The Bleeding Heart Show

The lion sleeps

To borrow from one of the Senator’s most memorable speeches, Edward Kennedy need not be idealised or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. There will not – and should not – be a single obituary which avoids mention of the murky & tragic death in Martha’s Vineyard, and every attempt to pay tribute to his life & work must recognise how starkly this act of private cowardice contrasts with the determination & bravery which marked his public life.

Kennedy was as flawed & tragic a figure as one could find in professional politics. His two brothers were murdered, his first marriage collapsed as his wife battled alcoholism, he survived a plane crash which left him with chronic back pain, and his twelve-year-old son only survived cancer by having his leg amputated. He was known to be a womaniser & heavy drinker, and reports of his sordid & boorish escapades were commonplace among Washington’s gossipy elite.

But if the occasion of his passing does not mean we can excuse or ignore a troubled life, nor can those black marks distract from recognising him as one of the most important and effective Senators in American history. Ted Kennedy was involved in passing (and in many cases authoring) practically every progressive accomplishment in the past fifty years: the Civil & Voting Rights Acts which ended discrimination against African Americans; the Medicare & Medicaid programmes which have provided healthcare to millions of poor Americans, and the S-CHIP scheme which extended care for children. He secured increases in the minimum wage, Family & Medical Leave, and reform which opened America up to immigration from all over the world.

He was perhaps America’s first mainstream advocate for gay rights, consistently supported a woman’s reproductive freedom, was a critic of the wars in Vietnam & Iraq, and of Apartheid in South Africa. He worked to implement the ‘Great Society’ of Lyndon Johnson, and then stood to defend it during the days of Nixon, Reagan & Bush. Very simply, his work helped to improve the material conditions of millions of Americans in a way that very few politicians, past or present, can compare to.

It will be widely mentioned, of course, that his death came before a victory on health care reform, an issue Kennedy described as the ’cause of my life’. But the Senator has still done more than most to make this a success; the committee he chaired has already passed a bill which would expand health coverage, and the delay is being caused by the gutless dithering of Senators in a different committee. If President Obama does finally get a healthcare bill through Congress, that too will have been partly due to his hard work.

It’s never wise to regard modern politicians as heroes. They can be prone to hypocrisy, susceptible to self-interest, and when they get things wrong they hurt not just themselves or their cause, but a vast number of people with whom they have never met. In his private life, Edward Kennedy made many bad decisions and was privileged enough not to suffer their consequences, but that still won’t detract from a record of public service which few will ever match.

The Forgotten Militia

Somehow, I’m always last one to comment on articles like this, but after seeing it generate a substantial amount of comment in the blogosphere, I’ve finally gotten around to reading A.C. Thompson’s detailed, forensic and chilling account of the violence that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

For anyone too pushed for time to read it all, the story is centred around New Orleans’ Algiers Point; a rich, white enclave within the predominantly black district of Algiers. Unlike most of the city, ‘The Point’ was lucky to avoid the worst of Katrina’s damage, but with the city’s infrastructure at the point of collapse and the local/national media sensationalising looting and civil disorder among the city’s black population, its residents resolved to protect their homes using any means necessary.

And so the residents hoarded guns and ammunition, built barricades and makeshift alarms to detect trespassers, patrolled their ‘territory’ in SUVs and aimed weapons at anyone suspected of threatening the ‘peace’ of their neighbourhood. What followed was a spate of shootings which resulted in a number of serious casualties and even murders. In every single incident Thompson uncovered, the shooters were white and the victims were black. To this day, none of the assailants has ever been charged with a crime, nor has the city’s police department sought to investigate any wrongdoing. As one of the militia observed “no jury would convict.”

The Nation describes this story as evidence of a ‘race war’, and that’s certainly not too far off the mark. Whilst the victims weren’t hunted down per se, nor shot solely for being black, the reason they encountered violence and intimidation was because in that isolated, racially segregated and utterly paranoid part of New Orleans, their skin colour made them seem like a threat. Equally disturbing is the ambivelence Thompson’s interviewees showed toward victims’ lives, the lack of reflection on whether – in hindsight – the residents did the right thing, and the ease with which they were all described as ‘niggers’.

