The “broken-windows” school of policing says that you can help maintain public order by taking care of even small examples of disorder—such as fixing broken windows. Liberals scorned that policy in the last decade as somehow racist. Well, in recent days we’ve learned that America’s left does have a broken-windows policy: Let rioters break enough windows and loot enough stores and maybe their righteous anger will be satisfied.
That’s certainly how it looked when the June sun rose Tuesday over the broken glass, looted storefronts, burnt-out cars, and vandalized buildings in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Madison and other American cities. Public officials let rioters exploiting the memory of George Floyd run wild in the streets. Even after nearly a week of violence, these and other liberal Democratic cities let lawless radicals harass and plunder almost at will.
In downtown St. Louis, four police officers were shot after midnight. “I believe some coward randomly shot at the police line,” said police chief John Hayden. A 7-Eleven was looted and set afire, but firefighters were deliberately slowed by protesters in responding. “We had people lying down in the street” and trash cans were placed as obstacles to block fire trucks, said fire chief Dennis Jenkerson.
In Philadelphia, city of brotherly vandals, gangs of rioters rolled through several neighborhoods Sunday burning businesses and cars. They returned for more on Monday, shutting down the highway that bisects the city at evening rush hour.
Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said a crowd of more than 100 surrounded a lone state trooper inside a vehicle and began rocking it. When two SWAT teams arrived, the crowd pelted them with rocks from the road and above. Police had to fire spray pellets, bean bags and tear gas to escape.
At first Mayor Jim Kenney backed the police. But by Tuesday he was tweeting that “there may have been additional uses of tear gas. I am deeply concerned by this development. All of these incidents will be investigated by Internal Affairs.” Police are threatened by a mob, the officers defend themselves by non-lethal means, and the mayor wants to investigate the police. No wonder rioters feel they can do whatever they want.
In New York City, hoodlums rampaged through Herald Square and the flagship Macy’s store, Fordham Road in the Bronx, Times Square and SoHo, among other places. Nearly every storefront on lower Fifth Avenue was vandalized. A cop was struck and injured by a hit-and-run driver in the Bronx. This isn’t protest. It’s anarchy.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo had set an 11 p.m. curfew but somehow managed not to enforce it. TV cameras showed gangs of youths working as teams to loot one store, then move on to another. Overwhelmed police could do little more than wave their clubs and hope to catch one or two as they sprinted past on their way to their next target.
The NYPD has some 36,000 officers. How could they not be deployed in enough numbers to contain this rampage? And how can these public officials not deploy the National Guard to assist the police in restoring public order and protecting the innocent? This wasn’t the first night of mayhem. It was the fourth in a row, and the police clearly knew what could happen. The only explanation is that Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio lack the political will to stop it.
This isn’t merely about damage to property. It’s about destroying the order required for city life. Non-criminals are afraid to go into these cities to make a living. The police pull back from active policing, which creates more opportunity for criminals, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods. Businesses that are finally starting to emerge from government lockdowns have new costs to absorb and more reasons for customers not to return.
What all these cities have in common is that they are led by Democrats who seem to have bought into the belief that the police are a bigger problem than rampant disorder. They are either cowed by their party’s left, or they agree that America is systemically racist and rioting is a justified expression of anger against it. They offer pro forma disapproval of law breakers but refuse to act to stop them.
They should recognize that wide-spread lawlessness is not helping their cause. Americans have the right to protest, peacefully, and the killing of George Floyd in police custody is cause for anger and grief. But as the violence continues, Americans of goodwill will support the police and a return to safe streets as the highest priority. Police reform and social injustice will get a smaller hearing.
Public officials need to deploy enough police and National Guard to stop the mayhem. They need to channel the peaceful demonstrations by time and place, as American law allows, so agitators can’t use them to attack police to create violent confrontations. If they can’t or won’t do that, these Democrats will be complicit in destroying their own cities and harming the very people they claim to speak for.
The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today created its own humorous tradition when the New York Times wrote a story attributing sex and race where it did not belong — ”World Ends; Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.”
In this case, the WSJ editorial isn’t funny at all:
The violence that broke out in American cities this weekend goes far beyond justified anger at the killing of George Floyd on Monday. The rioters are looting shops and attacking police with impunity, and they threaten a larger breakdown of public order. Protecting the innocent and restoring order is the first duty of government.
The violent scenes in more than 30 cities were the worst in decades. Minneapolis police were overrun on Friday as neighborhoods and a police precinct burned. Los Angeles police were assaulted and their vehicles vandalized and burned. In Milwaukee a 38-year-old police officer was shot and 16 buildings were looted. In Dallas a shopowner trying to defend his property with a machete was stoned, beaten and left bleeding in the street.Americans watching on TV saw reporters grabbed and pushed by protesters who flashed obscene gestures for the cameras. Police were pelted with rocks and bottles amid “Defund the Police” signs. Mayors across the country set curfews, and in Minneapolis and elsewhere the National Guard was called in.
This was more than spontaneous anger at the grotesque video of a white cop, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on the neck of the African-American Floyd for nearly nine minutes as he pleaded to breathe. Many protests were peaceful. But the riots in many places had the earmarks of planned chaos by those using Floyd as an excuse for criminality.
Gov. Tim Walz blamed agitators from outside Minnesota, including white supremacists and drug cartels, for feeding the violence, though he offered no evidence. Attorney General Bill Barr on Saturday blamed much of the trouble on “anarchistic and far left extremists, using Antifa-like tactics, many of whom travel from out of state to promote the violence.”
Antifa are loosely affiliated agitators who claim to be anti-fascists. They dress in black and cover their heads, often letting others man the front lines while directing assaults on police from a distance.
Amid this chaos, police in most cities have shown notable discipline. A police car drove into a crowd surround-ing it in New York City, but even Mayor Bill de Blasio noted it would not have happened if protesters had not been threatening. The risk is that, as confrontations escalate, some police will lose their cool and someone will be killed, producing another cycle of protest and violence.
Contrast all of this with the progress of the justice system in the Floyd case. Officer Chauvin was charged Friday with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The Hennepin County district attorney brought charges in record time that he will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and he says he may bring more charges, presumably against one or more of the three other officers involved in Floyd’s arrest.
