THE REAL CRIME IS THE LEVEL OF SERVICE ON STROADS.

Reason's Lenore Skenazy finds a new manifestation of the Nanny State.  "A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store."

WHEN DID THE EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM HAPPEN?

I recently watched the newly released Civil War, which has provoked all sorts of commentary, including complaints about promotional posters depicting scenes that didn't make the movie.  "The first was that they depicted scenes that do not appear in the film. The other is more controversial, and that is how these graphics were clearly AI-generated."

Face it, dear reader, journalists attempting to get from New York to Washington without going through Baltimore isn't like chronicling the 34th Wisconsin marching from Cairo to Savanna; never mind that getting Abraham Lincoln through Baltimore to be sworn in was pretty fraught in the spring of 1861.

What were the plate tectonics by which a new confluence of the north and south branches of the Chicago River cleaved Marina City in two and moved them to opposite Union Station?  In the movie, somehow Chicago and much of New York remain intact, while there's a battle over unspecified objectives near Pittsburgh?

SUMMONING THE ECHOES. From time to time, I check on basketball at Milwaukee Hamilton. Last summer, the school appointed a new coach and a number of students transferred. At the time, I made this observation.

The school board's investigation turns up no impropriety in those transfers to Hamilton. The eight players obviously wanted to enroll at a high school that has a planetarium.

It was much simpler years ago, when the independent (read: religious) high schools might have been stronger in sports thanks in part to Catholic Youth Organization junior basketball programs and selective philanthropy that somehow made it possible for tall, coordinated, and poor kids to attend Marquette University High or Racine St. Catherines or, on occasion Stevens Point Pacelli or Manitowoc Roncalli (if you wish to study the papacy, start with the names of the Wisconsin Catholic high schools.) Sports boosters in the City Conference would lament the lack of interscholastic competition in junior high and residency requirements.

How things change.

Milwaukee Hamilton's Tom Diener, who won more than 300 games and five state titles with Milwaukee Vincent, faced off against longtime St. Catherine's coach Bob Letsch, who has led the Angels to more than 500 victories and three WIAA state championships.

In the end, hot-handed Hamilton missed only one shot in the third quarter, made 9 three-pointers on the night and rolled to a 62-52 nonconference victory over the Angels, ranked No. 1 among Division 3 teams in the Associated Press state poll.

"There was a lot of wins out there on the floor," said Letsch, who is in his 30th season with St. Catherine's. "Two guys who love the profession and love working with the kids."

On Tuesday night, Diener's kids - he started four sophomores - didn't do much wrong. They played tenacious man-to-man defense, chose their shots carefully and took care of the ball. The Wildcats (8-1) turned over the ball only twice in the first half and seven times in all.

"I've seen NFL games where there were more turnovers," said Diener, who is in his first season with Hamilton. "We had a superb decision-making game and played solid defense from start to finish.

That "four sophomores" brings back memories.

A musical interlude is in order.

We're rarin' to go
Ready to show
Hamilton is the greatest school we know
So come on kids, and make the scene,
Get out there and fight that team!
We'll yell a little, shout a little, jump a little, cheer a little,
Hamilton High, let's get out and win!

REDISCOVER BOURGEOIS MANNERS?

I suspect that the heirs to Dick Tuck have trumped-up allegations ready to go against any judicial appointee on Our President's short list, which is the best reason for Senate Republicans to call a halt to the freak show and call the vote.  Oh, and any wavering Democrats with close elections coming up in six weeks?  Turf 'em out!  Our President is spot on, exhorting voters attending rallies in Indiana or Missouri or Montana or Nevada to send the likes of Claire McCaskill back to private life.

I also suspect that the current set of allegations, against Brett Kavanaugh of the prep school and Ivy League circuit, have purchase precisely because the prep school and Ivy League social scene is just one long party.  Here's Emily Witt in The New Yorker.

Now the rest of us are learning about the hierarchy of Washington private schools—about what it meant, in the eighties, to go to Georgetown Prep as opposed to Landon or Gonzaga, and about the girls’ schools Stone Ridge, Visitation, and Holton-Arms. By all appearances, the kids from these prep schools almost exclusively socialize with one another, and that social network informs their identities for the rest of their lives. As reporters have investigated Kavanaugh’s high-school years, many alumni have expressed fear about going on the record and alienating themselves from a close-knit community. “I guess you could call it a fraternity between a bunch of rich kids,” an anonymous alumnus of Georgetown Prep, who overlapped with Kavanaugh there, told the Huff Post. “All this shit happens, and then nobody really wants to talk about it, because if one person crumbles, the whole system crumbles, and everybody tells on everybody.” I spoke with another Georgetown Prep alumnus, who hated high school but still didn’t want to go on the record about what it was like there. Even for those who take less pride in the institution, what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.

