Presence patrol

 Apparently we're doing this... 

 
...because it worked so fucking well in Baghdad and Kabul:

"President Donald Trump announced he is placing the Washington, DC, police department “under direct federal control” and deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital..."

It's easy enough to sanewash or handwave why the drooling moron is doing this, but to me the real issues are in the mechanics of the actual doing. Because...

1)  Soldiers are shitty cops.

That's also #2 through infinity.

Soldiers are trained to kill people and break shit. That's the nature of the business. So whenever you try to use them as "cops" (call them "OOTW", "assistance to the host nation", "peacekeeping", "occupation", whatever...) you run a genuine risk that that training will break out in unforeseen and usually disruptive or even dangerous ways.

Think the paras in Belfast, or the 325th in Fallujah. If you put Joe and Molly in a tight spot, they're going to default to their training, which is not "cop".

Mind you, as I think I've hammered hard on here, even "cops" aren't often very good at "peacekeeping". Confronted with people they dislike and distrust their go-to reaction is to pull out the club and the pepper spray and start shit.

So using soldiers to police D.C.? Just in and of itself that's not a smart thing, because

2) The things Trump is telling these GIs to do would be difficult to impossible even for truly gifted and well-led municipal leaders, police and social service organizations and staff.

"The Homeless will have to move out, IMMEDIATELY."

Where? 

How?

As I noted when the City of Portland had this brilliant idea a couple of years back, what the actual fuck do you expect these poor bastards to do? 

"The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?"

Yeahno. 

So here's an interesting note on this whole "round 'em up and shove 'em in The Camps" thing.

I had a lovely evening with a dear friend not too long ago. She's a retired elementary school teacher, grandma, traveler, thoughtful and honest and kind. 

(FWIW, the tradition around here is that we don't show people's faces without their permission, but feet are fair game...)

But she's also a longtime Portlander who's had bad experience with homeless/feral street people in the past and, like the rest of us, is sick and tired of the trash and the noise and the apparent menace. 

She's all in on these camps.

"They can get help there. They can get treatment. They can get their lives straightened out".

My response was "Okay, let's say that happens." (thinking "we don't want to pay for that now, why would we pay for that once the hoboes are locked up out of sight..?") "Then what?"

Once you've caught-and-released these people? They're still broke. Still unable to afford a roof, a shower, a toilet. Still unemployed, or underemployed to where they don't make enough to pay for those. 

"We will give you places to stay..."

WTF? Seriously? How? Where? No, show your work. Where are these Homeless Havens? Who pays for them? Who maintains, and runs, and cleans them?

And how do soldiers help do all that?

Is Tubby suggesting that the D.C. Guard set up Homeless Refugee Camps in Bradenburg? Silver Spring? How? Who's gonna pay for that, and for how long?

And while we're on the subject of the D.C. Guard...

3) We're probably not talking the most elite of military material here or the best military experience for doing this, either.

Fatso might think that wearing the tree suit makes you a combination Rambo and Clausewitz (drink!), but in my experience a lot of Guard joes were fairly average at best, and a fair number of them had little or no active time. 

Farkling about Southwest Asia has changed that...but not for the better. So the ones that do have RA experience? A lot of these jokers will have "presence patrol" experience in Iraq or Afghanistan and associate that with policing at best unwelcoming and at worst dangerously hostile places.

Putting someone whose "peacekeeping" experience is Kandahar or Basra or Baghdad in NW Washington D.C.? Probably not a good idea.

I'm guessing that the primary unit that will be tasked for this is the 372nd Military Police Battalion. The D.C. Guard website says that the "Red Hand" outfit...

"...plays a crucial role in conducting traffic control, corrections, security and mobility support, especially during National Special Security Events, like Presidential Inaugurations and when deployed, such as the 276th Military Police Company’s deployment to Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba in 2016."

So pretty much cage-kickers, with a short c.v. in crowd control. Not sure how that works on the Mean Streets of Foggy Bottom.

So this looks a lot like the "depopulation" thing we just talked about; a "one-simple-trick" "conservative" "solution" to a difficult and complex (and, I note passing, an imaginary-in-the-"no, crime and vandalism and mayhem are not really running wild in D.C."-sense, but that's pointless to drag in because this isn't about an actual thing but the usual "conservative" reality-is-what-I-believe-it-is bugnuttery) problem.

One of the worst aspects of Trumpism is the grinding stupidity of it.