The Justice Department and FBI have assisted the investigation, as the D.A. has noted. Mr. Barr condemned the acts in the video and has launched a civil-rights investigation. Current and former police across the political spectrum have denounced the acts on the video as a gross violation of proper police methods. President Trump issued an awful tweet that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” but his remarks otherwise have supported Floyd and shown sympathy with peaceful protesters as opposed to rioters.
Police brutality is too common, and it should be prosecuted. But these events have become national causes precisely because they are exposed in the media. Cameras on cops have made it harder to cover up abuses and may have deterred some. There are white racists in our midst but they are condemned everywhere except in the fever swamps of the internet.
There are also consequences for black lives when police retreat from policing. Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist, has found that when a high-profile police incident goes viral and is followed by a Justice Depart-ment investigation, homicides and felonies spike in succeeding months. “It’s costing black lives,” he told our columnist Jason Riley last week in a Manhattan Institute video. “That pains me” and no one is talking about it.
All of this poses a particular challenge to the liberal establishment that runs most of these cities and states. The mayors of Atlanta and Denver were excellent in distinguishing between peaceful protest and violent destruc-tion. But others have encouraged rage against police, and so-called social justice prosecutors have risen to power in such cities as Philadelphia, San Francisco and St. Louis. Now we’ll see if they protect the neighborhoods they claim to represent against violent mobs.
The same goes for liberal media and intellectuals, who are in general portraying the riots as an understandable response to social injustice. Most of them live far from the burning neighborhoods as they denounce police. They ignore that there is no chance of addressing social injustice without underlying civil order. The main victims of a summer of chaos in America will be the poor and minority neighborhoods going up in flames.
In Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything… (1989), Lloyd Dobler sketches out a stumbling, uncertain-but-nevertheless-determined path for his and my generation:
“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed.” “We’re not sure what we want, but not this,” was a strange but endearing generational rallying cry. Few of us who saw the film in our teens or early twenties failed to laugh with recognition.
Ascribing common traits to an entire generation of tens of millions of disparate Americans is a dubious exercise, even a fool’s errand. So call me a fool, I won’t take it personally.
For instance, assuming everyone in a particular generation has seen a particular movie. Except probably for the original “Star Wars.”
Still, a few characteristics unique to Generation X did become clear as the decades passed. Gen X was notably the first generation to have to deal with the mistakes of the Baby Boomers, and the first in which interracial relationships and homosexuality enjoyed widespread acceptance. Gen X-ers were also more emotionally damaged by divorce than the children of any previous or subsequent generation. There was fragility within us as we faced a joyous historical moment when American ways had indisputably been proven superior to those of the Soviet empire and affluence had become, for the first time, available to a huge proportion of Americans. No previous generation could simply choose wealth, but Gen X discovered that a master’s in business or a law degree was a virtual ticket to the upper class. And this created a conflict, given the anti-materialist shibboleths of the John Lennon-led Boomer culture we’d all inherited: Did access to wealth mean we ought to pursue it? Could we achieve it in some Doblerian way that preserved our sense of self? The natural optimism and excitement of youth were tinged with doubts.
Steeped as we were in Boomer rock music, we sensed it was full of questionable advice. Turning away from, or blowing up, the existing power structures so we could “get ourselves back to the garden,” as Crosby, Stills and Nash sang in Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” was not an option we considered. We were not revolutionaries. The country that awaited us not only didn’t require radical overthrow, it seemed pretty good. Our first votes were likely to be for Reagan (61 percent of the youth vote in 1984) or George H.W. Bush (53 percent in 1988). We advanced into adulthood as cautious idealists, a little hopeful and a little confused.
When I arrived at college in 1985, U2 and Talking Heads were very much the bands of the moment, but there was a palpable sense that Bono and Co. still hadn’t quite fulfilled their promise, that their best days, like ours, were yet to come. Junior year, just as we returned from spring break to a New Haven that flipped overnight from gray slush to Monet efflorescence, U2 delivered its hoped-for masterpiece in The Joshua Tree, instantly and obviously the defining rock album of the decade.
If those who were born in the ’60s and grew up in the ’70s seem a little blasé about COVID-19, maybe MeTV explains why:
If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s, then you know how relaxed everything used to be. Our parents never forced us to wear seatbelts, we pretty much ate whatever we wanted, and were given way more responsibiity than we should have been given. It’s a little sad kids today won’t get to experience half the things we did, but looking back, there’s a good reason why they won’t.
Were these 12 things we did as kids kind of dangerous? Yeah, maybe some of it was.
1. Playing with dangerous toys
Parents were a lot more liberal with what they would let us play with. Forget about choking hazards, we’re talking hot plates, noxious odors and sharp metal objects. It’s a wonder how we made it out of the decade intact.
Not only were there lawn darts in the neighborhood, but we used to have a waterslide (a plastic sheet into which a water hose was plugged in, with holes on the sides squirting out water) that supposedly caused paralysis when someone hit a dry spot, or something.
2. No seatbelts
We never had to buckle up back in the day, which meant we could sit wherever. That includes stretching out across the seats, lying against the back windshield, or, if your parents had a station wagon, rolling around in the cargo area.
What was better than all of that was hitching a ride in a flatbed pickup. No cushioned seats, no roof and nothing but the wind in your hair and sun in your face.
Our first second car was a 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air, whose rear seat had no seat belts. So my brother and I had to share the front-seat lap belt, because the possibility of our faces slamming into the metal dashboard was certainly preferable.
3. No helmets
Just like seat belts, people didn’t really see the value in this piece of life saving gear. Kids popped wheelies and raced each other without helmets, let alone knee and elbow pads. Falling was an art form too because you had to land without splitting your head open or breaking any bones.
At one point we set up a bike ramp on the sidewalk. Heading into a jump our dog started to walk out in front of my bike. I hit the brakes hard and suddenly found myself looking up at the sky, having flipped the bike. No helmet. No concussion … I think.
4. Running after DDT trucks
This one is probably the biggest “what were we thinking” moments of the ’60s and ’70s. We would run after these suckers when they rolled into our neighborhood and sprayed the air with a chemical fog. If your street had some traffic, it was just the risk you had to take to have a little fun.
