The Sound Bites and the Fury
THE SCRAPBOOK couldn't make the recent march on Washington, where hundreds of thousands of Americans arrived in the nation's capital to petition their elected representatives about fiscal restraint, criticize Obamacare, protest higher taxes, and promote a variety of allied causes. In fact, we were feeling a little sorry for ourselves--having missed all the fun--until we read the various accounts of the event in the media, which instantly cheered us up.
You could tell the march was a roaring success by the deliberate attempt among the chattering classes to minimize its size, misrepresent its message, and cast aspersions on the many thousands of citizens who participated--peacefully, happily, and with considerable effect, according to the polls.
Anger was the representative slur. Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker was his usual poetic self--"the fury returned, uglier than before and no longer subject to the minimal restraints inherent in a national electoral campaign"--as he invoked a frightening image of rampaging yahoos in their "tea-partying, town-meeting-disrupting, pistol-packing" fury. Somebody named Lydia DePillis, a New Republic reporter-researcher (translation: young pup who has to work on Saturday) reported-researched to her readers that "On Saturday, September 12, America threw a gigantic temper tantrum in Washington, D.C."
At which point, THE SCRAPBOOK felt the shock of recognition. Temper tantrum; where had we heard that before? And then it struck us: Who can forget the immortal observation of the late Peter Jennings, the onetime ABC-TV news reader, who summed up the 1994 congressional elections, which returned Capitol Hill to Republican control for the first time in 40 years, with these choice words:
Some thoughts on those angry voters. Ask parents of any two-year-old and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It's clear that the anger controls the child, and not the other way around. It's the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way . The voters had a temper tantrum last week [and] the nation can't be run by an angry two-year-old.
True enough, but who is the parent here, and who is the angry two-year-old? THE SCRAPBOOK has always had a suspicion that certain segments of America's left wing have misgivings about democracy--dissent, popular sovereignty, checks and balances, free speech, all that stuff--and that the exercise of these democratic principles is an affront to those who, by virtue of their virtue, know what is best for us.
Take the New York Times, for example. Thomas ( The World Is Flat) Friedman is enraged by America's messy political system, with its balance of power and universal suffrage and McCoys and Hatfields who dare to question the pronouncements of the White House or, say, the New York Times. The spectacle of our popular democracy is so almighty frustrating to Friedman, in fact, that he wrote a column extolling the "one-party autocracy" of the People's Republic of China which, despite its 60-year record of tyranny, political repression, and the slaughter of tens of millions of Chinese, "is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people" who are doing what Friedman would like to do to America.
To paraphrase Peter Jennings, while it might be the job of parents to teach children to control their anger "and channel it in a positive way," few Americans regard the exercise of their basic rights as "anger," and fewer would choose Thomas Friedman or even Lydia DePillis as their "parent."
Good News from the Garden State
A small group of homeowners in Long Branch, N.J., has been fighting to keep their houses since 1995. That's when the city government began working with a private developer on a massive redevelopment project for Long Branch. The developer promised to bump up the town's tax base; the town promised to declare the necessary land blighted and help the developer seize land via eminent domain. (The entire ordeal was chronicled in "Razing New Jersey," February 13, 2006.)
Long Branch itself was no prize--the town had indeed fallen on hard times. But the neighborhood the developers wanted to raze was one of the last well-kept, middle-class parts of town. The home-owners in the neighborhood banded together and, with the help of the Institute for Justice, fought back.
Over the years one of the developers was sent to prison for doling out bribes; a city councilman went to jail for accepting them. A shady trial judge found in favor of the town and the developers, only to be unanimously overturned on appeal. But last week, after 14 years of battle, the homeowners achieved total victory. The town withdrew its eminent domain filing, signed an agreement not to seek another one, and will also pay a portion of the homeowners' legal bills. And the developer has been ordered to repair the damage it's done to the neighborhood over the years.
Sometimes you can fight city hall.
Beth Rickey, 1956-2009
The country owes a debt of gratitude to conservative Republican activist Beth Rickey, who died September 11 at the age of 53. "There had been a time, back in the early 1990s, when journalists and academicians, Jewish leaders and evangelicals, conservative and liberal, all proclaimed her a heroine. They were right," Quin Hillyer wrote in the Washington Times. "Beth Rickey, perhaps more than any single person, helped stop the meteoric political rise of neo-Nazi David Duke."
Even after facing death threats, Rickey exposed Duke's odious views by secretly taping and releasing his racist and anti-Semitic statements made during public speeches and private phone calls with Rickey. She then founded the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism (LCARN), which helped to defeat Duke in the 1991 Louisiana governor's race.
As Hillyer wrote, "LCARN's research, political ads and publicity efforts against Duke eventually garnered international acclaim. The organization hounded Duke at every step. And finally, just in the nick of time in 1991, Duke's balloon popped. [Governor Edwin] Edwards ended up winning by a monumental landslide, 61.2 percent to 38.8 percent. Duke never recovered politically."