Cobb

Disenchantment with Obligatory Seriousness

I am rethinking my entire life as a writer. It is because I have come to understand too much of what I once knew nothing about, the Chatting Class. I just read the other day that British erudition is a condition of fear and that strikes me as exactly true. I once sense the fear of being a white boy named Smith with no chance of distinguishing myself except through actual accomplishment. Some days that is what I think of the Chinese. Except none of this is true. The meritocracy is on the margins and most people bullshit their ways through life, only occasionally rubbing up against the actual truth and then only fractionally marching in tune with it.

Not long ago, in fact at the beginning of this year, I came to the realization that there was nothing at all I wanted to tell the world. I have instead decided to talk in no way up or down to anyone. I will write as if I'm writing for myself and only say what I need to have said. Those who get it will get it. I don't expect that many followers anyhow. When I retire, I'll rethink the matter. Practically speaking it means I will shortly abandon Quora. I have had a good three year run with 1.2 million views. But I'm rather tired of being clever. Facebook. Well, I have actual friends there. As I tweet into the darkness, Facebook will be a mirror.

In the meantime I will be consuming a new set of classics, mostly film and literature and perhaps some poetry. Who knows? I might actually memorize some poetry. Go figure.

Bring Blogs Back

Everybody who thinks about it knows it to be true. Social media isn't working the way we thought it would. 

There are a lot of reasons. Some are simple and some are rather complex. But let's look at the simplest reason and to my mind, one of the most important. You don't own your own words. When you live on Facebook's property, you don't own your own words. They can be deleted by someone other than you. They can be banned by someone other than you. You can hardly even know what you said a year ago by searching for it. I don't mean to suggest that Facebook alone is capable of this, but it is the 900 pound gorilla. The same things are true of Twitter and the comments sections of hundreds of new media outlets. 

When it comes to participating in the debates that a free and open society require, these social media spaces do not facilitate. That is not why they exist. That is not their business model. They were not created to sustain collaborative thought, but to let everybody connect in social ways. They are not town halls so much as they are gas station bathrooms on the information superhighway. They serve everybody without much discrimination, but their facilities often stink. Sometimes you wonder who came in here to write what you see on the walls, and you cringe. No matter how many bots or attendants you apply to a roadside rest stop, it will never become a town hall. That's something you design from the ground up. Social media needs a redesign.

However, there was a moment of glory in the past in which the level of discourse broadly available to the internet public was better than it is now. That was the age of the blogosphere. As MySpace was dying and Google experimented with something called Orcut, which became very popular in Brazil, the American scene was beginning to get a taste of blogs and bloggers. It was a feast of alternative information written by individuals or edited contributions of blog leagues that set the American political world on fire. It was a place for writers, and it still is. 

As a veteran of early internet sites like The Well and Cafe Utne among others, I have been fortunate to have met some of the most exciting and informative writers anywhere. My history goes back to bitnet, Fido and Compuserv. Since there has been an online, I have been there. And so I have witnessed the temptations presented to bloggers to become more mainstream as previously paper only media publications moved online. Who would not, having become influential on their own, want to become even more influential as a syndicated columnist? And so many of the best bloggers moved on out of self-publication to sponsored work. I cannot say whether or not that affected the quality of their writing or if they have been edited into corners. But it did violate one of the key aspects of the blogosphere itself, which was full individual control. 

A blogger has many responsibilities aside from writing, one of which is to police their comment sections. One needs to decide whether or not to accept paid advertising. One has to decide which other blogs to link to using the novel idea of the trackback process. One has to periodically update the design, and of course one has to pay for their blog to be hosted. I've been paying 15 dollars a month for over 15 years. In 2007, there was a such thing as the Black Blogger of the Year Award dedicated to the late blogger Aaron Hawkins. I won that year owing to my extensive coverage of candidate Barack Obama and the insightful conversations I was able to host at my blog. These days I have about 900 friends on Facebook. Those days I had 1500 hits a day. The greatest responsibility to my mind was to foster the proper environment for conversations that would live on the blog. To welcome the right kind of interlocutors and to push trolls away, to steer debate towards productive an insightful conversation, to entertain tangents that are useful and yet keep the related ideas corralled. It was work. Creative, rewarding work. It required skin in the game, not some disingenuous promise to promote free speech contingent on the arbitrary goodwill of advertisers and marketing networks. 

