When it comes to shitholes, many are hypocrites

By Rubashov

Shitholes... seems like there are a lot of them. 

And how they are defined depends on one's perspective.

When we go to a diner and the soup has a fly in it, the eggs are adorned with someone's hair, the table top is greasy, and we can smell the restrooms (another cozy euphemism, eh?) we say that "we'll never go back to that shithole."

But for others, the bar is set much, much higher.

Like Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, who once said of Binghamton, New York, and its environs:  "This place is kind of a shithole... There was nothing that I passed (on the three-hour ride from New York City) that I couldn’t milk."

We get it.  For some Americans, the fly-over portion of America is, to use Jon Stewart's phrase, "a kind of shithole."

In the aftermath of President Donald Trump's alleged remarks about a few Third World nations, some have attempted to define it as "racist" -- the most overused moniker in use today.  So much today is called "racist" that the word has lost its punch, much in the way the word f*ck has (though still blocked by some Internet filters). 

But can we actually define the term "shithole" in any meaningful way?

Actor James Woods made this attempt:  "Rule of thumb: if the water where you live is not potable because local engineers can’t somehow separate well water from sewage water, you live in a #shithole country."

Fair enough.

Writer Scott St. Clair suggested that we turn our attentions to the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics and its studies of each country's level of "open defecation" to determine which are "shitholes" and which are simply borderline.  Does a high level of shitting in the street define one's nation as a "shithole"? 

Many people don't like the idea of characterizing a whole nation that way.  They say that you can't paint with a broad brush like that.  But many of these same people are quick to claim that all white Americans have "privilege" -- ignoring the fact that there are more of them in poverty than any other "group."  Many of these people assume that all white Americans have ancestors who owned slaves (percentage wise, it is far more likely that a black American had an ancestor who owned a slave or was involved in the slave trade).  Black Lives Matter's great misstep was to ignore all those "sovereign citizen" videos on YouTube and to assume that their white fellow citizens were racists instead of fellow sufferers (albeit, for many, to a lesser degree) of a vastly empowered and increasingly militarized regime of policing. 

BLM could have won outright had it not taken a "minority" position.  But when one considers that Al Sharpton and Chris Christie use the same establishment public relations firm, maybe it has gone the way it was supposed to go.  After all, working class black Americans and working class white Americans haven't been at each others' throats like this for decades... while the one percenters are getting richer and richer off a booming stock market.  Go figure.

The media is constantly programming Americans to paint groups with a broad brush.  The entertainment industry's portrayal of black Americans are the imaginings of suburban Gen-X writers and is decades off.  So too are its ideas about the South -- while its portrayal of working class America, particularly of those who reside in mobile homes... well, talk about one's perception of what a "shithole" is -- the suburban trailer park must jump in the minds of America's media.

It seems to us that two kinds of people make a nation a "shithole" -- that nation's politicians and the world media.  Rich celebrities like Bono -- a world class tax-avoidance artist -- reap public relations windfalls from advocating for the Third World, sending working class taxpayers' money into the hands of a corrupt political class, who invests it in places like Switzerland.  When anyone notices this, they are called "racist" by the media -- who run heart-tugging appeals that picture suffering children, covered in flies, without proper drinking water.  America's taxpayers see all this media and say, "What a shithole!  We need to help those people!"  The people who live there say, "This place is home, but the politicians have turned it into a shithole and there is no getting rid of them, so we're out of here."  You can't blame them.

Yes, you can't blame them, because they are no different than most Americans in wanting to escape the "shithole" and move on.  In America, the grass is always greener somewhere else.  We are a people on the move.  That's not how is used to be.  A few generations ago, we stayed in one place for so many generations, we developed regional --even neighborhood -- accents.  Once upon a time, there were people in a section of Philadelphia who talked like Rocky did.  Now it is an out-of-date stereotype on SNL. 

That's why so many of our most educated and well-to-do fellow citizens take a relaxed view of illegal immigration.  Lacking loyalty to a place -- leaving it for greener pastures instead of staying to make it better -- is a way of life for many Americans.  And when there is something they don't like, they move.  No wonder they so readily understand when others abandon somewhere, leave it to those who would despoil it, to come here.  The working class and the poor, they can't move as easily and are often left with no choice but to improve their community in order to improve their circumstance.  Of course, they look upon illegal immigrants coming into their community differently than do the rich and mobile.  They see increased competition for jobs, increased taxation to support expanding social services, increased pressure on remaining green space, the potential disruption of established folkways, and the loss of property value (which, for many, could lead to them to ending their days in a substandard nursing home, laying in their own piss).