It's exhausting. The daily piling of stupid on nonsensical on corrupt on ignorant all founded on ridiculous 4chan gibberish. Trying to push back against it is like shoveling water; it's ALL just bullshit all the way down, so there's no actual logic or reason or sense involved, there's no bedrock there outside bafflegab, so there's no pinning down these people or their ideas to beat the life out of them. They just ooze from one idiotic notion to another to justify whatever they want to do, because that's all it's really about. 

It's what they want to do and now they can.

And that it pisses their enemies off?

That's just gravy. 

Why we can't have nice things, Part the Infinity; "Run Betsy Run" Edition

So the other month I mentioned Betsy Johnson, the Columbia County airport pest currently running for governor as an "independent".

Now.

First, ol' Bets is about as "independent" as I am the fucking Dragon King of Bhutan.

She's a bog-standard pre-Trumpian Oregon Republican. She owns a fucking machinegun, for fuck's sake, and checks all the GOP low-tax/pro-plutocrat boxes. She's a wholly-owned subsidiary of the big business interests that ran the Oregon GOP before their voters ate the culture war monkey brains and developed the prion disease that has now lobotomized the national Republican party

So the only point in her favor is that she's just not as looney as the actual Republican candidate, who is exactly what you'd expect from the sort of person the GQP wants to rule the libs with an iron hand; a fucking goofy QANut.

No, what's irritating to me is that as a supposed "independent" she's got nothing, and none of the usual media suspects is willing to lay that out to the voters.

The whole point of a third party/independent candidate is that they're outside the whole system, right? They're not beholden to the institutional interests of the two big parties that our electoral system inevitably produces.

If the states are, in fact, the "laboratories of democracy" as Justice Brandeis is supposed to have claimed then Bets is that heroic lone researcher, working tirelessly in her basement to produce the results of ideas that Big Pharma or Big Chem have intentionally left untried. 

She's the one who's supposed to break the bounds of conventional U.S. politics with new ideas and new plans.

So.

How's she doing with that?

Let's take a look at just one issue: homelessness.

I talked at length about it in the link at the top of the page. My conclusion?

"Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.

Seriously.

That's it.

It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care."

So let's go to Bets' campaign page - it's the second link at the top - and see what new ideas and new plans she proposes. We'll start with a screenshot of her "homelessness" issue tab:

Here's her lead-in:

"Under Kate Brown and Tina Kotek, the number of unsheltered homeless has grown; there are more dangerous tent cities in many more locales; more people using, buying, and selling drugs openly on the streets; more people in desperate need of mental health services; more waste and garbage piling up in public areas; and more people dying or being killed on our streets. No issue demands bolder leadership and change than Oregon’s homeless crisis.

As Oregon’s independent governor, I will lead on homelessness with straight-talk and no-nonsense urgency. I will hold state and local officials accountable for achieving results. Having helped establish the Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland, which provides a broad array of services to people experiencing homelessness, I know that homelessness is a complex issue."

Having admitted that "homelessness is a complex issue" Bets' signature achievement on the subject, what she touts as her reason for "knowing" about the complexity of homelessness, is the "Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland".

Let's look into that a bit, shall we?

First of all...North Portland! Ma hood! Wassup, brah! Where you at, Hope Center homies? Hopies, testify!

Wait...the fuck?

Where the fuck IS this joint??? What? THERE???

Y'see..."Bybee" is the giveaway. 

Bybee Lake is a remnant of the old Columbia River floodplain, now locked in by diking and filling. 

It's waaaaaaay the fuck out on what's called "the Thumb", miles away from the city center - where things like jobs, SROs, mental and physical health treatment services are - and even too far from "downtown" St. Johns for anyone but a race walker to hike to without getting gassed.

It's buttfuck nowhere.

Here's what Bets' idea of a terrific place to put homeless people so they can "achieve results" looks like:

And here's what's around it:

This is one of the worst industrial deserts in Portland.

There's literally nothing there but miles of empty streets, warehouses, and docks. The bus service is pathetic: the #11 runs a whopping total of 8 times a day on weekdays, neither before 5am nor after 7pm, and not on weekends.

That's Betsy's idea of "helping" solve the homeless problem; an industrial shed in the middle of the least-peopled part of North, impossible to reach without a car, and miles from any sort of human need-fulfillers ranging from food to shelter to a pack of American Spirit.

This is just fucking ridiculous.

But this is Bets' "plan". 

