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Unilateral Armament

Why are Americans such assholes?

Amongst other afflictions, I'm a lap steel guitar player. My job involves going into saloons and getting people to drink more alcohol by assaulting them with live music. I've never liked the hard-wired connection between bars and live music, particularly when my comrades and I succeed to the point where the customers drink enough to produce their pistols, threatening to mess with the “live” part. The general rule is to keep playing. And if we play loud enough, we can often divert attention from anything but actual gunfire — at which point, like everyone else, we begin hugging thefloor.

Lately, I've been playing in a mellow duo with the soon-great, always-wonderful Ben Jordan, and back in July we got a gig at The Canal Club down in “The Bottom,” in downtown Richmond, VA, where I live, a pretty average, mid-sized American city. I had played The Canal Club before and liked it for being a big room, with good sound and unusually large and attentive crowds.

But, unknown to us last July, The Canal Club was almost dark, as in closed. The big upstairs stage I'd enjoyed before was dark. We played downstairs to perhaps five people, two of whom were “with the band,” such as we are. There had been recent, widely-published incidents of more than usual success in the live music/alcohol consumption/pistol-producing department. The prospect of mayhem and death had dampened enthusiasms. Once more, crime was eating the people and profits of Richmond!

But my exclamation point is flaccid. Crime has been taking a bite outta Richmond and other American cities for many years. Last year's bite is written into next year's budget — and into our personal Profit & Loss statements. Whatever your “enthusiasm,” in terms of conducting business in your town, the prospect of mayhem and death will surely dampen it.

The only enthusiasm not dampened by crime is what the late President Eisenhower might have termed “the Criminal-Corrections Industrial Complex,” now a power lobby in every state and federal body. The C-CIC easily outlobbies interests in education and social programs, because tough laws, mandatory sentences and, most of all, Prohibition II: “the Drug War,” have created demand for a supply of police, guards, bureaucrats and ever-bigger prisons. This enriches a Big Lobby that is against crime and for motherhood so explain your vote against that, Sen. Smith!

It's a self-amplifying, continuous loop: skimping on social services and schools to pay the C-CIC assures the creation of more angry, illiterate criminals who can only go ... into the C-CIC — where most grow even more illiterate and angry. Americans are caught in a downward spiral of botched priorities.

We don't want to pay a few dollars up front getting decent schools and help for single working moms. We seem to prefer paying billions on the back side, “correcting” the predictable result of our front-side folly: trigger-happy kids with nothing to lose. Gang activity grows apace, with gangs, and the C-CIC lobby, being among the few institutions actually investing in America's children.

I understand that the Swiss keep assault rifles in their houses as part of a simple national defense plan, to wit: who wants to attack a mountainous country where everybody has a machine gun? The Israelis, awash in terrible violence on a daily basis, are likewise armed to the teeth, but, like Switzerland, England, Canada or New Zealand, their murder rate is insignificant compared to the United States.

I forget my Michael Moore, but Bowling for Columbine re-related the familiar statistics: a few dozen fatalities for all those other countries, and thousands of shot-dead citizens for the US. It's not just easy availability of firearms, though that doesn't help. Again, we apparently prefer it this way — unless we are personally killed. Or someone we love. Or our particular gig goes dark.

Otherwise, we enjoy electing “tough” politicians who build a bigger prison where we really needed a better school. In Richmond, the minute any child of sufficient means reaches school age, it is whisked away to our local versions of Columbine, CO; suburbs where the schools are whiter and the delusion of “safe” soothes the savage commute back to the bleeding city.

Opponents of educational spending and social supports say caring is for wimps. They don't know why we kill each other in such outlandish proportion to other nations either, but, whatever it is, it ain't no education and social supports. It's an erosion of traditional values by the liberal media — or too much gun control, taking the firepower away from law-abiding citizens who might otherwise provide triangulated counter-fire from across the bar, literally lighting up those dark clubs and taking out the bad guys — with minimal “collateral damage,” of course.

But, surely, people learn the vast majority of their behavior, good or bad. And learning involves teaching, both by our despised teaching institutions, and by the day-to-day example of a society that despises teaching. Given the burgeoning home school movement, the vouchers and “faith-based” initiatives, unattractive teaching salaries, inflexilbe union and government bureaucrats, even the old, derisive platitude, “Those who can do, those who can't teach” — few can remain unaware of American disdain for its public schools — especially in cities.

Kids are ignorant, not dumb. They see the priorities. Why should they value education when, plainly, we don't. Crime, gangs, violence — it always comes back to teaching, the business of creating citizens instead of problems. That answer is as hard to run away from as a bullet.

Text © Travis Charbeneau

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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