We might expect the better-off and well-educated in places like Haiti to stay put and help their nation out of its troubles -- but how many rich people stayed in Detroit, Michigan, to help the town that raised them get out of its troubles?  No way!  It is easier to tear the shithole down, street by street.  In the end, there will just be two groups left in Haiti -- the political class stealing the international money that media coverage and the western elites bring them -- and the poor who will be kept poor so that those appeals and the money keeps coming.  Who is to blame the more adventurous of poor Haitians who attempt to follow their middle-class to places like France and the United States?  And you can say just about the same thing for Detroit.

If the nation's moving companies are to be believed, New Jersey is one of America's main shitholes.  Lots of people are moving out of New Jersey because of the tax and regulatory policies imposed on them by the political class here.  Not that the political class itself stays.  Rich guys like former Speaker Joe Roberts, Democrat of Camden, get out of this over-taxed shithole the moment they leave office and move to Republican-run states, like Florida. 

Of course, there are a lot of people who come from a whole lot worse shitholes and who would love to get to New Jersey.  So maybe, in the end, what is or isn't a "shithole" is a matter of where you are?

We thought of this when reading a Facebook post by a Republican candidate -- a fellow named John McCann -- who repeated the silly mantra:  "All are welcome."  Yeah, yeah, but this candidate has moved from state to state throughout his life.  He's a lawyer, his wife is a doctor, and they are plenty rich to say "enough of this shithole" if too many people he ends up not wanting to live near take him at his word.  Yep, "all are welcome" until too many of those "open defecators" take advantage of your front lawn, and then... "we're rich honey, so we can move to someplace better."  Only the poor and the working class who can't move get screwed by the silly virtue-signaling of elites like this guy.

Speaking of which, we came across a breathless article on a Trenton-based political website, written by a former official of the administration of Governor Christine Todd Whitman.  This fellow was demanding that every Republican publicly break with President Trump by calling him bad names over his alleged "shithole" comment.  He really had his knickers in an uproar over it.

Too bad that he never had anything public to say about all the sexual abuse and skirt-chasing (by both males and females) that went on during the Whitman administration.  We distinctly recall one high-ranking official chasing after her female assistant with a cigar.  Then there was the high-ranking legislator whose staff made sure that females were accompanied whenever they ventured into his lair, as is done during physical examinations in a doctor's office.  Or another high-ranking legislator who enjoyed luring the female members of his staff into attending what can only be called "sex" parties.  Oh, it goes on and on, and it is all far worse than saying the word "shithole."

Look, for better or worse, Donald Trump is a performance artist.  Always has been.  Like Jon Stewart, he practices what can be called a transgressive art form.  He engages his audience by getting a rise out of us.  By the time his presidency is over, he will probably be running through George Carlin's list of "words you can't say" at the start of his press conferences.  But hey, he is the elected President of the United States and will be so for the next three years unless there is an illegal coup of some kind.  By-the-way, such an act would make the United States of America... officially... a shithole -- politically, if not materially.

Always remind yourselves -- you holier-than-thou pricks in the political and media and corporate establishments -- that it didn't need to be this way.  The Democrat Party could have run an honest primary process.  You didn't all need to conspire to give us the "President" you wanted us to have.  You fixed the Democrat Party primary process but couldn't fix the national election.  So here we are.  Stop complaining about it.

A Democrat asks: "Where does free speech end?"

A Democrat activist wrote:  "Where does free speech end?  Certainly at the grill of a Dodge Challenger.  KKK and confederate flags have always been around in my lifetime, protected as free speech, but nazi (sic) flags?  With a war in living memory that killed millions and a movement that killed millions more, I thought swastikas were a red line.  Are nazi (sic) flags free speech?  I know/hope that republicans (sic) don't support this but will they speak up, or are they entirely spineless?"

Purposefully running down somebody with an automobile isn't free speech.  It is murder.  Because it happened in Virginia, with its Republican Legislature (the GOP controls the Senate 21 to 19 and the House of Delegates 66 to 34), if convicted the perpetrator will get the death penalty and will be executed for his crime. 