In the text she goes into detail:

"Set a plan to end dangerous and unregulated camping in public places by creating more safe, designated camping areas and more emergency shelters with access to life-saving services. Oregon cannot continue to use public places as a waiting room for services and/or housing. This failed approach is dangerous and inhumane."

Bets is just lying again here. Oregon law as it now stands forbids the local authorities to use force to remove camps unless the campers already HAVE "designated camping areas and...shelters" to go to. It's not that her opponents WANT the situation. It's that it:
1) costs tax money, which Bets' plutocratic owners and her wingnut voters don't want to give, and
2) means putting the hoboes amongst the Good People of Portland, which those people don't want to see, either.

All of which means that places like the cities of Portland and Salem are in binds; they want to move the campers out - because nobody likes nutters living in trash heaps -  but they know that without the money and the political capital to have somewhere better to go they're just chasing them around the open spaces.

And the "shelters" are, still, the worst "answer". People hate them, and 9 of 10 will immediately run back out to the streets.

So. Stupid games for stupid prizes, Bets.

How about the rest of her "ideas"?

Like any Republican, Bets luuurves her some coppers, and her "plan" includes the usual copaganda about how the problem isn't that Portland Police Bureau is a wretched hive of scum and villainy but that the coppers don't get enough "support" (i.e. head-to-toe tonguebathing) from the local pols.

She also loves some developers, so there's the usual GOP boilerplate about "...outdated rules, regulations, and fees..." which is more than likely the usual GOP-speak for "all that fucking bugs-and-bunnies-enviro-shit". 

Bottom line? The result of 86ing "rules and regulations" is not going to be more affordable housing, but more McMansions in the 'burbs and spendy single-family homes. 

Developers make money building that stuff, and they won't build low-cost units for low-income people unless "rules and regulations" (and development bureaus and tax measures) force them.

And that ties back into her other homelessness "plans"; if she really meant them to work they'd all mean more taxes, more top-down forcing neighborhoods to accept low-cost housing and other residential options, more support (meaning, more money) for things like treatment, medical, psychiatric, and economic assistance.

Helping get anything like close to "solving" the problem of poor people without homes takes fucking time and money. LOTS of time and money.

Is Bets down with ANY of this?

Don't make me laugh.

She wants to let cops jail hoboes, and she wants her developer friends to make lots of lovely money.

That's it. That's all. Everything else is smoke, mirrors, and bullshit.

So:

But you wanna bet me she can't pull about 25-30% of the vote? Enough to throw the election to the Republican nutter...just like she wants to?

Because unlike this post, the Oregonian and all the other "news" outlets refuse to do what it took me about twenty minutes to do - expose "Betsy" as nothing more than the same fucking sort of airport pest she was thirty years ago

And that is part of why we can't have nice things. 

Here in Oregon...or anywhere else in this fucking country.

King of Rebels

The pablum "celebration" of Dr. King that typically appears today always pisses me off.

The man was nothing like the kindly saint of "civil rights" that usually appears in them. King wasn't some sort of foofy, kumbaya-singing pacifist. He was a hardass. He was a bombthrower. He was routinely condemned as a "communist" and a "public enemy". His "nonviolence" was a slit-eyed, cynical tactic that offered up the bodies of his troops to the racist thugs because he knew damn well that the Great American Public would seize on the slightest hint that the Rapacious Negroes were coming to Get Them to bury him and his cause.

He wasn't violent because violence wouldn't have worked, not because he was some sort of secular saint.

He also hated the sort of wealth-fellating and poor-bashing that the modern GOP so desperately represents.

The linked article is a cautionary tale of King's real views on things like equality, wealth, poverty, and the "American Dream" as opposed to the usual tepid encomiums of peace, love, and brotherhood that we're going to hear from radical reactionaries like Paul Ryan and whichever former Pravda stringer His Fraudulency trots out today; Dr. King would have fucked your shit up, wingnuts. He hated and despised everything you stand for.

And so do I.

Apology and Explanation

I've been a bad, bad blogger.

The First Rule of Blogging is, after all, Thou Must Above All Have New Content and I've done two things here in September and October; diddly and squat.

Oh, don't get me wrong; I - as in the real I, the IRL I, the person who lives behind this page - have done a pantsload; worked (a lot!), parented and husbanded, watersealed the deck, painted the front steps and the front fence, realized that I suck massively as a gutter-and-downspout contractor...watched, and written a gajillion words about, soccer, played games, shot at the Trackers' archery range, read to my daughter, wrestled with my son over videogames, tried to figure out what the fuck is wrong with the Ranger pickup...talked with my sister about our mother, now frail and fading in her lonely post-Master Chief old folks home...

