It Don't Matter To Me

It took seven weeks, but the Trump administration finally did something I actually agree with.

It forced the city of Washington, D.C. to dismantle and remove Black Lives Matter Plaza just north of the White House.

I'm sure I know why Trump wants that public art removed.  You, assuming you've followed my blog for awhile, know why I am glad to see it removed.  Because it's not public art.  It's a piece of overdone messaging.

For those who haven't followed my blog for awhile, let me explain.  Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered the painting of the words BLACK LIVES MATTER in big yellow letters on two blocks of Sixteenth Street Northwest just north of Lafayette Square in response to Trump clearing out with heavy-handed force peaceful protesters demonstrating against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The two blocks were named "Black Lives Matter Plaza" and the big yellow letters were eventually made permanent, with a few cobblestones and bollards installed to make it look like a real plaza.

From the perspective of wanting to use public art to make a statement about police brutality, the whole idea of Black Lives Matter Plaza was asinine.  Painting a slogan in huge letters on a public street is an act of heavy-handed gigantism, the effect having all the subtlety of a fist in the jaw to make sure observers Get It.  The letters themselves are so gargantuan and oversized that they're best visible from a helicopter.  Maybe Mayor Bowser wanted to get Trump's attention when he was airborne in Marine One, but the effect of this stunt sort of lost its resonance when Joe Biden became President and the message Mayor Bowser was sending was an act of preaching to the converted.  The method of messaging overshadowed the message, much like Trump's reaction to the protesters a few days earlier overshadowed the message of law and order that Trump was trying to convey . . . and contradicted it.

And can we agree that the "plaza" itself was ugly?  The design of the plaza that resulted was a civic joke,  the cobblestones and rows of bollards  looking awkward and charmless.  Far from being a real plaza, the name suggesting a pedestrian space, the street was still accessible to motor vehicles.  In addition to being ugly, it was also redundant, as, as noted here before, Lafayette Square - a real plaza - stands between the southern terminus of Sixteenth Street Northwest and the White House.  And finally, there's the name itself.  Black Lives Matter Plaza is named for a slogan.  A good slogan, a meaningful slogan, but a slogan just the same.  I mean, of course, the great plazas of the world - Trafalgar Square, the Place Vendome, the Piazza San Marco . . . Black Lives Matter Plaza.  Not as dumb-sounding as the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky, but you get the idea.

Of course the PC crowd is all upset about this.  The CEO of the pavement marking company that originally painted the letters called the dismantling of Black Lives Matter Plaza "historically obscene."  It's obscene to dismantle a "plaza" that existed for less than half a decade?  That's not exactly the same as preserving a house Harriet Tubman once stayed in.  Other defenders of the plaza claim that an important message is being erased.  Uh, can I see you in my office, ladies and gents?  You still have the message.  No one is preventing you from saying the message out loud or continuing the Black Lives Matter movement in other ways.  But painting BLACK LIVES MATTER is big letters on two blocks of a street and naming it Black Lives Matter Plaza - I've said it before, and I'll say it again - does not solve anything.  It just makes people feel better.

Oh yeah, when the Black Lives Matter movement against police brutality first started in the mid-2010s, there was the suggestion that their slogan should be "Black Lives Matter, Too," the addition of that fourth word meant to suggest that black Americans were a part of our society rather than a people separate from it. The idea was rejected.  Yeah, that worked out, didn't it?

Mayor Bowser said that the two blocks of the former Black Lives Matter Plaza will be replaced with new murals.  Good, hopefully, they'll be more colorful, more universal, and also more creative that painting giant letters from a cookie-cutter traffic-control font.   

Defund the Police?

Seriously?

You think the only way to deal with police brutality is to take away police funding and let the cops enforce the law for nothing?  You think the cops are going to foil bank robberies if they're not going to get paid to do it?  You think police detectives will be able to track the robbers down - or solve cold-case murders - without the funding they need for equipment and fingerprint detection?  What, you want to farm all that out to private eyes?  Is that your message, guys?

Actually, that's not the message these activists are trying to send.  The intended meaning of their slogan is to spend less money on the police and put more money into social programs and education, which would deter crimes by giving people less and no reason to commit them.  Okay, I get it, you mean like cutting the military budget to fund schools, health care and Amtrak.  They don't want to zero out the police entirely.  Well, that's not what the slogan conveys.  It makes it sound like they do want to zero out police funding.  But when you consider that protesters like the one in the left-hand corner of the photo above are the type who think you need to hold a mask with your hand when it's already strapped on to you good and tight, it makes sense that they don't think things through.       

Both Joe Biden and Jim Clyburn have already announced their opposition to defunding the police, which should make it clear that they both misinterpreted the slogan and that the slogan is ripe for misinterpretation.  That's why left-wingers always lose. Their slogans keep sending the wrong message. 

And by the way, "defund" is not a word.  My spell checker keeps flagging it.  

Rock Bottom

So many black men have died at the hands of the police that I can't comment on it anymore than to say it's wrong and it shouldn't happen, because I can't find anything more eloquent and verbose to offer than that.  But the Minneapolis case of George Floyd - which sparked a riot that led to fires in Minneapolis - requires me to comment here.  When are the police going to get it?  You dehumanize black men, you dehumanize Americans . . . and America.   

And this is all happening in the backdrop of the United States having passed the number of 100,000 COVID-19 deaths.  We've sunk to a new all-time low. 

And what is the guy in the White House Donald J. Trump, doing?  Stoking the embers of resentment, calling the demonstrators "thugs" (the arsonists were outsiders having little to do with the protests) and demanding that they be shot, hoping to tilt Minnesota into the Republican column this fall with his divisive "law and order" rhetoric,", which Nixon used in 1968, a year after the Newark riot.  (New Jersey would go Republican in a presidential election six consecutive times beginning in 1968.)

And something else happened in Minneapolis that must have warmed Trump's heart - a CNN reporter was arrested while covering the riot.  (He has since been released.)

Joe Biden is expected to address the Minnesota Democratic convention tomorrow. This could be a, if not the, defining moment of hi presidential campaign  He will have the opportunity to call for calm, reach out to black voters in a meaningful way, and show more empathy and maturity than Trump all at once - if he balances his comments right - more vividly than in his most recent TV interviews.

However, he can forget about choosing Amy Klobuchar as his running mate.  It turns out that Officer Derick Chauvin, the fired policeman in the center of the Floyd killing, had had numerous complaints against him in the early 2000s, when Klobuchar was Hennepin County attorney (Hennepin County includes Minneapolis).  Klobuchar failed to prosecute Chauvin in another incident where he shot a suspect to death.  Her vice presidential hopes just burned to the ground with those buildings.