Tuesday, June 16, 2020

I'd still rather be in Seattle than in Fox News' nightmare fantasy world


I have to admit that the reporting by media outlets like Fox News, which acts as Donald Trump’s de facto “advisor,” usually borders on the inane, especially in regard to things that it and its primary viewership only understand through the prism of their own fears, paranoias and prejudices. Greg Gutfield, who is frankly an idiot, proclaimed on his Fox News show that the so-called “autonomous occupation zone” in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district (or now called the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest”) is an exercise in “infantile behavior” and "setting up their own law and order” that is “actually kind of hyperviolent” before suggesting a “Lord of the Flies” scenario, which isn’t precisely an accurate analogy, since the William Golding novel suggested that a community stripped of  enforcement mechanisms for “civilized” behavior would degenerate into a world of “survival of the fittest,” not anarchy and chaos. Gutfield also accused the protesters here of being “fascist,” which is “odd” because most people outside the Fox News orbit think that “fascist” is the kind of state that it is endorsing with its support of the anti-democratic leanings of the Trump administration.

Not surprisingly it is this kind of talk that is behind Trump’s proclamation that he will send in reinforcements to clear out the Capitol Hill protesters and return “law and order” to the neighborhood, which I think is an overblown estimation of the situation here, good only as a propaganda tool to satisfy the fantasies of right-wing paranoids. I have said many times that I don’t think that Seattle is a particularly “progressive” city, but rather full of superstars-in-their-own-minds narcissists whose “liberalism” is often undercut by petty prejudices and discrimination against certain groups or “ethnicities” who are not protected by their “guilt” or fear that their prejudices will inspire street-level reprisals.  Such phonies.

It is all for show in any case, since most of these people don’t have anything better to do since the city is mostly still in lockdown mode; the office building I work in, like all the rest in downtown Seattle,  has been mostly empty for the past three months with most of the employees “working” remotely.  When the city returns to its normal workaday habits, this show will be as forgotten as yesterday’s breakfast; that’s not a criticism, just plain reality. How many mass shootings occur in this country where people wring their hands for a few days, forget about it and go through the same motions when the next incident occurs? Fox News, meanwhile, is right now engaging in the usual right-wing “whataboutisms,” obfuscating the spate of killings by police by  exploiting the fears and stereotypes of those who see the issue of race through the prism of such. 

It isn’t that communities that have problems with crime shouldn’t also confront the reality of their own rogue elements and who they expect to “fix” those problems—and it doesn’t help what some of these “kids” are learning from their “elders.” But Fox News’ motivations are open to question—especially when what it is doing is promoting a vicious cycle where “lawful” violence only begets more violence. The Washington Post is reporting on a story concerning the village of Bethel, Ohio—population 2,800—which was the scene of a small BLM crowd of 80 organized by a local teacher, Alicia Gee. Bethel is apparently an almost all-white community, and Gee wanted the village to make a “statement” on the matter this past Sunday. Instead, the village was virtually taken over by 700 “counterprotesters—motorcycle gangs, ‘back the blue’ groups and proponents of the Second Amendment,” with many carrying guns, baseball bats and clubs. 

While the initial protest group were all locals, most of “counterprotesters” were not; in fact many of their bikes and vehicles had out-of-state license plates. The Post quoted a protester who observed this group “walking down on the other side of the street from up town, yelling obscenities and threatening us…ripping signs out of our hands, ripping the hats and masks off of our faces, ripping things out of our pockets.” In a video of the event, one “counterprotester” proclaims “This ain’t Seattle!” We’re not in a Democratic state here!” 

You know, I’d rather be in Seattle; it’s “safer.”

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