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PAR.TISAN lUVIEW
this town; but when a local news reporter was finishing up her television
spiel with the hand-me-down phrase, "Reporting from embattled
Crown Heights," a number of black kids who were standing around in–
terrupted her and observed that they didn't know who those violent
people were in their streets every night. The kids said those people didn't
live in the commLlI1ity, in the neighborhood, and were coming from
somewhere else. They themselves had lived around Jews all their lives,
these young people told the television reporter, and made it clear that
they got along well with them. When Pete Hamill went out into the
Crown Heights streets he corroborated that fact: the bottle-throwers
and name-callers were from outside the community.
In
other words, it
was a setup, just as the Washington Heights riot was rigged by drug
dealers to make it clear to the police that when one of their dealers'
fellow traders in addictive powders went down under the lawmen's bul–
lets, they would go to the streets. There are divisive forces out here , but
they represent tips, not icebergs. For all the attention, the ranks of the
Nation of Islam don't swell. They have never swelled.
One central reason for this is that Negro-Americans are not puritani–
cal and have never been attracted to religious orders that frowned upon
joy. The members of the Nation of Islam are a dour bunch; far too
dour to ever appeal to more than a cult faction of the black American
community. Louis Farrakhan, Khalid Muhammad and Chicago's Steven
Cokely are applauded for the way they shake an anti-Semitic Mickey
Finn, but few step up to the bar. What we really have, and this is also
connected to the denial of the murders of European Jews, is the desire
for recognition through the outrageous. This cannot be disconnected
from the fact that our society has celebrated for far too long the ro–
mantic idea of rule-breaking, not the rich complexity of mediating be–
tween the spirit of the law and the letter of the law; a theme that, as
Peter Stowell observes, John Ford addressed so brilliantly in his films
about the challenges at the center of American democracy. Our democ–
racy is founded on a high-minded conception of commonality and indi–
viduality, not narcissism and perpetual alienation. Bu t if we accept
alienation as a painful iron mask no one can see through and through
which we cannot express our souls, we too often mistake hostility for
the highest expression of honesty, and vulgarity for vitality. At least since
the loss of faith that arrived with Black Power and followed Vietnam
and Watergate, we have failed to prove, over and over and over as all
civilizations must, what the burdens and wonders of civilized behavior
and discourse really amount to; one of which is standing up to
irrationality, not worshipping it as the deformed child of encounter–
group therapy we pat on the head and call beautiful.
Those black kids who invite nutville Nation of Islam types onto
