Just Three Shooting…Um…Shopping Days Until Christmas

I’ve been below the radar and nearly off the grid for the last week.  For what it’s worth, I’m trying to find a way to budget my time in such a way that I can still include the nearly two hours required each day to write this blog, and I’m not quite there yet.  It would help if there could somehow be twenty-six hours each day, but even at that, I’d probably just fall asleep in my recliner an hour earlier and sleep an hour later.  But enough about me.  Site statistics show a total of two page views today, and if I’m successful, I can at least double that within the next five or six hundred words.

My youngest son, Zach, just arrived home from New York yesterday.  He lives in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn and he told me that the site of the murders of two NYPD cops was just a short half mile bike ride from his brownstone.  He and a friend rode by and saw an ocean of police vehicles with strobe lights flashing and yellow tape strung far and wide even a day after the incident.  Like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers and hundreds of thousands of other Americans, Zach was part of the peaceful protests against the most recent wave of police brutality (Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, etc.)  According to Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, and a host of FOX News talking heads, the blame for the murders of officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos can be laid squarely at the feet of President Obama, Mayor Bill deBlasio, and pretty much anyone else who spoke out against the sanctioned murders of so many unarmed black men and boys.  At the head of this chorus of finger-pointers was Patrick Lynch, the president of the NYC Policeman’s Benevolent Association.  To translate and paraphrase the sentiments of Lynch regarding the police, “You’re either with us or you’re against us”.

That has been the stance of police across the country since these protests began.  A cop in Mishawaka, Indiana, who printed and distributed hundreds of “Breathe Easy, Don’t Break The Law” t-shirts, is emblematic of the police (and conservative) mindset.  They feel the police are blameless, that there is no racism or profiling involved, and that if every citizen obeyed every law and demonstrated instant obedience to every police command, no one would ever need to be hurt.  For instance, if Eric Garner simply hadn’t committed the heinous offense of selling loose cigarettes on a street corner, and if he had meekly offered his wrists to be cuffed the moment officer Daniel Pantaleo told him to do so, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this today.  And if Tamir Rice, a twelve year-old boy, had only raised his hands and laid prone on the grass…within the less than two seconds of the Cleveland cop diving out of his police cruiser and firing the fatal shots, no one would have anything about which to protest.

Look, the murder of those two NYPD officers whose only crime was wearing the uniform and doing their job is appalling, but it is no more or less appalling than the murders of Brown, Rice, Garner, and hundreds of others whose deaths never made the news.  But while these murders are shocking, they are in no way surprising.  I’ve said this before: There is a huge well of frustration and anger in this country, and the basis is largely income disparity paired with racism.  What is surprising to me is that the frustration and anger haven’t yet boiled into something even more toxic.  The protests of the last few weeks have, in fact, been very restrained, very well-informed, and very peaceful…but there is no reason to believe they will forever remain acts of passive resistance.

There is a perception among a segment of the population, mostly young black men, that their every action, from simply walking down the street wearing a certain kind of clothing to petty crimes like shoplifting, can be treated as a capital offense by the police without any repercussions whatsoever for the cop who carries out the summary execution.  And there is another segment of the population, mainly the police, who see the world in very sharply defined camps of “us” and “them”.  Right now, these two segments are basically at war.  The murders of the two NYPD street cops is only going to add fuel to the fire.  There will undoubtedly be more of the same in other cities, and the police response, rather than restraint, will be justifiable paranoia, with even more black men being gunned down on the slimmest of pretexts.

I don’t have an answer for any of this.  In a perfect world, we’d simply get rid of the means of all these murders, the guns.  But that has the same chance of happening as the Bears winning the Superbowl, the Cubs the World Series, and me being named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  So we’ll have to deal with the world as it is.  As Bad Santa might say, “Merry freaking Christmas.”

BW

 

To Serve And Protect…Who?

