Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll laments the meltdown in CRY, THE BELOVED CITIES. She writes:

Warning: there is nothing funny in the following column. Maybe next week. I am “borrowing” the lovely title of Alan Paton‘s beautiful book about the tragedy that is South Africa, Cry, The Beloved Country. To look at something you love going, as my Grandpa would have said, “to hell in a hand basket,” is nauseating, heartbreaking, and enraging. Particularly when it is completely unnecessary. In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say it is deliberate.

Growing up in rural Minnesota, the Twin Cities held an almost magical fascination for me as a child. We Minnesotans understood that you didn’t even have to say “Twin.” We were on good enough terms to use her nickname. We just said, “Yeah, we’re goin’ to The Cities tomorrow.” And everyone understood. Shopping at the “skyscraper” that was Dayton’s, in the (literal) Bargain Basement, riding the awesome escalators. Later, having real Chinese food down the block, nothing too exotic or spicy, probably Chow Mein which we had at least heard of! Kung Pao Chicken would still be a decade off…

If we were very lucky, it would mean taking in The Ice Follies. After 1961 there was the unbeatable excitement of an outdoor Twins Game, rooting for Harmon, Bob Allison, Jim Lemon, Lenny Green. Daddy would spring for the crazily-priced $2.00 hot dogs though Mama felt that was a terrible rip-off. Mama’s two favorite players were catcher Earl Battey and Lenny Green (CF), because, you know, all rural Republicans in the 60s were horrible racists. Everyone knows that who has ever been to college.

As young marrieds, Mr. AG and I lived in St. Paul near the U of M campus there, and later, shared with four other people a big old rambling rented house on 36th and Hennepin near the cemetery in Minneapolis.

We moved to San Francisco for 4 years – on the border of the Mission District and the Castro District – where there was as yet no poop on the streets except from dogs. When our son was two years old, we returned to Minnesota and lived there from 1975 until 2010. I left a large piece of my heart – and the majority of my family — in Minnesota even when the politics became unbearable and we moved to Arizona.

The Twin Cities is where we bought our first modest home. It’s where my comedy career was launched. Our son returned there after college. He and his wife just bought their first house. We probably have 100 friends there, 50 favorite restaurants, favorite used book stores, which, as this was being written, were being burned to the ground by savages and cretins who danced as it burned. Uncle Hugo’s. There for 40 years. Mr. AG was too upset to eat.

To see The Cities in flames, to watch the police fail to fire a single shot even with a rubber bullet to keep their stations from being torched, to see anyone who objected, black or white, beaten up, is like watching some kind of Mad Max movie, only the thugs win. Watching the worse-than-useless, cowering, emasculated Democrat toadies in charge capitulate utterly to the mob, in fact, to be on the SIDE OF the mob, is terrifying. When the Governor’s daughter has access to information to AID AND ABET the mob, it’s time to get out, friends.

The elected Democrats blather about white racism, confessing to white guilt like a psycho who rushes to confess to every crime. That’s why, at least in the past, cops used to leave out important details that were not reported in the press, to trip up the mentally ill chronic confessors. Academia has been leaving out vital, exculpatory details about America for decades now. The chickens have come home to roost. As they always do.

Racism, we are assured by those leaders, is still “systemic”— a ridiculous lie — but if the “system” WERE racist, who RUNS the entire “system” in the Twin Cities, fellas? I doubt there’s even a Republican dog catcher in the Metro area. So speak for yourselves. You ADMIT you are racist and I believe it. Own it. I am not, nor is anyone I know personally.

Oh, Susan, you say, you just don’t know the pain of seeing someone your color killed. Never mind that filching an Air Fryer and two packages of Huggies from Target seems an entirely inappropriate way to demonstrate that grief. But it’s not true anyway.

By the time you get to 73, you have seen a lot of death in your life: cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, suicide. Unfortunately, I have also known FIVE people personally who were murdered. Though two were famous, I knew them just as people. One, a black prison activist in San Francisco named Popeye Jackson. Killed execution style in a car on a city street, just sitting with a woman friend, a wife, though not his. She was killed too. Unsolved to this day.

Harvey Milk, lovely photographer, sweet man. Almost all the baby pictures of our son were developed by him at his camera shop in our neighborhood. Killed by a white guy, also a Democrat, allegedly for being gay though the loon also killed Mayor Moscone. I cried all day the day Harvey was killed, but now I see I missed out on my sacred right to loot.

The son of a fellow activist in San Francisco, white teenager, riding with a bunch of black “friends” who, in a preposterous tale, just happened to stop the car when a black thug came over to the car and point blank killed the white kid, and only him. Not only were there no riots, his devastated mother told the press she preferred to be the mother of the dead child. That to be the mother of the killer would have been unbearable.

A co-worker in Minneapolis, a brilliant proofreader, a white immigrant who spoke 7 languages, was beaten to death by her black boyfriend. Nobody burned anything down.

And finally, a childhood friend of our son, who grew up with a single mother, joined the Navy, was thrown out like Hunter Biden for drugs. He came home clinically depressed, and since $83,000/month jobs in the Ukraine were unavailable to him, instead he got drunk one night and wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood with a sawed-off shotgun. Police were called. He killed a police dog before being gunned to pieces. Shot 27 times. Both the cop and the young man were white. In letters to the editor and public opinion, all the sympathy was with the loss of the dog. No riots over his death. No nuanced multi-part newspaper articles about “root causes” or his existential pain for being poor and fatherless.

So, yeah, I have seen murder most foul. Many commenters have mentioned the difference between the aftermath of the horrible killing of Mr. Floyd and the reaction to the senseless murder of Justine Damond. No white people torched Cedar Square West. In fact, “activists” have chanted for the release of her Somali murderer, Mahamed Noor.

When I was quite young, I saw a picture in a magazine of a public lynching at which the crowd had brought picnic baskets and small children. That image was indelibly burned into my brain and has horrified me ever since. Like Holocaust imagery, some things seen cannot be unseen. Things that could make you give up on humanity entirely.

The sight of looters dragging young children into Target to grab things they did not earn, did not purchase, did not DESERVE had a similar effect on me, though the lynching was far more grotesque. But WAS it, really? The horrific murder of one person vs. the murder of a city, the lost livelihood of thousands, of the end of the law and order that guarantees civilization?

Governor Walz, don’t give me your mealymouthed platitudes about how “it’s not worth the loss of one life” to spare hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure, save thousands of small businesses, preserve fragile civilization itself for one more blessed day.

OF COURSE IT IS, you pontificating fool. Not one single rioter HAD to be there. The wrongful, infuriating death of Mr. Floyd had been noted and universally condemned already. A march of 50,000 could have occurred without the riot. If you had brought sufficient force to bear the minute peaceful protest turned to rioting, all the looters and arsonists had the choice of risking their lives to continue or the option of just going home.

My uncle was killed at age 20 in the Pacific theatre. He died for civilization, for freedom. And though he had enlisted in the Marines, had volunteered to die for his country, just up and leaving was not one of his options. Neither was it an option for the other 416,800 U.S. combat deaths in World War Two. Had those deaths not occurred – every single one a tragedy with life-altering ripples for the surviving loved ones – Governor Walz would be delivering his supine defense of arsonists and looters in German. And Mr. Frey would not exist.