Posts that were here previously may now be found at the page entitled “Some Favorite Posts.”
Category Archives: St. Louis
Not a great place to keep Christmas, Ebeneezer . . .
There’s not much good news in Missouri this holiday season. As the salvationists appear outside local businesses ringing their bells and the papers carry the usual stories of needy folk in line for help from local philanthropy, there’s a good deal else that suggests the coarseness of life in this place.
Towing scandal: The ringleaders of a crooked towing company, whose exposure triggered the resignation of a former St. Louis police chief and suggested a deep vein of corruption in the St. Louis police department, have all been given sweetheart sentences by a federal judge this week. Bill McClellan has written two columns about it, here, and here. As McClellan complains about one case, “Citizens have lost their cars, the city has been cheated out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and the man supposedly behind all of this gets 10 months. Talk about throwing the pamphlet at a guy.”
Racism continues: To make matters worse, New census data have been released that appear to show that St. Louis “is among the most racially separated regions of the nation,” according to another Post-Dispatch story. John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, is quoted to the effect that these data “suggest that all the talk about a postracial society means nothing at the level of neighborhood.” In ethnically mixed neighborhoods like my own, one is aware of racial hostility and suspicion, aware of racial gangs, aware that most reported crime is racially attributed. Racism is institutionalized in this city, as apparently in other cities in the nation’s so-called “ghetto belt.”
Institutional closings: And there’s bad news too for the institutionalized disabled all across Missouri, as the legislature debates closing all state facilities for the disabled and forcing patients into home care regardless of hardship. Of course many of these facilities were pretty dangerous places for their clients before budget cutting targeted them, but it looks as though Scrooge has the votes in Jeff City to close them now, as he usually does when it comes to harming the weak in this state. The cruelty of this thing is so flagrant that decent folk shouldn’t tolerate it. But I’ll bet they do. After all, we’re famous in Missouri for denying Medicaid to thousands of children and for resisting the new federal health care program.
We can’t afford care for the disabled in Missouri, and apparently we can’t afford safe highways any more, either; but the St. Louis Cardinals still think the city of St. Louis can afford to help them finance the dubious Ballpark Village. So as I wrap packages and try to think benevolent thoughts this year, I think I’ll increase my disability insurance and forget about those baseball games I’d like to attend next summer: that, and stay off the roads in bad weather.
—which is what I’m doing today.
the snake’s the thing . . .
This is another “Let’s talk about snakes” post in honor of one of my graduate school professors who had a favorite schtick that began with that expression. I’ve written only fifteen of these in the three-year history of this blog, and it’s been a year since the last one. I should likely do better than that, especially since my habit of using the word, snakes, in a figure of speech that bears on some part of the post’s content is always a challenge to my ingenuity. So here goes:
Summer entertainments: We’ve been making the rounds of community arts events in the city this summer more than in some past years. A “Jungle Boogie” concert at the St. Louis Zoo was wonderful fun back at the end of May and introduced us to the Ralph Butler Band. At the Shakespeare Festival in Forest Park, we saw an excellent Hamlet, with no gimmicks other than Shakespeare’s own. We also took in two summer operas, The Marriage of Figaro and Eugene Onegin at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In spite of a few sublime musical moments, Figaro is a silly opera. Some performances try to recapture some of the social satire lost in Da Ponte’s adaptation of Beaumarchais, but the Opera Theatre’s productiom leaned pretty heavily on soubrette and buffo clichés and stage business that did little to distract one’s attention from the silliness, and vocally the performance was pretty lackluster. The Onegin was better. The cast’s powerful voices and Tchaikovski’s music almost lent credence to Pushkin’s poetic melodrama. The performance of Russian-American soprano, Dina Kuznetsova as Tatiana, was exceptional among fine performances by all the lead singers.
The Biden Leaks: Ben Smith at Politico passes on information about how Vice Preaident Biden’s views on the Afghan war were leaked recently. So—if you’re an administration operative and you don’t like some policy your bosses are pursuing, all you have to do is leak information that among your bosses somebody is disagreeing. I’m not always in favor of punishing leakers, but this is a time when I think somebody (maybe more than one somebody) should be fired.
Old time religion: It’s fitting to remember as we celebrate Independence Day that Jefferson’s ringing claim of god-given rights didn’t extend even to all men, in his own time and afterwards for generations, even for generations after we fought a bloody civil war over slavery. And if we needed reminding, the posting of portions of Samuel Seabuty’s infamous defense of slavery over at Episcopal Café should do the trick. I think it is the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury and other theological conservatives that the gospel as understood by past ages is sufficient in the present. That view doesn’t survive much inspection of the past, when Christian churches and theologians justified slavery and the vilest anti-Semitism, and that’s only a part of the foreground. Friends have recently returned from President Obama’s home state of Hawaii, where they saw striking reminders of the inequality nourished and fostered there by an iniquitous cabal of missionaries and planters—not exactly the home of the brave, to quote Justice Scalia in another context.
A purloined letter: Over a year ago I wrote a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. In light of recent events that I may write about one of these days, I took a look at an old blog post that linked to that letter the other day. Imagine my distress when I discovered that the link turned up this. Talk about dead letters! But today I’m happy to report that my letter is still accessible at the Post, though it is now in a different place. Indeed the listing of my letter amongst regular articles in the paper makes me feel less snake bit.
—though I didn’t exactly get a byline . . .
yet once more . . .
Yesterday the Supreme Court began yet another debate about race, this time about whether a test for promotion that favors white candidates may legitimately be used by the Hartford, Connecticut, fire department. White candidates who were denied promotion on the basis of the test had sued, claiming discrimination (i. e. that they were refused promotion because of their race). No black fire fighters passed the Hartford promotion test–it’s not an unfamiliar situation. St. Louis Fire Chief, Sherman George, was fired by Mayor Francis Slay in a similar case.
In the case before the Supreme Court, the arguments quickly took shape around the clichés of the affirmative action debate. Here’s what Robert Barnes reports in The Washington Post as plaintiff’s attorney Gregory S. Coleman’s presentation of the heart of the plaintiff’s case:
Racial classifications are inherently pernicious and, if not checked, lead as they did in New Haven to regrettable and socially destructive racial politics, [Coleman] told the court. He said New Haven officials scuttled the promotions not because they found fault with the test, which they had commissioned from a private company, but because the results caused a political uproar.
The court is sensitive to the perception among some whites that affirmative action programs are unfair to them and seems set to endorse the proposition that racially discriminatory outcomes do not establish a basis for municipalities to reject test results such as the ones at issue in Hartford.
Barnes reports that at one point in the questioning yesterday, Justice Roberts “asked Deputy Solicitor General Edwin S. Kneedler whether he could ‘assure me that the government’s position would be the same’ if the results had been reversed — if black applicants had scored well and no whites were eligible for advancement.” Apparently Justice Roberts did not find Kneedler’s affirmative answer satisfactory, and he is right; though his initial question is wrong and wrong headed.
White racism remains entrenched in American life from top to bottom, the institutional racism of white privilege. It may be that affirmative action programs have done all they can do to change this situation and that what remains must be left to hope and good will as our society evolves. But if the court rules as it seems set to rule and endorses institutional racism, that will be a serious setback to the almost century-old effort to redress racial injustice through the courts, to the legacy of James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, and Thurgood Marshall.
As Barnes puts it:
[These] arguments come as the court has grown more skeptical of [race based] policies, and in the wake of the election of the nation’s first black president, who has urged a new conversation about the effects of past discrimination and the future of race relations.
It will be a truly mournful thing if one consequence of the election of Barack Obama turns out to be an endorsement of white privilege by the United States Supreme Court.