The Eternal Exculpation Effort

     I am frequently bemused by the extent to which the bien-pensants will go in their determination to avert their eyes – and ours – from verifiable facts. Some of them seem sincerely to believe that their wishes can remake reality. Others, of course, are simply practicing the tactics of obfuscation and deflection that have served them well in the past. In either case, the facts are as they are.

     One of those facts is that people in business seek profits, not losses. While they may do incidental charity – donations and such – that is not their raison d’etre. If they can’t make a profit in some district, they won’t operate there. They won’t offer their products and services there. They’ll go to where there are profits to be had.

     Now, one of the depressing yet undeniable facts of our time is that there’s a strong correlation between regional demographics and the profit potentials of retail businesses. A crime-ridden district will have no appeal to retailers, for theft, vandalism, and regional violence will bring them losses, not profits. And not to put too fine a point on it, the demographic common among such districts is a high proportion of Negroes.

     But the bien-pensants cannot abide the implication that Negroes and the crime rates associated with them are the reason for their own troubles. They must find another plausible cause. Capitalism being perfused by “systemic racism,” perhaps? No doubt someone has advanced that thesis, even if it would reduce to the absurd assertion that a dollar bill in a black hand is worth less than the same bill in a white hand. As that’s implausible in the extreme, the hunt is on for another explanation.

     And here it is:

     There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth: The roads themselves are racist! Who knew that asphalt and concrete could harbor racial attitudes? But the Transportation Secretary has said it, and on network television at that.

     It would be naive to expect that a Usurper Cabinet member would admit to a demographic fact as unpleasant as the correlation between Negroes and crime. The Democrats need the Negro vote to win elections. But the true elephant in the room is crime. Has anyone asked him to explain why businesses looted and torched in the urban riots of the past two years are not reopening? To make the causal vector clearer, has anyone asked him for his explanation of why retailers are fleeing San Francisco? In that city, Negroes are a relatively small minority, only about 6% of the population as of the 2010 census…but the city’s hard-Left district attorney, Chesa Boudin, has refused to prosecute crimes of theft, which have consequently exploded.

     If crime rates are high in heavily black districts, the absence of businesses from such districts requires no other explanation, certainly not “racist roads.” But no Democrat would ever admit that.

     The Negro has long been a Leftist mascot. He and the Hispanic immigrant are vital to the Democrats’ coalition strategy. The party promises to direct benefits toward members of the coalition in exchange for their electoral loyalty. But the damage done to the Negro and the Hispanic by Leftist politics has become so severe, and so obvious, that those members have begun to defect from the Democrats’ coalition. And of course, the Democrats, frantic that they might lose that voting bloc, seek to pander them securely back into the fold.

     So the roads themselves must be racist. Their placement and design intentionally discourage, if not outright forbid, the emergence of businesses in heavily black districts. It’s baked into the asphalt and the concrete! The poor downtrodden Negro must not be blamed for his state, for he can do nothing constructive about it. Quod erat demonstrandum, as we mathematicians and Latin scholars like to say.

     When your premises are wrong, no amount of logic can save you. But that’s a point of interest only to those who believe that one’s reasoning should be grounded in the facts.

     It’s time for a nationwide belly laugh at this lunacy, as raucous and derisive as our throats can achieve. Yet even that might not get the Democrats to take stock of themselves. It might awaken a few more minds to the ludicrousness of the Left’s polemics and the desperation of its panderings, but that’s about all we can expect until the Usurpers are ejected from the corridors of power.