The early 1980s might have been particularly conducive to wild partying, with more effective formulations of The Pill, and herpes and heterosexual AIDS not yet a thing.  Here, though, there's one -- yes, with a dubious story, and yes, with a political motivation -- spilling the beans on how our Credentialed Elite aren't really any more educated, they're just better connected and better protected.

THINGS DONE DECENTLY AND IN ORDER.

Tonight's sermon is based on 1 Cor. 14:40.

Let us begin, because begin we must, with continuing coverage of the rape investigation at Duke University. Salon's Alice Bumgarner looks at the student culture and the university's response.

At last week's Academic Council meeting, [Professor Houston] Baker [of English and African-American Studies] says, "one of the faculty asked President [Richard] Brodhead directly, 'Will you say, I condemn Duke's culture of alcohol, violence and sexual assault, and make that a top-down statement?'

"He answered, essentially, I will not do that. His rationale? These things exist at tier one institutions. Causality is not certain, but we do know these cultures exist in high school, as well. I'm the leader, and how can I make that sort of focused statement for this entire institution?

This is the same Professor Baker whose rather intemperate letter to headquarters received the smackdown from his provost that University Diaries reported. But let us suppose there is some truth to President Brodhead's remarks. "These things exist at tier one institutions." To quote my dad, "Why compare yourself to the worst?" Is this remark simply a confession that there is such a thing as an upscale safety school? Is it an unwillingness to confront the hook-up culture and the MTV Spring Break construction of collegiate life and the marketing of a Jacuzzi U. or a summer camp, to name four themes that never fail to provide material for these pages? Are we seeing things being done decently and in order, President Brodhead?

LAKEFRONT LIBERALS' LUXURY BELIEFS.

Our President is contemplating sending National Guard troops to support immigration enforcement efforts in major cities.  It's muddled and authoritarian, according to Matt Bernius at Outside the Beltway.

Separately this week, Trump indicated that he and his team are in the planning process of deploying the National Guard to three cities: Baltimore, Chicago, and New Orleans. The [impetus] (?? — Ed.), according to official comments, was over the issue of crime.

Meanwhile, in those fifteen square miles of privilege surrounded by the Third World, Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has been assuring all and sundry that Chicago is safe and the local authorities can handle it.  John Kass is having none of it.

Hey Gov. Pritzker, if Chicago is so safe why not prance around the West and South Sides at night without your phalanx of  armed bodyguards? You might go it alone. But you wouldn’t dare do that. You expect minority women of low-incomes to take the filthy and dangerous CTA at night to and from work. And to vote Democrat, for you. You must think them to be stupid.

Of course you do. They keep voting Democrat. They’re not stupid. Those women are good people. And they don’t deserve the garbage thrown at them by politicians and the press.

Angry? Yeah, I’m angry, with good reason. Because there is another deadly game going on in America, a political game of Russian Roulette that unfortunately is not so obvious.

And who loses? Not the American political class. But some lose. They lose everything.

This game is played by Democrats seeking to maintain power in the mapping and gerrymandering of Congressional Districts. And it has killed many Americans and broken many American families and killed many children.

Yes, often in those districts that keep voting Democrat, in part because no other political party has offered a better value proposition.  Enterprise zones, less restrictive zoning, and no broken windows, anyone?  I mean, stopping crime is one of those eighty-twenty issues, and those fifteen square miles of privilege aren't as safe as they once might have been.

Pedestrians can't walk downtown without being accosted by the homeless and illegal beggars. Kids can't play in the parks without navigating "tent cities" and dodging needles and fentanyl zombies. The Fire Department is responding to out-of-control fires in these encampments at least weekly. The rat and bedbug infestations are rampant and as we mentioned, the buckets of human waste, piles of garbage and discarded gas cylinders make Chicago look and smell like a Third World shithole.

The fact that enforcement is suddenly on the table makes it obvious the polling numbers are massively supportive of what's coming in the next week or so.

There's much more material from assorted keyboard warriors urging additional law enforcement in Chicago, and other major cities.  That is for another post on another day.

LIBERTARIAN JUNETEENTH, TRANSGRESSIVE JUNETEENTH?

