Clean Jim, Dirty Harry, and Barry the Beer-Drinker
The conservative press lost no time in converting the Henry Louis Gates affair into a morality play that pitted a loose-lipped race-baiting President against a squeaky clean policeman with an excellent record in what is politely termed "minority relations." To cap the list of Sgt. James Crowley's virtues, conservatives triumphantly point to his five-year record at a nearby police academy in "teaching his fellow officers about racial profiling," as our friend Pat Buchanan put it so delicately. What, precisely, does "about racial profiling" mean in Cambridge? It means: how to avoid racial profiling. As the head of academy (alas, his name is Thomas Fleming) explained to the AP, " The course, called "Racial Profiling" teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community "and how you don't want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from."
What is racial profiling, if not an acknowledgment that different racial and ethnic groups are statistically more likely than other groups to engage in different sorts of illegal behavior. The Irish, who have a genetic weakness for alcohol, are too prone to get into fights, while Sicilians and South Italians have demonstrated an amazing ability to organize extortion, protection, prostitution, and gambling rackets. When O.J. Simpson kills a white woman or engages in other violent acts, he is simply living up to a statistical stereotype that informs us that African Americans, who make up less than 15% of the population, commit roughly 50% of violent crimes. And, O.J. is as exemplary a representative of his group's criminality as Bernie Madoff, John Gotti, Mohammed Atta, and Joaquin "El Chapo" Loera Guzman (a billionaire Mexican drug lord who made the exclusive Forbes list in 2009) are of theirs.
Obviously, most Sicilians are not crime lords and most Jews are not international swindlers. One has even heard of Jews who murder their wives and Mexicans who swindle investors. "And WASPS, what about WASPS?" some of you are undoubtedly asking. Their crimes are often on as massive a scale as Madoff's and usually papered over with hypocritical justifications, such as patriotism or democratic human rights or the free market. I suppose it is enough to mention such names as Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Dick Cheney to suggest the astonishing range and success of Anglo-Saxon American villainy. But police departments and insurance companies must both take account of ethnicity—along with sex, age, class, education—in drawing up general policies. Young white male high school dropouts tend to get into automobile accidents more often than middle-aged Asian female professors, and the New York police would be ill-advised to crack down on Upper West Side Jewish stockbrokers, when they are searching for someone who knocked over a liquor store.
To defend the public, police departments have to practice ethnic profiling. To the extent they refuse to profile, they are failing in their duty, though I like to think that in cities less enlightened than Cambridge, all this repudiation of ethnic profiling is so much political rhetoric. But even this rhetoric has a demoralizing effect on the American people. It is also dangerous. The news media will tell us everything that is known about a serial killer—except his race and (if he is Muslim) religion. The local "Crime Stopper" will often tell you to "be on the look out for" a male in his mid twenties, medium build, dark hair, etc., without ever mentioning his race. How in the world are we supposed to protect ourselves, if we don't know whom to look for? The simple answer is that the people who run police departments—I do not speak of the officers themselves—often do not care. Race is only a factor when the victim is black. There would have been no "Gates Gate" if the tenured faculty member had been a straight white Christian male—the rarest of rare minorities on an Ivy League faculty. Too many police departments today are more interested in shielding us from the truth. As a result, they refuse to protect us from the ugly reality of violent crime.
One of the more obtrusive consequences of the campaign against racial profiling is the inconvenience to which passengers are subjected in airports. Mohammed Atta's more radical brother, dressed in turban and robes, can sail through security, while TSA gives the business to a sweet old lady from Alabama or—and this happened to a group of kids I was taking to France—a home-schooled girl who dressed like a refugee from the 1950's.
Inspector Harry Callahan would not have shrunk from ethnic profiling, nor would he have gone to the White House to sip a Belgian brewski with a man who had slandered him and then refused to make an actual apology. Obama took a page out of the Clinton book when he spoke about "calibrating" his remarks—a phrase as dishonest as it is illiterate. Sure, Harry Callahan is a fictional character made up by Don Siegel and his writers, but he represented something real in American cops of earlier times. He had the guts to stand up not only to criminals but to all the corrupt effeminates who are in charge of the criminal justice system. He constantly put his life and career in danger because he cared about protecting the public, which is why, as his Mexican-American partner comes to realize, he is called Dirty Harry. " Now I know why they call him 'Dirty' Harry. He gets the sh-t end of the stick every time."
