the jury going to believe, that he really was in fear for his life or that he was illegally looking for an excuse to execute a warrantless search? No, other than teenagers who are dressed sloppily or who give him attitude, who are the only people he's allowed to search for drugs without probable cause? Black men.

But what can we do about it?

End the War on Drugs? You wish. Not this decade, or the next, maybe not even in your lifetime at this rate. Certainly not in time to solve this problem. By all means, if you want the War on Drugs to end, keep campaigning for it. But don't count on that being this country's salvation; by the earliest possible time it could come, it will come as too little, too late.

Make the cops give up Terry stop pat-downs without probable cause? Never going to happen. You are never going to get a 5-vote majority on the US Supreme Court to tell cops that they just have to accept the possibility of some suspect pulling a gun on them without giving them some chance to prevent it.

Make the cops search everybody they interact with, making getting patted down for weapons something that happens every time you talk to a cop? By the reasoning of Terry v Ohio, this really is what they ought to be doing. Because once you look past the irrational fear of black men and look at the actual reports of police officers being shot or stabbed, there's no age, income, ethnic, or racial profile that helps. Anybody could have a warrant that they'd rather kill someone than face. But look at how loud and persistent the calls have been for the TSA to use ethnic profiling in their pat-downs, even though all that would do is tell al Qaeda they can smuggle anything they want onto a plane if their agent looks white enough. The American people would not sit still for rich white men, for elderly grandmothers, for pre-teen kids, for priests and nuns being patted down every time they come face to face with a cop.

Change the Terry stop procedures so they can't come up with drug evidence? Now that's an interesting prospect. But it poses serious technological challenges. Because they are required to search everyone, the TSA is desperately trying to get away from pat-down searches, and spending a small fortune to find ways to do it. But there's no way every police officer on patrol could fit a backscatter x-ray machine into his car or onto his bicycle. On the other hand, my friends who've been through US Secret Service checkpoints lately tell me that the Secret Service, which has at least as much reason to be concerned about concealed weapons as your average cop making a traffic stop, makes do just fine with hand-held magnetometer (metal detector) wands unless they do have probable cause for a more thorough search. Could we require all Terry stops to be done without coming into contact with the person, by use of magnetometers? Well, it wouldn't catch all plausible weapons, not anything made of plastic (or glass, or obsidian, or bamboo, or whatever). But then, a current Terry stop won't catch all plausible weapons, either. No, the bigger obstacle is that it's one more thing to tell cops they have to carry with them at all times. Have you looked at a cop's belt lately? What they have to carry is already getting insane. So yeah, if you can find a hand-held magnetometer likely to catch any gun, or any knife larger than a couple of inches, from a distance of a couple of inches from the body through cloth, that is weather proof, shock resistant, reliable, affordable, and under a couple of ounces of weight, yeah, that might work. Years from now, when we get them all rolled out. Do we have that long?

If anybody else has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Take your time. But don't wait too long, or Meacham Park won't be the only part of the US that boils over.

So that I could get to this article, yesterday I gave you a history of the city of Kirkwood, Missouri, and of its neighbor the unincorporated city of Meacham Park, from their founding in 1853 and 1892 up until 1990. Now that you understand that much, let's pick up where I left off, with the 1990-2008 history that explains why Charles "Cookie" Thornton's murder of five people at the Kirkwood City Hall on Thursday, February 7th, was neither "random" nor "senseless" nor the act of a "crazy man," but something even more awful.

Along about 1988 or '89, both Kirkwood and Meacham Park could tell that they were beginning to have problems, entirely separate problems that needed urgent solutions:

Kirkwood: Ever play Sim City 2000 or any of its sequels? Then you may have run into a game rule that must have seemed frustrating and arbitrary to you ... but it turns out that it isn't. As documented by Joel Garreau in his far under-rated, absolutely essential 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, this particular rule is something that was discovered empirically, when inexpensive computerized spreadsheets first started changing urban planning from its roots in art, architecture, and the humanities into what it is today: namely a science, a branch of economics. Cities all over the country were computerizing their budgets and their expenditures, and making some of this data available to the public. This gave commercial real estate developers, and politicians, and university professors a universe of raw data from which to make statistical correlations. And one of the first and still most important discoveries they made was this: residential costs money, commercial makes money, industrial breaks even.

