Posted on 07/17/2015 1:25:42 PM PDT by lulu16
In a documentary brimming with sociopolitical messaging, this American Experience film goes back to the hot July night of 1977 that saw New York City suddenly go dark, then erupt in a widespread orgy of violence, looting and arson—the most extensive in East Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. The film diligently traces the cause of the blackout—a lightning strike in Westchester County, and a resulting chain reaction that ended with total power loss for almost all all of New York City. But it’s clear virtually from the outset of “Blackout” that the power that concerns the filmmakers doesn’t have much to do with electricity.
Soon—very soon—this becomes a tale of the city’s haves and the have-nots, of the difference in the ways they fared on this night. Those in poorer neighborhoods gather in the streets to escape their hot apartments—there is no air conditioning in the city. The privileged, dining at the dark Windows on the World restaurant, sit drinking champagne—a gift from the management. The film isn’t subtle—testaments to injustice abound. There are merry rooftop parties on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, scenes not quite as damning as those one percenters swilling champagne, but bad enough. In this script, the story of the night of July 13, 1977 was not the blackout and the ensuing criminality: It was about the plague of inequality and how it had at long last found expression.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
This was the 1970’s—a time, the film explains, of great tension in the city, thanks to high unemployment, budget cuts, a financial crisis. The creators of “Blackout” lose no opportunity to add to their extensive if occasionally strange list of the riots’ social causes. The city’s residents were unnerved, the film points out, by a disturbing increase in crime—a fact whose point, we can only presume, is that the fear about the crime rate helped impel citizens to go and commit criminal acts themselves. One of the more unforgettable factors cited as contributing to the night’s upheaval was, we learn, terror over a serial killer on the loose. This was, of course, the Son of Sam, fear of whom—if we’re to follow the film’s logic—also played a part in sending hordes of people into the darkened streets to loot stores.
continued;
The film’s energies are in any case devoted to another sort of explanation that should by now be familiar—the kind that continues, solemnly, to impart the message, held as religious faith, that inequality and injustice are the prime cause of the sort of behavior that took place in New York City during the blackout of 1977.
“Rape, murder, arson and rape.”
If the lights went out now, what would hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires do?
Interesting in one of the comments, a man recalls his working class neighborhood with two Catholic churches did not leap into depraved behavior.
You mentioned rape twice.
A ‘Blazing Saddles’ reference?
Well.... they could burn some money.
Just like in Ferguson, a reporter asked why he was looking a private little mom and pop store, his reply wearily, “I’m tired of the sh!t.”
It’s like a switch that goes off in their heads that they are blameless in their crimes.
Yes!
Entitlement attitude.
“Chewing gum in line, eh?”
As a NERC Certified Operator, I have heard the tape recording of the conversation that night.
The New Your Operator hesitated when he knew that he should shed some load to save the rest of his grid. It was very sad to hear the panic of his voice.
Now we are trained, load is just another tool that we can use to save the grid.
Bastards are going to be lined up to second guess us, it just comes with the job.
“Through the Vatican?”
Kinky!
I lived in an integrated neighborhood in Queens at the time. The male members of the Lebanese family who owned the local grocery showed up with lawn chairs and long rifles, listening to Middle Eastern music on their boom boxes and sipping iced tea, and the whirlwind passed them by, even though the Brothers h8d them worse than they h8d Jews.
Oh, bull. I was there that night and most neighborhoods were quiet. People got out to direct traffic. I was in my apartment on East 73rd St. (one of those box apartments that cost $300 a month. The Upper East side had tremendous amounts of tenement buildings - it was hardly champagne-swilling outside of Park Avenue.)
I was on the phone to my pal, Kimee, who lived in a walk-up on the Upper West Side. She wanted to go to sleep but a couple of gay guys (poor actors) were having a dance party in the stairwell. So we talked for awhile, yawned a few times and went to bed early.
To this day, I don’t remember what I did for dinner.
“Where’s the white women”?
Did the Vatican in its many mysterious and evil ways contribute to the blackout?
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