MEDIA TREAT WHITE ON BLACK CRIME DIFFERENT FROM BLACK ON WHITE

To All,  

 With all the protests, rioting, looting, and burning of stores throughout the US because a police officer knelt on the neck of the Black man, George Floyd, kneeling for over 8 minutes and killing the suspect, yet something about Minneapolis and police killings is never mentioned.  In all the numerous stories about the incident, and the telling video that accompanied the stories, there is no mention of the July 2017 incident in Minneapolis in which a Black police officer shot and killed an unarmed white woman (who had earlier called the police worried about a possible rape in her back yard).  The story probably would never have been allowed to reach beyond Minneapolis (the national media have no desire to hype Black on white killings) except for the fact that Justine Diamond was not an American but an Australian, and the Australian government protested what had happened to her.  There were no street protests, no riots, no looting, no burning of stores.  The Black policeman was charged, found guilty, and now serves a 12 year sentence.  In addition, her family was paid $20 million by the city, of which the family donated $2 million to fighting gun violence.  While Floyd is now a name on the international scene, the media have buried the information about the Diamond case with her.

   There is a great contrast in the way the media treat white on Black crime, and Black on white crime.

    Hugh Murray

COMMENT ON NEWS 30 May 2020

To All,

     Good news to those who watch late-night comedy shows.  Jimmy Fallon, star of NBC's The Tonight Show, has just qualified to run as a Democrat for Governor of the state of Virginia.

     He qualified when an old video of his stint on Saturday Night Life surfaced in which he appeared pretending to be another comedian, Chris Rock.  To do this effectively, Fallon was in black face.  Of course, even defending black face as a possible Halloween costume probably contributed to the termination of NBC's contract with Megan Kelly.  But Fallon is a known liberal, like the present governor of Virginia (in in younger years appeared in black face and in a KKK gown), so Fallon may keep his Tonight job.

   ************

     Democrat Governors and Mayors continue to keep lock downs of many businesses, even threatening those who open up with fines and arrests.  But last night, in many Democratic run cities, there were protests against a policeman's knee on the neck of a downed Black, George Floyd, accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill.  The weight of the cop was sufficient to kill the suspect, and protests have erupted throughout the nation.  The penalty for passing a bad note should not be death.  However, not all of the protests are peaceful, especially after dark.  Not just in Minneapolis, where the knee death occurred, but in many cities, after dark, the crowds became mobs that looted and burned stores, even here in Milwaukee, but also in Atlanta, Houston, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas, etc.  What is interesting is that even with more cops on the street, even supported by National Guard troops, they look on, but do not stop the rioters.  Lesson to be learned: Democrats will arrest someone who wants to open his legitimate business, like a barber shop, but will not arrest those who want to loot a store or burn it down.  Even if the arsonists are not wearing a mask for the virus!  Once again, the pro-crime nature of the Democrats is demonstrated for all to see.

     Hope everyone remembers this in November.

     Hugh

"Novel" Memoir Skips Much of Interest

ON EARTH WE'RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS (Penguin, 2019)

By OCEAN VUONG

Review by Hugh Murray

One recipe for comedy is to juxtapose the anticipated and expected to, or replace it with, the incongruous. (This is not a joke.) One common example: “Seven days without God makes one weak.” Poetry can be somewhat similar, describing a noun with an unusual adjective, or the adjective with an incongruous adverb. These surprising descriptions can provide amusement to the reader, or they may seem confusing, or profound, or a bit of all. Vuong indulges in much such word play, some simple, some belabored. After telling of the long flights of monarch butterflies from his home in Connecticut to Mexico, he compares a book's page to a folded monarch's wings. Then, when they open, will they fly away with the book? Too heavy. Admittedly, some of his comparisons are poetic, and the reader can pause to ponder. But sometimes the comparisons add nothing to the prose nor to the thought. It is simply another stop sign on the road through this “novel” memoir.

Vuong provides portraits of his grandmother Lan, his mother Rose, and shorter, more narrow sketches of his “grandfather” Paul, and his slightly older teen-age lover Trevor.