I don’t remember this, though I’ve read about it, possibly in Monona but not in Madison.
5. Unsafe playgrounds
Anyone remember swinging so hard that one part of the swing set would come off the ground? Or what about the burns we suffered sliding down scorching metal slides during the summer? And there wasn’t a cushy rubber foundation back then, just asphalt.
The grade school playground and the neighborhood park playground all had metal equipment on asphalt and dirt, respectively. Over at school, a kid running in fog soundly connected with an iron basketball hoop post, resulting in a concussion.
6. Latchkey kids
If your mom or dad worked late, then chances are they gave you the keys to the house so you could let yourself in after school. For those couple hours, you might as well have been a full-fledged adult.
Sure, your parents expected you to do homework while you were alone, but you secretly watched an episode or two of The Brady Bunch before they got home.
7. Leaving 12-year-olds in charge
If you had a younger sibling, then you best bet you would be watching after them at some point during the day (especially if you were a latchkey kid).
You didn’t need any certifications to babysit either. If you were at least 12 and able to dial 9-1-1, then you got some pretty sweet babysitting gigs. It was perfectly acceptable too.
I started babysitting in middle school. It was next door, for the princely sum of $1 an hour.
8. Diets
There was no such thing as “health foods” like kale and quinoa back when we were kids. If it was sold at the store, then it went in our stomachs. Plus, the less preparation that went into a school lunch, the better. Shout out to the Wonder Bread sandwiches, chips and Twinkies that probably stunted our growth as kids.
I’m 6-foot-4. I thought my growth was being stunted by the coffee I started drinking when I was 4.
9. Sitting in the front seat
The lack of seatbelts meant you could sit wherever you wanted, and no seat was more coveted than the middle seat in the front, back when front seats were benches. If there were six people in your family, then you fought your siblings for that position. If you sat there, you got to control which radio station the family listened to, and got the extra protection of your mother’s arm when your father stopped too hard.
10. Secondhand smoke
There was no escaping the haze of cigarette smoke in the 1970s. From airplanes to automobiles, we probably inhaled more secondhand smoke as children than some people do in a lifetime today. Looking back, we’re happy to leave this one in the ’70s.
I had a few relatives, and more coworkers, who smoked at work. I don’t think it caused (cough, cough) any problems.
11. Explosive cars
It’s basically a fact that cars were death traps back in the ’70s, and the Ford Pinto is the prime example. Not only did we not wear seatbelts and sit wherever we pleased, we were driving in cars that could explode because the fuel tank wasn’t designed properly. Luckily, the cars were discontinued in 1980, but only after we had risked our lives riding in them.
Our Boy Scouts carpool included a Pinto. It didn’t kill us, but the back seat required flexibility to get in and out. (Particularly because the rear-seat cushions were like falling into a toilet when the seat wasn’t up.)
12. Summer
Come to think of it, the three months between the school year were the most dangerous times growing up. We would leave the house for hours at a time, run around without shoes, and come home with more scrapes and bruises than we could count.
There was no structured playtime and no cell phones, just long days of sunshine and absolute fun. Yeah, being a kid in the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t all that bad.
I joined the military later in life. I was 37 years old when I went to my Officer Basic Course at Fort Lee, Virginia. I was 38 when I climbed into the back of a C-130 Hercules to fly into Iraq to begin my deployment with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment at the height of the surge in 2007. I started that deployment with the conventional rhythms of civilian life thoroughly imprinted in my mind and heart.
Service in a war zone was a jolting experience in countless ways, but nothing prepared me for the shock of death. It’s not just the sheer extent of the casualties—one man, then another, then another, and three more—all cut down in the prime of life. It’s the unnatural inability to truly mourn their loss.
Back home, when a family member or friend dies—or even a friend of a friend—there’s a collective and often community-wide pause. Depending on your relationship to the deceased, you’re able to simply stop, to grieve or to share in the grief of others, to try to help bear another person’s burden. There’s a ritual that matters, and it’s a ritual that—ideally—helps a person begin to heal.
At war, however, there is the shock of loss and the immediate and overriding need to focus, to do your job. In fact, the shock of loss typically occurs exactly when the need to focus is at its greatest. At the point of the explosion—or the site of the ambush—there’s a fight for life itself. On the ground and in the air, there’s the symphony of rescue and response. In the relative safety of the TOC (tactical operations center), there’s an urgent need not just to understand but also to direct the fight.
And then, even when that fight’s over, no one stops. The only pause is for the “hero flight”—the helicopter mission that takes your fallen brother home. You stand, you salute in silence, and then you focus again.
Yes, there are short memorial services, often days later, but nothing about it feels right. Your soul screams for the need to grieve, but your mind answers: Grief is a distraction, and if you’re distracted then your mistakes can cause only more grief. So the cycle moves on, remorselessly. Death, shock, focus. Death, shock, focus.
It’s a cliché of course to say it, but I never appreciated Memorial Day until I had brothers to remember. I was home on a midtour leave on Memorial Day Weekend in 2008. We’d already taken too many casualties, and I’d had no time to grieve. I was still pushing the grief back. I still had to focus. I wanted to enjoy my time with my wife and kids, and to truly treasure that time, I had to hold back. They couldn’t see what I truly felt.
Then, the dam broke. My son was watching a NASCAR race and before the race started, they played Amazing Grace on the bagpipes, and I just lost it. I had to leave the room. It was too much. But that’s also when I saw the value of this day. It gives us back that pause that we lost. It gives us back that ritual we need. Memorial Day, properly understood, helps us heal.
As much as it’s a holiday reserved for remembering those lost in war, Memorial Day has lessons for the crisis of the moment. Memorial Day in 2020 is a day of grief happening in the midst of a season of grief. Today, in all likelihood, COVID-19 will claim its 100,000th American life. That’s 100,000 souls in roughly 10 short weeks. Even worse, for families and communities, there has been something deeply unnatural about the cycle of loss and mourning.
