CNN Malik Morris Takes Calls
From the transcript of
"Rappin' with the Dove"
Caller: Dove, how come you ain't gone to Africa?
Dove: I did go to Africa, twenty months ago. To Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and South Africa. But language problems, and in many places, primitive transportation and communication, limit the effectiveness of personal tours there. Too few people heard me, and still fewer understood me. So we made free videos tailored for Africashot them in Kenyawith written translations and subtitles in all the major African languages.
Caller: My question's for Dove too. Dove, what you got to say about government and taxes?
Dove: Taxes are the way the broad public buys certain things you can't buy in stores. Things considered necessities: streets, police protection, schools, public assistancethings like that. Government's job is to arrange supply and delivery.
In the process, government operates about as well, overall, as most big business does. Given the missions assigned them, they're about as efficient or inefficient. And generally as honest; often more. And like businesses, some governments are better than others.
Without government, the more aggressive, ruthless, and power-hungry among us would fight to rule. The disorder, destruction and suffering would make today seem like paradise. If we were very lucky, the warlord that won would try to rule well. But the problems of keeping power in a world like that would still result in oppression way beyond anything this country knows.
I realize that sometimes minorities find the police disinterested in their protectionand may find it hard to accept the fact that oppression could be much worse than what they're already familiar with. But imperfect as it is, our democratic systemdemocratic with a small dour democratic system and its notably imperfect laws give us substantial protection. They also limit and channel the energies and efforts of those aggressive people who make up so many of our businessfolk and politicians. The ballot lets us vote on who governs, and helps channel some public energies and resources to aid the poor, the oppressed, and the disabled.
Our government is flawedbecause we the people are flawed. The real way to improve government is to improve ourselves.
Malik: You talk about police protection. A lot of people our color need protection from the police.
Dove: A hundred years ago, industrialists hired private police, called goons, and arranged with public police forces, to put down labor strikes, and prevent workers from organizing. Their brutality was far worse than that of modern police forces, and often with less provocation. Read the history of the labor movement. Your local librarian can help you get started.
The Japanese cherry trees had bloomed and blown before the "marchers" began arriving, marching almost entirely on wheels. In a single day, West Potomac Park, the Mallalmost all the grassy areas between Constitution and Independence Avenueshad filled with tents, tepees, and pickups with camper shells. The pickups had driven over curbs and across lawns, but security had orders to overlook that. Latecomers squatted on the Polo Grounds, Capitol Plaza, Franklin Square . . . More than a few were strolling near the White House and the Capitol Building, or snacking and smoking in the sun on the broad steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Marines had kept them away from the fences around Lafayette Park and the Ellipse, and out of government office buildings.
The marchers came from fifty-one states, and many interest groups and constituencies. There were thousands upon thousands of the unemployed, thousands of veterans, of mortgage defaulters, of the elderly, the disabled; single mothers with their children . . . and of course the agitators, who'd come to foment troublepreferably violence.
People arrived in cars, trucks, and old buses. They growled up on motorcycles. Most arrived unkempt, after a day or two or three of riding, and taking turns driving and sleeping. Of those few who might have arrived nicely-dressedwho'd driven late model cars, and slept in motels en routemost parked outside the beltway and rode the tube in. It wasn't politic to drive up in a late-model SUV or Audi.
Their timing was no accident: The mid-April weather had determined the when, while the Web and the broadcast media had wittingly and unwittingly choreographed their arrivals.
The government, of course, had known they were coming, and when the vanguards entered the city, the chemical toilets, trash containers, hoses and hydrants had already been set up. As had units of marines and infantry well briefed and drilled on crowd management.
Surprisingly, at the start there were no serious disorders. Among the marchers, responsible leaders appeared or arose, notably among the military veterans. Early efforts by agitators to mount strike forces were squelched before the troops needed to do anything.
Television teams, of course, were everywhere. Demonstrators with loud-hailers orated and ranted, rousing their listeners to chant with them: "Bring out Big Mama!" The tens of thousands of voices carried well in the bright spring day.
Senators, congressmen, chiefs of bureaus, assistant cabinet secretaries arrived from various government buildings, accompanied by sound trucks, or by aides carrying loud-hailers. They invited questions, explained their positions, spoke sympathetically, and in general tried to distract the marchers from actually marching.
Thousands did march, of course, chanting, waving placards and American flags, but not in the single great mass the organizers had in mind. This was not a youth movement with a common passion, focused on a common theme, and there were few onlookers to impress. Instead there were several separate marches; labor's was the largest, and veterans' next.
In early afternoon on the second day, clouds began moving in, and some time later, distant thunder rumbled. The crowd grew restless. About 3 p.m. the temperature plummeted, and the breeze picked up. Minutes later the storm hit, large hard drops of icy rain that quickly became a deluge, accompanied by the first strokes of nearby lightning, and great bangs of thunder.