Clean Jim Crowley is cut from another cloth. He may be the finest officer in Cambridge, in Massachusetts, in the whole United States, but in promoting racial sensitivity and opposing racial profiling, he is defending a leftist political system and not the citizens of America who are robbed, raped, and murdered by "ethnically diverse" criminals. I have witnessed, up close and personal, what happens when white people make the mistake of trying to defend themselves from black criminals and fight back. If the officers on the scene are black—or as racially sensitive as Sgt. Crowley—it is the victims who may be arrested. At best it is, as one officer told me, a "he said/he said" situation. The best advice I have received from the police is to install alarms and security cameras in my house.
I know there are still plenty of good cops in our country. Some of them even read Chronicles. But if Clean Jim Crowley can be praised as among the best police officers America has to offer, we might be better off without police departments. We could keep the money we spend on their inflated salaries and benefits and invest in private security agencies that will work for us instead of for governments that do not care, literally, whether we live or die.
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Although it is a loose way of talking, WASP is used ordinarily to denote that mixture of British and North-European stocks that predominate in the American elite class. FDR got some Dutch blood from the Roosevelts, French from the Delanos, English from the Aspinalls. Since a pure" WASP would have Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and French blood--at least--it is hardly a stretch. As for the Cheneys, they were de-Frenchified by the 17th century when they were living as Puritans in Roxbury, MA. I on't think anyone suggested Crowley is a WASP, though there are English families named Crowley, whatever their ultimate origin. The question is not one of race or even of true ethnicity but of that ethnic identity that is equated with class. And yes, as Joseph Wambaugh once remarked, Barney Miller was by far the best cop show on TV, the best written and the most true to life.
First, I'd like to say this by far is the best account I've read of the Gates affair.
Second, I'm curious, Dr. Fleming, what do you think of the phrase 'Celto-Gemanic'? It's broader than 'WASP', encompasses most of Northern Europe (as they, with a few exceptions, are mostly Celtic or Germanic, or a combination of the two), but has the added advantage of including people from Northern Italy and other areas (such as the Midwest of the U.S.) who also are of Celtic/Germanic origin.
@7 Corky Again: "White boys who are prone to violence join the military where their actions aren't counted as violent crimes - but should be."
Dr. Fleming's response to you, while correct as far as it goes, was the response of a scholar and gentleman. On the day after news arrived of the combat deaths of five more of America's best, it is an uphill battle for me to respect the standards of this site and refrain from describing what I wish he had told you, instead. It does involve that cork, however.
White boys who are "prone to violence" mostly go to prison, just like their non-white counterparts. Your condescending and derogative term does not apply to those who are accepted into the military, where one is required to have self-discipline, a willingness to make sacrifices for others, intelligence and patriotism, all of which qualities distinguish them from the merely violent ghetto-rat.
I live on Madison Street, on Chicago's wild West Side, where we have been the only white family literally for miles around for four decades now. As I type, I can hear the drug dealers crying their wares below my window. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on high fences, security lighting, and inflated electric bills for said lights to remain lit 10 to 16 hours a day. When I came home from Viet Nam forty summers ago, the streets around this old house were blighted with the burned out remains of the King riot. Still today on any night in good weather, this street turns into the midway of a twisted carnival starring the black criminal element. For forty years I've heard uninformed people like you casually toss off their malicious charge that service in the military is equal to criminal activity. Take a walk down my street, if you dare, and see what criminality and people who are "prone to violence" really look like.
#54 - The current US military has lowered and broadened its standards to include many foreigners and criminals, including convicted felons. More broadly construed it also includes the mercenaries (excuse me - "private contractors") of the notorious Xe (Blackwater) and similar organizations. To a large extent it has become a war machine of extremely well-trained and well-equipt "violent ghetto rats" inflicting hell on the helpless citizens of other countries throughout the world. This has nothing to do with patriotism or willingness to make sacrifices for others. It's simply the merciless policing of a world-wide empire.
re-#54
"those who are accepted into the military, where one is required to have self-discipline, a willingness to make sacrifices for others, intelligence and patriotism,"
Are you actually trying to describe the contemporary US military? For many Americans, intelligence and patriotism are the qualities which tend to keep them from enlisting in a professional imperial military.
@55
You forgot to mention one other thing.Although not talked about much,our military is badly fractured along racial/ethnic lines.There are all kinds of "red neck," black,and latino gangs snarling at each other within the armed forces.Inter-ethnic violence is not unheard of.I have it on good authority that black and latino veterans are effecting "technology transfers" with their co-ethnics in the nation's great conurbations;urban guerrilla warfare techniques and how to defend against their counter-measures are spreading amongst the proletariat.
I leave it to you gentlemen to assess the import of these tidings.
"it is unrealistic to assume that an 18 year old American has a clue as to what is going on in Iraq or the Balkans."