If yesterday's post was the history lesson, today we dip into the political economy, with a diversion into cultural studies.  I'll let New York Post commentator Kendall Qualls open, with what on other days might qualify as a Friday short take.  "Let’s celebrate Juneteenth as long as we understand that it all started with July 4th."  You'd think that "conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" would have codified that for all time, but there are people who let Platonic perfection get in the way of an emergence that is messy enough, and we'll return to Mr Qualls to close the post.

Jack Hunter also offers what would otherwise be a short take.  "Juneteenth isn’t ‘woke.’ It’s as American as apple pie."  His conclusion: "While Juneteenth naturally will mean more to many black Americans given that history and the suffering, it truly is a no-brainer holiday for anyone who values human freedom to celebrate."  For Lincoln, and liberty too.

MORE ON THE CULTURAL COLLAPSE.

The conversation among the Tories and the Jacksonians of the Right on the correlation of forces that is wrecking the lives of people who used to think of themselves as middle class continues.  It appears as though Michael Brendan Dougherty in The Week got the conversation (or was it a slanging match?) started.  "The [Tory faction of the] conservative movement has a lot of ideas for improving the life of a typical coke-sniffer in Westport, Connecticut... [but] next to zero ideas for improving the life of the typical opioid dependent who lives in Garbutt, New York, outside of Rochester."  He concludes, "Time to think harder."  Rod Dreher did, in two separate essays.  On March 14, he invited readers to compare and contrast the usual smug dismissal of the concerns of the groundlings (that there's a gentry liberal smug and a Tory smug make neither any less smug) with an understanding, by people living in rougher circumstances, of the agency people still living in rough circumstances could exercise, or not.

During my crusading liberal days in college, I was full of ardor and right-thinking on the subject of race and poverty. I dismissed my dad’s conservative views as typical hard-hearted Reaganism, and fumed over how someone like him, who was raised working-class and was culturally working class, could sympathize with Reagan, that old racist. What it took me years to see was that however shaped my father’s views on race and poverty were by his generation’s attitudes, they were also deeply informed by years of observation of how poor black people, like poor white people, lived. He would try to explain to me how nobody who lived the way so many of the black (and white) poor did in our parish could ever hope to break the cycle of poverty. It took education, and hard work, and self-discipline, especially staying off of drink, drugs, and avoiding having children outside of marriage. You had to be sensible with your money, he would tell me (I didn’t know until many years later how hard he and my mom, a school bus driver, struggled financially during my childhood).

But identifying people as hard-core no-accounts, or "wouldn't hit a lick at a snake,"  or lamenting that "he knows better than that" need not translate into abandoning such people, rather than providing, if by no other way than by example, structure.  Come March 16, here's Mr Dreher on why the structure matters.

This is why I get so angry at my fellow conservatives who blame bad schools and incompetent teachers for the poor educational results among the impoverished. Children are not empty receptacles into which we can insert knowledge. If they live in homes filled with noise, chaos, violence, and contempt, it doesn’t matter what race they are, they are going to be very lucky to make it.

But in his column, "do-your-own thing" might work well for trust-fund babies with victim studies degrees from tony colleges, or for that Westport cokehead.  For people without the resources or the awareness of the old tradition, well, there's no keeping up with the Kardashians in the 'hood or up the holler.

This is what it means to live in therapeutic culture, in which maintaining a sense of well being is the absolute telos of our common and individual life. This is what it means when the values of the marketplace (e.g., “The customers is always right”) have infected our normative institutions, and inform the way families and individuals see themselves. This is what it means when our churches (insofar as people still attend them) treat their purpose as offering people comfort and uplift, not solid moral norms and preaching repentance when we fall short. This is what it means when we the people expect our institutions — our schools, our churches, and so forth — to cater to our own felt emotional needs.

The middle class can forestall the reckoning because we have money and resources to avoid the consequences; the poor and the working classes do not. But a reckoning is coming.

But as the splintery trashy culture splinters, it's the people who have means that can escape the collapse (that is, until the only way to make any money off vacant houses built for an increasingly affluent population is to rent them out to whoever), and that includes the cokehead with a big bonus, and the Trump protester run home to Mommy.  But there are no guardrails elsewhere, and as the rentals to whoever continue, there will ultimately be no guardrails in Westport.

What does this private judgment mean? Well, in effect, it means withdrawal to behind defensible boundaries, to within communities where there remains robust moral standards held in common. This is what the ongoing fragmentation of American society means. I see no reason to think it will be arrested any time soon. As [Kevin Williamson] and David French point out, we can’t even talk about these things openly, with confidence.

