The Unbearable Blindness of David Simon
It's how the left keeps you in the fold despite the evidence of your own eyes.
 What Leftists Do.
I have been traveling and so this comes a little late, but it’s still worth saying. Lawrence Meyers at the wonderful Breitbart site Big Hollywood had an excellent takedown of David Simon last week. Simon, author of the brilliant book Homicide and creator of the excellent television show The Wire, is also, according to the book Difficult Men, a self-obsessed and bullying leftist. Recently, he attacked conservatives and, indeed, the U.S. Constitution they are trying to defend. Simon says:
If original intent included the sadism and degradation of human slavery, then original intent is a legal and moral standard that can be consigned to the ash heap of human history. Hardcore conservatives and libertarians who continue to parse the origins of the Constitutions under the guise of returning to a more perfect American union are on a fool’s journey to decay and dishonor.
I leave it to Meyers’s strong piece to take down this nonsense, as indeed he does.
But here’s what bugs me. The Wire (which is, to some extent, based on the year Simon spent with the Baltimore Homicide Squad while researching Homicide) takes place in a city without conservatives, even without Republicans. There has not been a Republican mayor of Baltimore since 1967. And much of the show’s genius lies in its depiction of the brutalized life of black people in the city’s ghetto.
So we have a writer who has seen for himself, and who has shown us, the effects of Democrat governance on a city, the dehumanization of the poor that is the direct result of leftism and the corruption that inevitably springs from it. And yet Simon blames conservatives!
I understand why too, as I’ll explain on the next page.
I was a liberal once. I knew that liberal policy was wrong — but I also knew that conservatives were evil. Racist, sexist, uncaring, one step from Nazis. This was a religious truth to me. Well, of course it was. All leftists are taught this. That’s how the left keeps you in the fold despite the evidence of your own eyes. Leftists do to their followers what the townspeople did to Jim Carrey’s character in that movie The Truman Show. They teach them to fear and hate the unknown so much that they won’t test alternative ideas no matter how bad things get. “Life in Liberal World may be a mess, Truman,” they tell you, “but oh the horrors that wait for you out there in Conservative Land!”
David Simon’s intelligence is being thwarted by this superstitious fear. Cowering inside the virtuous feeling of his leftism, he does not know what he does not know. If he wants to see up close the horrors that left-wing policies visit on the lives of the poor, he ought to try watching The Wire. It’s all in there.
Read more: http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2013/11/10/the-unbearable-blindness-of-david-simon/#ixzz3YcqivjlI
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Sedulous Suasion
Two points to address in your column.
First, you write Mr. Simon denounces the Constitution since it did not end slavery.
That forces me to try and defend the Founders’ decision not to try and end it in our Constitution.
Never really thought about it before, and so I can easily be wrong on this, but here are my thoughts: They just finished a war with England. How simple would it have been for the southern states to refuse the Constitution and then form their own new nation to preserve slavery? That would be a valid concern.
I just did quick research and read the new states up north quickly outlawed slavery. If not for the Constitution setting up the nation, those states could not have stood fast in quickly outlawing it.
But here is the biggest point which non-historian Simon blissfully ignores: the forming nation was still full of Tories. We fought against them. They were throughout the nation. How simple would it had been for them to foment a second War after the northern states tried to outlaw slavery in the Constitution? They would fight in that war, and help form a new southern nation. England of course would help with that.
So if Mr. Simon had his way, there would be an entrenched American southern nation today still practicing slavery. His beloved Maryland would be in it. While the United States consisting solely of northern states would have its constitution outlaw slavery, the American southern nation in its constitution would authorize punishment of wayward slaves. Thank you Mr. Simon for basically screaming in ignorance that the Revolutionary War should have resulted in a Tory led American southern nation preserving slavery.
Some might argue if the southern states formed their own nation, they would have been crushed by the northern states. In the 1860s, yes. In the 1790s, no. The southern colonies won the Revolutionary War (see Yorktown). The northern colonies could not have defeated them in the 1790s. The influx of immigrants needed for the Union to win the Civil War had not happened. The years of northern abolition to inspire northern soldiers had not happened. The southern nation led by Tories would have easily formed. And slavery would have been entrenched.
Does Mr. Simon realize what would have happened worldwide if a southern American nation since the 1790s worked to preserve and expand slavery? All allowed because the Founders followed Mr. Simon’s advice, tried to outlaw slavery, and lost a united American nation?
I am dumbfounded Mr. Simon is livid half the colonies after the Revolutionary War did not form a nation to preserve, and expand worldwide, slavery. That is what certainly would have happened if the Founders proffered the David Simon proposal to abolish slavery at the Constitutional Convention.
Second, you write as a former liberal you were taught to hate non-liberals. You write liberals are taught to fear the political unknown, which includes conservative policies. With great cleverness you write Mr. Simon can see the results of liberal policies by watching his own show which portrays a liberal enclave.
I have only one thought on this, beyond thanking you for being well-equipped to persuade liberals to permit conservative political solutions. Does not what you write mean liberals accept one dogma? If liberals as a group reject non-liberals, that implies they don’t reject each other. Conservatism has multiple divisions – social conservative, economic conservative, libertarian conservative, and moderate conservative to name a few. No such modifiers are used on liberals. Does this mean there is one liberal political dogma which American liberals are expected to accept? If so, who constructed that dogma? Who is the Martin Luther of the dogma of American liberalism? My guess is FDR, thanks to Woodrow Wilson first making FDR’s unconstitutional power grab palatable. If not for Wilson demanding the Constitution be ignored (like Mr. Simon demands), I doubt Americans would have accepted FDR’s usurpation of power.
If prayer says post this, I will.
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Fail Burton
I only now just noticed that in comments Mr. Simon mentions that white people who watch 12 Years A Slave must cringe watching what white people did.
That is the tip-off right there. If I say black people must or should cringe at watching black flash mobs, sharing some racial guilt or responsibility, that is always said to be racist.
And yet the Left commonly asserts exactly that principle, and across generations no less, for white folks. If it's a whites-only water fountain, it's not a principle, but just a double standard of racism smoke-screened as justice.
In fact, the Left cannot use principle in its arguments, because those arguments are self-contradictory and easily shredded.
I might cringe at what humans do, but I have never cringed at what whites do while looking at what blacks do as if they're a ladybug on a leaf, beyond my ability to relate to. I don't look at the pyramids as if aliens built them or shine with racial pride at the (our) Parthenon. What rubbish.
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