That is to say, from a city and county revenue versus expense standpoint, all residential property consumes more taxpayer dollars than any residential property owner, no matter how expensive the property, can afford to pay in taxes: police, roads, recreational facilities, schools, all the rest of the stuff that voters demand. Industrial property pays good taxes, because of all the assessed value off the industrial machinery inside, but they also consume a lot of taxpayer dollars in extra policing costs, extra road repair, pollution cleanup, and so on. Commercial property, by contrast, consumes almost no taxpayer dollars. None. The buildings aren't terribly flammable (usually), there are fewer fire hazards on most of the properties than in either the average home or the average factory, but unlike homes and factories, they're more likely to have extensive high-tech fire suppression systems. The types of crime they attract tend not to be the kinds that require extensive police work, but they're even more likely than homes or factories to go to the expense of putting in ultra-tech alarm systems and they hire their own private security in large numbers. They often, in modern office parks, even pay for their own roads. It is for this reason, more than any other, that owners of commercial property have been pitting cities and counties and states against each other in such a relentless drive to reduce the commercial property tax rate to zero: to them, it's a basic fairness issue.

(As an aside, there is one part of this I find to quibble with: the people who do this analysis charge the costs of education against the people whose kids are in school, not the employers who would otherwise have to pay a fortune to train employees. Still, as a general rule of thumb, it works.)

Now remember what I said about Kirkwood's history, yesterday? How fundamental it was to James Kirkwood's plan that the city of Kirkwood have, except for the few tiny little shops that people's wives would need for buying clothing or food, nothing but upper middle class and middle class residential property? When in the mid to late 1980s, urban planning analysts finally proved the above, the Kirkwood city government realized that what they desperately needed, if they were going to continue to balance their budgets, was an awful lot more commercial real estate, far more than could fit into Kirkwood without demolishing an awful lot of high end residential property, something that was neither affordable nor politically viable. So they looked over at Meacham Park, nearby, which was having its own problem.

Meacham Park: Meacham Park was also almost 100% residential. It had lower government costs than Kirkwood, but even less valuable property. More importantly, for explicitly racist reasons, St. Louis County started yanking their police patrols out of Meacham Park in the 1980s. (Meacham Park never incorporated officially as a city, and as such, the County was responsible for police and other municipal services. There are quite a few such places left, to this day.) At the time, the County was having its own budget problems, and the then-Republican county government decided that patrolling a dirt-poor all-black neighborhood wasn't the best use of police manpower. And as happens every time word gets out that the police won't go into a neighborhood to investigate crimes, the drug gangs moved in. So the Meacham Park neighborhood association looked into all of their options, but they couldn't make the numbers work. They couldn't raise enough revenue, being all residential, to incorporate and form their own police force. And being all black, they couldn't get any bank to okay the loans needed to develop any of the property they did have as commercial.

So the city of Kirkwood made the residents of Meacham Park what they called "a generous offer." If the Meacham Park residents would vote to ratify Kirkwood's annexation of Meacham Park, the city of Kirkwood would fix their problems. They would pave the roads, they would provide the police, they would build a new fire station and provide better and faster police and fire and ambulance service than the County ever did. They claimed to be doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, to be doing this because as a wealthy city they could afford to, to be doing this because their Christian consciences told them this was the right thing to do for their poorer neighbors. The closest they came to admitting a cynical motive was when some people pointed out that they had long been under a court order to allow Meacham Park kids to attend previously all-white Kirkwood schools, and they were tired of Meacham Park's kids dragging down the school's academic averages, so they wanted to make Meacham Park a nicer place to live, so Meacham Park would develop more jobs, so Meacham Park's kids would see that there was an advantage to getting a good education.

Look, if you're a black American over about the age of 12, or at least no later than by the time you're old enough to vote, you really ought to know this: when a white politician says he's doing a favor for a black person out of the goodness of his heart, he's lying. Period. But once they heard the cynical explanation, the Meacham Park residents felt comfortable enough that they believed that it was safe to betray Elzy Meacham's dream and let themselves be ruled by an all-white city government, in a city of almost all-white ministers, with an all-white judiciary and an almost all-white police police force, and in 1991 Kirkwood officially annexed Meacham Park.