The crowd broke for cover. They crammed into tents, crowded the Lincoln Memorial, packed the Sylvan Theater, and pushed dripping past entry guards into the museums along Madison and Jefferson Drives. In the first mad rush, some had fallen and been trampled. Almost all were soaked. The troops hadn't been drilled for a rainstorm, but their officers had the good sense to let the crowd run.
In twenty minutes the downpour was over, replaced by lighter rain, steady and cold. When the troops tried to steer people back to their bivouacs, some resisted. In the confusion, some agitators avoided the troops, moving by groups into side streets, carrying with them other able-bodied people. They began smashing windows, stabbing tires. Cars were overturned and set on fire. A gas tank exploded in a fireball. Sirens ululated through the streets, and some who realized now what they were getting into, headed back for the bivouacs. Someone produced Molotov cocktails, which were thrown at police cars and through shop windows.
The rioting, however, did not become widespread. The violence was localized, involving perhaps two hundred vandals, but it triggered something else. Local gangs moved in to loot, and set their own fires.
When the troops had gotten most of the marchers corralled on the vast lawns again, the camps were a shambles. Tents had been knocked down by people trying to crowd into them, out of the rain. In the confusion, agitators had slashed and stabbed the waterhoses, producing geysers, cutting pressure, and adding to the storm floods that formed ponds on the lawns, and flowed into tents. Chemical toilets had been sabotaged, some by pocket bombs. Their contents leaked and stank.
Many of the marchers, disgusted, began to lug their belongings back to their vehicles, preparing to leave.
On the first day, the arrival day, Florence Metzger had several times stood at a White House window and looked outout across the Rose Garden and South Lawn, and over the Ellipse, at the growing tent camp in the park. Something like this was almost inevitable, she told herself. She had no doubt the troops would handle the situation properly, and probably no serious harm would come of it. But it was a damned nuisance, and all it would accomplish was distraction from the tasks at handhers and everyone else's.
Showers had been forecast for the evening of the second day. Perhaps, she thought, rain will shrink and shorten the demonstrations.
On the second morning, the marchers were still arriving, but at nothing like the rate of the day before. Near noon the Weather Service warned of a squall line approaching, but no one seemed to realize what it might mean; certainly no one in the White House. When the storm hit, the President was in the Oval Office, having just finished talking on the phone with the secretary of commerce. Hearing the first great thunderclap, she hurried upstairs to the living quarters to watch from a window. The violence of the initial downpour hid the stampede from her, but when the rain thinned a little, she could see well enough to recognize the potential for serious problems.
When reports of vandalism and looting began coming in, she turned grim, and called in a standby marine battalion. They would, she was assured, be on site within an hour.
Before nightfall, gangs of looters ranged in earnest and in force, and she ordered the marines and rangers to clear the streets of them. What they succeeded in doing was dispersing the rioters into peripheral neighborhoods, where they filtered among buildings in clusters too small for choppers to keep track of. There was sporadic gunfire, some by automatic weapons. Around 1 a.m., eight mortar rounds landed in bivouac areas. Remarkably they didn't kill anyone, but military ambulances hauled away more than fifty wounded.
It was the veterans who prevented panic, grizzled old men from the Vietnam War, middle-aged vets of Desert Storm and the Balkans, and younger vets who'd served during the Troubles. They surprised both themselves and the troops on duty.
In the morning, Florence Metzger addressed the nation on television, reading statistics from sheets, but mostly speaking off the cuff. She'd scared the hell out of her staff with her determination to do it that way, and after she'd finished, she was sure she'd blown it. She couldn't remember anything she'd said, and afterward feared to watch and hear it on the cubethough she did of course, when at last she found time.
But everyone around her, journalists and staff, told her it was as good as any speech she'd made. Not polished, but rational and compelling. She shouldn't have been surprised. She'd lived with the problems since before her election, been crammed with information, briefed daily by experts, semi-experts, and quasi-experts.
She'd begun with numbersthe known casualties and arrests, mostly of rioters, looters, and vandals. Then she went on to the Depression, its roots, its consequences, and what needed to be done by the government, the public, business . . .
The rest of the day and the evening were spent conferring with joint operations command, the mayor and police commissioner of D.C., the FBI, and various cabinet members, who were told to unlimber emergency plans for serious work projects. And she spoke with the heads of various interest groups, who promised to call back as many as they could of their marchers.
She wasn't sure what she'd accomplished with all that, but hopefully something. Better to charge into it, she told herself, than wring my hands.
At 2:30 a.m. she finally lay back in her Flex-Bed with half a glass of brandy, and began watching True Grit. Before 3 o'clock she was asleep.