Paradoxical Progress

Well, unfortunately, I have no idea how to capture screen shots from web sites (egads...). Otherwise, I'd show this: the front page of the west coast's leading daily showing a gigantic city block overflowing with people marching in support of immigrant communities, matched with a headline proclaiming..."Immigration Rights March Attracts Far Fewer in L.A."

Ok, ok, so last year more than a half a million people thronged the city, leaving the Black Bloc boys (and police and security service types) with visions of revolution dancing in their collective head. Still, this is the most mismatched front page I've ever seen. What a crabbed, caviling point to make, really; it's the kind of uncharitable reaction that would make one blanch if you heard it said at a party or over dinner. Unless, of course, one's institutional role is to pooh-pooh the poor immigrants, with their little marches and flags and things.


And yet, on the other hand, check this. Maybe I just haven't noticed, but this is the first article I've seen to characterize what happened in LA in 1991 as an uprising, not a riot. It's long been a point of pride on the left to say LA Rebellion or Uprising, rather than Riots; I'm happy to see some MSM types follow that lead.

I might be writing this only because I saw an a little piece in the Washington Post, about John Hope Franklin (like Morgan Freeman times 1,000,000) leading survivors of the Tulsa "Race Riot" to Congress to ask for some recognition for their suffering, and recompense for their losses. (In 1921, hundreds of white men, deputized by OK sheriffs, tore through black neighborhoods in Tulsa, killed 300 men, women, and children, and burnt down a 42-block area). As one mother told her daughter, "Your country is shooting at you."