There is a word for what happened next, and that word is "ethnic cleansing."

One: The ink was barely dry on the incorporation papers before the city condemned half of Meacham Park, used eminent domain to seize people's property, and turned it over to politically well-connected developers for free, with demolition paid for and construction subsidized by taxpayers, to build a Wal-Mart and a bunch of strip malls. It's worth pointing out, by the way, that almost every single business in that development has had an EEOC complaint filed against them, because according to the neighborhood association, every single one of them has gone to demonstrably illegal lengths to make sure that they did not hire a single male resident of Meacham Park. If you look at the city of Kirkwood's web page, you'll see that they insist that their offer to the residents who lost their houses was quite generous. Here's how they say it was supposed to work: let's say you owned a house in Meacham Park that was worth $27,000. The city would offer you your choice of $27,000 (which wouldn't buy you a house anywhere else, really, not anything that qualified for an occupancy permit anywhere near St. Louis), or of any house in Kirkwood up to $93,000 in value, with the city paying the difference. Very generous sounding, right? Right? Uh, wait. Is the city going to pay the three and a half times higher property taxes, too? Uh, no. Is the city going to pay the three and a half times higher maintenance costs for the rest of the home owner's life, too? Uh, no. No, the city is going to wait until you fall behind on the repairs and/or the taxes, condemn the property, take it for free, and sell it; that way you get nothing. Only a few people were foolish enough to take that offer; the city professes shock and disappointment at this. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that so far as I can find any records, the city didn't even make that much of an offer to any owners of rental property, or to their many tenants; they were just run out of town.

Two: Remember that promise of faster police, fire, and ambulance service? Yeah, funny how that works. According to the residents of Meacham Park, and verified by several reporters over the years, you know how that actually worked out? Now that Kirkwood owns Meacham Park, if you call 911 from anywhere in Meacham Park, the very first thing that happens is the city dispatches at least four cars of police, usually with dogs. They then descend upon and secure the property, demanding ID from every black male over the age of 12, and run all of those IDs against the list of wants and warrants. If they come up empty, they then claim to feel unsafe, which grants them the constitutional right to do weapons pat-downs of anybody they feel is dangerous, which to a cop in America almost without exception means "black males over the age of 12," in hopes of finding something that would give them an excuse to search for contraband. And only after they have secured the property, and arrested every possible arrestable black male over the age of 12, are the police willing to listen to whatever criminal complaint prompted you to call the police in the first place. If you called because of a fire, Meacham Park residents insist that the police hold back the fire trucks until this search has taken place. If you called for an ambulance, same thing.

That's the first thing I thought of when I heard about Thursday night's terror attack on city hall in Kirkwood, because the Friday before that was when Meacham Park resident Kevin Johnson got the death penalty for his murder of Kirkwood police sergeant William McEntee. You see, back on July 5th of 2005, Kevin Johnson's baby half-brother, 12 year old Joseph Long, went into cardiac arrest. He had a congenital heart problem, the family knew to call 911 right away. The police arrived before the ambulance was dispatched, and insisted that it was more important that they find Kevin Johnson, who was wanted on a minor parole violation, than it was to perform CPR on the dying 12 year old child. After the police gave up in disgust, the ambulance arrived, and declared Joseph Long dead on the scene. Now, the autopsy would later reveal that Joseph Long was irretrievably dead before the police even arrived. But Kevin Johnson didn't know that. So far as he knew, the Kirkwood policy of arresting every arrestable black male in Meacham Park, before even considering rendering emergency assistance, had cost the life of his baby brother. So he went out and got a gun, announced to his family that he was going to hunt down and kill the first white Kirkwood police officer he could find, and over their objections, did just that. A week ago Friday, the jury accepted the (all white) prosecution's argument and the (white) judge's instructions that this qualified as "cool deliberation" and "premeditation," the necessary elements to make this a death penalty case.

