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Our New National Motto: Shelter in Place!

Our New National Motto: Shelter in Place!

Political conventions are supposed to be about controlled hysteria.

Thousands of people cram into a hall. Music throbs. Speeches blast. And in the case of the Republican convention that opened Monday afternoon in Cleveland, the a cappella children’s choir on the stage was considerably more diverse than the delegates on the floor.

No matter. Conventions are about image building. Reality can be left for another time and another place.

In the modern era, in which delegates are chosen by primaries and caucuses, conventions have a built-in silliness. It is like watching the Oscars already knowing what names are in the envelopes.

In Cleveland this week, there are but two names in the envelopes: Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Where’s Mike Pence? Hey, Pence, get over here. Didn’t anybody give you your cues? No matter. Somebody on the Trump campaign will get around to it.

The conventions are all show business, and the business of show business is to please the crowd. Scholar and media theorist Neil Postman wrote in 1985, “If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.”

This year, there is an added element to the conventions: Which party and which candidate can keep our citizens from being slaughtered and our police officers from being slain? Which can delay, if not halt, the march of horror across the globe and terror through our land?

Which, for pity’s sake, can let us wake up in the morning, click on the TV or boot up the computer and not feel a cold sweat before the screen comes to life to show us how many of our fellow human beings will not be coming to life at all.

Which can give us a day — just one day! — of life without foreboding and dread?

“We must not turn our backs on each other,” Hillary Clinton said about Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where a gunman killed three police officers Sunday.

Hell no. Don’t turn your back on anyone these days before you know what he is carrying in his hands. And if it’s a gun and you live in a state where openly carrying a gun is legal, your choices are limited.

But “duck and cover” is a good one.

And “shelter in place” is becoming our new national motto.

President Barack Obama has asked politicians to dial down the rhetoric of hatred and division and to also not lose hope. In Dallas, where five police officers were slain July 7, he said: “I’m here to say we must reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem. And I know that because I know America.”

Donald Trump says we don’t even know Barack Obama. “I watched the president, and sometimes the words are OK, but you just look at the body language. There’s something going on,” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” Monday out of deviousness or ignorance or both. “Look, there’s something going on, and the words are not often OK, by the way.”

The words are not OK. The body language is not OK. And by the way, did they ever do radiocarbon dating on his birth certificate?

According to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, released Monday, 64 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump and 54 percent have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton.

The bar for the presidency isn’t just low; it’s virtually subterranean.

But in Cleveland, the show begins.

In a news conference, Jeff Larson, the CEO of the convention, was peppered with questions about security. But he kept his eye on the ball.

“We are very proud of our podium,” he said, pointing out that a 10 million-pixel image was being projected on a 1,711-square-foot digital screen. The lighting grid weighs 140,000 pounds, and there are 647 moving light fixtures that he can use to affect “the color and tone of the convention.”

Principles? Policies? Platform planks? They would probably take up too many pixels.

In 1996, Ted Koppel and his “Nightline” crew made headlines when they packed up in the middle of the Republican convention in San Diego and went home.

“This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event,” Koppel said. “Nothing surprising has happened. Nothing surprising is anticipated.”

Koppel was expecting a surprise? That’s why he schlepped to San Diego? What planet did he grow up on?

Nobody in Cleveland is expecting a surprise this week. Few want one.

Nice, quiet, humdrum and bloodless will be just fine.

Roger Simon is Politico’s chief political columnist. His new e-book, “Reckoning: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America,” can be found on Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes.

Photo: People stand on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., July 17, 2016.   REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

The Demons Of Our Racist Past Still Haunt Us

The Demons Of Our Racist Past Still Haunt Us

So we’re not post-racial yet.

Instead, we are preoccupied with race, chafing along the color line, possessed of wildly divergent views of authority, justice and equality. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in the aftermath of widely publicized police shootings and the attacks on Dallas police officers, 60 percent of Americans believe race relations are growing worse.

Some among us lay the blame for that, absurdly, at the feet of President Barack Obama, who was supposed to usher in an era of peace, harmony and racial healing — at least according to some utterly naive predictions made at the time of his first election. Instead, it seems, his presence in the Oval Office precipitated a furious backlash, a tidal wave of resentment from those whites who see his ascendance as a sign of their decline.

But that’s not the president’s fault. He has studiously tried to avoid stirring the cauldron of race, to bridge the color chasm, to unite the warring American tribes. His only crime is in symbolizing the anxieties of those white Americans who see a black man in power as the bete noire of their nightmares.

