A Question Of Public Deportment

By now, the entire country knows what’s happened in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the “no true bill” decision by the grand jury that sat on Officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of giant thug Michael Brown.

I had a predictable reaction to the rioting and looting:

You can take the savage out of the jungle,
But it’s much, much harder
To take the jungle out of the savage.

I claim that the videos that have surfaced since the disorder began support that evaluation, and no other.

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Chiefest among the nominally nonviolent obscenities of this affair are the words of His August Majesty, Barack Hussein Obama, first Emperor of the United States:

That this man should have the gall to stand before an audience and prattle about the rule of law – he who routinely flouts the law! – is a blasphemy beyond my power to adequately condemn. That he should call the rioting “an understandable reaction” – he who accused the police of “acting stupidly” in the Henry Louis Gates matter, without having even a superficial acquaintance with the facts! – recalls Maxine Waters’s defense of the Los Angeles rioters after the acquittals in the “Rodney King” trials. Has there ever been a less sincere, more barefaced liar in any American public office, much less in the Oval Office?

America, your greatest shame isn’t allowing Obama the presidency. It’s having returned him to it.

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But let’s not dwell on the present when we have the past and future to address. After all, they’re so much bigger!

Time was, there was no hesitation on the police’s part to enforce noncontroversial norms of public conduct. They would routinely tell “undesirables” to “keep moving.” Nor was there any unease among law-abiding citizens about the practice. It was well understood that we would grudgingly tolerate much that went on behind closed doors that we could not countenance in public. Absolute intolerance of public misbehavior expressed an understanding of “camel’s nose under the tent lip” dynamics: a “broken window theory” of public conduct that reached well beyond vandalism and random disorder.

The breakdown, as always, started with little things. Littering. Public nuisances such as loudly played radios and boom boxes. Jostling on crowded sidewalks. Much followed from the mistaken tolerance of such behavior – a refusal by ordinary citizens to haul the offenders up by the scruff of their necks and compel penance and redress – that few predicted at the time.

We were opening the door to savagery in the streets. Some of us saw it coming and said so. Not enough Americans listened.

Incentives to savagery won’t affect everyone equally, of course. Those who responded by “acting out,” in the common parlance, were already predisposed toward such conduct: the sullen, the wrathful, the violently inclined previously held in check by a sense that they’d never get away with it. That the great preponderance of them are Negroes should surprise no one. What other demographic cohort has systematically been told that it’s “owed,” that “Whitey is holding you down,” that “justice” demands the mulcting of the innocent as “reparations”...and of course, “no justice, no peace!” -- ?

No one can hear such a gospel year in and year out without reacting to it. A hefty fraction of American Negroes have internalized it. Thus we have reached a situation quite similar to that of Muslims. It’s often said that, whereas the radical Muslim wants to behead you, the “moderate” Muslim merely wants a radical Muslim to behead you. Similarly, whereas the black rioter wants to loot your store and burn it down – assuming he gets the order right, that is – many a “peaceable” black merely condones such conduct as “an understandable reaction.”

Needless to say, this is not a formula that will restore order to America’s cities.

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The violence will continue. It’s likely to intensify, as the public reaction to it has been hesitant at best. Why, for example, have so few affected business owners not organized a private militia to guard their establishments? Why has no governor acted to arrest and confine those openly exhorting the “protesters” to violence and vandalism, as is licit under the doctrine of incitement to riot? Why has the president not federalized the National Guard nationwide and sent it to the sites of rioting and looting with orders to shoot to kill?

Given the identity and character of the president, I doubt we need an explanation for that last point.

Would anyone care to dispute John Derbyshire’s “The talk, non-black version” today?

There’s more and probably worse to come. Stay tuned.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)