Central Park Five
 

May 31, NETFLIX is showing WHEN THEY SEE US, based on one of Trump’s favorite delusions about the Central Park Five. Can’t wait to see his tweets about it.

More info:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/fe...see-us-1212466

After twenty minutes, I had to stop and be sick.

For this alone, Trump should not have been elected president, or dog catcher. Or dog.

Best,

Ed

As the saying goes, don’t blame Trump; he did everything he could to show he was unfit to be president before the election.

Cheers,
John

Haha. True story, John. Further, he was stunningly virtuosic at it.

Cheers,
Erik

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What new American proverb can we conjure that captures the essence of how Trump got to where he is now? What is the cautionary tale? The moral of the story? There's got to be some parable to be had from this all. Not that I think we should go all biblical or anything...

I feel like when the time finally comes to be rid of him I'm going to take a long, hot shower; for as long as the hot water holds out. Though I don't know what it must feel like to be literally raped, I imagine Trump's presidency to be a kind of slow political rape of the people. From all I've read on the subject, I do think that he fits the description of a rapist. I feel sorry to have to even say it, but it's how I feel.
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I am perennially amazed at the millions who love him. People are weird.

John

They are indeed, John, or... as they say in England (up north, in a heavy dialect, ...but which we all now say, regardless of which area we're from):

"There's nowt so queer (as in strange!) as folk!"

Jayne

It's the co-dependent relationship of Echo and Narcissus. She feels voiceless without him, and he needs her adulation, although he despises her.

I tried to write a poem about it, but I failed--readers seemed to have assumed that I was talking about Melania, or about female supporters of Trump, rather than about an aggrieved and insecure segment of society, over and over again, throughout history, ready to support the next autocrat who will tell them how great they used to be and how ill-treated they've been lately. Maybe I'll workshop that one. I'd like to get it right.

Julie: "I tried to write a poem about it, but I failed... Maybe I'll workshop that one. I'd like to get it right."

I think you should keep trying. There is a tenacity to your thinking and expression that could be useful in our collective poetic effort to expose him and pin him down to the cleansing light of truth.

Here -- some food for thought from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/o...xasaoGx_VvBIBE
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The most disturbing thing about a figure like Trump is that he has spent decades doing showily indecent things like calling for the deaths of presumed-guilty-until-proven-innocent young Black and Latino men (the Central Park Five), precisely because he knows that a significant portion of American society will applaud him for saying the racist things they want to hear.

Powerful as he is to do lasting damage to our democracy, Trump is just one guy, and despite what his doctors say about in their glowing reports on his health, he doesn't strike me as someone who is likely to be around to celebrate his 80th birthday. I'm more worried about the millions who still support him and his vile agendas. They'll be around much, much longer than he will. And they'll be waiting to prop up the next would-be dictator who promises to make them great again, at the expense of minorities.

Some proverbs off the top of my head (cued by Jim, above)

Self-reliance will die in silence.

A dog in the manger is our danger.

A narcissist is his own anti-Christ.

The Trump cards are wild canards.

You can lead a Trump to truth, but you can’t make him think.

Sorry, intermittent connection is screwing me.

A couple of weeks ago, I read pretty much the whole Wikipedia article about the Central Park Five jogger incident (which I didn't know anything about till I saw Ralph's thread).
Here is an excerpt that I found quite disturbing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case

The same Wikipedia article notes that no DNA evidence ties the five to the crime. This squares awkwardly with any suggestion that they raped the victim, as far as I can see. OTOH, DNA ties Reyes to the crime conclusively. I prefer science to speculation. Just the facts, Ma'am.

Cheers,
John

This story was new to me. In the light of Hillary Clinton's criticism of Trump, I was interested to read this:

And here's a fuller version of the quote. She said, “We need to take these people on, they are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way but first we have to bring them to heel”.

From what I gather, Clinton was at the time lobbying hard for federal "Three strikes" legislation. The speech was made in New Hampshire -- 98% white at the time, and apparently not an area to experience much by the way of violent inner city crime -- and it was a month before the primaries.

That's true, John, and I agree with you. A person is innocent until proven guilty. Definitely! OTOH, Reyes was (I think I read somewhere in the article) incapable of telling the truth, an inveterate liar. So there might have been others involved, but they will likely never be identified. In any case, it was a tragedy, like too many others in human history.