(Since Cookie Thornton's attack, St. Louis County police have been doing all of the patrols in Kirkwood including Meacham Park, ostensibly to let the Kirkwood PD mourn, until the last of the Kirkwood funerals. Somehow, I can't shake my feeling that the residents of Meacham Park are just okay with this. In fact, under the circumstances, everybody involved is probably safer if we keep it that way for a while.)

Three: Over the course of May, 2001, one of the only actually modestly successful businessmen in Meacham Park was cited by the city of Kirkwood for an ordinance violation. In and of itself, that's not proof of sinister intent, even though the particular ordinance is one that is impossible to obey. Your town probably has the same mostly-stupid ordinance, too: a law making it illegal to park commercial vehicles in a residential neighborhood. Every small building contractor, every independent towing firm, every small lawn care business or gardener, every business below a certain size that involves owning a pickup truck or a van, has to violate this ordinance every night, because if they're not big enough to own a separate facility, and/or if they can't afford to have a separate vehicle for personal use, they've got nowhere else to park it. Almost never do any of them get ticketed for this; heck, in my own neighborhood, within 2 blocks of here, I could point to at least three of them. When a ticket does get written, in any city in America, it almost always happens for the same reason. Some neighbor gets into a fight with another neighbor over something stupid. They dig up a copy of the city ordinances, looking for something to complain about, find out about the commercial vehicle rule, and call the cops. Maybe that's what happened here. Maybe.

(This is #1 on the list of questions I still want an answer to: who called in the original complaint against Cookie Thornton's truck? Because if it was a feuding neighbor who started this, and not a white politician, it might absolve Kirkwood of some tiny amount of the blame for what happened after.)

But that's the end of the similarity. Because what almost always happens after that, in every case but this one, is this. The cops write one, and only one, ticket. If the neighbor calls again, they say that they've already ticketed the vehicle, that now it's up to the courts. The city councilman or alderman steps in and tries to referee the feud, tries to make the person complaining shut up, tries to get the guy who owns the truck to stop doing whatever it was that ticked off the neighbor. In the meantime, the guy who owns the truck goes and pays a trivial paperwork fee of $5 or maybe at most $50 to file for a variance to the zoning code for a big enough "commercial" space for him to park his truck in. Virtually without exception, he gets that variance; as a contractor I know put it to me, city councils hand out variances like lollipops. But that's not what happened here. Instead, Kirkwood went out and ticketed Cookie Thornton's truck every night for two months. When he asked his (white) city councilman to intervene, the city councilman declined. So he got a lawyer, who advised him to file for a zoning variance. He did. And could not get the zoning board to even look at his request "until he complies with the law first," a requirement never ever imposed on any other contractor. When he went to the (white) city council to complain about this, they refused to put him on the agenda. When he rose to speak during public comments periods, they ruled him out of order and evicted him from the meetings. So he spent months going to every zoning meeting, and every city council meeting, and loudly demanding to have his zoning variance heard, until the city adopted a policy of having him hand-cuffed by the Kirkwood police and bodily hauled out of every meeting he showed up at. In addition, the city retaliated by sending out city inspectors to find every possible citeable offense, including at one point sending out city mowing trucks to mow his lawn because it was one quarter of an inch over the legal limit and billing him $200 plus court costs, including ticketing all of his residential vehicles for being one inch or less too far from the curb.

In January of 2007, Cookie Thornton gave up on the city of Kirkwood and filed suit, first in front of the county, then in appeals to both the state and to federal court, arguing that this pattern of selective enforcement was racially motivated. He told personal friends that he was giving up on Kirkwood and Meacham Park. All he really hoped to get out of his lawsuit was enough money to cover the expense of moving out of state, so he could go down to Florida, where he had other family, and start all over again with nothing. A year later, on January 28th of 2008, a week ago Monday, the last court of appeals denied his case. He couldn't produce any witnesses to prove that the selective enforcement was racially motivated, and the courts are hesitant to get involved in selective enforcement cases in general. So on Thursday, February 7th, Cookie Thornton gave up on public justice altogether, realized that because he did not give up his business and evacuate when he got that first ticket, they were not going to settle for anything less than destroying him as a person. So he wrote a one-line suicide note, picked up a gun, and went down to his last zoning meeting. If you look at the Post-Dispatch seating chart and step-by-step diagram that I linked to yesterday, you can clearly see with your own eyes that he did not fire randomly. He searched that room for very specific people, shot three people at point blank range enough times that he reasonably hoped that they were dead (one of them probably will live, despite two execution-style head shots), and other than that only intentionally shot the two police officers who got between him and them. He then made no attempt to escape, forcing the police responding to the scene to kill him.