Perhaps, and it is also probably unrealistic to assume that an 18 year old American has a firm grasp on 20th century American history, but doesn't an 18 year old American have an *obligation* to learn about the history of the military he's going to join? And if that military has a history of engaging in unprovoked, undeclared, unjust wars, is he not in any way responsible for either pledging his service to a military with such a record or for failing to acquaint himself with that record?
I do not at all know that it is the military that is responsible for America's wars, and I do not imagine that any sane person thinks that the USA would last a day if not defended by a large military. When I read some of the comments sent into this website by people in their 20's and 30's, whose contempt for fact, truth, and logic would astonish even the guys I went to school with, I can hardly bring myself to pass a harsh judgment on the 18 year old dummies who are products of the American system, whether they are ghetto rats from Chicago or Ivy League graduates. But, the truth is, human beings only rarely amount to very much and only a tiny proportion of them are capable of thinking independently. Without strong moral and cultural pressures, most of us lapse into the moronic self-seeking that characterizes almost the entire American people today. So, cheer up and have kinder thoughts about dumb teens who are as hopeless as they are clueless, just like their parents and probably their grandparents. In America stupidity is like an Aeschylean curse that replicates itself across the generations in an unending downward spiral of mental and moral imbecility.
Thank you Dr. Fleming. I am currently reading The Morality of Everyday Life, by the way, and find it immensely enjoyable and rewarding. I recommend it highly to anyone here who is disenchanted with modern American life and wondering whether there is (or ever was) a better, brighter way.
Thank you for the work you do.
Also, do you, Dr. Fleming, not believe we could drastically reduce the size of our military - say, to whatever size is necessary to maintain and operate our nuclear arsenal, plus an additional body of soldiers sufficient to guard our borders and conduct whatever small scale operations might need to be conducted short of total war, in the unlikely event of which we could re-institute the draft?
Any military which is powerful enough to dominate most of the globe and threaten the remainder with complete annihilation is way too powerful. The US has something like 11 super carrier battle groups and many squadrons of stealth aircraft. No other nation has ever built even one super carrier or stealth aircraft. The US also dominates near earth space with its surveillance and communications satellites and these are what enable the war machine to work with such deadly precision. As for the US needing all of this to last more than a day, I really don't understand that at all. As much as the US has made itself hated throughout the world with its arrogance and bullying, I don't think there is any country which would want to destroy us completely or even conquer us. This vast machinery of death and destruction needs to be radically down-sized before the next generation of weapons, the killer robots, are tested and deployed. It's true that the generals themselves do not pick the wars, although some of them like Powell and Petraes, have been influential. The wars are picked by the Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas, etc. and we certainly cannot trust them to make moral decisions.
I completely agree that we have a bloated military establishment that is used to support two wicked projects. The more obvious project is world-domination on behalf of the economic elite of the US and its allies, but the second is just as bad, namely, the socialization of vast numbers of young men and women whose traditional loyalties and morality are undermined and then replaced with an ethic of obedience to the revolution. Nonetheless, we cannot at this point back off too far without exposing our people to retaliation, no matter how much of it be richly deserved
"the socialization of vast numbers of young men and women whose traditional loyalties and morality are undermined and then replaced with an ethic of obedience to the revolution."
This is the immediate task. It is so obvious a task for traditionalists and conservatives as to be obscure, neglected and ignored. Obama awarded honorary degrees at Notre Dame, Heather Mac Donald celebrates Feast of the Assumption with anti-christian, bilge, appeal to the "Secular Right", "Conservative" Republican, Arlen Specter joins Democratic Party, Southern Poverty Law Center Banks Millions, Chronicles lives on a shoestring, kids takeover National Review, Patriots while having sons die in Iraq and are labeled unpatriotic for opposing idiots, the list is so long and the results so astonishing, that a blind man could read them with total comprehension. Traditionalists are in full retreat while the enemy is teaching their children and mistaking the very etymology of the word ,Tradere, they continue to advocate working with republicans to oppose current legislation? FOR HEAVENS SAKE!!!!!!
I seem to recall that posting links to other sites being frowned upon here, but Bill Kauffman (who I believe used to write for Chronicles) has an excellent piece on the devastating effect the military has on the American family (divorce rates, infidelity, absent fathers etc), saying "the single greatest cause of rootlessness--the great undiagnosed sickness afflicting America--has been our standing army". It's in a piece titled "An Empire of Widows and Orphans" and I recommend it (as I recommend all of his works).
I've known Bill for years and he usually writes well as an essayist. He is, however, a little skimpy on research and has no firsthand knowledge of hte military. There many actual scholars who have written well on this subject, including my former boss Alan Carlson, who was talking about this 20 years ago.