Sick family members have been whisked away, never to be seen again. Countless thousands have died alone, rather than surrounded by the people they love. Without true wakes, visitations, and funerals, communities have been unable to come together to lift each other’s burdens. There’s an old proverb (the internet says it’s of Swedish origin) that goes like this—“Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half-sorrow.” In our season of grief, all too many Americans haven’t been able to share their sorrow.
As the country slowly begins to confront the sheer enormity of its loss, we should learn from the power of Memorial Day. When we can gather again—when we can comfort our neighbors in person—remember not just who they lost but what they lost. They lost a ritual of grief that can never be restored. In the months and years to come, however, we can pause for them—we can pause with them—and give them the moments they need to help them heal.
How, you ask, has this blogger been spending evenings during the coronavirus-mandated statewide lockdown of sorts?
Binge-watching a TV series that screams the ’80s, NBC-TV’s “Miami Vice.”
The short version of the creation of the TV series is two words from NBC programming executive Brandon Tartikoff: “MTV cops.” Or. more precisely, two cops that looked as if they had stepped out of an MTV music video. (Back when MTV played music videos.)
In one sense, “Vice” could be said to be a 1980s iteration of a classic that had recently gone off the air, the original “Hawaii Five-O.”
Both were set in lush locales that hid the seething sewers of crime (and, in Miami’s case, decadence) underneath. (To unreasonable ends, in Five-O’s case; as costar James MacArthur once put it, the show probably solved every crime in the islands halfway through its run.)
Things diverge from there, though. Unlike, say, “Adam-12,” I am confident in asserting that no one decided to go into police work based on “Miami Vice.” Outside of the setting Five-O was a straight police procedural. Vice was sort of film-noirish in that the heroes had skeletons in their own closets.
James “Sonny” Crockett was a former college football star and Vietnam veteran who started the series by trying to avenge his young partner’s death. Ricardo Tubbs was a New York City police detective who went to Miami to avenge the death of his brother, another NYPD detective.
The two are members of the Miami–Dade (then known as “Metro–Dade”) Police Department’s Organized Crime Bureau, called “Miami Vice,” investigating and either arresting or killing drug dealers and various other purveyors of South Florida vice, as well as their politician and dirty cop (including feds) enablers.
Crockett lives on a sailboat moored in a harbor. Thanks to asset forfeiture, Crockett gets to drive a “Ferrari Daytona” (which was actually a replica car on a Corvette chassis) and a speedboat. (Ferrari was upset about the use of the faux Daytona, which wasn’t built by Ferrari to be a convertible anyway, so Ferrari donated two Testarossas for use.)
It’s always interesting to learn who was considered for the roles that were iconically played (if that’s a word) by the eventually chosen actors. Crockett candidates included Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolte, Richard Dean Anderson, Mickey Rourke, Gary Cole, and Larry Wilcox (yes, of “CHiPs”) before Don Johnson, who had been in four failed pilots (as was Tom Selleck before “Magnum P.I.”) was chosen, reportedly over Wilcox. Denzel Washington would have done a great job, but different job, as Tubbs. Geoffrey Cole, who ended up on “The Cosby Show,” also auditioned for Tubbs.
Johnson considered leaving the series after its second season. Mark Harmon, formerly a rookie cop on “Adam-12,” a sheriff’s rescue guy on “240-Robert” and a San Francisco cop in the movie “The Presidio,” was considered as Johnson’s replacement.
Their boss was initially Lt. Lou Rodriguez, played by character actor Gregory Sierra (previously seen playing a detective in “Barney Miller”). Sierra, however, didn’t like working in Miami, so he was killed — I mean, written out — and Edward James Olmos was cast. And arguably that’s where the series took off in a character sense; the conflict between detectives Crockett and Tubbs and their boss was rather stereotypical in Sierra’s case, but Olmos’ Castillo, described in one place as a “modern-day samurai” with an improbable background for a police lieutenant, was impenetrable and unpredictable, at least until writers lost the plot of his character in the final season. (Olmos joked that he was the highest paid actor per word in Hollywood.)
We started watching the second season, and then when we purchased the whole series (from exactly where you would expect to get DVDs — Menards) we moved to the pilot and the first season. The series certainly was rolling in the second season.
The series is famous for a lot of things, including the start of a lot of acting careers:
One way you can tell its cultural impact, beyond the pastels (an idea creator Michael Mann came up with after going to a Miami paint store — and Crockett’s penchant for baggy light-colored clothing and shoes without socks) …
… is the number of musicians who started appearing in the series during season one, a trend that continued through the third season. The soundtrack is basically a who’s-who of pop and rock music of the ’80s, with a few pleasant flashbacks as far back as the early ’60s.
And, of course, Johnson became a star, as did Olmos.
One of the more amusing moments is when Johnson’s ex-wife, Melanie Griffith (the daughter of Tippi Hedren, with whom Johnson appeared on the 1973 movie “The Harrad Experiment”), appears in an episode as the owner of a call girl service. After the series ended Johnson and Griffith remarried, and then re-divorced.
To say the series is an unrealistic depiction of police work is completely beside the point. Every officer, including Castillo, contributes to the series’ body count to the extent that all of them should have been fired, even if all the shootings passed shooting review board muster. The bad guys usually have the shooting aim of Star Wars storm troopers. Castillo’s detectives lie to their boss about getting personally involved in cases without impunity, and only get called on it once. (Though that was an epic 15 seconds, with Castillo calling their professional conduct in the case “abominable.”)
Miami is, as Hawaii was, depicted as a nest of crime and, well, vice, buried under a sea of cocaine, the wonder drug of the ’80s. (A place called Sex World is prominent in one episode and part of others.) One can only imagine what the producers (including Dick Wolf before he started the “Law & Order” juggernaut) would have come up with a decade later after “NYPD Blue”
The series is quite dark. According to one website 108 people are killed in the five seasons, and frankly that seems low. Crockett is a Vietnam veteran (how that dovetails with his being a college football star and his apparent age in the mid-1980s … well, it’s TV, which is not subject to the usual measurements of time), and he runs into damaged Vietnam veterans who make up plot points in a few episodes. And whether or not Crockett was damaged by Vietnam, he’s got the macho-sensitive brooder thing down. (In two episodes he regrets previous behavior toward a female high school classmate and a former police partner who was homosexual, not to mention his being an absent husband and father, which is why he is an ex-husband. Young Crockett didn’t learn that the way to avoid regrets is to not do the wrong thing(s) in the first place.)