We should remember, of course, that these were exceptional (and hopefully unrepeatable) circumstances: the city’s infrastructure had collapsed, law enforcement was at a minimum, essential resources were in short supply, lots of people had access to a firearm and city officials and the media were complicit in spreading stories about violent black boogeymen. With such chaos and fear, otherwise decent people can be driven to extremes of violence and cruelty they might otherwise have not been capable of, and there is no suggestion anywhere in Thompson’s piece that this ramshackle militia was formed solely with the intention of killing black people. Whatever we can or cannot learn from this story, I think we should restrain ourselves from seeing it as representative of race relations in America, in Louisiana or even in New Orleans.

Nonetheless, there are some questions this story raises which I think should be addressed more widely. As Rebecca Solnit asks, why has this story never been a part of the accepted history of Katrina? In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, we heard plenty about black men committing acts of violence, looting and rape; why is it that the story of a white armed militia, which has been an accepted as fact in New Orleans for years, has never been a part of the narrative? Furthermore, why has it required a liberal magazine to publish this story before the New Orleans Police Department decided to investigate exactly what happened in Algiers Point?

Beyond that, the story raises uncomfortable questions about our social psychology: how we behave when the state loses its ability to police and protect us; whether social groups are intrinsically incapable of regulating the use of violence; whether, in times of crisis, the identity politics of class and race will always shape and constrain human solidarity.

But the last and most obvious conclusion, of course, is that these events needn’t have happened. If the levees had been stronger, if New Orleans had been sufficiently evacuated, if enough law enforcement had been put in place to deal with the aftermath, and if state and federal bodies had been swift enough to deal with the human catastrophe which followed, there might never have been a need for an Algiers Point militia, and its fear-stricken victims might have survived.

I suppose the time for New Year’s Resolutions has passed, but let’s hope we won’t have to say ‘never again’ ever again.

Photo by Flickr user wallyg (Creative Commons)

Caroline, no?

In news which may come as a shock to those who wrote melodramatic op-eds about the election of an unknown, untested and altogether unlikely-sounding black man to the office of President, it turns out that Barack Obama’s Historic! Change-making! Victory! hasn’t forever banished nepotism, elitism and the long-stay permanance of political dynasties from holding great influence over public life.

Lest he upset some very wealthy Manhattanites and disrupt what the media and her society cheerleaders have already hyped-up as her long-delayed coronation as queen of Camelot, New York Governor David Paterson will name Caroline Kennedy as his state’s next Senator, replacing the outgoing (and, for all her faults, studiously competent) Hillary Clinton.

If it does happen, it should be troubling on a number of levels. First, whilst Ms Kennedy might well become as impressive and dilligent a Senator as her predecessor, she has shown precious little evidence of it thus far. She has no experience in legislative politics, no substantive record of public service, has not given a press conference in support of her candidacy and all that is really known of her political views are the brief answers she (or her advisers) gave to questionnaires submitted by the Times and the Politico.

Of those answers, there are some telling gaps in either her knowledge or her openness. When asked about her views on the future of New York’s enormous financial sector, her team responds with “at this time, Caroline does not have a specific plan to fix New York’s financial services industry”, instead pledging to work with her peers. When querstioned on local issues, like the budget for New York State or education reform, her answers are similarly vague, and a question about Israel was batted away with the most banal political platitudes.

And then there’s the issue of restoring another political dynasty. DailyKos diarist Morus found that the US Senate is actually more heriditary than the UK’s House of Lords, with 15% of its members being directly related to previous or current holders of high office. For a country which fought a revolution to banish such privileges, I imagine this is enough to give anyone pause for thought.

Of course, you’ll find hereditary aspects to many other professions besides politics, from the modest, family-run business to the world’s largest media empire. But what makes political dynasties different is their access to the machinery of power, as well as their ability to sell the ‘brand’ of their surnames to the general public in a way which sometimes obscured their policies or competence. For Caroline, the Kennedy brand seems to be used as a substitute for demonstrable experience in public service, and whilst the people of New York will eventually have the chance to decide whether or not she’s done her ‘brand’ and her state justice, I think it’s unlikely that someone with the same CV but a less illustrious surname would be on the verge of taking a seat in the United States Senate.

None of which necessarily means she’ll be bad at her job, of course. But for as long as glitzy political brands are favoured over unfashionable, hard-working public servants, the practice of egalitarianism and social mobility will always be somewhat stifled.