Today I engage with many of the same writers I've known for 20 years online at Facebook. Many of us are getting tired and have enjoined a litany of complaint. Fake news, censorship, filter bubbles, defriending and the ever present trolling and flame wars are on our frustrated minds. But I think the most egregious problem in social media is its abbreviation.

I don't speak Emoji. And unlike the editors of The New York Post, I can't very often come up with a catchy headline to tweet out. I may be verbose even for an essayist, but the things I find of interest require more than two or three sentences to say. I think that is true of all of human affairs. People should not be forced into abbreviated descriptions of their ideas and their selves by the constraints of social media. I want to be responsible for the claims I make, so having them disappear after I post them serves no good purpose. Abbreviation of time is unacceptable. It's not as if the world doesn't have enough disk space in the cloud to handle all of our words, or even all of our digital video. So why should I have less than everything I want to say be referenceable in an opus of compositions over the years? Why should I not have every objection or agreement from everyone who wants to react to my compositions as well? I get that with my blog. I do not get that with Reddit or WhatsApp. The complexity of human affairs requires more space and time than social media adequately facilitates. It's no wonder that people are so frustrated.

When Google killed Google Reader, the use of RSS syndication of blogs and other online periodical publications fell to a variety of inferior tools. But now an outfit called Feedly handles it well. I still follow a selection of excellent writers in what remains of the blogosphere. Medium.com has also become a popular place for writers in all sorts of subjects. But the domination of social media over the average person's internet reading is beginning to grate on everyone's nerves. I hope to remind people that there are still cultured and informative places of respite from the oligopoly of the mainstream social media, and it is worthy and capable of supporting us all. 

I call on developers to revisit the innovations of the blogosphere and to move forward in their further development. I give props to Typepad and the other blog ecosystems for the steady platforms they have provided for years of reliable operation. I encourage writers new and old to get into blogging and recreate and renew what we know the medium of blogging can do to inform and delight. I call on devotees of the well crafted word and visual arts to put your best work forward. I call on editors in the mainstream to spend time outside of the world of compromise for wealthy producers and nurture and support organic writers in this decentralized medium. 

We must own our own words. We must resist censorship. We must facilitate real informative debate. We must not be policed by bots and algorithms. 

We have done better. We can do better again. Bring blogs back. 

 

 

Dodge City

Q: Has America already done the "What would it be like for everyone to be armed?" experiment? Wasn't that Dodge City in the late 1800's? What did we find out from that?

A:

Well, without going into the details of history of Dodge City there are a few things that are obvious.

1. It didn’t start a second civil war.
2. The nation survived and prospered.
3. Additional territories became states.
4. It didn’t terrorize people so badly that they couldn’t bear to watch a romanticized Hollywood version.
5. Even if you get the entire history of Dodge City wrong and misrepresent it today, it’s irrelevant to today’s politics.

So that’s my initial take. Let me give you an additional take based on my personal opinion and experience.

I have long been an advocate of a punch in the nose. I was a big brother in the neighborhood and I believed in a fair fight. So if two kids had exchanged fighting words, it was up to me and other big brothers to let a fair fight happen. This is generally known as chivalry, it is an etiquette between men that allows them to settle their differences with honorable combat.

Today in America, a business, or a school can be sued into bankruptcy over an insult. Here on Quora, thousands of people ask countless variations of the same ‘is this racist’ question seeking public affirmation of a principle that has nothing to do with them.

So I assert this. If men would fight with honor it would settle matters between them without the necessity for thousands of journalists and citizens get embroiled into a controversy. We have become a nation of busybodies thinking that we can insert our opinion and votes into every issue under the sun. None of it is our business. It is a complete and total waste. People cannot take a punch, shutup and say “I quit, you win.” Instead we try to march and get millions of other people invested in our business, with the hope that the ultimate government or social power will be on our side. So we are on the road to becoming dependent on everybody but ourselves to resolve our disputes. This is the way of children. I repeat, this is the way of children.

Would you lose a fistfight or lose a lawsuit? Think about the impact on society.

I’m not suggesting that every dispute can be solved on the field of honor, or that trial by combat is always appropriate. I’m saying that there is an entire class of disputes that could be, but are instead played out in the media and the ‘court of public opinion’ that weakens our society and absolves people of personal responsibility for their conduct so they can become celebrity victims. That cycle has nothing to do with courage, justice or any other virtue. We are a weaker society because of it.

