Grievance Theater

Daniel Greenfield writes a timely post this morning about Grievance Theater.

The grievance theater is never really about the specific case, the specific shooting, it's about the links between the social problems of the black community, the compromises of civil liberties necessary to keep entire cities from turning into Detroit and the inability of the media to address the sources of crime as anything but the phantoms of white racism. It's about a black leadership that is more interested in posturing as angry activists and shaking loose some money than in healing the problems of their own communities.

Trayvon Martin was their big moment with grievance theater being used as part of a presidential campaign on a national level.

We have been treated to an episode of grievance theater, with the man in the White House playing the familiar Sharptonesque role of healer and inciter.

A local dysfunction has become a national dysfunction, not because every city has become New York and Chicago, but because the people at the center of power know urban politics, community organizing and racial consciousness theories and little else. Like some Third World communist backwater, we are being governed by men and women with no understanding of anything practical, but a thorough grounding in Marxism-Leninism.

The rich and the upper middle-class can pay more, but there's no amount of money that will cover a government that spends money as if there is no tomorrow.

That is the lesson that has yet to be learned from the cities whose dysfunctional politics have been transplanted to the national government. Along with the politics has come the grievance mob, the outrage machine, the outpourings of self-righteousness, the class warfare fought by corrupt pols and the rest of the bread and circuses show that has blighted the American city.

The ghetto farms black communities for votes and more importantly for subsidies. For every dollar that is taken to help minorities, a penny goes to the problem and ninety-nine cents goes to the hucksters, the administrators, the bureaucrats, the wives of influential pols hired on massive salaries to oversee some aspect of the program, the experts who monitor compliance, the affirmative action contractors who charge four times as much to build a school or provide meals, the unions who have the exclusive right to service the program, the slumlords who administer affordable housing and finally the politicians who have the money kicked back to them by all of the above.

The local productions of grievance theater have gone national and we are all compelled to watch them play out. The country has been turned into unwilling participants in a national drama that places a distorted idea of race at the center of our identity for the benefit of the same hucksters and politicians who have destroyed the city and are hard at work destroying the country.