But I haven't been here. And there's a couple of reasons for that.

One is that I've just been crazy busy in real life.

The other is that my laptop at home died.

It died hard, I gotta say. First the screen started to go, then the hard drive, finally the whole thing just wouldn't start. It was an ex-laptop, it had ceased to be, it had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, rung down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible.

But that means I have to blog on the machine at work.

Which kinda sucks.

Because either I have to do this on work time - which my boss disapproves of - or I have to stay late at work, which I disapprove of.

And, frankly, given the state of financial play at the Fire Direction Center...it's unlikely that I will be getting a new machine anytime soon.

So.

I promise to be better at blogging. I wish I could say I had a backlog of posts in me; I don't. The only thing I had this week that I thought of posting was a comment regarding a female friend that watched the second Clinton-Trump debate. I asked her if she'd learned anything she didn't already know or hadn't guessed, and she replied that she was tremendously impressed with Clinton's poise and intelligence and now felt like she could vote FOR her instead of against the tangerine-hued shitgibbon.

I commented that it seemed like Hillary had grabbed her by the pussy, then.

She stuck out her tongue at me.

Anyway...I'll try and get something new up this week. I think it's time for another "The Army I Knew", wherein a certain young lady doesn't get her diamond earrings...

Gem among the dross

I didn't want to make it sound like I was slagging off on everything in Aberdeen, even though I couldn't help noticing that probably something between six and eight out of ten people I saw walking the streets today was obese.

And not just cute-n-cuddly, round-n-roly-poly big but freaking huge; big-ass butts and ginormous legs and big honkin' peniculae lapping down over their hips (what in the service we used to call "Dunlaps' Disease" because your gut done lapped over onto your legs...). I mean...the fuck? Is the county seat of Grays Harbor County some sort of secret repository in the National Strategic Morbidly Obese Caucasian Reserve or something?

So not only were these people walking around looking all poor and beat down, but they were...well, huge.

I know the connection between poverty and bad diet and obesity, but...damn. Like heart attacks walking around in bad clothes.

That was pretty depressing.

Anyway, I wanted to say that I did find something of value here; the 8th Street Alehouse.

The pub fries were crisp and savory and hot and with the spicy remoulade were a perfect match to the malty house ale, and the steamed clams were resonant with brine and sweet with butter and were a boon companion to the grapefruit IPA (and I don't say that lightly - I am typically not a fruit-beer fan!)

What turned out to be amusing was the couple at the next table turned out to be in the consulting business as well; she a hydrologist and fisheries specialist, he an air and water contaminant analyst. He couldn't remember the name of the old Chicago Cub's broadcaster (Jack Brickhouse was the man's name, by the way, a memory from my mother's summers listening to the Cub on the radio...)and that led us to talking about this and that and eventually found out what we did for livings. So we spent a bunch of time talking about funny consulting things.

(BTW - In case you don't know GFT conventions, if I show pictures of people who either haven't explicitly given me permission to show their faces or I haven't been in a position to ask, I only show their legs and/or feet. It seems like a compromise that lets me preserve their privacy but show something of them on a medium that is as visual as literary...)

Anyway, the 8th Street Alehouse was a good place to be after a long day in the hot sun wrangling samplers full of goo.

(Aberdeen, as you can imagine, is built on tens of feet of sloppy Chehalis River alluvium. For a day's drilling that's fine. For a week? Christ, it's like punching the clock. How many samplers full of gray duck shit can you stare at, pocket-pen, torvane, and worm-roll before shoving the goop in a baggie and moving on to the next sampler full of gray duck shit? Before getting bored out of your fucking skull, I mean..?)

And it's probably worth a look back in after tomorrow's day-full-of-duck-shit; I haven't tried the fish and chips yet.

There's only one teesny little problem...

The 8th Street Ale House is in Hoquiam.

So I guess Aberdeen still pretty much just sucks pipe.

Down and out in Aberdeen

I had never been to Aberdeen, Washington, before.

I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with this place. It's on the inside of the long Willapa Bay embayment that forms the far southwest part of Washington State, where the Chehalis River empties into the big estuary.