Eric Garner should not be dead.  He shouldn’t even be arrested, in custody, or have had anything to do with the NYPD.  Much has been made of his murder, clearly depicted on a video with a clearly audible soundtrack, at the hands of half a dozen NYC police officers, but not as much has been made of why the police surrounded him in the first place.  Garner didn’t have a gun or a knife.  He wasn’t fleeing after robbing a liquor store or grabbing an old lady’s purse.  He wasn’t suspected of spousal abuse or pedophilia or drugging and raping a series of women (if you have enough money and fame, you can always get a pass from the police, even if you’re black).  So why did police approach Garner in the first place?  Why was he considered a danger to the public safety?  Let’s let Eric Garner tell us himself.  Here are his last words on earth, from the video: “Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”

Eric Garner’s capital offense was selling loose cigarettes on a sidewalk near the Staten Island Ferry terminal.  That and being a large black man.  Garner is not the exception.  He’s the rule.  Police routinely harass people of color.  It’s been documented a thousand different ways.  Before it was recently discontinued, the NYPD had a “stop and frisk” policy.  They were allowed to stop anyone on the street and demand that they submit to a body search, even if that person was not a suspect in any crime.  The police had complete arbitrary authority to choose their victims based on any criteria they deemed appropriate…and you can bet your 401K and your house in the Hamptons that the main criteria were black, hispanic, and poor…not necessarily in that order.  It exceeds any standard of credulity that Garner was doing anything that should have attracted police attention.  They simply rousted him because he was black and imposing and because they could, and then when he challenged their authority, they reacted exactly like the schoolyard bullies most of them are…they showed Eric Garner who was boss, and now he’s dead.

That racism is alive and well in America and that it has a secure home in police departments from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, is now beyond question.  Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice bear silent witness to that ugly truth.  But it’s not just jackbooted stormtroopers masquerading as peace officers who are to blame.  Think of those grand juries in Missouri and New York.  Those were just a dozen citizens whose identities we’ll never know, who decided that the lives of Garner and Brown didn’t mean as much as maintaining the yoke of police power.  There is little question that the prosecutors in both cases got exactly what they wanted, which was a “no bill” against the killer cops, but that result still depended on the complicity of the jurors.  Irrespective of what evidence was presented or how it was portrayed, especially in the Garner case, it is completely beyond comprehension how a dozen “regular” people could watch the tape of an unarmed and unthreatening man being put in a choke hold, swarmed by half a dozen police, dragged to the ground, and killed as he was begging for his life…and come to the conclusion that absolutely no crime whatsoever had been committed (except of course for the guy who videoed the cops at work, who was arrested and indicted).

It’s not just those grand jurors who bear a portion of the blame.  In the sense that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, we all bear some blame in what is becoming a national travesty of justice.  St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCullough, known for protecting bad cops throughout his career, is an elected official…the voters of St. Louis county chose him, and the same can be said of the prosecutor in NYC.  In recent years, the Supreme Court has made decision after decision favoring police powers over individual liberty.  If it was up to this Supreme Court instead of the Warren Court, it’s unlikely that the Miranda warnings ever would have been mandated.  You do NOT have the right to remain silent (and we have the right to beat a confession out of you if we know you’re guilty…)  We, as a people, elect the officials who make it possible for our own rights and liberties to be subjugated, abrogated, and ignored on a daily basis.  Every time someone pees in a container before a witness in order to keep his or her job, it’s another admission that we don’t take our own Constitution very seriously.  Every time the NSA reads our email or records our phone conversation or uses facial recognition to identify us on a public street, we’re telling the state, “Go ahead and be a police state.  I’d rather be a little safer than a lot more free.” Beyond that, every time we elect another official who stands four square against things like the minimum wage, affordable health care, and equitable taxes, we’re supporting the unconscionable wealth gap in our society, a society where the top one per cent hold over fifty percent of the wealth and the bottom fifty percent live every day from hand to mouth.

