Jeb Lund, at Rolling Stone, on “a crossfire with 100% casualties“:
… [Wolf] Blitzer is a man of breathtaking stupidity… His service seems to be offering permanent credulity to power and permanent skepticism to its challengers. He can be induced to parrot talking points by even junior-varsity hacks… If he could reanimate the corpse of someone shot in the back by police to ask one question, it would probably be, “Why did you do this?”
So his interview yesterday with community organizer DeRay McKesson about Monday night’s rioting in Baltimore couldn’t have been more Blitzerian even via the intervention of a force foreign to him, like effort.
Raw Story posted highlights and video, so click over if you want a fuller experience. After asking McKesson about his plan for the day’s protests and ignoring his reply, here are Blitzer’s questions, in order:
1. “You want peaceful protests, right?”
McKesson seems a little stunned, then agrees, then goes on to cite both how police departments have been anything but peaceful and that there had been days of peaceful protests in Baltimore and around the country. Blitzer replies:
2. “But at least 15 police officers have been hurt, 200 arrests, 144 vehicle fires — these are statistics. There’s no excuse for that kind of violence, right?”
McKesson then replies that there is also no excuse for the seven people killed by Baltimore PD in the last year.
3. “We’re not making comparisons. Obviously, we don’t want anybody hurt. But I just want to hear you say that there should be peaceful protests, not violent protests in the tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King.”
It’s all right there, everything in the Dealing With Aggrieved Minorities Playbook, a script even a Blitzer can read.
First, McKesson, a guy who is not a national black leader, has to explain himself. He’s there, so now he’s the representative — because, connect the dots, while that rioting happened, McKesson was also black at the time — and it’s implied that he has to account for things here. It doesn’t matter that McKesson had fuck-all to do with it and lacked the clout to stop it, let alone any contact with the people responsible; he’s on TV.
Second, there’s the instant begged question that what happened must be disavowed. Blitzer hasn’t the capacity to engage the idea that legitimate grievances might underpin what happened in Baltimore, that fire and rage might be ugly manifestations of a greater truth, that rage might have a fuel from an outside source. It has to be condemned first. That’s the only purpose for this segment. That it will be ended before any greater systemic discussion occurs is almost a given; just get the condemnation on the record, then — oops, will you look at that — we’re out of time, back to the studio.
Third, the moment McKesson can use the language of outrage at violence to impugn a system, Blitzer immediately declares that “we’re not making comparisons.”…
…It’s hard to get exciting and memorable footage of systems. Systems take a lot of time to identify and study, and their scope spans more than a day. They take time and perspective to explain. And they’re not very sexy. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” covered two centuries and required nearly 16,000 words. Techcrunch’s history of redlining and racial exclusion in just the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area took nearly 12,000. And you can report those only once… A fire is different. A fire can burn for days. A fire is instantly interesting in a way that those stories are not, and a fire has the gift of being in some ways self-explanatory. “Why are we looking at that?” Because it is fire, and we all are Beavis. “Why is the fire there?” Because something was lit on fire.
… We can all understand a thing on fire or a thing destroyed, because we all to some extent own things. There is an immediate calculable worth or sympathy to the destruction of a property, and almost always our attitude toward that property’s purpose is neutral, meaning that its destruction can always be fascinating but can quite often be pitiable as well. We can project the relative worth of our things onto any property and gain a sense of proportion as to what was lost. Moreover, the destruction of a thing can rarely be blamed on the thing itself, making it (usually) morally neutral and the harm brought to it almost always the agency of someone else. This, amongst other reasons, is why we have a “Broken Windows” police policy instead of a “Broken Peoples” policy. We implicitly understand that someone broke a window, and that it is not the window’s fault. Fixing broken windows is good. A broken person can be blamed on just about anything, but in a pinch, we make it easy on ourselves and just blame them. Fixing them is now a moral hazard.
The resultant constant murmur of this kind of opportunistic filming and morally null thinking is basically “property, commerce, property, commerce, property, commerce” running like a dull pop-punk bass line…