If you have not read anything written by this particular crackpot social commentator, understand that I believe in few things, one of those things being that you and I are slaves, and that the figurehead of the system that owns us resides in a Big White House south of the Mason Dixon Line, just as slave masters of the Antebellum South did. So please, as you marvel at my broken mind—at my strange belief that my M.D. State I.D. is a slave pass, and that the renewal notice that came in the male from the MVA, is a threat—consider that I have now been living in Baltimore Maryland for 34 years, that a year of that time has never gone by without my being attacked or threatened by multiple—and sometimes numerous—black men and youths, and that nearly half of those years saw me harassed or threatened by a police officer.
My crime, in the eyes of both of these mortal enemies, is the same, Walking While Working Class and White in a Majority Black American City.
I plead guilty.
Back to the Beginning
So despite the fact that I was drinking beer with four black men this past Monday, I was doing so ten feet from where, decades ago, three black men—one armed with a screwdriver fingered in his palm—attempted to pin me against a wall, only to hear the steel-on-steel ping of a 12 inch Othello gravity blade as my illegal, un-empty hand came out from under my trench coat in defiance of my white slave masters’ laws.
As I speak with Hawk, a former boxer and retired mail carrier, Mason a retired cop, Dave, a principal of a charter school that stands mere blocks from the epicenter of the riots, and Sam, a towering 60 year old heavy weight who was recently pulled over and detained by cops who were searching for a 5 foot one inch, 120 pound, 25 year old suspect, they see me as a boxing coach, not a writer, and certainly not that long-haired knife-toting creep of the 1990s.
Among these men, who are an interview pool, I speak honestly only of boxing. In every other thing I act as a fisherman careful not to pollute the waters he plumbs.
I do not argue.
I do not inform.
I drop bait into the waters of their collective mind, seeing what it will bring. I do likewise with the whites I know. On Monday night, when I told a white liberal the truth behind the riots—about the purge—he got depressed and asked me to stop. Baltimore whites have more variance of group opinion and less variance in individual opinion, particularly where matters of race and society are concerned. On these divisive grounds blacks will hold a wider, and more informed, array of individual opinion, which seems to contradict the fact that they block up—in political terms—more cohesively. This is one of the reasons that I seek black opinions, the other being that they are less sheltered and have seen more, so provide more anecdotes.
The Purge
Our collective need to believe in a vast lie is so great, that even when an alliance of criminal organizations claims to be engaging in a targeted purge, we decide—left, right and center—to characterize it as a riot of the misguided.
I have been asked by readers to write a retrospective of the Baltimore Riots. I have no desire to do so. In fact, I am at the bar with Hawk and his friends nine days after seeing the first police cruiser burn on the TV monitor under which we drink, for the opposite reason, writing the prequel to the story that wasn’t told, the story that will repeat itself, and, if our masters have their way, will likewise not be told. The story that has been told to the world was that of a black man being killed by white cops, and black protestors becoming enraged over the death of a helpless child of The State, and getting out of control.
The media narrative is of the riots. If you believe what happened in Baltimore in the dying week of the month of April in 2015 was a series of riots, than you have swallowed half the Lie, and its toxic roots are burrowing into your mind every time that psychic plant is watered by the CNN watering can.
The actual, true, narrative is of a PURGE, a racial purge that is a test run for a bolder stroke to come. But even this purge was but a diversion—I strongly suspect—for whatever drug land moves were made by the three criminal gangs—including the aptly named Black Guerilla Family—who incited the purge, which was read by the media as a riot. There it is, the narrative of the Lie, three steps removed from the real story at its inception and diverting from actuality on a daily basis, aided and abetted by all concerned, all of us taking a thought bath in our collective pool of delusion.
That is far from what happened. In short what happened was that the politicians, police, and organized drug gangs staged a show for the media. And, while the world watched a few square city blocks burn, the politicians rushed to cover their asses, the police declined to defend the bottom 99% of the population, and the drug gangs terrorized, and looted the city, which, I suspect, was itself a mere covering action for whatever drug land activity went unseen by their enemies in the chaos.