Let’s be honest: there are very, very few of us who would “say something” about kids being raised as Kevin D. Williamson was (assuming that he was not being criminally neglected; he hasn’t specified the conditions of his childhood). But of equal significance, very few of us would “say something” to other middle class parents about the way they raise their children, or the way their children’s behavior is making it harder for all of us to raise morally upright kids. Nobody wants to judge (publicly, anyway), and certainly nobody wants to be judged.

So we continue to drift apart, unmoored from authority, and unable to perceive how lost we are. If we do not draw some clear moral lines, in community, and submit to them, and defend them, we are going to lose them entirely. We drift towards moral anarchy in the public square, and we conceal from ourselves what is happening, either not talking about it or euphemizing it as “diversity” or some other Orwellian term meant to conceal truth.

How can we ever hope to defeat the enemy if we cannot even name the enemy, or confront our own collaboration with it? Yes, people who are unemployed or underemployed have big problems, but as my reader wrote, handing them a good job is not going to make them show up to work on time, or marry, or stay married, or raise disciplined children. Plus, there are plenty of people who have good jobs now, and to all appearances solid middle-class lives, but who are quietly, behind the facade of respectability, falling apart.

Kevin Williamson reacts, apparently concurring in part.  Sometimes, it's necessary to reclaim the culture, to stop enabling the dysfunction, and at the same time stop wishing it away.  "It’s cowardice, a refusal to look at the thing squarely as it is and to do what it is necessary to do."

That doesn't stop the more conventional sort of hypothesis-posing, as in a Wonkblog interview with Mr Dougherty.

Is it because employers are less loyal to individual workers, and so the value proposition for moving to find a job is lower? Is it family breakdown? It becomes harder to move from the de-industrialized Northeast for a machinist job in South Carolina if it means leaving behind children with an ex-wife or partner. Is it the rise of single men, who don’t feel the need for work as urgently? Is it the decline of other mediating institutions that could paternalistically shepherd job-seekers into employment? And if government cannot change those things, what else can it do?

That comes to what, exactly, is conservatism conserving?  Reason's Shikha Dalmia adds to the conventional hypothesis-posing.

Scott Lincicome of Cato Institute notes that between 1990 and 2014, the percentage of working-age adults receiving disability more than doubled.

This meant that workers had less need to uproot themselves from their families and communities for jobs far away. The aforementioned Tennessee workers have preferred to stray not too far from their original commuting zones, for example. In other words, family ties became a barrier to—as opposed to facilitator of—individual ambition. But this dampening of drive will prevent Americans not only from adapting to the gale force winds of trade but other disruptions as well. Indeed, if China, India, and—as per Donald Trump's new bugaboo—Vietnam, pose a mortal threat to Americans, what exactly will they do when robots arrive on the scene? Call for repealing the laws of physics? Deport scientists?

I suspect that family ties have always been reason to stay, and in the absence of either a vigorous economy or the presence of a different kind of welfare state, that will be true.

Institutions that enable dysfunction?  The consequences will be immediately obvious.

HIJACKING HIS BULLY PULPIT?

Professional protester Michael Winship is not happy that Our President wants to make himself Master of Ceremonies at this year's Independence Day festivities.

Trump's favorite perks surrounding the office of being president revolve around a similar but exponentially greater grandiosity: he wallows in the overall pomp and circumstance of the job and the receiving of or presenting awards and honors; anything focusing on him that doesn't take too much mental effort.

So as we enter the official beginning of summer with the Memorial Day weekend, we need to look ahead just a few weeks to the next big holiday and realize, with a shudder, that even the Fourth of July, that most patriotic of American celebrations isn’t safe. Solid ego and id, Trump has decided to make it all about him.

It began with a surprise tweet from him in late February: "HOLD THE DATE! We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C., on July 4th. It will be called 'A Salute To America' and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!"

It gives Mr Winship opportunity to have a good wallow in the past, invoking another president much despised by the Angry Left.

The last time something like this happened was nearly fifty years ago, in 1970, when Washington's Fourth of July was rechristened "Honor America Day," exactly two months after the National Guard killed four kids at Kent State University in Ohio during protests against Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. (A week and a half later, police killed two more demonstrators at Jackson State University in Mississippi.)

In the wake of this violent national division, and bipartisan claims to the contrary, "Honor America Day" was created as a celebration of Richard Nixon organized by his pals J. Willard Marriott, the hotel magnate; the Rev. Billy Graham and Bob Hope. As per historian Kevin Kruse, "Organizers self-consciously recruited conservative crowds, sending White House advance teams across the country to bring 350,000 members of Nixon's Silent Majority to the capital by car, train and bus."

