Bastards of the Party

If you have HBO, and a brain, you have to watch the new documentary Bastards of the Party. It gives the topic of gang warfare in Los Angeles the historical context that was missing in three decades of media hype around the phenomena. It shows what happens when a government destroys a generation of community leadership, a nation abandons its unskilled workforce, and a community gets carried away by its own nihilistic mythology. Even more than that, it shows how poorly we are served by a consumer media more concerned with scare tactics and sensationalism than in identifying the true stories behind our society's most difficult questions.