I can't imagine any kind of rally I'd have a desire to attend
And it's not just because of COVID
Portland, Oregon, of course, has been the nightly scene of “progressive” mayhem since May, one of those cases that makes one wonder what there is left to destroy. It seems that destroying people is what the “demonstrators” have turned to.
And occasionally the yay-hoo types show up to kick the anarchy up a notch, as the Proud Boys presence this weekend did, causing baseball bats to come out on both sides.
The scale and the degree of potential for chaos was not quite at a Portland level in Bloomington, Indiana yesterday, but Black Lives Matter got into it with a support-the-police movement staging a rally on Kirkwood Avenue in front of the Monroe County courthouse. Some punches were thrown and a lot of hateful yelling harshed the mellow throughout downtown, where restaurants are trying to do some al fresco business within pandemic guidelines.
It seems that this rally was in response to one of those silly defund-the-police rallies that the lefties held recently. The support-the-police rally was organized under the banner of a Facebook page called Redneck News - does its raison d’être need to be spelled out any further? - that has been selling tee shirts at area supermarket parking lots all summer. The crowd was decked out in full in-your-face yee-haw regalia. Some guy standing atop a pickup truck strumming an acoustic guitar into a small sound system laid on the bumpkin drawl as thick as he could in his rendition of the national anthem.
BLM wasn’t going to let this go unaddressed, and unpleasantness ensued. Two groups that serve as caricatures of the two broad societal takes on law enforcement got into it and proved nothing except that civil discourse is impossible in 2020.
As an actual conservative - that is, someone who sets store by the three pillars and takes his cue from the lineage of thinkers going back to Burke and Montesquieu - I found two kinds of participation in Saturday’s proceedings deeply disappointing. One was that of Jeff Ellington, a state representative. The other was that of Robert Hall of Grassroots Conservatives.
As I’ve said before, I was heartened to see the flourishing of GC in its early days and went to several of its monthly meetings.
Bloomington is home to the largest Indiana University campus in the state and has been a progressive hotbed for decades. As a musician, I will say that its musical scene over the years has been excellent, owing in large part to the rich cross-fertilization that happens at the Jacobs School of Music. It’s also a great restaurant town. But the other stuff - hosting a Students for a Democratic Society National Council meeting in 1963, the role of the Kinsey Institute in debasing human sexuality, the appearance of Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson at the first Earth Day rally in Dunn Meadow on the IU campus on April 22, 1970 - has made it one of those people’s republics that dot the nation and now lead its downward spiral.
Thus it was such an encouraging development when GC came along. And in 2015 and 2016, the winners of the monthly straw polls for the Republican presidential candidates were always someone other than the Very Stable Genius, who always came in dead last.
Robert Hall conducted the meetings with even-handedness and had a knack for finding quality speakers. The issues discussed both on the agendas of meetings and informally were recognizable conservative concerns.
But as with so much since the Trump phenomenon has infected conservatism and the Republican Party, Grassroots Conservatives got mired in preoccupations that have been conducive to schoolyard taunting, leading to the kind of embarrassment we saw Saturday. At this weekend’s rally, Hall devoted much of his time at the microphone - atop the Redneck News truck - to the issue of wearing masks. It’s been his hill to die on lately. Never mind that countries around the world are operating according to the notion that masks are helpful in addressing the pandemic. When one checks out the recent issues of the GC newsletter, one might get the impression that Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb has cooked up mask mandates on his own.
The whole thing is so stupid. Defund-the-police rallies are stupid. Support-the-police rallies are stupid. What kind of needle does either side think it’s moving?
Rallies centered on any kind of ideological take on a cause du jour are ineffective ways to persuade the general citizenry. For one thing, we’re inured to it. The August 1963 march on Washington, of which the “I Have A Dream” speech was the capstone, made a huge impression and moved the needle. But you can’t keep repeating a certain formula and expect the same level of impact.
What kind of rally would I consider attending? Can’t think of one.
I’m a Christian. Would I consider going to some kind of massive assembly of believers, replete with praise-band guitar-jangling and waving arms?
I don’t think so. Give me my little country church, where we sing old-school hymns and pray for each others’ health issues, where the connection is between people who know each other and the scale of the proceedings isn’t overwhelming.
No, I think the whole format has devolved into futility. The only effect at this late date is to put humankind’s collective reversal of its maturity on display for all to see. And to get people kicked in the head.