Aberdeen clings to the south edge of the Olympic Mountains massif and appears to be a very typical sort of Northwest coastal town; wedged between the mountains and the sea, shoved into the shelf of flatlands that are entirely too likely to disappear when the inevitable tidal inundation rises up from the dark Pacific beyond.

I wasn't sure why the sign at the end of Washington Highway 12 read "Come As you Are" until I turned into 2nd Street looking for one of my drilling locations and came across "Kurt Cobain Landing", the truly bizarre and tacky little park at the end of a dead-end street in the Felony Flats neighborhood.

The effect on a passing stranger is unsettling. The Flats have not materially changed since Cobain's time; the little houses and cheap apartments are dingy and rundown, the streets weave drunkenly as the shoddy paving crumbles away. The "park" itself is nothing more than a stand of trees behind the crash barrier at the end of the street, a sign with a picture of Cobain, a fugly cement guitar standing strangely erect from a dark block, priapic fretboard pointed skyward.

The Young Street Bridge further on is supposed to have a thicket of Cobain-inspired graffitti underneath, but I was busy and couldn't take the time to wander over and peek at others' necrophilia.

I spent the better part of a sunny afternoon driving around Aberdeen and neighboring Hoquiam and marveling at the sheer unattractive poverty of the place. The place is, for lack of a better word, a dump.

Don't mistake me; I've lived in the Northwest a long time now and I understand what most of these coastal towns are. These are the land's end, the far edge of the wealthy nation that sprawls across the continent behind them. This is hardscrabble land, Trump country. There was never much here. Timber and fish, for the most part, the land too steep and stony to farm, the great cities behind the wall of mountains too distant for commerce.

The fishing was never easy; the salmon runs hammered flat by fishwheels and gillnets, the ocean cold and cruel as the storms of winter claw down out of the Gulf of Alaska, and the timber...the locals will tell you that the hippies and the tree-huggers locked up the timber.

The reality is that the first lumbermen felled all the huge trees with careless greed and never restored the mountains. The forests, when they were replanted, were steep and costly to log, and the timber companies found it more profitable to ship the logs they did fell directly to Asia. The big mills closed, one by one, and never reopened.

The jobs are gone, the wealth - what little there was of it - is gone, it seems like even the hope is gone. The people are gone; Aberdeen has never regained the people it lost after the Depression. About sixteen thousand grim, grungy looking people still live here but even in the cheerful July sunshine Aberdeen looks depressing.

No wonder Cobain killed himself.

At least there's work for me here, and beginning tomorrow we will do it, our drill roaring and grinding through the dumpy streets of Felony Flats.

As Cobain might have said; nevermind.

Heart of Darkness

I tend to tread very carefully around jim and Lisa's place these days. I try and avoid getting folks' ire up over there. Still, I check in every once in a while and so it was just the other day that I caught jim's two posts on the current devolution of the City of Detroit.

I don't have much connection with that sadly diminished place. I only know largely what you know; it's become a byword for the Third-World-in-the-U.S., it just went officially bankrupt, and it's something of a touchstone for everyone, black or white, with a theory (crackpot or otherwise) on race, society, and the current state of the Nation.

However; Mojolicious DOES have a connection with the former Motor City, and a close one. Her thesis work in "Urban and Regional Planning" was funded by grants from the City and a variety of social agencies and was intended to provide some ideas, and, hopefully, solutions to one of the most blighted areas in the city.

I know my bride is a tough woman, but it took some pretty big stony ovaries for a young white woman to walk around that particular part of Detroit back in the late 1980s talking to people, taking notes, and gathering statistical information on things like demographics, employment, crime, marriage and pregnancy, and personal and family histories. She has some pretty hair-raising stories about encounters with the local gangsters. She also has some pretty amazing stories about what she saw and did there.

The result was a 300-page description of the neighborhood, where it was, how it had gotten there, and where it was headed. The whole macguffin culminated in a presentation of her thesis, methods, data, analysis, and conclusions before the Detroit City Council and the agencies that had funded her.

Before the presentation Mojo went to her thesis advisor, presented her data, and then summed it up. Had Joseph Conrad ghosted her thesis he might have expressed it thusly:

"Exterminate the brutes."

Mojo didn't gloss over the outside factors that had played an immense, often critical role, in the devastation of her study area. The lingering effects of slavery (broken families, poverty, poor education, social fragmentation) and racism. Brutally oppressive policing. Official disinterest. The loss of paying jobs as companies closed up or fled, and the massive, vicious white flight (and educated, middle-class black flight to a lesser extent) that robbed the City and the area of the most capable and engaged citizens.