But there is so much that is NOT there! Vuong, born in Saigon in 1988 is brought to America when he was 4 to live in poverty in a poor section of Hartford, Connecticut. How did he get to the US? With his mom and grandma at that time? His father too? All together, or in spurts? The dad Vietnamese? There is nothing in this book about the boy in school, who knows almost no English, and being Vietnamese, is most likely smaller than most other kids his age. How was he treated? And mistreated? Who, if any, befriended him? How did this affect his character? Much of the book is about his mother (indeed, the book is an epistle to her). However, even when he sets off for a job on a tobacco farm at age 14, was this mainly for financial reasons, or because of disappointments in school? Working with tobacco his first day, his co-workers address him in Spanish, assuming he is another of the illegal aliens working there. Vuong was soon treated kindly by the Hispanic lead worker, who assigned him a task he could do (with effort). Working there, the lad meets Trevor, the 17-year-old white son of the farm's owner; Trevor, like the hired hands, also works the fields. They hit it off, and in time, engage in sex after work. After various explorations, the innocent boys are both shocked and embarrassed to discover that sometimes during anal sex, sh*t happens. One of the few amusing episodes. Like Trevor, Vuong snorts coke, but declining to go along with everything his older friend does and offers, Vuong refuses to inject heroine.

Unlike “white privileged” Trevor, Vuong receives a scholarship to a Brooklyn College. Again, the role of the public school in this transformation is absent. What, how did this happen? I would prefer less poetry and more answers to how a small guy with no English is metamorphed in a decade into a scholarship student in another state? This might be quite a story from which many might learn. Meanwhile, the “privileged” white male Trevor, over does it and dies at 22.

Vuong returns to Vietnam with the ashes of his grandmother, but present-day Vietnam is another absentee from this volume. It might crowd out monarch butterflies flights or cliff jumps by buffaloes.

Perhaps asking for Vuong's survival kit is going too far, but with odds against him, he did survive and do well. Perhaps, the title provides a clue – he and we all are gorgeous. But we know that that is a lie. True, some are gorgeous, but usually for only a short span; and some are not and were never gorgeous; and some are hideous. But on some level after high school, we all learn that as pleasant as eye-candy is, it cannot sustain us; we also require, need, the ugliness of most proteins. For adults, the main meal is soup to nuts, not much eye-candy. This short book is episodic, jumping round in time, explicit on street names in Hartford and other sites, inclusive of some Asian superstitions, echoes of war, somewhat poetic, but omitting so much of what must have been important.

LAND "REFORMERS"? or MOB TYRANNY?

THE MOUNTAINS SING (Kindle ed.) 2019

Algonquin Books, 2020

By Nguyen Phan Que Mai

Review by Hugh Murray

I rarely read fiction,preferring works of history. Yet, even when I taught History, I was aware of what readers could learn from novels and in the first half of the American History course, assigned the Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn. One acquires knowledge of mid-19^th century America almost unawares, while laughing at the antics of the characters.

The Mountains Sing is not funny, but I learned much from it. For example, I had read and heard the simple phrase “land reform” over decades in hundreds of books, newspaper articles, TV news shows, and documentaries. Stalin's collectivization of agriculture and mistreatment of kulaks in the Ukraine did present a negative impression, but that was long ago and now everyone concedes that Stalin had made some mistakes. Just after WWII, Mao's civil war against Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek was interpreted as a disagreement over Mao's desire to achieve land reform, or so many thought at that time. Land reforms in Rhodesia and more recently in South Africa meant snatching farms from whites to give to Blacks, but that was viewed as a continuation of the continent's de-colonization. A more recent television serial depicted land reform: the German “Line of Separation” showed a small German town in the defeat of 1945 divided between American and Soviet sectors (like the much larger Berlin). A large mansion and plot belongs to the count, a returning officer of the Reichswehr. His wife is shot and killed in the final days of war, and when he realizes his land is in the Soviet sector, he moves to the West. His pretty, 18-year-old daughter inherits the area and building. She falls for a young German who is poor, and whose brother is not actually kin, but an extra son taken in by his mom when the other boy's Jewish parents were taken away. Her boyfriend is in the (Communist) Party, after the Nazi defeat. The Communists begin an agenda of change: “Bauern Land statt Junker Land” - farmer's land instead of nobleman's land. The young woman is unhappy, but her boyfriend persuades her that as a couple, they can get a good plot and become regular farmers. By the end of the series, she has become the strongest defender of East Germany.