Make no mistake, we were treated to a magic show—or rather you were. While you watched the news, I was living in an open city, decreed by the authorities to be absolutely un-policed for the first 30 hours of Monday and Tuesday, and then from 5 a.m. until 10 p.m. through Saturday morning. I saw a total of three hours of news coverage with two and a half hours raw riot footage—the rest brain washing media spew.
The story I have tried to tell is a narrow, patchy account of the actions, words and observations of people who experienced Baltimore without law enforcement for nearly a week. My purpose in writing this prequel is to set the stage in terms of the denizens of what I call the Harm City Watering Hole on the eve of the last purge, and the next. A week after the wind down people have settled down to the new normal, which is no different in kind than the old normal, but greater in intensity. People have done their best—like good slaves should—not to let the recent raw reality affect their beliefs, and continue doggedly on toward the abyss intended for their extinguishment.
Hawk wants to talk boxing and could care less about the riots. He knows his people are easily incited to violence by their masters and he just shakes his head and prefers to discuss another recent disappointment, the Manny vs Money fight.
Mason is biting his lip, wanting to stick up for the police, as he usually does at such times. But the liberal principal, Dave, in his pink shirt, blue tie, and shiny pecan head, is waxing oppressive, going on and on about how understandable it is that people rioted—attacked their own neighborhood, put some of their own people out on the street and out of a job—in light of all of the video of police brutality against blacks on YouTube these past few years. Mason wants to smack this guy and shakes his head slightly as I egg the bleeding heart on, who also thinks it was terrible that his students—who did not take part in the riots—had to walk under the guns of the National Guard.
On and on, he wrings his hands over the oppression of black by white as I egg him, bringing up many examples from my own life of white cops abusing black men. Mason wants to throw up his hands. Sam is looking at me with suspicious eyes, wondering what this white devil is up to. Sam has been harassed by so many white cops in his 60 years that he cannot trust a white person. You see, he bought into the lie that the police represent the community rather than the government. Therefore, white police beating up blacks represent the will of the white community. Therein lies the disconnect between white and black in America, a divide that has been made more permanent and deeper over this past week.
Finally Sam and the Principal agree that the riots were justified because an upscale white man attending the Orioles game on the first night of the riots told a black protester, “Get a job.”
Mason has just crawled down the escape chute in the base of his cop lizard brain as his friends decide that a white man telling a black man to get a job is just cause for a dozen deaths, hundreds of injuries, lost jobs and businesses—a burned down old age home…
Dave then looks at me and says, “I run that school for good children over behind Mandawmin, but I drink out here in Hamilton [I suppose so he won’t be mugged by his Mondawmin brothers], and live out in Harford County. My next door neighbor is a racist redneck. We’re friends, drink beer together and talk about the world, and he’s trying to learn what it is like to be a black man in the city—that not everything is determined by race. What about you my friend, how do you see this?”
Mason groans and sits back, as if he is expecting me to defecate on the bar.
Sam looks at me from under his big heavy lids expecting that I will finally break out my KKK hood and dance along the rails chanting the N-word.
Hawk shakes his head and grins, as I decide how best to rain dark dread drops of uranium tears shed by mutated Iraqi babies on Dave’s liberal guilt parade.
“I don’t see this as black or white, but as slave and master, man and boy. Who is the hero of this riot, a black woman who slapped her boy—who kept him a sissy for our masters?”
Sam’s eyes are bugging out of his head and the other mouths are open.
“I know two heroes, have spoken to them, and they will remain unknown. When two white women were being hunted through the streets of East Baltimore and Middle River by young black men, who came to their aid and saved them, but two older black men? To me this is about young and old, like that young buck that tried walking up on me on Monday night. Why, I ask, cannot the stories of these black men be told? I say it’s because they are men, and being a man is what’s truly against the law in this society.”
I downed my beer, waved goodbye to Hawk, shook hands with Dave as Mason and Sam crossed their arms and cringed like visitors to a leper colony, and walked out into the sunny day, where only one young black man tried to intimidate me on the way home, as opposed to the normal three, and his dumb emasculated ass failed like the many hundreds before him.
