The Covington Kids, the Native American Drummer, and the “Hebrew Israelites”

Until recently we’d never heard of Covington Catholic High School, nor the town of Park Hills, Kentucky, but at the moment they are both unavoidably famous.

One of those “viral videos” that frequently infect the internet showed some Covington students wearing “Make America Great Again” ball caps in a tense encounter with a Native American drummer on Saturday at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the aftermath of an anti-abortion rally, which by Sunday led to all sorts of outraged coverage from left-leaning media about arrogant white youth menacing a an aged minority group member in the age of the President Trump. On Monday another longer video of the same incident from a literally different perspective was released which showed the Covington students had been harassed by some nearby members of a black religious cult known for its hatred of white people, which led to all the right-leaning media grousing about the “fake news” vilifying Trump-supporting white folk. On Tuesday both sides and the Native American drummer in the literal middle of it were all still arguing about what happened.

On the one hand it was no big deal, as no one was injured and such racially and politically charged unpleasantness goes on everyday outside of cell phone camera range, but on the inevitable other hand we can’t blame either side for trying to make a big deal of it.

The original video showed a young MAGA-cap-wearing fellow staring at the Native American drummer with what can reasonably be described as a sneering smirk, and some of his classmates are doing the “tomahawk chop” gesture and shouting something or other that didn’t sound at all friendly, and given that it came at the end of anti-abortion rally it did seem a nicely succinct summation of the liberal narrative about the age of Trump. The Native American drummer they were clearly mocking is elderly and a respected tribal leader and decorated war veteran, too, and the short video looked undeniably bad from its certain perspective.

The libertarian-leaning Reason magazine then came up that longer video from a different perspective, however, and it clearly showed that while awaiting a school bus to bring them home the students had peacefully endured the profane and racially charged insults of a nearby group of “Hebrew Israelites,” a weird cult that preaches black people are the true Jews of the Old Testament and everyone else is damned to hell, and that the Native American drummer, who happened to be there because he’d been involved in an indigenous people’s rally had placed himself between the two groups in an apparent attempt to calm the situation. He chose to direct his drumming at the white students, who might or might have understood his intentions, and although they were arguably disrespectful they were non-violent and didn’t do anything that can be construed as threatening. The “Hebrew Israelites” had been taunting the white students with anti-homosexual slurs, too, and are well-known for their anti-Jewish sentiments and general hatefulness, and it was so hard for the left-leaning meaning media to explain that many were in retreat on Tuesday.

The right-leaning media went on the offensive, plausibly arguing it was an example of the “fake news” rushing to judgment about Trump supporters. Trump himself weighed in via “Twitter,” and is reportedly planning a meeting with his disparaged fans. We can hardly blame them for making the best of the opportunity.

Some of the the left-leaning media are admitting the situation was more complicated than they’d supposed, but still think that a smirking bunch of MAGA cap-wearing and “tomahawk-chopping” white boys at a rally against reproductive rights deserve whatever opprobrium they get, so the debate will probably last through today. No one’s likely to get the best of it, however, and we expect the incident will be long forgotten by all but those were personally involved.

All sides are looking for heroes, but they’re not likely to find any that will last past the next news cycle. Those obnoxious “Hebrew Israelites” are clearly villains from any side’s perspective, but they’re such an ineffectual fringe cult that the right can’t make them much of a bogeyman and the left needn’t muster any defense for them. That Native American drummer might have had the best intentions in inserting himself into the confrontation, and despite his war heroes we can hardly blame him at his advanced age for addressing his drumming to to the skinny white Catholic school kids rather than the burly black power street activists who’d been taunting them, and he strikes us as neither heroic nor villainous. The Covington kids were clearly nonviolent and blameless of any misdemeanor, and it’s worth noting they are after high school-aged boys, so worse could have been excepted, but that one did have what can reasonably be interpreted as a self-entitled smirk and one of his classmates was pulling his shirt off in the cold in a provocative way and they were doing that “tomahawk chop” thing that Native Americans reasonably find offensive, and even as dumb high school kids they could have acted better.

Looking at it from all the cell phone camera-recorded perspectives, it strikes us as just another example of the unpleasantness that all too frequently occurs in our politically polarized society, which we frequently witness even here in Wichita but never bother to record on our old-fashioned flip phone. We blame human nature and Trump and his equally crazed enemies, and the more impulsive right-leaning and left-leaning media, and the occasional Native American drummer who ill-advisedly walks into the middle of it, and all of us on the sidelines who wonder what to do about it and the worse that’s sure to come.

— Bud Norman

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Still Fighting for a Lost Cause

Another horrific Islamist terror attack occurred in Spain on Thursday, which should have provided President Donald Trump an opportunity move past the racial controversies that have dogged him the past week. He responded to the deaths and injuries in Barcelona with an appropriately dignified statement of sympathy and support delivered via “tweet,” but spent more time in the day prolonging the racial controversies, provoking new ones, and picking fresh fights with his growing number of critics.