It was also unique for its abrupt endings in the first two seasons of the series that leave unanswered questions. (Did he survive or not?) Not often are there tags with humorous conclusions. In fact, five consecutive second-season episodes end with a suicide, with Crockett yelling “NO!!!” as the character prevents his or her being able to return to the series.
Two of the main characters start by providing comic relief — detectives Switek and Zito, usually found in a van filled with surveillance equipment. (Complete, early on, with a giant bug on the roof.) They’re portrayed as something less than competent early on, though that changes. And then Zito gets killed, and Switek, larger than everyone else and with a penchant for inappropriate comments to match, develops a gambling addiction. The two female leads, detectives Gina Calabrese and Trudy Brown, seem to spend the largest parts of the episodes they’re in engaging in prostitute sting operations.
There is humor in the interaction of the characters, particularly Izzy Moreno the malaprop-plagued informant, such as …
“We move in the same social matrix!”
“Hey, man, you can’t go in there with those brown shoes, this party is color-cooperated!”
“The slightest barometric altercation in the atmospheric pressures tend to affect my paranasal digestive systems.”
“Like a lawyer and a priest, when I’m immoralizing women …”
“You are ruining your skins! The ultra-veelet rays are destroying the epidermal cortex as we speak!”
“Dr. Trautman, yes … He only handles the physotropic symptoms, I was called in to deal with the psycho-kinetic diseases, the neural consciousness frontier.”
… and another informant known as “Noogie,” but otherwise it was pretty grim until the fourth season, which featured episodes about dueling televangelists, a cryogenically frozen reggae singer, UFOs, and the theft of bull semen. Black humor (appropriate for a series involving police) can be found throughout the series, such as when a chemist developing the most pure synthetic cocaine in the world tries some himself (after Izzy fakes trying some), and achieves the first and last high of his life.
Throughout the series Crockett and Tubbs had underworld alter-egos, Burnett and Cooper, respectively. Oftentimes Crockett/Burnett and Tubbs/Cooper got involved with women as part of their cases, but it always ended badly for the women (one of Tubbs’ girlfriends doesn’t survive the teaser), particularly singer Caitlin Davies (played by singer Sheena Easton), who over several episodes testifies against a corrupt record producer, falls in love with Crockett, marries him, gets pregnant, goes on tour and gets shot to death.
One episode later the writers trotted out the trope of a character’s getting amnesia, and so into the fifth season Crockett thought he was Burnett, and acted accordingly, adding to the series’ body count. And then magically Burnett went back to Crockett, conveniently forgetting Burnett’s carnage, and conveniently avoiding the usual career repercussions for a police officer who killed several people.
After Crockett returns to his right mind, the rest of the series (including four episodes that ran after the series finale, one of which may have been a pilot for another series that NBC didn’t buy, and another of which NBC declined to broadcast because of its subject matter, child molestation) foreshadows the end of the series through Crockett’s increasing burnout. That could be said to apply to the series too, particularly when the last two seasons featured increasingly bizarre storylines or repeated stories from earlier seasons.
The series ended with a two-hour finale movie in which Crockett and Tubbs are recruited by mysterious feds (are there any other kind?) to rescue from a fictional Latin American country a corrupt dictator (supposedly based on Panama’s Manuel Noriega, though he looks more like Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, and he’s played by non-Latino non-Arab actor Ian McShane) who is willing to tell all to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Crockett and Tubbs are, of course, nearly killed on several occasions and repeatedly double-crossed, which leads them to their living end.
… whose song ended another cult classic, the 1970s movie “Electra Glide in Blue.”
Lopez Video reviewed the series after doing what we did:
The concentration on raw aesthetics during the first 2 seasons makes this show a classic. Whether it was Michael Mann, this Yankovich character, or whoever, the primary emphasis of the show was raw aesthetics – the detective stuff came second (albeit a close second).
This was a show about pastel colors, Art Deco architecture, pop music, cars driving fast beach-side, drugs, and most importantly, sockless loafers with flowing blazers over a wrinkled V-neck.
The detective stuff was obviously interesting on a biological level: I want to know the answer to the mystery! The more mysterious, the more I want to know the answer. And the regional ideation with the various Columbian drug cartels or anti-Castro Cubans or the corrupt cops / politicians… It’s all just fun to watch, especially if you’re from Miami. Like bubblegum.
I stand by my original assessment that the show would’ve been far more addicting if the writers had extended the life of the first drug king-pin, Calderone. His story is tied to the motivational drama of Rico Tubbs – Calderone murdered his brother in New York City, thus kickstarting the entire show.
Instead of killing Calderone by the 5th episode of the 1st season, they should’ve made Calderone an almost omnipotent drug kingpin. His power is profound & supreme. He exists only in shadows.
And so the capturing of Calderone would’ve become the specter that ties the entire series together. This is the season finale everybody tunes in to see (Think: “Lost“).
Anyway, they didn’t do that & the show quickly develops into a psuedo-CSI with a “monster-of-the-week” feel; sometimes introducing random-ass female love-interests for both Sonny & Rico. It’s all kind of blah but you stick around waiting for that new awesome 80s tune or that one unexpectedly good episode of that surprise cameo appearance by Bruce Willis or Julia Roberts.
Not enough Calderone? They took on Calderone and his brother and his cousin. And Tubbs fell in love with Calderone’s sister and they had a child, but of course they both died.
The double agent aspect of the show elevates it to something special. It reminds me of Scorsese’s “The Departed” & Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” There’s something spectacular in seeing people transform by putting on masks to exist in separate worlds. Having to live two realities is extremely archetypal, and very cinematic.
The undercover theme is what made the show consistently interesting for me.
As far as acting, the real stand outs are Edward James Olmos and Martin Ferrero, with Don Johnson representing the blank every-man like a Warhol silkscreen: even his name is a blank canvas for projection… Don Johnson. It might as well be Al Whiteman.