It makes more sense to blame the presumptive GOP nominee, Donald Trump, for these troubling times. He enters his nominating convention in Cleveland as the same divisive bully he has been throughout the campaign — a man singularly ill-suited to lead a diverse nation.

Trump has not just pandered to the prejudices of his mostly white supporters; he has also encouraged them with his incendiary promises to limit immigration and his vicious insults of the president, starting with his claim that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Trump works assiduously to keep us divided, a state that sharpens his political advantage.

But the simple truth is that neither Obama nor Trump created this moment. This unruly time has been more than 200 years in the making. We have not yet put away the old ghosts, so they continue to haunt us.

Take the police shootings that have prompted protests around the country during the last several days. There is nothing new about police violence toward black citizens, nothing unusual about bias in the criminal justice system, nothing unexpected about the institutional racism that conspires to imprison black Americans disproportionately.

Just read Douglas Blackmon’s “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of law enforcement practices in the Deep South following the Civil War. White business owners demanded low- to no-cost labor, and they got it by imprisoning black men unfairly and putting them to work.

To justify their rank oppression and their state-sanctioned violence — black people were lynched with impunity for more than a century — powerful whites trafficked in awful stereotypes about black criminality. Those old biases — those hateful stereotypes — didn’t just fade away with the civil rights movement.

As President Obama put it during his moving and elegant speech memorializing the Dallas dead, “We also know that centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery, and subjugation, and Jim Crow — they didn’t simply vanish with the law against segregation.”

Still, there are many who would dismiss Obama, whose political views demand they grant him no legitimacy. Maybe they’d listen instead to Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who rose to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday to give a deeply personal account of his maltreatment at the hands of police officers.

Scott is a rock-solid conservative who rarely agrees with the president about anything. He is also black, and, as he noted, that’s enough to kindle suspicion from some law enforcement authorities.

“In the course of one year, I’ve been stopped seven times by law enforcement officers, not four, not five, not six, but seven times, in one year, as an elected official. Was I speeding sometimes? Sure. But the vast majority of the time, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reasons just as trivial,” he said.

That’s a powerful testament to the ways in which the old ghosts still haunt us, even in an age of a black president and two black U.S. senators. We are not post-racial yet, and until we can confront and exorcise the demons of our past, we will never be.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.

Photo: People take part in a protest against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter during a march in New York July 9, 2016. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

The Summer Of Our Discontent

The Summer Of Our Discontent

Now is the summer of our discontent, Shakespeare might say, with none to make it glorious.

Under a broiling sun, Washington feels stuck on the head of a pin, as Democrats look forward to one party convention in Philadelphia and Republicans dread theirs in Cleveland. What if they gave a party and nobody came? Some fear the party’s about over, now that Donald Trump has crashed it.

The funeral of five Dallas police officers slain by a black former Army reservist was a solemn panoply of presidential unity. To comfort a country rocked by two years of police violence against black men, George W. Bush and Barack Obama led the grieving in the summer’s darkest hour. They represent opposing sides of a desperately divided country, so why not give peace a chance in Dallas, a highly segregated big city? The bloodshed in 1963, the day President Kennedy died — that history can be overcome.

(But I majored in history.)

Yes, the presidents seemed to say to restless street rage: Black lives matter. And yet, police lives matter more, when it comes down to official attention and rites of mourning.

Nothing is resolved. Nice try, though. Angst festers in Dallas, in Baltimore, in Ferguson, Missouri, — to name but a few cities sundered by racially streaked encounters between white police officers and black civilians. Police brutality is nothing new, but it has sunk deeper into the cultural soil and black men have born the brunt of it.

As a white woman, I witnessed it for one night in Baltimore. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent a night in the Baltimore women’s jail.

It’s been real, police militarization, since 2001. Just the other day, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, it was caught on camera. Police with excessive body armor, carrying clubs and weapons as if they were going into battle against civilians at a peaceful protest. In Minnesota, another questionable civilian police-involved death recently took place. The Democratic governor, Mark Dayton, conceded race was probably a factor.

And that is how bad it is. The Black Lives Matter movement has changed civilian awareness. Whether it has changed police behavior is the question. The despair of this summer alone suggests not. Police have the power, and they like it that way. Race relations are plunging to their lowest level since 1992, The New York Times said.

Politics in Obama’s final summer is full of spite, with one Democratic Senate leader, Harry Reid, asking what planet Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is living on. That kind of personal enmity didn’t used to happen on the floor.

Senators look ready for a change of season from this summer of our discontent. The president, too, looks weary, his face etched with sorrow as he reached the end of his words on racially based police violence. “I’ve seen how inadequate words can be,” he declared in Dallas, “in bringing about lasting change.”