She reminded her advisor of Detroit's white community's role as massive dickheads who refused to consider their black fellow Americans as, well, fellow Americans.

She also didn't let the black residents off the hook for the problems they had caused themselves, particularly the 1967 riots that had turned white flight from a torrent into a flood and the endemic gangsterism, school dropouts, early pregnancies, and overall assumption of victimization and passive laying about.

But her conclusion wasn't primarily about the past or the present but the future.

And she concluded that the neighborhood as then constituted just didn't have any.

The place was simply a wasteland. There were few paying jobs, and so few residents actually worked a regular job that most of them had no experience or acquaintence with the notion of just getting up five days a week, getting put together, going to work and working eight hours.

There were few parents who were parenting, and even fewer who could parent effectively.

The handful of people who were actively pursuing some sort of enterprise were largely criminals; ironically, drugs and crime were the "job-creators".

Her recommendation would be familiar to any commander confronted with a broken combat outfit; break it up, disband it, discharge the truly wrecked troopers and spread the saveable survivors out as individuals or tiny groups into more confident, successful units in hopes that they would regain their confidence and become soldiers again.

Seriously.

Her advice was that the neighborhood needed to be razed - she left out the part about sowing the ground with salt but knowing my bride it was probably implied. The people had to be parceled out into better neighborhoods, with close supervision and direction from social workers and agencies, where they could be overwhelmed by the mainstream habits of their neighbors and their dysfunctional outlook on life - as with the whipped soldiers - replaced with confidence and the skills to succeed. Many of them would literally have to be returned to life's Basic Training and rebuilt with a completely different attitude if they were to have any hope of even breaking even at life.

And many of them were simply beyond hope. They were doomed for prison, or death, and there was little anyone could do at that point to change that.

Mojo's thesis advisor was horrified. She flatly refused to present Mojo's thesis to the Council or the agencies. Instead she skimmed through her data, omitted the most damning conclusions, and added some (in light of Mojo's hard statistical analysis) pollyannaish conclusions that suggested that some tweaking here and a program or two there would help the neighborhood recover. The Council and the agency reps nodded sagely and proceeded to move on to the next item on their agenda.

Mojo left Michigan that year with a sick and sour distaste for the entire business; her department, her advisor, the people who commissioned her study and had no interest in the actual conclusions enough to actually read it. Oh, and for the entire "science" of "planning", which apparently considered the collection of actual hard data superfluous to their discipline...

Needless to say, her study area is worse off now than it was twenty-something years ago.

Here's the thing; Mojo actually had a working solution to the problems of the City of Detroit. It was hideously expensive and would have created massive hardships both for the governments and organizations involved, the residents of the blighted neighborhood and the residents of their "gaining units" that would have had to pitch in to fix these sorry bastards. It would have required a complete alteration of the ideas and prejudices of veryone involved, black and white, and an acceptance that a) the "culture" of the ghetto neighborhood was broken beyond repair and had to be discarded while b) the "culture" of the white suburbs - hating and fleeing the blacks of the urban core - was broken and had to be discarded, too.

Everyone would have hated it.

The optimists on the Left would have decried "blaming the victims" and "disrespect for African-American culture"; the pessimists on the Right would have snarled that helping negro gangsters wasn't their job and whined about losing their purity of essence.

(And from the wingnut Right there would have been even loonier loons shrieking and flinging poop, loons whose "solutions" would be based on their "life experiences" in suburban malls, intellectual ideals culled from Ayn Rand novels, and an ignorance of actual power vacuums that would have made Thomas Hobbes into Snake Plisskin, but, shit, that's the state of the Wingnut Nation these days...)

And, anyway, who are we kidding?

There was never a hope in hell that anyone was going to spend the time, money, effort, and risk the chance of spreading the negro virus out of the containment areas to "do something" about the people in that neighborhood. In their ghetto the blacks were quarantined.

Doomed, yes, but safely away from the healthy people.

To try and "do something" - something that might have actually worked; changed those people's lives, given them work, culled the herd to separate the sheep from the goats, saved the saveable and exterminate the unsalvageable - would have risked "us", the nice people, the good hard-working, tax-paying Americans, the salt of the earth.

Would have required us to do more than roll up our windows on our Subarus, lock the doors, and drive on.