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| Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan |
Voltaire knew from bitter experience that if one wanted to take a true measure of freedom of thought and expression, one had only to ask what is not being published.
It’s always difficult, sometimes impossible, to map negative-space.
Voltaire, a cartographer of the anti-clerical Enlightenment period, ending in a
bloody bang with the French Revolution, followed by the rumbustious Romantic
period, mapped his own negative space by saying the unsayable, an effort that
got him thrown out of most civilized European countries.
We no longer exile our public nuisances. In the postmodern
period, exile is thought to be unpostmodern, unwoke. Instead, clinging tightly to narrow
ideologies, we deny them space in approved publications – like, Voltaire would
say, were he alive today, the opinion pages of much of the print media in the
northeast; and let us not forget Facebook and Google, who are not publishers, we
are told, and therefore not subject to constitutional provisions block-checking
intentional non-malicious censorship.
One can only imagine how Voltaire might have turned that flimsy
proposition, false on the face of it, into acidic satire. Facebook and Google undoubtedly
are publishers. They are publishers because they publish things – except
when they decide not to publish things, a censorious power often deployed by
both the national and state media.
A comprehensive list of what is NOT being published in
Connecticut’s media would be impossible. Too long, the editors would say. Could
you reduce all that stuff to a tweet-size, and no multi-syllabic words please?
And if the tweet-thought ruffled the feathers of the increasingly leftist
reigning power, it may never see publication anyway.
By way of example, take the commonsensical notion that the
alarming increase of fatherless families in urban areas greatly contribute to
the alienation and criminal activity of young African American boys. The single
most oppressed and overlooked group in America are not women, but African
American boys, not consumers oppressed by greedy under-taxed captains of
industry, but African American boys, not students in Ivy League institutions
convinced that racism is every bit as virulent in present day Yale and Harvard as it was in the post-Civil War South where, Billie Holiday told us in 1939, Strange Fruit grew on Southern trees, but African American
boys, whose path from fatherless households to prison is a short bumpy ride.
Most important sociological studies of family disintegration
in urban settings show a positive correlation between the absence of fathers in homes and urban
pathologies, such as criminal activity among young African American
boys, a lack of interest in schooling, a rampant increase in pregnancies among
African American girls who have grown up in households in which their own young
mothers have yielded to urban pathologies -- such as the replacement of fathers
in households by a cradle to grave omnipresent and presumptively omniscient
state.
One would suppose that some of these perceptions would find
their way into news stories concerning the rising incidents of gun related
crime in urban areas, young African American boys shooting other young African
American boys, sometimes missing the mark and killing 3 year-old children, such
as Randell Tarez Jones, whose names
are soon forgotten in the rush to cover matters deemed more important.
A soothing forgetfulness of the deplorable conditions under
which African American boys live in Connecticut’s larger cities is endemic. In
the postmodern period, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has all but disappeared from a successful
institution, a ladder out of poverty, the traditional family, from which, in the
past and future, all good things flow. And absent fathers are invisible as an
important contributory cause of grief-drenched urban pathologies in most
Connecticut commentary as well, one notable exception being the unheeded
political commentary of Chris Powell. Once the Managing
Editor and the Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, Powell, now
retired, continues to write columns for the paper.
U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned us in 1965 that the
African American family was under assault and quickly disappearing. “The gap
between the Negro and most other groups in American society is widening,”
Moynihan wrote in The
Negro Family: The Case For National Action.
“The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of
family structure. The evidence — not final, but powerfully persuasive — is that
the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling… Nearly a quarter of Negro
women living in cities who have ever married are divorced, separated, or are
living apart from their husbands. The rates are highest in the urban Northeast
where 26 percent of Negro women ever married are either divorced, separated, or
have their husbands absent.”
We have progressed considerably since 1965. Current
data indicates “57.6% of black
children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living
absent their biological fathers.”
The data is readily
available but considerably underutilized by editors, reporters and commentators
in stories touching on – the expression is not merely metaphorical – urban anarchy.
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