Sleepers, Awake
Irene is not her official blog name, but it's her real name, and it's my grandmother's name. It's a good, strong woman-name, and it deserves a revival as much as "Hannah," which is getting one.
Irene has written a gem of a piece, one for the anthology of modern American left-to-right sojourns. These are the people I feel closest to in the blog-world, and I never feel closer to them when I read these kinds of stories.
Her piece is set six years ago, in the wealthy suburbs of San Francisco, at a niece's graduation. The college let the students choose their own keynote speaker. In a bit of dismally predictable "progressive" folly, they chose the notorious cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The experience of watching weepy morons drape themselves over his ignoble cause was one of the hammer-taps in the wedge of my own split from the left, but I got to watch it much closer to home, in and around Philadelphia, where the blue-collar cop Mumia killed, Danny Faulkner, was not an abstraction, not a cardboard figure of The Man, but a loving husband, neighbor, friend.
Not so in California. Irene didn't have that perspective, then. But she was beginning to get it.
It's good. It's better than good. Go read it and weep.
Irene has written a gem of a piece, one for the anthology of modern American left-to-right sojourns. These are the people I feel closest to in the blog-world, and I never feel closer to them when I read these kinds of stories.
Her piece is set six years ago, in the wealthy suburbs of San Francisco, at a niece's graduation. The college let the students choose their own keynote speaker. In a bit of dismally predictable "progressive" folly, they chose the notorious cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The experience of watching weepy morons drape themselves over his ignoble cause was one of the hammer-taps in the wedge of my own split from the left, but I got to watch it much closer to home, in and around Philadelphia, where the blue-collar cop Mumia killed, Danny Faulkner, was not an abstraction, not a cardboard figure of The Man, but a loving husband, neighbor, friend.
Not so in California. Irene didn't have that perspective, then. But she was beginning to get it.
As my husband and I approached the "friends and relatives" seating area for the graduation ceremony, we encountered a sort of commotion; a small band of friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner were handing out a set of Xeroxed flyers, badly laid-out and amateurish-looking; I've since learned that this small band of folks, they of the poorly designed, unsophisticated marketing collateral, were members of The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.
...
We suffered through the keynote speech of Mumia, my husband and I and small infant daughter, listening intently to the ravings of Mumia, the great idol of the rich white American progressivaratti; the speech was shallow, stupid, and ridiculous.
...
It is only recently that I have begun to reflect on the small band of determined friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner, with their terrible, stupid-looking flyers -- people who would most likely never live in Marin County, send their children to the nation's top-rated public schools, or rub shoulders with Sean Penn; people who would wear black socks with brown shoes and sport Farrah Fawcett hairdos years before the newly married Duchess of Cornwall would make them fashionable again.
I remember the future Ben-and-Chloes (or Kyle-and-Jens!) of Northern California wildly cheering Mumia's speech, just before they left university forever, and went on to graduate school at Berkeley or UCLA, or to their stock options, their professional partnerships, their plain wooden frame-houses in Marin which will probably fetch far more than $1.5 million apiece by the time they are able to afford them. I think of them, and what the friends and relatives of Officer Daniel Faulkner must have felt when they heard those cheers, and I blush, embarassed, warm-of-face, remembering how I was afraid to be seen reading those awful, amateurish flyers describing how Mumia had murdered their loved one, one Officer Daniel Faulkner, a working class man who gave his life to clean up some of the mess left behind in a Philadelphia urban ghetto by Ben-and-Chloe (or Kyle-and-Jen!)
It's good. It's better than good. Go read it and weep.
