One of those irritating Goody Two-shoes civic rituals is going to occur in Fort Wayne a couple days from now, and once again I'm nagged by that familiar old question: "What can they be thinking?"

Fort Wayne, fifteen miles down the road from TLD World Headquarters, is a town of about 200,000, which makes it number two in Indiana. The city contains enough colored minorities to lift the annual rape, robbery, and homicide toll far above the Oslo Standard or Toronto Index or whatever other yardstick our gun-grabbing totalitarians are using to shame us with these days. (As radically alien peoples with a gift for violence keep flooding into previously homogenous countries with traditionally peaceful, not to say meek, civic cultures, I predict the disarmers will have a more difficult time finding a suitable standard ... but already I digress.) In terms of crime, from the mid 1980s through most of the 1990s Fort Wayne was a crack suburb of Detroit; the cops claimed that at least 70 crack houses were open for business in the Negro districts. Drug prohibition combined with the congenital tendencies of the drug entrepreneurs ensured that the city's homicide rate established record after record. More recently, the drug killings have abated somewhat, but plenty of street atrocities and home invasions still occur, including plenty of black-on-white attacks.

The event coming up in Fort Wayne is nothing less than a March for a Crime-Free City. Not a March for a Safer City or a March to Cut Crime, mind you, but a March for a Crime-Free  City. In other words, the plan is to outdo Oslo and Toronto, even though this is a country where considerable testosterone still flows among certain segments of the population and where some of us don't automatically cower and tug the forelock in the presence of the constabulary. All the local respectables are lining up for the march, including the established media, the sopping wet clergy, and the NAACP. In fact, the NAACP is the principal sponsor. Just what kind of mindless utopianism are those people practicing?

***

It's got to have something to do with the town's cultural history. Like so many urban settlements in the Upper Midwest, Fort Wayne's Goody Two-shoe and ruling-class elements are mostly descended — spiritually if not still biologically — from the Puritan Yankee Coercive Moral Uplifter out of New England. Later settlers introduced strong German Lutheran and German Catholic influences, but the official hate campaign against the Beastly Hun during Wilson's War stripped away the charming expressions of that culture, leaving only a certain melancholy authoritarianism easily exploitable by the heirs of the Yankees.

Fort Wayne is Lincoln country, Indivisible Union country, Salute-the-Flag-and-Shut-Up country. (And you'd better believe it will never see a controversy over any alternative flag.) It's the grateful and boastful host of the country's leading Lincoln museum, though the Great Satan never actually set foot in the town. Bland Big Government Republicans and bland Big Government Democrats jostle gently for power. The Republicans win a little more often than not, but of course it makes little difference.

Underlying the March to End All Crime, then, is the same Yankee-Lincolnite millennialism that presumes a humanitarian American empire can administer a lasting peace in the Middle East and rescue all puppies from being run over by oxcarts in Ethiomalabongo. The national dominance of Yankee millennialism is suggested by the fact that the entire country has had to listen to God knows how many Campaigns for a Drug-Free America in recent years, and no one seems to have fallen out of his chair laughing.

***

But this time the Yankees have surely wandered deeper than ever into the asylum. Usually they don't state utopian goals so baldly while adopting means that even a child can see would be utterly useless for achieving a 5 percent improvement. The "drug-free" campaigns featured some mindless ribbon-wearing, to be sure, but they also entailed protracted drug education (if that's what you want to call it). And while the state-feminists' Take Back the Night marches are pretty infantile at first glance, they actually involve a lot of businesslike agitation for continued nationalization of the criminal-justice system. In the propaganda for the "crime-free" march, however, I haven't detected so much as a hint that the local laws, cops, and courts aren't up to the job. There's no suggestion of a bitter confrontation with a corrupt, uncaring, or incompetent local Establishment; indeed, the Establishment seem to be putting on their walking shoes, too.

For a certain kind of liberal, I figure, the march is an extreme example of his compulsion to be seen wearing all the Correct sentiments. It's pretty clear that soppy liberals have no clue how societies and economies actually work — no clue to the laws of human action — in view of the fact that they always propose to solve social problems by throwing more tax money and government power at them. Maybe self-delusion can only go so far. I mean, if your favorite government programs merely exacerbate the problems you specialize in, decade after decade, it's understandable if you eventually start elevating sentiment over substance. Understood that way, the March for Freedom from Crime looks a lot like the liberal version of a mass tantrum.

That probably explains much of its attraction for the mush-heads whom old-style Commies would consider "useful idiots." It doesn't explain how anyone else could be expected to take it seriously, though. For that, we have to dope out what the really plugged-in types are up to. (In a national context, we'd be talking about the senior Red Guards and Dark Suits.) And they have doubtlessly engineered the march quite deliberately as therapy for whites who are terrified by black crime and who as a result tend to shy away from blacks. TV cameras will show impressive numbers of safe, peaceful, public-spirited Good Negroes marching alongside smiling, unterrified whites. That exactly parallels what the national telescreen does when it assigns black actors to portray 90 percent of the judges and police captains in its shows.

In being praised and joined by all Forces of Good in the community, the march will effectively preempt any frank discussion that might otherwise have threatened to break out. Discussion, that is, of racial and cultural differences — of the wages of state-forced diversity — of the collapse of families both black and white resulting from the state's design and our own degradation. It will remind the sheeple once again that only the Forces of Evil ever talk about such things.

It will also distract the more impressionable from dwelling on that most un-utopian means of achieving actual, total freedom from violent black crime: fleeing to distant white suburbs or small towns. That factor alone may explain the planners' cant about a "crime-free city," which otherwise sounds so feeble-minded.

With all that going on, something else there won't be much room left for is any sober, realistic talk about firearms preparedness. That reminds me of one other possibility, and if it comes to pass it will make the march look much less idiotic and much more sinister. None of the preliminary propaganda that I've heard touches on gun control, which has always been a hard sell in these parts: a case of the Yankee mentality's being overwhelmed by the rough imperatives of the Old Northwest, I suppose. But many of us have seen TV commercials that represent a theatrical movie as a gripping human drama or light comedy, only to discover too late, as we sit in the theater, that the film is little more than a project for advancing socialism or sodomy or miscegenation. If the Fort Wayne march turns out to be a stealth operation against the righteously armed citizen, I'll report.

***

It will also be interesting to see whether the march itself is crime-free. In the old days, this sort of ceremony would have had the pickpockets out in force. Nowadays more than your purse is at risk when you tramp the asphalt and mingle in the urban crowd. I hope Fort Wayne's thoroughly modern marchers know enough to stick together and not wander into any nearby parks once the ceremony is over.

October 20, 2000

What do you think of Strakon's analysis? If you'd like to see your brief comments posted on the site, please respond here.

All comments will be subject to the usual editing, and we will be looking for those that are the most thought-provoking, pro or con.

Return to the "Strakon Lights Up" table of contents.