That appropriately dignified “tweet” to Spain was followed within an hour by another advising the Spaniards to summarily execute the captured terrorist suspects with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, based on a thoroughly-debunked story he likes to tell about the American an anti-insurrection campaign during the Philippines occupation, and thus far the Spaniards seem to be ignoring the counsel. A similarly shaky historical knowledge of the Civil War seemed to misinform another series of “tweets” lamenting the recent removal of several statues and other monuments honoring heroes of the Confederacy in several cities, including the Virginia town where a white supremacist rally set off deadly violence that started the past week’s lingering controversies.

There’s a reasonable case to be made for leaving the monuments that expressed the beliefs of past generations be, and letting future generations draw their own conclusions about them, but the aftermath of a deadly white supremacist rally is the wrong time to make the argument, and throughout the week Trump has demonstrated he’s not the right man.

He spoke of the “beauty” of some of the statues, but as a real estate developer in New York City he was notorious for razing such historically beautiful structures as Fifth Avenue’s Bonwit Teller Building, with its classic art deco bas-relief sculptures preserved only by court order and charity funds, and his aesthetic sensibilities are not well-regarded by most architectural critics. Trump is right to worry where such historical revisionism might end, as some people would like to see even such founding fathers as the slave-holding George Washington and Thomas Jefferson banished from places of honor in the public square, but he only bolsters their case when he consistently fails to not the crucial difference between the Revolutionary heroes who won America’s freedom and created a system of government that inexorably led to the abolition of slavery and those Confederates who fought to destroy that country and forever preserve the peculiar institution.

Some of those Confederate soldiers fought for the safety of their homes and families rather than for slavery, to be sure, and there’s certainly a strong case to be made that their descendants should be able to honor such bravery and sacrifice in their own communities. For many of those descendants the memorials express only the virtues of loyalty to home and family and the bravery that backs it up, values they now wed to the still-United States of America and feel with a deep regret for the worst of its past, and their views deserve the respect Trump has given them.

Any honest argument, however, requires a frank acknowledgement that slavery was an intolerable moral evil and that the Confederacy did wage its war of rebellion in defense of it, that many of the memorials were explicitly intended by their builders to honor that indefensible cause, and the sort of torch-bearing and shield-wielding and Nazi-flag-waving white supremacists who provoked the deadly violence in Virginia last weekend wanted the Gen. Robert E. Lee statue in the park preserved for the very same reason. Any honest argument would also have to address all the people in those communities whose ancestors were enslaved, who might have a very different view of the statues in their hometowns of the general who fought preserve slavery, and frankly acknowledge that any American president also owes those views his respect.

From our very old-fashioned Republican point of view, we also think it best this argument  he made at the local level. It’s taken a while, but those descendants of slaves and slave-holders and the folks who only fought for the Confederacy because that’s where their homes and family were have been working things out fairly well for themselves in the past few decades. There are still the occasional racial atrocities — yes, on both sides, although we don’t want to get into the score — but the region has seen rapid economic development, enough racial amity to draw many black migrants back from the north, and their college sports teams have been hugely successful. Southern legislatures and county commissions and town councils now work out such mundane matters as tax abatements and bridge-building contracts and zoning permits with black and white representatives, so we also trust their judgment whose statues should adorn their city parks. Here in Wichita in the heart of “bleeding Kansas” all the monuments are to the boys in blue, so we don’t have deal with these issues, but we trust that the people of the south interact with one another enough to know which white folks were for home and family and which black folks won’t want to tear down the Washington Monument,  and can come to a reasonable conclusion. If they decide they’d rather not honor Confederate generals, we figure there’s also a strong case to be made for that.

General Ulysses Grant allowed the Confederate army he’d vanquished to ride home atop their own horses with dignity and a military salute from his own victorious troops, and although Grant was also ruthless in battling the newly-formed Ku Klux Klan there was also a strong case to be made for that. The Reconstruction years of occupation by the Union army were harsh on the south in less defensible ways, too, but there was good reason to usher the south back into the Union with something of its dignity and values of home and family and martial spirit intact. President Abraham Lincoln made that case with enduring eloquence when he stated a policy of “Malice toward none and charity toward all.”

Trump is admittedly more the “punch back ten times harder” and summarily-execute-’em-with-a-bullet-dipped-in-pig’s-blood kind of president, though, so he’s handling the latest recurrence of the debate quite differently. The critics of his rather equivocal response to the white supremacist violence in Virginia now include South Carolina’s white Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who knows his constituency better than Trump and has calculated that he shouldn’t run for re-election on a neo-Confederate platform, and Trump “tweeted” back with a claim that the “publicity seeking” Senator had lied about him. South Carolina’s black Republican Sen. Tim Scott, who wouldn’t have been elected without a lot of votes from the descendants of slave-holders and those who fought for home and family, and strikes us as an impressive fellow, declared the president had abdicated any moral authority, but so far as we can tell he hasn’t yet been met with any presidential “tweets.”

By now the entirety of the Democratic party and much of the Republican party is critical of the president, along with most of the executives of the Fortune 500 companies and the entirety  of the  Joints Chiefs of Staff and most of the heads of state of our democratic allies, but Trump seems unlikely to back down any time soon and move on to such mundane matters as that debt-ceiling resolution that’s going to need Graham’s and Scott’s votes if the country doesn’t go bankrupt. Like the vanishing heroes of the Lost Cause, though, his most stubborn defenders can be assured that at least he fights.

— Bud Norman