Yet after a while, Don Johnson becomes quite identifiable as the ideal of a Warrior spirit: the kind of person you want to visualize weekly being in your world, because of this-quality or that-quality.
And as for his partner, played by Philip Michael Thomas, he is the quintessential balancing-force of this Warrior energy… with perhaps more of a Lover archetype activated & mixed-in, as he’s usually depicted rocked by his erotic emotions. Johnson is shown this way as well, but his character seems to develop an awareness overtime to consolidate these feelings in exchange for heightening his job performance… like a pure Warrior. Nothing stands out about Philip Michael Thomas’s character, and yet couldn’t imagine this particular show without him. He’s like the ground-rock that keeps the animality of Sonny Crockett contained.
Finally, the music in the show is great. There’s some classic music-movie moments, running all throughout the show, to the very end of the season finale. The resurrection of good obscure music (even if it was popular in its day) by contextualizing the sounds to new images, is just something I adore about cinema. It gets me high.
Everyone has an opinion of the best episodes …
“Miami Vice” clearly is of the ’80s, which is why it was a stupid idea to make a movie. (I will not dignify that idea by watching said movie.) I wonder, though, if a Vice-style show featuring police chasing around all matter of human depravity could be done in a different locale — say, Las Vegas. (Not like the original “CSI” did.)
Dear grads, lockdown class of 2020: Switch off “Animal Crossing,” wrap up that episode of “The Masked Singer,” pause practicing your TikTok “Renegade” dance, finish ironically chugging your Corona beer, and listen up—Karens, Beckys and Chads, too.
Yes, someone owes you an apology. You’re heading into the worst job market, competing with 33 million recently laid-off plus furloughed employees. I told you to take that antifungals course. To paraphrase the philosopher Bluto, 3¾ years of college down the drain. All this from a coronavirus 22-year-olds have a statistically insignificant chance of dying from. You will forever be Generation C. All of Gen X through Z’s FOMO—fear of missing out—has morphed into FOGO, fear of going out.
You got cheated out of a graduation ceremony, but don’t despair: Facebook to the rescue. This Friday it’s hosting #Graduation2020. Woo-hoo! And professors be damned—“words of wisdom” will come from Oprah, Awkwafina, Jennifer Garner, Lil Nas X and Simone Biles, with special musical guest Miley Cyrus. But, get this, only two of those six graduated from college and they are all incredibly successful. I think this is Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg rubbing it in.
They may not be sages, but neither are the people you trusted who got you to blow through your parents’ savings. Especially since you finished classes via videoconference—remember, you can’t Zoom a zoomer because a zoomer can’t be zoomed (ask your dad). The only good news is that you won’t have bad dreams like the rest of us about missing class or that last test. You likely passed automatically.
You were told to go to college, study hard and you’ll get a good job. But that model has been broken for a while. Instead you got cancel culture, pronoun police, plus diversity and inclusion—of everything but sound ideas, which need to be free to mingle and test-drive. You’ve been run down, you’ve been lied to. You ended up with someone else’s agenda.
“You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view. . . . The truth is often what we make of it; you heard what you wanted to hear, believed what you wanted to believe.” Sound familiar? For 20 points, who said it? Socrates? Kant? Hume? Rousseau?
These aren’t the ideas you’re looking for. The continued lockdowns are proof that those we trust, politicians and omniscient public-health officers, flunked economics. You probably took an Econ 101 course filled with tired Keynesian dogma. Or a comparative-lit class that ignored the Western canon. Or consumed a culty climate catechism.
You might even have trusted to expect a sustainable, intersectional, collectivist utopianism paying you to sit at home collecting Universal Basic Yang Bucks. Well, you’re sitting at home all right—unemployed and maybe unemployable. If you’re floundering, don’t expect anyone to admit, “You messed up, you trusted us.”
But it’s not too late. All of a sudden, everything is up for grabs. Education. Health care. Travel. Energy. Commercial real estate. Government. Transportation. Missing meat! Most of these are crony industries being destroyed before our eyes. It’s time to trust progress, price signals and perpetual change. Are you ready?
You’ll have to stay focused, because the indoctrination will continue even after graduation. When you hear about stakeholder capitalism, living wages, network neutrality, income equality, election meddling or gig workers as employees, it’s often a front for someone else’s agenda. Movies are infused with manipulative messages. Many articles on technology and Silicon Valley shoehorn in the obligatory “you didn’t build that” paragraph—it was government-funded research. That’s like saying Mark Zuckerberg didn’t build Facebook because he learned fractions at a public school in fourth grade. Again, other people’s big government agenda. Trust yourself to build the future while others wait for government help.
The Showtime series “Billions,” a comic-book rendition of Wall Street, has the tag line “Trust No One”—a bit much. My advice? Take it all in and then make up your own mind. Read voraciously and watch studiously, but always with a skeptical eye. And don’t fall for windbags at cocktail parties or protest marches. Trust your own judgment.
There are really only a few things you can trust. Trust data: the sum of available information, the more the better. Trust markets: the sum of price signals and what everyone thinks that’s hard to distort. And finally, trust your gut: the sum of your experiences. Let’s face it, that’s why you went to college, to hear new things, learn new perspectives, and share ideas with new people. Trust me: Use all of that and you’ll be successful. And the “truth is what you make of it” quote? Obi-Wan Kenobi said it a long time ago. He didn’t graduate college either.
In a way, American culture has nationalized a perspective that was popularized during the Obama administration and one that I hated to no end.
If you think back to those thrilling days of yesteryear (when we were introduced to “funemployment” and a dystopian “new normal”), almost everything that happened to Obama was “unexpected” or “unique” because, as we were told by the media had never happened to any other president and that was why we should simultaneously cut Obama some slack and be thankful we had such a uniquely qualified man who was better than us in every way to fail at handling it.
That perspective permeated the Obama years and continues today as the media looks back in wistful and fawning nostalgia to the Age of Obama.
But it was stupid. It was the combination of contemporary arrogance with a total rejection of history (it wasn’t that people didn’t know history, they just chose to ignore it) because in every case, similar things HAD happened to prior presidents – and often just a few years back in the Bush administration.