Ian Fleming's Law: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." The residents of Meacham Park have a word for what has happened to them since they foolishly accepted Kirkwood's annexation offer: occupation. At the urging of local clergy and of their own local (informal) politicians, they have tried everything they could do to placate and get along with the white government of Kirkwood. That government has accepted none of their offers, has seldom even agreed to meet with them. After these three newsworthy incidents, I'm going to go even farther than the residents of Meacham Park have gone. I see the pattern perfectly clearly and, as someone who doesn't live in Kirkwood and who never drives through it, I'm unafraid to call it what it is: ethnic cleansing. At this point I have no remaining doubt in my mind that the Kirkwood City Hall's at least partial motive in annexing Meacham Park was to reduce the black, male, over-12 population of Meacham Park to zero. And they will not stop until they succeed. And if they balance their city budget, and enrich their campaign contributors, by giving all that black-owned property to their wealthy white friends for free, well, hey, that's just a bonus. This is no different from the century-long campaign of greed-driven lynchings that I wrote about day before yesterday.

Cookie Thornton was not the first terrorist to respond to an occupation army against which he was helpless with a suicidal assassination attempt. This is morally wrong. And it's also completely stupid; no occupied people in history have ever won their freedom through assassinations or other terrorist attacks. The Palestinians have been engaging in terror attacks against the Israeli occupation almost every day since 1948; how's that worked out for them? Occupied minorities win their freedom by bringing larger, outside governments to bear against their oppressors. It takes longer, many people suffer, it's hard work, but it works. What Cookie Thornton did was terrorism, he let himself become a terrorist, and I condemn that in clear and unambiguous terms.

(I will also say, by the way, to those who ask if knowing what they were risking by driving Cookie Thornton that far, that Kirkwood should have had more security against terrorist attacks? As I said the other day, remember what I call the Beirut Lesson. If enough terrorists want you dead so badly that they don't care what happens to them or their families as long as they get you, no amount of security will save your life.)

Yes, what Cookie Thornton did was both evil and stupid. But what he did was not "senseless" or "random," or the work of a guy who "went crazy for no reason." The people who tell themselves these lies do so for their own comfort, to absolve themselves of any responsibility to bring Cookie Thornton's oppressors, the thieves and bigots who are ethnically cleansing Meacham Park, to justice. And if we don't want America to continue being a place where we have to fear terrorist attacks like Cookie Thornton's, then to keep pretending that this isn't necessary, and to keep denying justice to black men who try as hard as Cookie Thornton did to live the American Dream, these are luxuries that we can not afford.

OK, some of you who are new to the blog may not realize this, and yesterday's entry may have come as an unwelcome surprise to you. See that "Warning: Sanity Hazard: Contains Forbidden Lore" icon? I mean it. I in fact have another icon that I use for when I'm being playful and/or referring to fictional "forbidden lore." When I post something that I know that some people on the Internet just plain do not want to know, and that others may not want to read before breakfast or let their kids see, I use this icon. And the subject of today's entries (and probably tomorrow's, or if not then one not long after that) is one that two centuries' worth of American teachers, editors, parents' groups, politicians, and even professional historians, think that you have no business being interested in. "Boost, don't knock." When studied beyond what they tell you in high school, American history can be a very depressing subject, one that can make it hard for you to remember that other countries have done as bad, and usually worse. That's one reason you aren't supposed to want to know this stuff; it might make you less likely to work for and fight for your country, when needed. Another reason is that most people think that none of this stuff is anything you can do anything about anyway, so why get yourself depressed over nothing? As you might guess, I usually disagree with this analysis.

That being said, if you're thinking of using what I've written here to prove how morally superior the people are where you live, compared to the multi-generational evil of us St. Louisans? You're a fool. Your home town is no better. You just don't know.