Miss EZZ
As I entered the old plantation house—sorrowfully absent a wait staff in white livery—Miss Ezz called me on the Man Phone. This lady, who set off the alarm that a hood rat army was descending on her store after her cashiers told her their children were planning a ‘purge’ on social media, called me up on the way home to vent. She had just driven through the neighborhood where the adult support elements of the youth brigade were drawn, and painted a word picture for me that described succinctly the life of the kind of man that the Dave had decided not to be, and, as a charter school principal, was trying to keep other youngsters from that area from becoming.
“Well Baby Cakes, we’re all back to normal in the ghetto. I just drove over to Eighty-three through my favorite neighborhood, between Reisterstown Road and Druid Park. It’s just a couple of blocks. We had the usual twenty or so half naked males from fifteen to fifty, walking around, doing nothing. In the winter when its real cold their numbers are about half and they’ll have some clothes on. Any other time they’re out here. If there was a job application terminal in front of that boarded up house, I could understand. You might see one, maybe two, crack whores. Today there was one Olive Oil looking thing a pushing rickety baby carriage along—without a baby, of course. I really want to yell out the window, ‘Please, get a job!’, so I called you instead.”
Though she thought that she was just venting, Miss Ezz was giving a scouting report that would be of great interest to anyone that understood urban guerrilla warfare. Half of these guys are working. They’re just not working for Wal-Mart.
Criminal gangs—or freedom fighters if you prefer—work as crews, cadres of fulltime operatives dedicated to undermining the enemy power structure. They maintain associations—as do biker gangs, and as did feudal lords—with part time operatives that can be called upon when needed. And those part-timers will want dearly to prove themselves for consideration as a fulltime operative.
The hard fact is that Baltimore is a war zone. The federal government has been waging an openly declared war on drug traffickers in low income neighborhoods since the early 1970s. In the late 1970s and early1980s three white men, who were relatives of people I interviewed, where beaten to death by cops in this war. There was no investigation. As the drug trade has been increasingly dominated in urban centers by blacks, they have reached into their community—as all guerilla forces fighting against an occupying force do—for political support, and have found it ready made. Now, when one of their soldiers gets killed, he’s a martyr. This is a turning point in the drug war, which is being stubbornly pursued even as the rubble from the opening skirmish is cleared. Those half naked males that white conservatives think are willfully unemployed parasites, and who white liberals see as helpless victims of white conservatives, are the very people who will be running things the next time society breaks down into its component parts as it did in Baltimore nearly two weeks ago.
Harm City Watering Hole Factions
I like to use the African watering hole cartoon scenario for studying violence in Baltimore, not because it is ironically accurate, but because most of my readers have seen nature documentaries. The nature documentary filmed in Africa is probably the single widest shared example of predation study that we modern humans have.
What follows is my observation as to the general parts of the Harm City Watering Hole body politic. Little has changed in terms of perspective, with few people having changed a single opinion, but rather descending into unthinking emotion, which has had the effect of drawing these separatist lines more clearly. Things are largely now as they were on the eve of the purge, and as they will be on the eve of the next purge. Recall that the riots were the cover story, the purge was the central story the riots were incited to obscure. Beneath that central narrative was a subtext; a tale of criminal enterprise that we can only wonder at.
The social factions are listed according to the most proactive, with—in war gaming terms—the highest action rating, followed by those factions which are increasingly unlikely to act in the matrix of reality [for instance liberals typically mistake their thoughts and pronouncements for actions] and unlikely to react effectively.
1. Hyenas: Drug gangs in Baltimore are managing a system of association with at least three distinct levels of integration. They were the first and most effective to act on every level, their lowest level being the youth mobs of rioters.
2. Toothless Lions: City and County municipal governments and police forces publicly proclaimed and acted according to an elite enclave mindset, and showed zero interest with protecting individuals and businesses outside of the political elite, police, and corporate business structure.
3. Vultures: The media has fallen into the hands of the hyenas by circling exclusively over lion kills and vocally protesting any effective lion activity.
4. Jackals: Various left wing activists have pounced on the hideous carcass found by the watering hole—an elephant named Mandawmin I think—reminding all, that the hyenas would not have savaged Mondawmin if the lions had not have killed one of their clan when they suspected him of tempting their cubs with magic mushrooms.