For some reason, some Americans have come to believe that whatever happens to us is the worst ever in history, it’s never happened before, we are uniquely damaged by those event and America just sucks.
That’s just moronic. It seems to me that there are those who work hard to make the issues we face SEEM worse because we want to be special and believe that somehow we are hurt more than any other population at any other time in history.
That’s just total crap. It’s like the college campus snowflake culture has blanketed America.
I’ve written before that we are undeniably the healthiest, most prosperous, most free and most mobile world that has ever existed (and those things are distributed more widely than ever before) and as such we are the best equipped population in the history of the world to understand, avoid and manage disasters of Malthusian proportions.
There has never been a better time to be alive and to be in America.
I once wrote and editorial titled “Consumers of Unhapiness” where I proposed that:
“The perpetually aggrieved are essentially consumers of unhappiness – it is as essential to them as food, clothing and shelter are to the rest of us. I was taught that the world was filled with beauty and it is natural to seek good feeling and pleasure – not necessarily to be hedonistic, but to be happy. Even the Declaration of Independence lists the “Pursuit of Happiness” right up there with life and liberty and yet these snowflakes pursue unhappiness. They have created this Hobbesian universe where pain, oppression and discord rule the day – but isn’t this what progressivism teaches? That there is only envy, rich people are only rich because they are stealing from the poor, earth’s climate is doomed due to capitalists willing allow factories to belch smoke into the air and deadly chemicals into the rivers for nothing other than naked profit and everybody hates everybody else?
There does seem to be a proclivity for certain people to seek out pleasure through negative experiences.”
America’s true uniqueness rests in our ability to overcome obstacles.
America needs to buckle our chinstraps and get on with it.
The phrase “to jump the shark” at first referenced the point at which a television program started to lose its moorings, and its audience. Specifically, it referred to the episode of Happy Days (1974-84, ABC) when “the Fonz” (played by Henry Winkler, now better known for his role as an acting teacher on HBO’s Barry) jumped over a shark tank on water skis. Ratings for the show did stay up after the episode because there were only 3 or 4 channels available back then. Many fans, including this then eight-year-old, however, became mere viewers after that episode.
Today, though, the phrase has expanded to include any turning point eventually ending in disaster.
Lots of folks, from politicians to used car salesmen, are trying to calm fears associated with the COVID-19 pandemic by harkening back to America’s glorious past. “We” can get through this, they say, because “we” successfully traversed worse travails. The problem with that analysis is the “we” has changed. Yes, America suffered invasion and the destruction of the national capital in 1814, a long, bloody Civil War, and so forth. But the Americans who preserved or prevailed then are all long gone, as are many of the nation’s most important institutions.
Yes, some people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II are still alive but they are hardly the same people they once were. And right now they should all be indoors wearing gloves and N95s, or those gas masks that we all bought after 9-11, a terrorist attack that most of those alive today survived. But did we really do a good job responding to 9-11? We lost a lot of civil liberties and treasure fighting unnecessary wars and still suffer through ridiculous rituals at airports that protect no one.
America’s currency and debt are in a similar position to post-shark Happy Days. Nobody really likes it anymore but decent alternatives hardly abound. Solid currencies like the Swiss franc are too small, leaving only the currencies of a deeply divided Europe or authoritarian China as serious competitors.
The level of the national debt in absolute, per capita, and percentage of GDP terms, which can be tracked here, frightens many. In round figures, the national debt is $24 trillion, or $72,000 per person (man, woman, child) or $192,000 per taxpayer. That is 110 percent of GDP, the highest since the World War II era. And that is just the money borrowed to fund operations. Other liabilities, like Social Security and Medicare, are estimated at $77 trillion.
But the real problem is the loss of what Bill White called America’s Fiscal Constitution, a set of borrowing and budget rules first developed by Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Treasury Secretary. The idea was that the federal government should keep a lot of “dry powder” so that it could borrow to fight wars, purchase territory, and respond to shocks. To do that, it had to run budget surpluses when peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice, and hence prosperity, prevailed. But basically since World War II, America has remained at war, some shooting, some cold, some necessary, but many, like the “wars” on drugs and poverty, concocted and counterproductive. Chronic deficits resulted.
Instead of imbibing the lessons of Richard Salsman’s The Political Economy of Public Debt, America’s policymakers and pundits ignore the national debt, or dismiss it with facile, and long since exploded, myths like “we owe it to ourselves” or “we can’t default on it because we can always print money to pay it.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many held that America might muddle along for decades more, unloved but the only serious TV show left on air. But the only thing more disappointing than the irrational response of many American governments to the pandemic has been the way that Americans have acquiesced to the suspension of their civil and economic liberties on very flimsy grounds.
At 40:30 of this video, leading epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski puts it clearly: “I think, people in the United States … are more docile than they should be. People should talk with their politicians and ask them to explain” the rationale for business shutdowns, shelter-in-place orders, and other medieval responses to what he, and many other epidemiologists not on the government payroll, believe is just another annual “pandemic” that kills those with weak immune systems. The government’s response is actually making matters worse by slowing herd immunity.
As I recently argued elsewhere, America’s educational system has not prepared us for the government power grab because it does not create enough Emersonian independent thinkers or, frankly, even adult thinkers. Due to the extreme Left bias of higher education, many of America’s college graduates remain intellectually infantilized to the point that they can do little more than Tweet ignorant hate at any idea that does not accord with Progressive mantras.
While some older Democrats, like the aforementioned Bill White, and Peter Schuck, author of Why Government Fails So Often, are rational beings worthy of the attention and respect of all thinking beings, many young progressives appear completely rigid between the ears. They want less economic activity to “save the planet” but cannot cheer death or the pain that lockdowns inflict upon the poor. While fewer miles traveled by automobile must warm their hearts by presumably cooling the planet, the thought of all the extra hot water needed to wash hands a dozen times a day must sting a bit, along with the fact that plastic straws and grocery bags are far safer during pandemics than purportedly “green” alternatives.
Strangest of all have been progressive calls for their archenemy, President Trump, to behave in a more authoritarian manner! The statist assumption that “only government can save us” is so deeply ingrained on the Left and Right that rational calls to vitiate the economic crisis with voluntarism have not gained traction.