I was there. I had been taking a course in filmmaking taught by a local priest at Washington's free university. In the wake of the national student strike and antiwar demonstrations that had closed DC's colleges, classes were done, so he and I decided to take the Super 8 mm camera we had been using and film the events of Honor America Day.

We met up early and began shooting the spectators dressed up in variations of red-white-and-blue finery and the many counter-protesters who had gathered as well. We worked our way over to the Lincoln Memorial where Billy Graham was leading a prayer service. Simultaneously, a smoke-in featuring red-white-and-blue joints began with lot of stripping down and jumping naked into the reflecting pool in front of the memorial. Meanwhile, a small group of young neo-Nazis shouted abuse. It was quite a scene.

Throughout the hot and humid day, there were confrontations between police and protesters. It all culminated in the evening when a nationally broadcast extravaganza hosted by Bob Hope and featuring a taped address from Nixon plus performances by Jack Benny, Red Skelton and Dinah Shore was broadcast from the Sylvan Theater near the Washington Monument.

Demonstrators pushed through police lines and tear gas was fired. But the gas, intended for protesters, accidentally drifted into the crowd there for the show and pandemonium ensued. The gas hit us, and I always swear this is true, it was while Kate Smith was singing "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever."

It's probably a good thing the heavies didn't know Kate Smith's full discography, or you would likely have had an even more violent protest.

Mr Winship's concluding remarks are instructive.

Instead of bringing the nation together, they only served to illustrate just how divided it had become — or perhaps to remind us how divided it has always been.”

If Trump insists on making the anniversary of our nation's birth a celebration of him, he will antagonize two-thirds of the country and perhaps thrill the other third that constitute his base. But his overreach will symbolize all that he has done to the country, trampling tradition and unity, trampling the tenets of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence that we commemorate on the Fourth, and trampling American democracy as no other president has ever done.

As far as I know, there are no internment camps for citizens in operation, no suspensions of habeas corpus, no garrisons at Arlington Cemetery or Fort Steadman.

I invoke those events because an anonymous Washington Post gripe about that presidential action requires them as context.  "One can get happily lost imagining how George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy might have graced such an occasion."

You don't have to imagine.  On Independence Day, 1863, Abraham Lincoln had just received word that the Army of the Potomac had held at Gettysburg, and that Vicksburg was taken.  He used the opportunity a few days later to offer a brief, unplanned speech to a cheering crowd in Lafayette Plaza.  "How long ago is it?  Eighty-odd years -- since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that 'all men are created equal.'"  He had another four months to revise and extend those remarks into the more familiar form.

We ought be grateful that the fractures in the international order, disturbing though they might be, are taking place at a time of relative calm, and we might pray that the world will little note, nor long remember what either Mr Trump says or how Mr Winship will trash it.

Yes, I did write "relative calm."  That despite what attorney general William Barr noted recently.

I really see no evidence of that, it is hard, and I really haven't seen bill of particulars as to how that's being done. From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring."

That interview has been recommended at Insta Pundit and Power Line.  And yes, I'm troubled that the very people who professed to be most appalled before the election that anybody would dare question the results of an election seem to be the people most devoted to questioning the results of an election.

On the other hand, as Don Surber concludes, "We have been fortunate to have good men come along at the right moments."  It doesn't hurt, either, that the brain-brothers of the people who, like Mr Winship, are now counting on Process, are the very people who, for a long time, have used every opportunity they have to deconstruct the institutions they now hope to rely on.  They're not going to like the new rules.

THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF THE WOMEN'S BASKETBALL SIDESHOW.

Indiana Fever reserve Sophie Cunningham has a history of standing up for herself and her teammates.  That's generally something for the court, but somehow the culture wars crop up.

Now, she's teasing a book.  It's probably not about recognizing junk defenses and providing subtle cues to get a teammate a better shot.

We, unfortunately, have precious few details at this point about what might be included in her "tell-all," but two likely topics are treatment of certain athletes by the WNBA and the delusional backlash at her wanting to protect girl athletes.

All those blue-haired weirdos who are showing up at games trying silence Sophie may want to be careful what they wish for, because if Cunningham really decides to open Pandora’s box, they might not like what comes spilling out.

It's been there all along, only the national media generally doesn't notice. Visualize a bench-clearing, fan-involved brawl at DePaul's old Alumni Hall.

A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF.