Now swing back to guns.

Here in Quora, you have the good fortune to hear directly from a class of individuals who understand the honor of combat, whether in service to their communities or nation or in defense of their own personal dignity, property and life. You will find in them a comprehensive understanding of what is a fair fight under the rule of law and what rules of engagement are when the rule of law is lost. This is an education that our life experience has failed to teach many of us. I am fortunate to have learned this way of the world.

If you haven’t learned these levels of escalation, you most likely associate, like Hollywood films instruct, that the cleaning or racking the slide of a pistol is a sign of irrevocable deadly intent. All I can tell you is that it is nowhere near so simple. Just like cracking a book does not have the same impact on every individual, possessing a firearm does not either. A scholar can tell a scholar. A fighter can tell a fighter.

Whether or not people choose to acknowledge it, there is a sizeable fraction of this country that possesses the virtue of courage and the discipline to engage properly to insure justice and the wisdom to know how to escalate disputes under the rule of law. If these are all new phrases to you, then I suggest you find a way to educate yourself in such matters. Human disputes are inevitable. It’s not about the gun. It’s about the mind. Admit you’ve not thought about it.

 

JBP To The Rescue

Jordan B Peterson has been on my radar about six months. Now I'm reading his book. The first time I saw him was when I was regularly watching Joe Rogan's Experience program and he was on with the professor who was harangued out of Evergreen State College. I'm not sure if that was contemporary with the moment but it served as a good milestone. I have since backed off a little bit in pointing at SJWs but weighed in a little bit more about the failure of Humanities and the permissive society. But Peterson has evidently been knocking it out of the park for some time now, and he's really square in the middle of it. All this is to say that not since I read American Mythologies have I come across someone who gets something so profoundly right about where we are.

I hesitated about reading Peterson, not knowing what to expect. There's little to indicate that a clinical psychologist would have so much to say as Meg Meeker did for me years ago, but I was wrong about that. He has put things very well in perspective. In his discussion with Camille Paglia, I am reassured that there are some people outside of the hard sciences that actually know what they're talking about. It gives me a reason to go a bit further towards where I have just started to go which into art history and serious cinema. Right now all I have is a small collection of pictures in Pinterest called Strange Beauty. The food thing remains, but I may be able to back out of some of the sadder aspects of stoicism if I get enough beauty. Beauty is certainly what's missing. Inspiration from a literary source is very hard to come by, but let me not dwell on that. The discovery of Peterson is a turning point.

The African American Term

(from the archives July 2014)

Q: Is it offensive to refer to black people as "black" and/or "African American"? White people seem like they're walking on eggshells, and they say "African American" a lot (when people might be neither African nor American).

A: I'm actually surprised that nobody remembers how the change originally occurred. In the late 80s when professors like Skip Gates was making a big splash at Harvard and Toni Morrison was the toast of the planet, a monumental book was published called the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Anyone who was paying attention would know and recognize that a new generation of scholars were getting a foothold in the better class of universities around the country, and Black Studies Departments were in the intellectual conundrum of only having a couple decades of history to justify their existence. The newer, younger, smarter black scholars in English for example would be quick to point out to people who didn't get it, that authors like Frederick Douglass didn't call himself 'black' nor did Jean Toomer. The expanse of interest in the 'black experience' had to be put in a more appropriate context. So the academic world rightly adjusted its terminology. To talk about the corpus of literature, music, dance etc of blacks in America, you couldn't just overuse Black America - so the term African American was used as a blanket term which was more academically proper, demographically equivalent and politically neutral. Americans of African descent thus became this in the abstract for the purposes of more accuracy - you could then put slaves, ex-slaves, free persons of color, Coloreds, Negroes and Black Americans all in the larger category and use fewer asterisks, anachronisms and other such malaprops.

Around the same time, a charismatic dude named Molefi Asante wrote a 50 page book called 'Afrocentrism' which kicked off yet another chapter in the  African American history of mobility in identity. (See? I used it correctly there.) This could be thought of as a second, or third if you want to count Garvey, attempt at a Pan-African unity in identity. For a short time, I myself identified with an international jet-set of 'New World Africans' while living in Brooklyn partying with Spike and dating cute Francophone chicks from Senegal. I almost got into the kinte cloth business. But that was then.

