I don’t know, Kevin Williamson, whether you can really say this with confidence:
Louis Farrakhan’s insistence that the Gulf War was the opening salvo in the Battle of Armageddon turned out to be slightly exaggerated.
For one thing, if you happen to be a citizen of Iraq or Syria, it’s a bit hard to know what might have gone worse. What surer sign of the apocalypse could there be than an actual apocalypse?
There are those of us who warned back in 1990 of the unpredictable quagmire that would result if we became the Bradley Fighting Vehicle-armed police force of the Middle East. Some of us feel justified in seeing the ensuing quarter century as one long continuum beginning with that fateful decision to look the other way when Saddam wanted to carve up Kuwait and then flipping out when he carved too much. If Poppy Bush hadn’t belatedly drawn a line in the sand, who knows? Maybe Scott Ritter never goes trolling for teen-flesh in a Burger King parking lot.
I can justifiably blame the decision to liberate Kuwait for almost everything, including that al-Qaeda thing that supposedly began to get organized a couple years previously.
In retrospect, an American president saying “This aggression will not stand” was one of the most unintentionally ironic things ever said. We’ve been stuck with aggression ever since.
But, really, if there is anything that Williamson truly misses in his assessment of N.W.A. and gangsta rap, it’s the hellscape that did emerge despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the containment of AIDS and the subsidence of the crack epidemic and the great reduction in violent crime.
According to Wikipedia, law enforcement shot and killed well over 600 people last year. And I wouldn’t call this “normal” exactly. They list one-tenth that number being killed by police in 2009, which happened to be the peak year of the Great Recession.
I don’t know why the police are out of control at the moment, but it’s one reason why the message that N.W.A. brought to the people in 1988 still seems hugely relevant today.