Detroit News film critic Adam Graham pans Pressure.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower allegedly told John F. Kennedy that the reason the Allies won WWII was because "we had better meteorologists than the Germans," it's possible that Ike was cracking a joke.

But the dead serious "Pressure" takes this assertion as gospel, and crafts a stiff drama around the weather on D-Day, and the brave men — or the brave man, in this case — who predicted it.

It's the kind of premise you'd expect to see on "SNL": In a world so overindexed on WWII movies, one man attempts to craft an Oscar-worthy biopic of the war's true unsung hero — the weatherman.

But "Pressure" isn't joking, at least on purpose, and director Anthony Maras does a good job of almost making viewers forget how ridiculous "Pressure's" premise is.

"This is a true story," reads the card at the introduction of the film, letting viewers know they're in for a Serious History Lesson.

It is very much not a true story, as anyone who knows why this monument is at Slapton Sands can tell you.

A Bohemian corporal noted upon being advised of Kriegsmarine torpedo boats shooting up a landing exercise there noted that there was a beach near Quineville with similar sands.  The houses of Slapton are closer to the Channel today.

Third Coast Review's Steve Prokopy is fine with a few liberties being taken with history in service of a good story.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat myself until I pass out if I have to: docudramas are not documentaries; they don’t show us exactly what happened because they are trying to tell the best cinematic version of a true story. Admittedly, I’d prefer they don’t outright lie to the audience (I’m looking at you, Bohemian Rhapsody), but if something needs to be altered slightly or characters need to be combined for efficiency’s sake, I’m fine with that. Pressure is director and TV veteran Anthony Maras’ second feature (after Hotel Mumbai, also based on horrific true events), and I have no real issues with its account of the 72 hours leading up to the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history that effectively decided the fate of World War II.

Mr Graham disagrees, if not as dramatically as the protagonists attempting to make sense of the incoming soundings. "In a larger movie about D-Day, there's a great two-scene performance to be made about the weather guy who got it right when no one else did. Anything more is overcast, er, overkill."

THE WAUKESHA CHRISTMAS PARADE MASSACRE, EVERY JULY.

I'm going to stay away from any conversation about whether accused reckless driver Darrell Brooks was wrongly released.  There's plenty of discussion about the merits of detaining people during an ongoing plague elsewhere.  I also hesitate to weigh in on the state of mind of Mr Brooks that afternoon, or of who might have failed him, or failed to detain him or institutionalize him long ago.  There are plenty of others weighing in, or perhaps speculating.

Rather, I want to start with a detail that came out in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel review of his record.

A decade ago, during a traffic stop, a Milwaukee police officer jumped inside Brooks’ car, fearing he was about to be run over. The officer had pulled him over for not wearing a seat belt. As Brooks began to drive away while the officer was talking to him, the officer got inside the car and wrestled for control of the steering wheel.

Eventually, the officer was able to stop the car and removed the keys. Brooks ran away from the car, court records say, and he was arrested hiding in a children's playhouse in the same block. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in that case.

At the time, that story was just another story about reckless driving on Milwaukee's stroads, something that radio talkers and the like have paid a lot of attention to over the years.  (Mr Brooks's out of the car behavior is not what I'd expect of somebody acting with malice; in Waukesha he ditched his car, then claimed to be a homeless man waiting for his Uber (?!) and got a local to make him a sandwich, as well as being in a place to be arrested, again peacefully.)

REDISCOVERING HOMECOMING. There have been a number of changes in the Milwaukee school system over the past three decades, including the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, immigration, open transfers, and a modicum of school choice. But sometimes things turn full circle. Among the changes that took place at Milwaukee Hamilton was the disestablishment of the band, as in closed, gone, instruments sent as surplus property to other schools. But it appears that the current administration has decided in favor of operating a standard-issue high school. There is still enough parent and student interest in football, for instance, for the school to have the highest attendance in the city (still not up to suburban levels, let alone the kind of interest one sees in the smaller towns of the North West Frontier, but progress in that direction.)


The band director asked the president of the alumni association for the words and music to the traditional fight song.

We're rarin' to go
Ready to show
Hamilton is the greatest school we know
So come on kids, and make the scene,
Get out there and fight that team!
We'll yell a little, shout a little, jump a little, cheer a little,
Hamilton High, let's get out and win!

Despite a few logistical difficulties, some instruments have been located to provide a pep band in the stands. Some of the players in uniform are reserves.

