Jen

Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America – by John Michael Greer

 

The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism – by Andrew J. Bacevich

 

Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (American Empire Project) – by Andrew J. Bacevich

 

Now Eric Garner – by Jim Kunstler

The result is a permanently oppositional black culture with an elaborate ideology of endless grievance and a guilt-tripped white political culture held hostage by it and pandering endlessly to it — and sandwiched in between those two dispositions is a whole lot of really bad behavior. The least you can say about the four incidents involving Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice is that they involved some degree of ambiguity about what was actually going on, and in probably all those cases, at least, death was not caused by sheer malice. The same is not true about the case of Zemir Begic, or of the many people victimized during last year’s “knockout” game fad, or indeed the astounding number of people being gunned down regularly on the streets of Chicago.

I don’t think we’re capable of making these distinctions anymore, and surely not of doing anything constructive about them. Instead, we just appear to be careening toward a new and different kind of civil war.