5. Meerkats: The majority of the black population fail to understand the causes of the purge, and yet, are stuck with the majority of the effects, as they listen to the banter of the vultures and jackals. Although they identify with the hyenas in this struggle they will be increasingly preyed upon by them. In fact, the vultures have demonstrated an increased reluctance to report mmerkat-on-meerkat crimes, paving the way for more purging of meerkats in the next event. Hyenas can easily convert meerkat burrows into their own dens.
6. Wildebeest: Conservative whites finally understand that the hyenas are coming for them, yet hold onto their chimera of a fantasy that a pride of golden maned lions will take over the Harm City Watering Hole and make it safe for ungulates—even those faɡɡot gazelles. The wildebeest now believe that the lions will win the next round and everything will be back to normal. They rest assured—albeit uneasily—that their hatred for hyena kind is now clearly justified. It is told that one amongst them preaches a cult dedicated to the belief that lions do not hunt wildebeest at all. But rather dine only upon zebras.
7. Gazelles: The white liberals of Harm City are in shock and dismay over the fact that the hyenas—having been preyed upon by the lions for these many moons—have struck out at the less dangerous inhabitants of their utopian matrix. They are busily looking up their collective ass for the blueprints to a watering hole where no animal is eaten by another, convinced that it exists, and must have been misplaced. In the meantime, since the hyena attacks, the general sense among the gazelles, is that, if some particularly bold gazelles could get the lions to blunt their remaining teeth on their ideological horns, than the hyenas would be left in peace! Of course, once the hyenas are no longer under attack by the lions, they would soon learn to eat grass like respectable ungulates, and no animal at the Harm City Watering Hole would ever get eaten again.
Welcome to the Harm City Watering Hole, Yo.
Awesome analogies, razor-sharp analyses—-nourishment for a thinking mind.
Thank you,
DL
Thanks James, you have provided us with another piece of the puzzle. Speaking of the War on Drugs, it is indeed a conundrum. Not only are we unable to win this "moral equivalent of war”, but government mismanagement of its prosecution has caused more societal problems than it has solved, hasn’t it? We lost the war on alcohol as well. The powers-that-be capitulated in that conflict because they realized that laws only work when most of the people in society support them. After 14 years it became clear that a significant portion of the American people did not support Prohibition. Likewise it appears we have reached a similar tipping point with drug prohibition. Those in opposition to drug prohibition either want to use dope themselves or don’t think people should be imprisoned for using it. At least alcohol abuse has been reduced to a level our society at large regards as manageable and tolerable; could we accomplish the same with drug use if we legalized it? Our government has chosen to conduct the War on Drugs by ostensibly concentrating on suppressing the street dealers and traffickers; they have essentially been designated as “hostis humani generis” (enemies of all mankind) like the pirates and slaver traders of old. Although we lack the will to carry that sentiment to its logical conclusion, as our ancestors did with the pirates and slavers. Therefore, the drug traffickers remain undeterred, at large and in charge. The rewards still outweigh the risks in the drug traffickers’ minds. Now, as you say James, drug trafficking has become connected with the struggle for "social justice" in minds of inner city blacks, which makes the conflict all the more intractable. On the other hand, we DID win the war on tobacco by not only restricting the tobacco producers (big, wealthy and politically influential though they were), but also by mercilessly persecuting tobacco users. The anti-tobacco movement succeeded in convincing tobacco smokers that if they smoked anywhere but under the open sky they were putting other peoples’ lives in danger. Even when outdoors, smokers must stay far away from decent folks. Have you ever seen any group of people as willing to accept their punishment as cigarette smokers? Of course, the anti-tobacco movement is largely an initiative of the Left (The Woman). Generally if a Conservative doesn’t like something he doesn’t do it, whereas, if a Leftist doesn’t like something he almost always wants it outlawed. One wonders then what would happen if The Woman decided to persecute drug use to the extent she goes after tobacco use? At the very least, you’d probably see more people get put into a headlock, handcuffed and hauled off to jail for offenses that would normally just warrant a ticket, wouldn’t you? However, it would still be the “asshole” police rather than The Woman who would get the blame for such arrests, wouldn’t it?
Oh FYI James, folks in the inner city in my corner of the country are talking about “The Purge” as well. It is going to be a long hot summer for certain.