This wouldn't happen in New Jersey, with its Democrat-controlled Legislature.  Here the perpetrator would be coddled at taxpayer expense and would, perhaps, sue the state because he wasn't receiving enough benefits.  It wasn't long ago that a convicted rapist sued the state so that he could have a sex-change operation and serve the remainder of his sentence as a "woman".  Of course, James Randall Smith, who was convicted of kidnapping and raping a 17-year-old girl, expected the state's taxpayers to pay for his sex-change operation.

As for Nazi flags, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has argued that a Nazi flag is as much an element of free speech as is burning the American flag.  On its website, the ACLU explains why it defended Nazis:

"In 1978, the ACLU took a controversial stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie , where many Holocaust survivors lived. The notoriety of the case caused some ACLU members to resign, but to many others the case has come to represent the ACLU's unwavering commitment to principle. In fact, many of the laws the ACLU cited to defend the group's right to free speech and assembly were the same laws it had invoked during the Civil Rights era, when Southern cities tried to shut down civil rights marches with similar claims about the violence and disruption the protests would cause."

The ACLU makes its arguments for all to read, on its website, and we encourage everyone to visit the website (www.aclu.org):

"Freedom of speech, of the press, of association, of assembly and petition -- this set of guarantees, protected by the First Amendment, comprises what we refer to as freedom of expression. The Supreme Court has written that this freedom is 'the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.'

Without it, other fundamental rights, like the right to vote, would wither and die. 

But in spite of its 'preferred position' in our constitutional hierarchy, the nation's commitment to freedom of expression has been tested over and over again. Especially during times of national stress, like war abroad or social upheaval at home, people exercising their First Amendment rights have been censored, fined, even jailed. Those with unpopular political ideas have always borne the brunt of government repression. It was during WWI -- hardly ancient history -- that a person could be jailed just for giving out anti-war leaflets. Out of those early cases, modern First Amendment law evolved. Many struggles and many cases later, ours is the most speech-protective country in the world.

The path to freedom was long and arduous. It took nearly 200 years to establish firm constitutional limits on the government's power to punish 'seditious'  and 'subversive' speech. Many people suffered along the way, such as labor leader Eugene V. Debs, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act just for telling a rally of peaceful workers to realize they were 'fit for something better than slavery and cannon fodder.'  Or Sidney Street, jailed in 1969 for burning an American flag on a Harlem street corner to protest the shooting of civil rights figure James Meredith...

Early Americans enjoyed great freedom compared to citizens of other nations. Nevertheless, once in power, even the Constitution's framers were guilty of overstepping the First Amendment they had so recently adopted. In 1798, during the French-Indian War, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act, which made it a crime for anyone to publish 'any false, scandalous and malicious writing' against the government. It was used by the then-dominant Federalist Party to prosecute prominent Republican newspaper editors during the late 18th century.

Throughout the 19th century, sedition, criminal anarchy and criminal conspiracy laws were used to suppress the speech of abolitionists, religious minorities, suffragists, labor organizers, and pacifists. In Virginia prior to the Civil War, for example, anyone who 'by speaking or writing maintains that owners have no right of property in slaves'  was subject to a one-year prison sentence.

The early 20th century was not much better. In 1912, feminist Margaret Sanger was arrested for giving a lecture on birth control. Trade union meetings were banned and courts routinely granted injunctions prohibiting strikes and other labor protests. Violators were sentenced to prison. Peaceful protesters opposing U. S. entry into World War I were jailed for expressing their opinions. In the early 1920s, many states outlawed the display of red or black flags, symbols of communism and anarchism. In 1923, author Upton Sinclair was arrested for trying to read the text of the First Amendment at a union rally. Many people were arrested merely for membership in groups regarded as 'radical' by the government. It was in response to the excesses of this period that the ACLU was founded in 1920.

...The ACLU has often been at the center of controversy for defending the free speech rights of groups that spew hate, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis. But if only popular ideas were protected, we wouldn't need a First Amendment. History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last. If we do not come to the defense of the free speech rights of the most unpopular among us, even if their views are antithetical to the very freedom the First Amendment stands for, then no one's liberty will be secure. In that sense, all First Amendment rights are 'indivisible.'

Censoring so-called hate speech also runs counter to the long-term interests of the most frequent victims of hate: racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. We should not give the government the power to decide which opinions are hateful, for history has taught us that government is more apt to use this power to prosecute minorities than to protect them. As one federal judge has put it, tolerating hateful speech is 'the best protection we have against any Nazi-type regime in this country.'"

Everyone should ask themselves the question, "Where does free speech end?"  And then follow that question with another:  "When do you want it to end?"