As the first black president, that has to be painful. Then again, Obama never ran to change America’s colors, to lighten a heart of darkness. He cast himself as a post-racial president, dealing with race only in case of emergencies.

Congress just marked its last day on the job until September. Hillary Clinton came to the Capitol to sit down to rally the team of Senate Democrats over lunch. Wish I were there, to see if she could lighten the gloom.

Bush, the former president, gave a good oration in Dallas, but how much “street cred” does he have? His entire war presidency brought this moment upon us. Had he not been so quick to invade Iraq on false grounds, we might have recalled that 15 of 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi. None were Iraqi. He sowed suspicion at home and started a clandestine “war on terror” that involved torturing detainees. The precision shooter in the Dallas slayings got his military training in Afghanistan — Bush’s first stop in his war — where we still have soldiers deployed.

Police departments across America inherited pieces of the Pentagon’s excess war equipment — (a policy Obama later opposed.) I saw with a reporter’s eyes, in Baltimore, how police demeanor shifted in unsettling ways, to a more aggressive “us vs. them” stance. Several relentlessly pursued poor Freddie Gray one Sunday morning, a “suspect” who broke his back in police custody and later died. Riots followed.

Not a pretty pass right now, while the sun is high in the summer of our discontent.

Photo: File picture of members of the group Black Lives Matter marching to city hall during a protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota November 24, 2015. REUTERS/Craig Lassig

Police Are Not The Problem, We Are

Police Are Not The Problem, We Are

This is not about the police.

At least, not solely. Granted, the police are the reason we are heartbroken today, the reason cable news networks are assembling panels to talk about black and blue, the fraught intersection between African Americans and the law. Last week, after all, saw two more African-American men shot by police under questionable circumstances and then, five Dallas police officers assassinated by a sniper at a Black Lives Matter rally.

But ultimately another tragedy overarches both of those: America’s ongoing struggle to reconcile itself along lines of race. We are still fighting over what being black means — and should mean — in a nation that ostensibly holds equality as a foundational belief.

We say that’s what we stand for, yet in virtually every field of endeavor, our behavior proves us liars.

In education, for instance, the federal government issued data in 2014 documenting that even as early as preschool, African-American kids are suspended far more frequently than others.

In medicine, a 2016 study by researchers from the University of Virginia found that white med students were sometimes less aggressive in assessing and managing the pain of African-American patients.

In labor, a 2003 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that job seekers with perceived “black” names were significantly less likely to get callbacks from prospective employers.

And in justice, oh, dear God. Multiple studies have documented a system that, from arrest to incarceration, is heavily stacked against African-American people.

This is not abstract. This is blood and bone reality, life as experienced by more than 40 million Americans. And can any thinking or compassionate person blame them if they are sick and tired of it?

Yet rather than respond to expressions of that frustration and anger in constructive and compassionate ways, too many of us seek every cowardly avenue of avoidance they can find.

Some take refuge in defensiveness, answering complaints about subconscious and systemic biases as if you’d just accused them, personally, of membership in the KKK. As if their feelings were what this is all about. Others try to shout down the messenger, often using the absurd formulation that to talk about race is racist.

Go online if you’re not there already and read the message board beneath this column; chances are good you’ll see examples of both.

Then, there are those who try to change the subject. As in Bill O’Reilly, the TV pundit, who recently proclaimed that Martin Luther King would never march with Black Lives Matter, a movement O’Reilly accuses of fomenting violence. King would probably find that laughable, given how often he was accused of the selfsame thing.

But again, to make this all about Black Lives Matter — or policing — is to make it too small. Granted, inequality becomes more visceral, visible and urgent when police are concerned, when we are called upon to tease out the role color played in some split-second decision to pull the trigger. But the point is, color also plays a role in the decision to punish a toddler, call back a job applicant, prescribe a drug, approve a loan, rent an apartment, or just extend the benefit of the doubt.

The police do not stand apart from society — they reflect it. And our society is riven by race, defensive about race, terrified of race. We say we seek understanding and light, yet too often generate only noise and heat. If America is ever to reconcile itself, that has to change.

It’s fine to demand better training, more body cams, more community liaisons. But to lay the onus entirely on the men and women in blue is to delude ourselves. Ultimately, the police are not the problem.

We are.

 

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Photo: Activist Najee Ali, seated center, is supported by a group of black civil rights activists as they block Spring Street in front of the Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles on September 30, 2015. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times/TNS)