Shouting Fire

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart a** New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too
Well he may be a fool but he's our fool
If they think they're better than him they're wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that's where I made this song

We talk real funny down here
We drink too much and we laugh too loud
We're too dumb to make it in no Northern town
And we're keepin' the n*****s down

We are rednecks, we're rednecks
We don't know our a**
From a hole in the ground
We're rednecks, we're rednecks
And we're keeping the n*****s down

--Randy Newman, "Rednecks"



Just got through the episode in Ken Burns' "Vietnam" which covered the murder of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State.

A little clip caught my attention, which Burns does not dwell upon, but it made me pause, then replay it: A distraught professor has rushed up to the Guardsmen who are kneeling and standing, weapons poised to unleash another volley of deadly gun fire at unarmed students across a grassy stretch and he implores the Sheriff or whatever he was, who seemed to be in charge, "Don't shoot!" 

"They have to disperse in thirty seconds or we'll shoot again," the Sheriff tells him.

Apologists for the National Guard always have claimed these were 20 year old kids with rifles, poorly trained, terrified of the mobs of students, who panicked and shot in fear for their own lives. (This defense became a mantra for every White cop who shoots a Black kid in the back after a traffic stop, of course, but in 1970, it was new.)

But what this three second bit of documentation showed clearly is how calm, and pre mediated this act was, on the part of a middle aged man and his calm and collected henchmen, who were methodical as any mob hitmen.

Some time later, the author James Mitchner went to Kent Ohio and spent a lot of time talking with townsfolk, students, police and his "Kent State" details how thoroughly many townspeople loathed the students who they felt were pampered, rich, unfairly privileged and somehow they believed the good fortune of these rich kids was responsible for their own deprived, miserable lives.

If this sounds familiar, it should. 

Captured by an aghast neighbor from Hampton NH

Speech, of course, is not action. You can say anything you want (except on Twitter now). But as Justice Holmes famously remarked, "The First Amendment does not give you the right to falsely shout 'Fire' in a crowded theater." The Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and now Donald Trump right wing stokers of the flame are the Santa Anna winds which explode into conflagration. 

They are speaking to those weak minded among us, the kindling just waiting to erupt.

These are the folk who burn with resentment, who smolder with self righteous wrath. They have their guy in the White House now. 


And they're loving it.