RUNNING EXTRA: In light of last weekend's brawl in Miami and one weblogger's discovery of a cohort of 17 year old ninth graders in the Milwaukee public schools, I'm motivated to mention two salient points. Hamilton won the game, and after the game the players queued at midfield, to pass starboard-to-starboard and shake hands. I have not yet tamed the digital camera to be able to take long shots after dark.

NO POLICE, NO PEACE.

In Baltimore, a publicity-seeking state's attorney indicts six police officers, and law enforcement backs off.

“I’m afraid to go outside,” said Antoinette Perrine, whose brother was shot down three weeks ago on a basketball court near her home in the Harlem Park neighborhood of West Baltimore. Ever since, she has barricaded her door and added metal slabs inside her windows to deflect gunfire.

“It’s so bad, people are afraid to let their kids outside,” Perrine said. “People wake up with shots through their windows. Police used to sit on every corner, on the top of the block. These days? They’re nowhere.”

West Baltimore residents worry they’ve been abandoned by the officers they once accused of harassing them, leaving some neighborhoods like the Wild West without a lawman around.

“Before it was over-policing. Now there’s no police,” said Donnail “Dreads” Lee, 34, who lives in the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Gray, 25, was chased down. “People feel as though they can do things and get away with it. I see people walking with guns almost every single day, because they know the police aren’t pulling them up like they used to.”

Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. The Occupying Army pulls out, who maintains order?

Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said his officers “are not holding back,” despite encountering dangerous hostility in the Western District.

“Our officers tell me that when officers pull up, they have 30 to 50 people surrounding them at any time,” Batts said.

Batts provided more details at a City Council meeting Wednesday night, saying officers now fear getting arrested for making mistakes.

“What is happening, there is a lot of levels of confusion in the police organization. There are people who have pain, there are people who are hurt, there are people who are frustrated, there are people who are angry,” Batts said. “There are people, and they’ve said this to me, `If I get out of my car and make a stop for a reasonable suspicion that leads to probable cause but I make a mistake on it, will I be arrested?’ They pull up to a scene and another officer has done something that they don’t know, it may be illegal, will they be arrested for it? Those are things they are asking.”

The Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3 on Thursday posted a statement from President Gene Ryan on social media saying that the police are “under siege.”

It's hard to observe Baltimore and not come to the conclusion that the political establishment has more to gain from a mass of constituents consigned to lives of unquiet desperation than they would gain from an outbreak of bourgeois behavior followed by those freelance application writer jobs.

[I]ncreasingly, over the last half century, the interests of the race hustling elite in the black community have diverged from the interests of ordinary black people.

Urban riots, for example, create a demand for more spending on social programs, but also depress property values in black neighborhoods and deter investment in these same neighborhoods. Hostility toward police fuels a liberal narrative about cops oppressing poor black people, but makes it hard for cops to protect the poor black people who are the main target of crime.

It’s long past time to start looking critically at black elites, and asking the question “just whose interests are they really serving?”

The generalization to self-despising multiculturalists and gentry liberals is left to the reader as an exercise.

DIFFERENT UNDERSTANDINGS OF WHAT A STATE OF GOOD REPAIR IS.

I'm old enough to remember the closing days of The America That Worked^(TM).  I was home from school eating lunch when I heard that JFK was shot.  At the same time, I was launching my academic career during the era that Ross Douthat understood as his good old days.

Noah Smith, the economics writer for Bloomberg and an edge-of-Generation-Xer (born in 1980), offered the beginnings of [an analysis of contemporary conservative ideology] last week on Twitter. The formative world of Gen X, he pointed out, was one of Republican dominance in presidential politics, evangelical revival in American religion and diminishing social conflict overall. “Xers grew up in a nation that was rapidly stabilizing under conservative rule,” he writes, suggesting that many Americans now in midlife associate the G.O.P. with that stability and the subsequent trends pushing the country leftward with disorder and decline.

To Smith’s list of Gen X-ian distinctives I’d add a few more: the conservative influence of John Paul II’s papacy for Generation-X Catholics, the seemingly positive trendlines on race relations (visible in polls of African-Americans as well as whites) from the 1990s through the early Obama years and the effects of the Reagan and Clinton economic growth spurts, which enabled my generation to enter adulthood under more prosperous conditions than the Great Recession-era landscape that hobbled millennials.

A critique of Gen X conservatism that started from this framework wouldn’t accuse my cohort of nostalgia for the racial or religious landscape of the 1950s; we don’t remember it, and we don’t want it to return.

On the other hand, they're aware at some level of the chaos that accompanied the end of the American High.