In Mountains Sing, Nguyen presents a vivid, and very different picture of land reform in North Vietnam in 1955. Unexpectedly, the family at the center of this novel is shocked when teens banging drums, and older folks, a mob, with sticks and implements to be used as weapons, arrive shouting slogans, Down with the Rich Landowners, Down with the Greedy Rich, Exploiters, etc. The scene is more akin to the 1931 film of Frankenstein, when the townspeople march on the castle of Count Doctor Frankenstein determined to destroy him and his creation. In the Vietnam story, this was a national operation directed by the Communist Party against all larger landholders it deemed unreliable. Out in the rice fields, some of the mobsters came across the brother and a son of Dieu Lan (then head of the household, and who would become the major character of the novel). The two men were beaten, tied to a tree, and tortured. They then killed one, Dieu Lan's brother. One of her hired workers was able that night to cut the rope holding her older son, and he fled. Did he make it to some safe area, or was he killed too? The mob reached her home, and she too was attacked, bound, and beaten. Her money and jewelry, stolen. That night an elderly servant quietly cut her ropes and she had to flee also. It was not easy as she took with her her three younger children and her 1-year-old baby. One omission in the novel, she does not consider trying to escape to South Vietnam. Instead, she can only think of getting help from a former teacher who lives in distant Hanoi, but a man she hasn't seen in several years.

On the run with four children, her struggle to stay alive and get to Hanoi consists of a large part of this book. Penniless, suddenly friendless, how is she going to make it? And as she walks along the national highway, she must often get off the path to avoid suspicion. She sees fires in the distance where other mobs have flamed the homes of other “exploiter” landholders. In one village, a gent with a pole wants to kick her out of the area because she is a beggar. In some instances, some will not help because they suspect she is on the list, and if they help her or her children, the Party will go after them. By this time she knew the party had a quota for killing exploiter landlords (like the American Left that loves quotas that disturb society in their own way, the VN CP had quotas to kill people).

Along her journey, Dieu Lan must leave a child with this kind lady, another with this family, another, and so on. With luck and courage, she makes it to Hanoi where new trials strain her endurance, but she learns new skills and her character keeps her coping and growing. I need not describe the entire plot, but her book provides memorable descriptions of folks in Hanoi when American bombers flew above dropping their cargoes, and for those below, the fright and then the rush to survive. I don't think I had read such a description of the bombings from the vantage of those on the ground. Hers is powerful. Also, soldiers for North Vietnam describe their war, from their viewpoint, some actions. Also being rained on by American Agent Orange (and I do not mean Trump). She includes the lies told by the victorious North Vietnamese army to those of the defeated South's ARVN, and the difficulties faced by the losing side (those who did not flee to American planes or ships, or those who did not commit suicide when Saigon fell). She describes some of the discrimination faced by black marketeers (an almost necessary ingredient in a socialist economy) and even some discrimination encountered by Northern carpetbaggers who got cushy jobs in the South.

On the negative side, it would have been better if Nguyen had given her characters an English name along with the VN name. I often did not even know the sex of some characters, though she did add clues in the dialog with “Sis” or “Uncle.”

She has one character make a decision that seems unrealistic to this Westerner. This character, a Northerner who has fled Communist oppression gets to South Vietnam and even joins the ARVN. He is helped by others who are Christian, and converts to their religion. He marries the daughter of a man with money, and has two children with her. As the government of the South begins to collapse, his father-in-law purchases a boat to get out, hopefully to America. It is for him, his wife, his daughter, her two children, and his son-in-law. He declines! I find this out of character. Instead of going with his wife and children, he wants to somehow find his mother and siblings, who may be in the North or, as far as he knows, may be dead. So he chooses to remain in VN. I find this incomprehensible. This entire book is an example of the importance of family. Well, which family, his mom, or his wife and children? I think the answer is clear, and not the one he made. Once the man has a wife and children, is that not his primary family?

Overall, Nguyen has written an excellent book.