I would gather that there are still a number of folks who are fascinated by the cultural dynamism of that international jet-set including the likes of Zadie Smith and Cornel West and all those who did Bring the Noise/Funk in those glorious early 90s, but Janet Jackson blew up and bifurcated the dreads from the crinkles and as far as I know, the twain never rejoined. By the time John Legend and Common went back to short hair, I think the whole Afrocentric thing was over, but I can't say with any accuracy because I went into the suburban daddy business.  Suffice it to say, the whole African angle lost currency, especially for those who don't even read 50 page books.

I think it came as some surprise to some that we went through a period of Bone Thugs & Harmony after all highbrow folks went through, which is part of the reason Lauren Hill was such an incredible surprise, but I digress with these cultural touchstones to point out that your basic 'black culture' goes through many shades and degrees within the spectrum of African American history. I have made my peace with the fact that it's under no direction or control but rather a manifestation of who's following whom, a very personal choice.

I can't account for why people focus on race, when culture is so much more nuanced and interesting, then again, the politics of race in America is pretty much the same stagnant story, and like I said, a lot of people can't be bothered to read.

Overheard in 2060

Dapla: Hey Farn, what are you doing? You left your status off.

Farn: Oh. I'm doing homework. American Studies. Click this.

Dapla: Hold on, my great uncle just deplaned I have to send him a car.

Farn: What? Doesn't he have..

Dapla: You know Uncle Chris..

Farn: Funny you should mention. My prezo is on pre-location customs in the US. It's crazy what they used to do.

Dapla: Like?

Farn: Well Afros used to blackface themselves.

Dapla: Oh wow. How did they indicate ironic mode?

Farn: No that's the whole point. All of this content was cast without stickers. Everybody had to guess.

Dapla: So all of this history that we get was reprinted?

Farn: Mostly. You can still get originals at the Smithsonian, but it's local-locked. The rights say you can't cast it with mods. So you can sit down and watch it flat.

Dapla: But you'd have to go all the way the Washington DC to see. Hmm. I'm going to be there in April. Maybe I'll check.

Farn: But you could still imagine. My teacher hacked off the stickers and controls and gave us a render. It was hard to scan but I eventually understood it. I mean it was really shocking to recognize people were so backwards.

Dapla: But they survived. I mean I'm really proud of Afros from back then. They went through so much.

Farn: But that's what this makes you question. It wasn't just external blackfacing. It was internal too.

Dapla: Yes but how could they know without ev-psych checking and cast rules?

Farn: Don't be presentist. They had moral development. There were cast standards then too. The FCC wasn't born yesterday.

Dapla: But that would mean the FCC was complicit in blackfacing. After all, they let it happen.

Farn: Yes but smart people knew and they made criticsm. Still, this was before the third parties. The criticism was ignored too.

Dapla: Life must have been hard. Can you imagine? People actually called themselves (ed-cite[Niggers])?

Farn: Yeah I thought Richard Pyror was the one who stopped all of that 100 years ago.

Dapla: Why are you taking American Studies?

Farn: It's a new requirement. I asked too many dumb questions, so my curriculum was adjusted.

Dapla: Are you still on track?

Farn: I don't know.

Dapla: What do you mean you don't know. Just..

Farn: I know I know, but I mean I'm getting more interested in this. I might rebalance more of my eds.

Dapla: You? Historian? Just so you can edhack stickers, right?

Farn: No. Serious. I mean what if we're being blackfaced now and don't really know it? What if?

Dapla: Oh come on. Everything is too open and ev-psych checked and all. Nobody gets blackfaced any longer.

Farn: But you have to admit there's a lot we don't know if you don't read flat and watch flat and not rely on stickers.

Dapla: Yeah but that's so difficult. There can't be that many people who can scan like that.

Farn: Exactly. It's like secret knowledge.

Dapla: No it's just conspiracy that needs to be local-locked. If it's not open sourced..

Farn: Don't trust it, I know. But everything worth knowing is not on the chains.

Dapla: We've had this conversation before. You're sounding so frosh.

Farn: Yeah. But think about your uncle. He could scan all that, no problem. You respect him.

Dapla: Yes but I wouldn't want to live so hard. I guess that's why I admire the old Afros. Inspiring isn't it?

Farn: But harsh.

