You may remember that some of the pre-release reviews of Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" in 1989 castigated Lee for having made a film that was surely going to provoke riots in the streets of major urban centers. Of course there were no "Do the Right Thing" riots, and to my knowledge, no mass purgings from Arts and Entertainment pages of the critics who were so quick to sound the false alarm, alas.
For a more recent, sleazier version of racist chicken little social/cultural commentary check out rightwing hack, Neal Boortz's dire predictions (thanks red rabbit) of race riots should Tookie Williams be executed. Accordingly, Boortz disdainfully predicted that the governator's fear of violent unrest would prompt a stay of Williams's execution.
The next morning, finding himself wrong on both counts, Boortz did the honorable rightwing thing these days--blame the weather. With no Category 4 hurricane to point to, Boortz decided it was just too damn cold in LA for the Negroes to get worked up. Someone tell me this isn't the 1880s.
This is of interest only because it gives you some idea of how willing the right is to use the specter of black urban unrest to explain/justify anything and everything--and their sense that democrats are still vulnerable to the soft-on-crime charge.
The punitive anti-crime/anti-terrorist police-state policies the Right has been pushing can't get enough of boogie men, domestic and international, for whom extreme measures are presumed to be the only possible measures.
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1 comment:
Nicely done, sir!
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