10/24/22
Newletter137
The Crack of Dawn
I don’t intend to be political in this newsletter. However, if one is taking a “historical” point of view of events, politics must come into play. I keep hearing present-day Republicans refer to themselves as “Christian Nationalists” – Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert particularly – and I’m not sure they even know what that means. The Christian Nationalists were founded in 1942 by Gerald L.K. Smith as a pro-Christian/anti-Semitic movement. Smith ran for president in 1944 against Franklin Roosevelt, receiving a mere 1,800 votes. Smith had already formed the America First movement and one of his main members and cohorts was Father Charles Coughlin, known as “The Radio Priest,” who ministered and broadcast from an ornate church right near here called the Shrine of the Little Flower. Father Coughlin preached Antisemitism and anti-FDR (often referring to President Roosevelt as “Rosenfeld”) and had 30 million listeners (out of a total U.S. population of 120 million). I remember my family driving past the Shrine of the Little Flower (located on Woodward Ave., Detroit’s main thoroughfare) when I was a little kid and my father launching into a rant that went something like, “That anti-Semitic son of a bitch Father Coughlin broadcast out of there.” Anyway, the Christian Nationalist organization is not some friendly church group; it’s a hate group. The truly sad part is that I suspect that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Bobert don’t even understand what the group they align themselves with means.
I don’t wear this as a sign of pride, but I’ve been in a city having a major riot twice. I was in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1991. I swear, I had nothing to do with it. It’s purely a coincidence. In 1967 I was 9 years old and these are my memories: it was a hot summer, the police wouldn’t let us play kick-ball in the street, and my mother’s favorite grocery store burned down, which she took personally. In 1991 I lived on Hudson St. in Hollywood, directly across the street from the Hollywood Police motor yard where they stored and worked on a dozen police cars.
Let’s drop back for some context. On the night of March 3, 1991, Rodney King led the notoriously paranoid L.A. cops on a long car chase that eventuated in the cops pulling him over, then kicking the shit out of him. But for the first time, a guy stepped out on his balcony and video-taped it. When I first saw it, living in L.A., my feeling was, “You’re lucky they all didn’t shoot you.”
When the cops all got a acquitted, thus began the “Rodney King Riot.” It started in south-central L.A., then moved straight north up Vermont. Blvd. to Hollywood. Several businesses on Hollywood Blvd. – two blocks from me – were set ablaze. I personally never worried for one second. The Hollywood Police cordoned off our whole block because of the motor yard, with black-clad cops wearing flak jackets and carrying M-16s all over the place. But I remember standing on the street with my neighbors, plumes of smoke filling the sky in all directions, and sirens and helicopters and cops everywhere, and we thought at that moment that society had all blown apart and was falling to pieces around us.
Everyone was kind of giddy and smiling. My neighbor lit a joint and we all smoked it front of all these armed cops.
That was a time.
A good day to one and all.