Dapla: Well, I didn't mean to get all into this. I really..

Farn: I already confirmed the meat.

Dapla: But I wanted to hear and see you say it.

Farn: Yes, Dapla, I confirm that I want to go to your meat.

Dapla: OK great. I'll see you then.

Farn: Say hi to Uncle Chris.

Dapla: Yeah, he may even unblock you.

Farn: Heh.

A Former Afrofuturist Look at Wakanda

To the extent that I spent a lot of time writing from a black cultural nationalist position, there are some things I haven't said about the Black Panther film that still may be of some interest.

This morning some thoughts occurred to me upon reading the proclamation that the soft sciences are 'fake news'. For the most part I agree and am, with qualifications, prepared to say that the Humanities have failed recent generations. Americans overvalue science and technology's roles in their well-being and become suckers in a permissive society in which ethics are not long considered or disciplined outside of the realm of today's journalistic games of scandal-gotcha. All of the wise men are considered to be dead. Gandhi's excoriation of Western Civilization being the last word. Although I'm not up on the latest by Pinker and Peterson, (I have to finish Taleb and Ferguson first), I find a great deal to be worthy of respect and admiration in Western society, including its Humanities which are failing to be properly instructed.

The failure of Humanities manifests itself in shallow literature, political correctness, cultural relativism and all manner of ethical backsliding I haven't the patience to enumerate. I know porn when I see it. I face it more often than I ever expected. So I have become a grouchy old man who perhaps takes classical pianists too seriously. I have retained the ability to enjoy the occasional action movie but I have noticed how much of our cultural production has leaned towards the cartoon. It's one thing to have a masterwork like 'Spirited Away' or 'Watchmen' hailed as great literature, but it's another to have clones of 'The Simpsons' and 'South Park' dominate prime time television. And if there is one clearly dominant form in the blockbuster movie genre, it is the miracle of Marvel.

Without going deeply into the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU), suffice it to say that Spiderman and the Avengers have become the last great bastion of Baby Boomer imagination trouncing everything else in society, limited as that imagination is. And so we suffer for it with a wave of films that rarely go beyond adolescent sensibilities. There can be no denying that these productions are expertly crafted and very entertaining. But they are ham handed when it comes to literary weight. Our superpowers vs their superpowers with some clever banter among the crashing buildings. Occasionally Tony Stark gets caught outside his Iron Man suit. Sometimes Wonder Woman has to pretend to be an ordinary chick. Batman (I know he's not Marvel) can be self-destructively brooding, but none of them really even approaches the vulnerability of Indiana Jones.

Enter T'Challa, the King of Wakanda who has access to two of the most powerful substances in the world. First is a gigantic supply of Vibranium, the element that makes Captain America's shield an irresistible force as well as an object that defies the power of Thor's own Hammer. Secondly is an African society of which he is the undisputed heavyweight champion. This is unique among all of the superheroes with the possible exception being Wonder Woman and Captain America. In this triumvirate, Marvel stakes out both sides of heroism. The power of war-ending combat ferocity and the power of heroic virtue. Captain America has, more or less, the proper virtue of America the Exceptional, and he has been right all the time, although successfully challenged in 'Civil War'. Wonder Woman, although not ultimate ruler of her secret island, has that same undeniable virtue and pronounces judgment on the entire planet and its foolish warmaking. T'Challa has all of the African virtue of tradition and inherits symbolically every feudal leadership quality we wished Ned Stark lived to exert over the Iron Throne. If people have a hard time recognizing the universality of Wakanda, it is not because Black Panther lacks it, but because it is expressed in an unfamiliar accent. The filmmakers didn't have to go far to collect such material, but the novelty of black cast films outside of Africa itself is still real.

The conflict T'Challa must face is perhaps the greatest of the three. There seems no chance for Wonder Woman to go back and convince her warrior-priestess culture to accept the challenges of world peace. They wish to stay invisible. Captain America will always be a prophet alienated from his corruptible society and it bureaucratic apparatus. Only Spiderman's youthful naivete survives this universe intact. Which makes me truly wish to see if and when Marvel Studios will deal successfully with the Silver Surfer. T'Challa however must handle the two boogie men of black American existential suffering. The first is the rejection of ancestor worship and every hidebound ethnic feudal tradition that has its roots in tribal bloodsport. Trial by combat is so well illustrated in Black Panther it echoes from the Toyi Toyi dancers in Soweto to fraternity step shows in the halls of Morehouse College. In the end he decides that Wakanda must enjoin with the world in the world's terms of constructive technology and democracy. The second is the rejection of the self-pity that justifies the Mao Mao mentality that would see the world purged by fire. And so T'Challa must meet and defeat his challenger to the throne who wishes to dominate the world in the world's terms of colonization and tyranny.

