I experienced a feeling of disconnect when I saw this post on Hugh Hewitt's site:

UPDATE: I was just thinking about my own memories of the Crips and Bloods. When I was a kid in North Carolina, the Crips and Bloods felt mostly mythological. I remember feeling the same way about them as I did the Killer Bees. Everyone kept talking about how they'd get here any day; they inspired a vague fear followed by certainty that they'd never actually get to our city.

By high school, things were different. I had a blue bandana snatched off my head by a group of local Crips while I was standing in line at the Food Court's Orange Julius. I was lucky to get no worse than that.

By last year, there were gang wars at two of the area high schools. Thank you, Tookie.

The disconnect came from the fact that I thought it was Hewitt writing the post, and the timeline is all wrong for him, he's an older...or rather mature man, old enough to remember the Communists.

My mistake, the signature on post was Mary Katharine Ham, a Southern girl who graduated from the University of Georgia in 2002, which makes more sense.

But the Crips themselves are having "Killer Bee" trouble of their own:they're being pushed out by the Mexican and Salvadoran Gangs from south of the border. Roger McGrath has a big piece in the American Conservative on the clash between blacks and Hispanics in LA, and while this clash is what we call "displacement" or "dispossession" in the workforce, and in local politics, in gang terms it means war in American streets.