From Mumia to Christie, unfamiliarity breeds un-contempt

Here we go again: Another American college has decided that -- in a world which only has 6 billion people, give or take a few hundred million -- no one would be better to impart wisdom to graduating seniors than a man who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer after he was found on the sidewalk, wounded from a shootout and holding the smoking gun that shot Officer Daniel Faulkner.

It's sad, and sadly repetitive, to read that students at Goddard College in Vermont chose that cop killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal, to deliver a commencement speech. But it's not really surprising. Throughout this 33-year saga, one thing as remained constant: The further removed that you are from the streets of Center City -- both physically and emotionally -- the more likely that you will see Abu-Jamal as a hero for oppressed people, and the less interest you will have in the facts of the case. Near Paris, they name streets for this guy. But most of us in Philly know what really happened here on Dec. 9, 1981.

I believe I've mentioned this before, but I'd never heard of the Mumia case until the early 1990s, when I still worked in New York City and read in the Village Voice about an NYC protest by people proclaiming his innocence. I was surprised -- at the point I'd been reading the Daily News or Inquirer fairly regularly for several years but had not heard of this matter. When I started working here in 1995 (!), I asked my new co-workers about the case and read some of the clips. I was shocked to learn how little reasonable doubt about Abu-Jamal's guilt existed -- among either the local media, or during the minimal defense he mounted in his 1982 trial.

But we live in a world where style trumps truth. People in France and Germany and on far-flung college campuses have heard that the American justice discriminates against people of color (which of course it does...just not in every case, and not in this one) and when an attractive and well-spoken dread-locked man steps forward as the spokesman for that cause, they want so very much to believe. But it happens all the time. Consider a very different iconic figure from our neck of the woods...Chris Christie.

I know, I know....it might sound outrageously unfair, on one level, to mention a convicted cop-killer in the same breath as a governor whose alleged sins are more on the order of bullying and the way he throws his political weight around. I'm not comparing Abu-Jamal or his loathsome deed to Christie, but I do think that each have a remarkable capacity to inspire a suspension of belief among large numbers of people. Just like Mumia, the New Jersey governor has a style that blinds people to what he's really done, and perhaps who he really is. And it only grows, the farther away you go from the Delaware Valley.

Citizens of New Jersey may be weary of Bridgegate, but they're more exhausted by the economic un-miracle of the Christie years, watching other states slowly recover while the Garden State remains stuck in the mud, somewhere in the swamps...Hop on a plane for a couple of hours, though, and Christie and his Soprano-State bravado is still box-office gold.

The other day, the Star-Ledger's Tom Moran had a piece that ripped this emperor's new clothes to shreds. He wrote of Christie's cross-country travels to boost GOP governors before fawning crowds, and the blatant hypocrisy of claims such as President Obama hasn't taken responsibility for the current crisis in Iraq (he has, however awkwardly). Wrote Moran:

 For the fun of it, let's measure Christie by his own standard. He has been dead wrong every year on the budget, predicting windfalls that turn out to be mirages. That's created giant shortfalls that have forced down the state's credit rating a record eight times on his watch.

So if Obama is some kind of dope for failing to foresee events halfway across the globe, then what does that make Christie for screwing things up right under his nose?

The piece concludes:

The crowd in Wisconsin knew nothing of Christie's hypocrisy. They heard a plain-spoken guy who tells it like it is.

The fact that Christie remains a contender in the presidential race is a chilling sign that glitter is more important than substance in American politics. He's drawing big crowds everywhere he goes.

Too bad they don't know him like we do.

Nope. A short time ago, Christie even told some GOP donors that Putin never would have moved on Ukraine if he were in the Oval Office -- as if nothing more than the governor's in-your-face style would intimidate a despot with a couple of thousand tanks at his disposal. A few actually did see through that, but too many voters eat it up. The style of the blunt-talking, truth-telling conservative politician is more powerful than the facts -- just like the case of the dread-locked revolutionary.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. After all, the truth about Christie's multiple failings as New Jersey's governor, just like the facts of how Officer Faulkner were murdered in cold blood, are widely available in a few seconds to anyone with a keyboard and an elementary knowledge of The Google Machine. But the reality is that in a world flooded with information, most of us are just looking for the driftwood of faith to cling onto, and the most misplaced faith only grows with distance. Just like Christie's favorite tunemeister one sang, "At the end of every hard earned day/people find some reason to believe."