Local reporters are doing their job amazingly well, and so the details continue to come out about Cookie Thornton's suicide terrorist attack on the Kirkwood City Hall continue to come out at a very encouraging rate. See St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Anatomy of a Rampage" (PDF), "Charles Thornton: The legal battles." Former Riverfront Times reporter Randall Roberts, "My Conversation with Charles 'Cookie' Thornton." And one that says about half of what I intend to say when I cover this in more depth tomorrow or the next day, Riverfront Times STLog: "Charles 'Cookie' Thornton: Meacham Park Boils Over." So I think this is the most important thing I can add to the conversation at this point: I can put it in the broader context of history, of US history, Kirkwood history, and Meacham Park history. Then, while we wait to see exactly when Cookie Thornton opened his paving business, and wait to hear why the city singled him out for enforcement of an ordinance that is not enforced against almost any other building contractor, and certainly not in so draconian a fashion and with a total refusal to negotiate, you'll understand why even before I heard the word "Kirkwood" attached to this story I knew that someone from Meacham Park had done it.

Kirkwood, Missouri, has several odd historical claims to fame. The oldest of them is the most fascinating one. Kirkwood, Missouri is the world's first intentional "edge city." Like a lot of St. Louis County, it started out its life as a couple of farms and a market, dating back to homesteads first colonized who-knows-when, barely after the Indian Wars had ended in the area. It may not have even had a name; at the time, most Missouri market towns didn't. The city of Kirkwood as we know it happened when a clever railroad engineer named James Kirkwood bought it all up, because he'd figured out a pretty reliable way to get rich. Worked, too. See, here's what James Kirkwood knew: "decent, proper" people all over the world, and in all times, hate big cities. It shows up in sermons from Hesiod's Works and Days to the New England "divines," in folk tales from Scotland to Baghdad, in songs from Homeric odes to World War I era pop music, in dramatic fiction from Aristophanes to film noir. "Everybody knows" that decent, honest, pious, honorable people live on farms. "Everybody knows" that nobody lives in big cities, at least not intentionally, except for corrupt politicians and other thieves, perverted "artists" and other prostitutes, greedy "priests" and other beggars. "Everybody knows" that decent, honest, pious, honorable folk treat the big city as a necessary and dangerous evil, a place to leave for in the morning, do whatever business you have to do, but make absolutely sure that you're safe at home on the farm in the country before nightfall, before the worst of the corruption can infect you.

But in early industrial America, at the beginning of the urbanization, that became logistically dicey. Rich people carved out their own gated enclaves and posted private armies, but the upper middle class and the middle class had nothing. So here's what James Kirkwood did, in 1853: he surveyed the rural area out past the extreme edges of St. Louis, looking for a tiny little farmer's market crossroad. But he needed not just any crossroad; he needed one where the geography was favorable to rail. He wanted a solid-rock ridge line all the way from downtown St. Louis to that intersection, or as near to one as could be found. When he found one, he bought it all up, secured the railroad right of way along that ridge line, and raised the financing to build a rail line out to his newly founded "rural town" of Kirkwood, Missouri. And he marketed the lots there to, and only allowed to move in, the white upper middle class and middle class from St. Louis. That way they not only paid him for their houses, recouping a big chunk of the cost of the rail line, but they paid him every day so that they could ride his train into their jobs in the city, and ride the train back out to their "rural" house, where they kept their families safe from urban perversion and corruption and sickness, being back there in safety themselves by nightfall, or at least by full dark.

It was so obviously brilliant that everybody copied it. Look at a modern-day map of the St. Louis metropolitan area, Missouri side. Come in just a few miles from what is now Interstate 270, to US Highway 67, which is mostly called Lindbergh Boulevard here. Except, not coincidentally, for the stretch of it that is still called Kirkwood Road. What US67, aka Lindbergh, aka Kirkwood Road, is, is the road that used to connect all of those train stations. Every single major suburban town along that stretch of road, from Florissant down to Kirkwood, is centered on one of them. It was an attempt to build one big long ring of lily-white upper middle class and middle class exurbs: no rich people