Generation X enjoys a certain bourgeois realism about what sustains human societies, what choices in your 20s will make you happiest in your 40s, that’s absent from the very-online progressivism of the young. There is an emotivism and narcissism that millennial liberalism and boomer liberalism seem to share, and in strong doses it’s poison for institutions. The ironic communitarianism of Gen-X conservatism probably isn’t the perfect antidote, but it may be all we’ve got.

And Gen X conservatives come by their hostility to emotivist liberalism honestly, because many of us grew up amid its wreckage. “Xers have little collective memory of either instability or liberalism,” Smith suggests, but that part of his analysis is wrong. To grow up in the ’70s or ’80s was to come of age just after liberalism’s last high tide, and to see evidence of its failures all around — from the urban blight and ugliness left by utopian renewal projects to the adult disarray and childhood misery sowed by the ideology of sexual liberation in its Hefnerian phase.

Americans younger than us have seen a lot of elite failure in the last 20 years, much of it conservative or centrist, and the idea of voting Republican, let alone for Trump, because of liberalism’s dangers seems to many of them absurd.

But what Generation X conservatives remember is not a distant past, nor an unlikely future. Their Trump support may be a folly, but their concern for what comes next is earned.

Yes, and there are a few of their next-elders (too young to have ridden that first, Hefnerian, wave, too old to have become the first latchkey kids) who see in this death tussle between the freaks and the straights that we call electoral politics who see echoes of those earlier failures of liberalism all over the contemporary political scene.

STEP OUT OF LINE AND DISAPPEAR.

In October of 2016, when all the Smart People and most of the Smart Money had Hillary Clinton measuring the drapes for the Oval Office (and repurposing a certain closet off it?) I made the following observation about the growing insurgency.  "But the Democrat-Media-Academic-Entertainment complex has been bringing the nasty, and Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine bring the condescension, and it's time to say Enough."  Tim Kaine has gone to wherever smirking betas go to, but Hillary still doesn't have a clue.  "Hillary Clinton isn’t ready to let go of her election loss to President Trump."  She continues to come off as Nurse Ratched.  Priceless.

She said, “She ran the presidential campaign like a mother who was telling the kids to eat spinach because it was good for health while the other guy was asking them to go eat fast food and have ice-cream,” India Today reported. Clinton may not have realized it, but this also sheds a lot of light on how she sees the average American.

The fatal conceit proved fatal to her candidacy (it wasn't the FBI, and it probably wasn't all those fainting spells, but it was that "basket of deplorables" crack) and now it's proving fatal to her hopes of being Mother Superior to the Democratic coven.  "It’s clear Clinton still resents losing the election, and wants to remain relevant in American and international politics. She hasn’t yet figured out how to do this without tearing down the electorate, and embracing that even Americans who make disappointing voting choices are still represented by the President." Yes, the Democrat court intellectuals are catching on, and yet the reaction from libertarian and conservative circles is more interesting.  "Clinton has made a strong showing for team smug," notes Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward.  (She's also written an interesting essay suggesting that Team Troll rolls out ever more outrageously futile and stupid gestures in response to heightened outrage or scorn from Team Smug.  Perhaps Hillary is flipping the script, but, in the fashion of bad comedians everywhere, she's delivering the punchline badly.)  Then comes M.B. Dougherty in National Review.  "She articulated a central myth of the liberal elite: We are beautiful and successful because we’re morally superior."  Yes, beautiful and successful the way that emperor's new clothes were elegant ... but I digress.  Also at National Review, Jonah Goldberg.  "It shows that she really doesn’t like large swathes of the country. She has a Manichaean view that says people who voted against her are backward, racist, sexist, and kind of dumb."  Perhaps, as Julie Kelly notes, it's simpler.  "No one was in the mood for a third Obama term." (More precisely, a sufficient plurality of previous Obama voters in states or parts of states that Herself couldn't bring herself to visit.)

Perhaps, though, it's Hillary who is dumb.  Jim Treacher.  "If Hillary thinks Trump's whole campaign was centered around repressing women and Indian-Americans, how does she explain why so many Trump voters are fans of [current Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley]?"

Whatever the explanation, she's provided Twitchy with comic relief.  "We get it, she can’t accept that she is the reason SHE lost and is desperate to convince the world that it wasn’t her fault, but all she’s really doing is proving what we’ve known all along, she’s just a mean old lady."  Each time she does that, she provides cover to reluctant Trump voters, or perhaps to realistic observers of the political scene, that the best reason for a Trump presidency is it's not a Clinton presidency.