I wanted to write something light and frothy today, something with a swirl of whipped cream and caramel and cinnamon on top, but I just can’t do it. I want to run down the street shouting, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” and “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” I should be joining the protesters in the streets, carrying truth to power, but truth be told, I’m not a protest-in-the-streets kind of guy. I have an aversion to crowds and a particular distaste for tear gas, and more to the point, I have no confidence whatsoever that some cop in full battle rattle won’t take the opportunity to turn me into a modern-day martyr. Cowardly? Perhaps, but I also truly hope that the axiom about the pen being mightier than the sword has some validity even in the age of armored troop carriers and weapons capable of firing 750 rounds per minute. And as far as courage goes, if the NSA and CIA and FBI don’t have all of my columns stored on a server somewhere, they’re more inept than even I ever imagined. I anticipate that if they ever start loading those cattle cars and filling those interment camps the yahoos in camo in Idaho are so worried about, I’ll be among the first detainees. I’ll just wait for that to be my badge of honor. And I’ll keep shouting from my very low and poorly attended soapbox here in cyberspace, even if it amounts to little more than pounding my head on a completely uncaring and totally immovable brick wall.
Has anyone else been having particularly intense dreams of late? I have, and while it may simply be a product of too much spicy food consumed too near to my early bedtime, it also makes me wonder about a sixth sense, a sense that something is about to blow. It’s hard to not look around and feel that something in the world has become unhinged, that the standards of normality are stressed to the limit. Look, it seems like a small thing, but the Bill Cosby scandal alone is emblematic of a larger disquietude. Cosby being a rapist is like finding out that Santa is a cat burglar. Both in a sense are fictional characters who represent attributes we admire, like family, like love, like compassion, like generosity…and to find out that our fantasies are built on stuff no more substantial than gossamer clouds is a shock. What the hell is left to believe in?
In Pennsylvania, we’ve got an ex-Marine who guns down his ex-wife and then takes the time and the effort to go to two more residences to kill five more of her family. This kind of thing pretty much blows to hell the whole NRA argument of “a good guy with a gun”. All these fucking so-called good guys tend to kill a lot more wives and children and rivals and bar brawlers than they do invading criminals in their homes. And let’s be clear on another thing: there’s a hell of a lot of violence involving veterans and cops and other guys who carry a gun for a living. There’s no way you can send a teenager to a place like Iraq and urge him to kill a whole bunch of people and watch them die and then have him come home and go on with a peaceful suburban existence. So many of these guys come back irretrievably damaged, and so many of them were angry and violent to begin with, we’ve created a whole generation of potential time-bombs. And don’t even get me started about the number of police officers with anger-management issues, fascist tendencies, and just generally nasty-assed attitudes. Case in point: Jeffrey Follmer, president of the Cleveland Police Union, was incensed that Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hopkins had worn a t-shirt reading “Justice For Tamir Rice and John Crawford” in pre-game warm-ups, and had the temerity to demand an apology from the player, which he refused to give. Both black youths were killed by the Cleveland police while carrying toy guns. Follmer goes on to arrogantly add, “How about this? Listen to police officers commands, listen to what we tell you, and just stop. I think the nation needs to realize that when we tell you to do something, do it, and if you’re wrong you’re wrong, and if you’re right, then the courts will figure it out.” By the way, if you watch the tape, Tamir Rice had less than two seconds to comply with whatever command the cop gave while emerging from his cruiser with his service weapon extended…before he fired that weapon into the 12 year-old’s stomach, killing him. Ask Tamir and ask Eric Garner. According to Jeffrey Follmer and most of the rest of the cops in this country, failure to instantly comply with any police officer is now a capital offense, especially if you happen to be male, young, and of any color other than pasty white.
In Australia, of all places, you’ve got a self-styled sheik and ISIS wannabe taking over a dozen hostages in a Sydney cafe. Man Haran Monis was armed with a gun, which is thankfully a rarity in Australia, where gun ownership is severely restricted. Monis’ siege was ended by an Australian SWAT team, but at the expense of two hostage’s lives, along with the inevitable killing of the hostage-taker. The number of these guys who are taken alive can be counted on your fingers and toes, and it’s unlikely you’ll need to remove your shoes. In Pakistan, a reported six to eight heavily armed Taliban guerrillas invaded a military school and killed over 120 children and teenagers before Pakistani troops violently ended the incident.
Worst of all, you can no longer tell the good guys from the bad guys without a program. When a sitcom icon is revealed a deviant and a president is convicted in absentia as a war criminal, you’ve got a problem. When you’ve got a justice on the US Supreme Court who says there’s nothing in the constitution banning the use of torture, indicating that the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause applies only to prisoners officially arrested for a crime, you begin to believe that Torquemada has been reincarnated and is wearing a new judicial robe. But do you know what really worries me? It’s that there are probably fifty or a hundred million people in this country who think that torture isn’t so bad and that police have every right to shoot down anyone they think deserves shooting and that it’s the rest of us who are living in some sort of left-wing delusional fairyland. Check out Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who’s now found her niche unsurprisingly on FOX News, who uses the Australian hostage crisis as a platform to defend the CIA’s use of torture…as if we just torture enough of the right people, we can prevent evil. Yep, that’s the argument…torture prevents evil. George Orwell is smiling somewhere.
BW
P.S. I couldn’t find a good place to link it, but if you have another ten minutes and you’ve already taken your blood pressure meds, you ought to read
American Torture — Past, Present, and… Future?
Kibbitz Corner 