It is significant that T'Challa must remain King of Wakanda and cannot simply be a superhero. And the way he traces and finds his righteous path is the subtext of the entire film that makes it stand out in the superhero genre with the possible exception of 'Batman Begins'. Though the film clunks through at times it doesn't submit indulging in weaker jibes a prior generation of black American filmmakers were required to poke at Whitey. This is its saving grace. It needn't preach to an audience that has been well prepared to embrace it as a black cultural phenomenon. It adequately represents these age old black liberation tropes and applies them properly to the planet, and it does so with very pretty actors and visually arresting cinematic effects.

In the end however, as complicated as T'Challa's fate must be, he must contribute next to that multi-worldly combat of the MCU. Which means he will have to join forces with all of the superheroes of Earth to defend the whole of Earth. He will become what Earth desires him to be more than what Wakanda needs him to be. He will crossover and be rebuffed, just like Steve Regers and the Amazon Diana. So he will face the question that face kings of all ages, to be a good man or to be a good king?

If it must fall to the storytellers of our digital age to create new superheroes out of whole cloth they could do a lot worse than these three, and they have before and will again. It's a pity that the entire affair costs the multiple billions the industry requires. And it is sad that these are not tales we could tell of our own doing from our own experiences. Where is the Vibranium required to clean up the actual City of Oakland's violent ghettos? Where is the ritual combat that puts down the shamefaced fatherless son bent on destruction? Where was the wisdom of elders and assisting tribes that kept the integrity of the actual Black Panthers from tyranny? These are questions for another type of literature that will not soon be funded by Hollywood or appreciated by Hollywood audiences. In the meantime there is some comfort that the film did not fall to the lowest common denominator but embraced the highest common factor.

I recalled in the end, despite my own grumpy demeanor, that for a younger generation who never heard of a guy named Derrick Bell, that Wakanda has become something of their Afrolantica.

Derrick Bell is perhaps best known for the principled stand he took at Harvard in 1990 when he quit his tenured position on the law-school faculty to protest the school's failure to grant tenure to a black woman. Now a visiting professor at New York Law School, Bell is still deeply interested in issues of race relations and has chosen to explore the subject fictionally in Afrolantica Legacies. In a nutshell, the story goes like this: a mysterious land mass suddenly appears in the Atlantic Ocean, a fabulous island on which only black people can survive. American blacks set sail to the island to begin a new life, only to see it sink again before they can reach the shore. On the return trip to America, the passengers draw up a list of principles called the Afrolantica Legacies, defining how they want to reposition themselves in American society.  The book uses a fictional setting to outline some remedies for the problem of race relations between African Americans and white people in our society.

I enjoyed reading Derrick Bell in the early 1990s before I had children, and entertained such fantasies appropriate to such writers who dreamed of being on the forefront of black cultural production. From time to time it's useful to revisit such dreams and see how they have become manifest in contemporary arts and crafts. I have been most impressed by the fact that Black Panther bears up best being a superhero movie rather than a race movie or a political movie. And though I've dismissed a lot of commentary on it. I understand that people need to see what they need to see. Today, I see Black Panther as the best Afrolantica there will ever be, which I hope says a lot about the dream in the first place, as well as the power of Hollywood to satisfy what we ask of the Humanities. Marvel did not invent nor re-invent Kunta Kinte, but Marvel makes damned good kinte cloth.

A Rude Idea About Gun Control

So there are 90 odd million gun owners in the US with something on the order of 300 million firearms in their possession. It occurred to me that with all the symbols and empty gestures flying around, maybe one ought to be considered. What if, in protest against gun control, gun owners were to go to their local police departments or city hall and donate 5 bullets. Just go and volunteer and say, you want to be on record as making America five bullets safer. 

It would then be on the municipal staff to safely dispose of that ammo. They would be overwhelmed. 

Of course the NRA knows better and has a common sense set of alternatives. But in terms of sending a message I can't think of a better one.