I don't think there's serious doubt at this point that the five of them were innocent. Five men cannot rape someone and leave no DNA trail behind while a sixth man, uncharged at the time, did leave DNA evidence behind. The only evidence against the five came from confessions which we now know were extracted under circumstances that negate any confidence in their reliability. They were presumed guilty by the police and the DA and abusively questioned until they agreed they were guilty. (I know a lawyer for one of the defendants, and I remember at the time that he seemed sincerely under the impression that his client was innocent).

Thanks, Martin and Roger. I agree with you.

Cheers,
John

You are right, Roger. They were, indeed, abusively questioned and finally succumbed the harsh treatment.

That Trump doesn't come out of this well is hardly surprising; the man is dangerous and clearly unfit for public office. But Clinton's contribution, which Matt highlighted, is shocking too. Particularly disturbing is the phrase 'the kind of kids that are called superpredators' (my italics): the idea that if one labels somebody a certain way it makes it easier to treat them more harshly that one would somebody else.

Edit: Of course, the first and primary victim in all of this is Trisha Meili, the woman who was beaten, raped and left for dead. The amoral, politically or racially motivated othering that went on afterwards (by the police, the media, Trump, Clinton) is vile, but let's not forget the violent, misogynist mindset that allowed someone to see Meili as less than human and so feel able to do this to her.

Speaking as a Democrat, exactly what Mark said. Bill Clinton's presidency is notorious for soaring incarceration rates. Here's a research article addressing that truism, which however also notes that Black incarceration rates soared particularly under Reagan and Bush I:
https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepol...tons-policies/
There is also, of course, this famous "tough on crime" story from the 1992 Clinton campaign:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricky_Ray_Rector
Rudy Giuliani was Mayor of New York, and made himself famous, from 1994 to 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayora..._Rudy_Giuliani. This was more or less a national trend.

Cheers,
John

Journalists in the national print media during the '80s and '90s used startling statistics of an uptick in all crime, from homicide to vandalism, to construct quantified claims about cocaine and street crime epidemics. Threatening imagery of grimacing hoodlums in cuffs and horror stories of crack babies was a daily commonplace disseminated on the news. All media elaborated on hardhearted thuggery, indiscriminate murder, and spiraling crack use, the levels of which the nation had not seen before and has not since. This drove anxiety home in the populace, who believed the script from so-called experts (one academic hack gained currency who coined a word to describe the behemoth, superpredators). Enter politicians, each used the people's fear to eke out a career in Washington. Indeed, promising policies of zero tolerance for the intolerable guaranteed them the support of the fearful; not doing so lost it in the same proportion, or at least in such quantities that most believed it political suicide to be anything but tough-on-crime. No party was exempt. Clinton, for instance, harnassed the momentum to help push him over the threshold between him and the White House; after the tsunami of street crime hysteria that had swept the '90s crested and crashed in the '00s at long last, he went to the NAACP headquarters to publicly apologize for overzealous sentencing policies. Too little too late, though to see a politician admit to having been woefully wrong is exceedingly rare, and so on and so forth.

There was obviously a lot going on that night that was overshadowed by the rape case, trial, and aftermath.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix...ve-11560207823

https://abcnews.go.com/US/case-settl...ry?id=63077131

Wait - are you saying, Sam, that police and prosecutors wanted some other verdict than that they had falsely obtained convictions in about the most high-profile NYC case of the 1990s? Wow, now that is one for the record books!
Or in the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, "Well he would, wouldn't he?"

Cheers,
John

John, I think the Scottsboro Boys were totally innocernt. I think the Central Park Five admitted to some criminal acts but not to rape, even though the police claimed they had. I am with the DA; they were not innocent bystanders who were picked up in some kind of random sweep.

Yes, the Central Park Five certainly did confess to things. That as I understand it is part of the point of the miniseries.
Sorry, I've heard of the Scottsboro Boys but don't know their story.

Cheers,
John

Nah. I don't want to get into this.

Sam - I just finished reading the whole Wikipedia article on the Scottsboro Boys. Thanks for mentioning it!