And don’t even get me started on the Right’s economic nationalism. Pure lunacy, like calls for AUTARKY (no international flows, like pre-Perry Japan!), now attracts serious attention. And why not? Didn’t we all “learn” in college that some French and German philosophers were right about there being no truth, just power and rhetoric? Strangely, though, the descendants of the apostles of postmodernism have no trouble seeing the truth in destroying the economic lives of most Americans because some unrealistic models claimed between 10,000 and 100 million people would otherwise die.
Is America about to jump the shark? Maybe it already has. Or maybe, unlike the Fonz, it won’t even clear the tank, the victim of the weight of its own inane policies. All that is clear is that somebody is going to have to pay for this fiasco, and that somebody is “us.”
Inequality is the price we pay for civilization. Property rights, inheritance customs and unequal gains from technological innovation have long divided us into haves and have-nots. Because stability favors such disparities, it usually took powerful shocks to flatten them. The collapse of states wiped out elites. The World Wars slashed returns on capital and imposed heavy-handed regulation and confiscatory taxation. Communist regimes equalized by force and fiat.
The greatest plagues also turned into levelers, by killing so many that labor became dear and land cheap. For a while, the rich became less rich and the poor less poor: Europe after the Black Death is the best-known example. Catastrophic pandemics joined systemic collapse, total war and transformative revolution — the four great horsemen of apocalyptic leveling.
Will the coronavirus crisis be such a leveler? It won’t act as a Malthusian check: mortality will mercifully be far too low to drive up wages. But progressives will seize on this crisis to push for redistributive reform, perhaps all the way to a Green New Deal. Failing that, misery and discontent might foment enough unrest to upend the status quo.
But not quite yet. Four great stabilizers stand in the way of democratic socialism or social collapse.
The most basic one is affluence: no society with a per capita GDP of more than a few thousand dollars has ever descended into breakdown or civil war. At some point, it seems, even the dispossessed have too much to lose, and well-endowed authorities are hard to dislodge.
The social safety net comes a close second. A century ago, shaken by the mobilizations and mutinies of World War One and the sudden threat of Bolshevism, European states ramped up investment in welfare schemes. America soon followed suit in order to survive the Great Depression. Revolution dropped off the menu. It turns out that welfare schemes don’t need to be Scandinavian-sized to keep the radicals at bay.
The torrent of seemingly free money created by central banks adds a third great stabilizer. By promising to bail out businesses and keep the unemployed afloat without reviving inflation, aggressive quantitative easing takes the shine off calls for punitive wealth taxes to foot the bill. This particular genie would seem hard to put back into the bottle: the Great Recession taught policymakers what was possible and at what low cost, just as the Great Depression had taught them what to avoid. We are now able to choose which bits of history to repeat.
Finally, science will act as a conservative force. This might seem odd, given our inclination to view it as a relentless driver of open-ended change. Yet technology is already widening existing inequalities, by separating the work-from-home crowd from exposed essential workers, and remotely taught students with reliable internet access from those without.
What is more, science has the potential to bail out the plutocracy even more reliably than any government or central bank could hope to do. The sooner labs and Big Pharma deliver effective treatments and vaccines, the sooner we can revert to some version of business as usual — with all the entrenched inequalities it entails. The odds are good. The SARS-CoV-2 genome was sequenced and made available just a month after the first reported cases in Wuhan. More than 1,000 drug trials are already underway. Nothing like this would have been possible even a decade ago.
This is not a coincidence. The great stabilizers have been creeping up on the great levelers. When pre-modern states fell, their elites were doomed. The United States is infinitely more resilient, and even if it wasn’t its richest would have other places to go. In the West, plausible revolutionary movements have gone the way of the dodo; and even if they hadn’t they would be blunted by mass affluence.
Nor are we in any meaningful way united against a shared threat. Notwithstanding the current surge in martial rhetoric — with Donald Trump posing as a ‘wartime president’ — our lived experiences are exactly the opposite of those fostered by total war. We are asked to stay home, not to venture out; we work less, not more; we are distancing, not thrown together in fox holes or armaments factories. The solidarity that shaped the Greatest Generation will remain a distant memory. And unlike in the aftermath of much more lethal pandemics, labor will be cheap: 30 million unemployment benefit claims will make sure of that. The four horsemen of leveling are set to continue their deep slumber.
In the past, the rich weathered a series of storms. The War of Independence was hard on wealthy loyalists. Slaveowners’ fortunes evaporated during the Civil War. The Great Depression delivered a double blow, first by wiping out investments and then through the ascent of unions and high taxes during the New Deal. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, capitalists were trapped, compelled to submit to unprecedented levels of regulation and taxation. Decades of relative equality followed.
Much has changed since. Deregulation, tax reform, financialization, globalization and automation have created potent means of both creating and concentrating wealth. As a result, the Great Recession failed to leave a lasting mark on the One Percent, and inequality stubbornly clung to the heights it had scaled. By acting in concert, the four great stabilizers promise more of the same.
The current crisis would have to spiral out of control to sap their strength — if, say the virus somehow foiled the efforts of the scientific community, or the economy slid into a drawn-out depression. If history is any guide, it would take a worst-case scenario for COVID-19 to bring about genuine leveling.
This COVID-19 pandemic response is what happens when progressive policies collide with natural law, the natural law being that viruses exist, they mutate and they infect humans — all the time, every day.
“Stay at home” policies aren’t a medical procedure, they are behavioral controls that delay the inevitable — unless and until medical science catches up to the virus.
Think about this — these policies offer Americans a dichotomy — allegedly designed to quell fear while also inciting it. For a majority of Americans, these policies convert rational, reasonable fear into irrational and unreasonable fear … and do not dismiss that there are people who hold totally reasonable fears about contracting COVID-19 due to their own personal risk assessments. I do not deny that.
But it sure seems the policies to which we have been subjected have been based on many contradictions.
I’ve said it many times and am seeing it play out every day — reasonable fear plus bad logic equals crippling unease but starting from a basis of unreasonable, irrational fear plus bad logic equals disaster.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 