Browsing PBH By Articles

The Life Of A Professional Snitch

The Article: Alex White, Professional Snitch by Ted Conover in the New York Times.

The Text: Kathryn Johnston was doing pretty well until the night the police showed up. Ever since her sister died, Johnston, 92, had lived alone in a rough part of Atlanta called the Bluff. A niece checked in often. One of the gifts she left was a pistol, so that her aunt might protect herself.

The modest house had burglar bars on the windows and doors; there had been break-ins nearby.

Eight officers approached the house, and they didn’t knock. The warrant police obtained, on the basis of a false affidavit, declared they didn’t have to — the house where their informant had bought crack that day, the affidavit said, had surveillance cameras, and those inside could be armed. Because they couldn’t kick down the security gate, two officers set upon it with a pry bar and a battering ram in the dark around 7 p.m. on Nov. 21, 2006.

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America & Hip Hop

The Article: How America and hip-hop failed each other by Touré in the Washington Post.

The Text: If you’re wondering why hip-hop has often been angry, sneering, nihilistic and dystopic, you can blame the war on drugs, and how it feels to be on the wrong side of it.

President Nixon announced a war on drugs, but it was President Reagan who started the modern battle in 1982, when hip-hop was in its infancy. This fight would not only shape the black community but also mold hip-hop, a music and culture whose undercurrent remains black male anger at a nation that declared young black men monsters and abandoned them, killing any chance they had at the American Dream.

As Nas rhymed on the recent song “Triple Beam Dreams”: “I would be Ivy League if America played fair.” Instead, he’s trapped in a virtual prison. “New York is like an island, a big Riker’s Island,” he says in another recent song, “The Don.”

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Normalizing Extremism In America

The Article: Extremism Normalized by Glenn Greenwald in Salon.

The Text: Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the Patriot Act is quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite substantial evidence of serious abuse), and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That’s how extremist powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view the warped as normal. Here are several examples from the last couple of days illustrating that same dynamic; none seems overwhelmingly significant on its own, but that’s the point:

After Dick Cheney criticized John McCain this weekend for having chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate, this was McCain’s retort:

Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should have.

Isn’t it amazing that the first sentence there (“I respect the vice president”) can precede the next one (“He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not”) without any notice or controversy? I realize insincere expressions of respect are rote ritualism among American political elites, but still, McCain’s statement amounts to this pronouncement: Dick Cheney authorized torture — he is a torturer — and I respect him. How can that be an acceptable sentiment to express? Of course, it’s even more notable that political officials whom everyone knows authorized torture are walking around free, respected and prosperous, completely shielded from all criminal accountability. “Torture” has been permanently transformed from an unspeakable taboo into a garden-variety political controversy, where it shall long remain.

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What We Will Be Ashamed Of In 20 Years

The Article: You Will Be Embarrassed About This in 20 Years by Michael Kinsley in Bloomberg.

The Text: Just 16 years after a Democratic president signed the fatuously named Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage in the U.S. as requiring one man and one woman, the debate over gay marriage is over.

Isn’t it? Even though DOMA is still on the books, even though most states that have voted on the issue have voted against same-sex marriage, all the energy is in the opposite direction. What seemed at first like a bizarre idea has become utterly conventional. By judicial decree interpreting the state constitution, by act of the legislature and someday soon by popular referendum, one state after another is falling. Same-sex marriage is legal in Canada.
About Michael Kinsley

Does anybody believe that five years from now it will be harder than it is today for two women or two men to marry? It’s no longer all that hard today. I suspect — don’t you? — that even many anti’s have given up in their hearts and have resigned themselves to taking comfort in one more example of how the country is going to hell.

“What’s next?” opponents of same-sex marriage have sometimes asked, they thought rhetorically. If a man can marry a man, what about a man marrying two men? Or two mixed-sex couples merging into a married foursome? Or — the inevitable reductio ad absurdum — why shouldn’t a man marry his German shepherd if he wants to?

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Make America Great Again By Leaving It

The Article: To Make America Great Again, We Need to Leave the Country by Elliot Gerson at the Atlantic.

The Text: Foreign observers used to chuckle at that very distinctly American political rhetoric of exceptionalism — the assertions of our God-granted preeminence and predestination. But beneath that laughter, there was usually grudging respect, and even envy for a country whose citizens were so ready to express such national pride.

Now such language it is often openly derided. Let’s face it, even with all the problems in Europe, and everywhere, the American lantern is not as brightly inviting as it used to be. And I don’t mean just literally inviting, as in inviting to immigrants — though that in itself is a huge problem, one that contributes to the general perception of a country closing itself inward.

When Americans travel abroad, they are often surprised at how well other countries do the things we used to think America does best. In fact, one reason so many American businesses still lead the world is because they benchmark the competition and emulate best practices. But suggest to an American politician that we should try to learn from other countries, and he will look at you like you are from Mars. It is somehow unpatriotic even to raise such comparisons.

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