It’s that situation, even more than the plague of racism, that is the engine driving the police state.  People are getting angry.  The last time this sort of egregious wealth gap was the norm, it was in France during the reign of Louis XV, and the next thing you saw was a lot of aristocratic heads rolling at the foot of the Bastille.  So when you see buildings aflame in Ferguson and freeways blocked in New York, and the streets filled with protesters who are, for the moment, peaceful, in a dozen other cities, you know there’s a lot of anger simmering.  I, for one, wonder what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

BW

Breathless: It’s A Police State And All Of Us Share The Blame

Believe me, I’ve got plenty to say.  What I don’t have is enough time to say it.  But I’ll put it in words tomorrow, and a whole bunch of those words will be undeleted expletives.  Meanwhile, the title gives you a hint of where I’ll be taking the discourse.  Oh, and as far as Celebrities Behaving Badly goes, it’s been a long time since anyone has done anything entertaining…unless you find drugging and raping aspiring starlets to be the stuff of sitcoms…which reminds me: Both Michael Brown and Eric Garner bear a striking resemblance to Fat Albert.  Coincidence or synchronicity?  You be the judge.

More tomorrow.

BW

Ferguson Follies

I thought about writing this post on Monday, after what can only be described as a somewhat bizarre and definitely unsettling press conference by St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCullough, where the only individuals indicted in any way were the media and the witnesses to Michael Brown’s shooting death at the hand of Officer Darren Wilson.  Two minutes into McCullough’s monologue, it was clear to anyone what the final announcement was going to be. In fact, it was clear to anyone with an IQ above their shoe size and access to a history book what the outcome was going to be the moment it was announced that Bob McCullough would not defer to a special prosecutor and that he was going to present the case to a grand jury in the first place.

There is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion.  A prosecutor isn’t required to present evidence to a grand jury in order to bring charges against a suspect.  If a prosecutor is reasonably convinced that a crime has been committed, he has the authority to bring charges, have the suspect arrested and jailed, and present the case to a jury of the suspect’s peers, as per the 6th Amendment to the US Constitution.  I can assure you that had Michael Brown shot Darren Wilson instead of the other way around, no grand jury would ever have been involved.

There are two flies in the ointment of prosecutorial discretion.  In the first place, the prosecutor must agree that a crime has, in fact, been committed.  In the second place, in real life, most prosecutors won’t bring charges unless they believe there is a good chance that they can win the case in court or force the suspect to accept a plea agreement. Accepting shaky cases affects their statistics and diminish their chances for career advancement.  That’s American justice for you.  In the case of Bob McCullough, there was virtually no chance that he was ever going to allow Darren Wilson to spend a single minute behind bars, nor was there any chance that Wilson was ever going to stand trial in a court of law.  The very fact that McCullough elected to give the case to a grand jury instead of simply bringing charges against Darren Wilson told you everything you needed to know on day one.

McCullough, in his rambling dissertation on Monday, assured us over and over again that the entire grand jury process had been completely objective and unbiased.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It was clear that the prosecutor was biased from the outset.  McCullough is from a police family.  His parents, brother, uncle, and cousin all worked in some capacity for the St. Louis police department.  This is why McCullough was urged to recuse himself from this case in the first place.  Again, his insistence on maintaining control personally tells you all you need to know about the fairness and openness of the process.  It was famously remarked by NY Chief Justice Sol Wachtler that “a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich” if that’s the outcome he desired.  So make no mistake: The failure of the St. Louis County grand jury to indict Officer Darren Wilson on any of the five charges they were given in legal instructions was totally the result the prosecutor presenting the evidence in such a way as to obtain that very result.

As it turns out, even if Darren Wilson had been charged with murder or manslaughter, he very likely would have been acquitted.  There is enough forensic evidence to back up at least parts of his account of the incident, including Michael Brown’s DNA being found in Wilson’s police cruiser and significant disparities between the various eye witness accounts.  All of that would have been enough to fulfill the requirement of “reasonable doubt” in the minds of a jury, especially when presented by a skilled defense attorney.  But there are also enough inconsistencies in the forensic evidence and the eyewitness accounts to suggest that Wilson may, at the most, have been outright lying and, at the least, “gilding the the lilly”.

Look, historically, police in America routinely get away with murder (and assault and rape and perjury).  If Darren Wilson had been charged with a crime and made to go to trial, it would have been the exception, not the rule.  If it had been you or I who’d held that weapon and shot that boy, we’d have had to plead our case before a jury, probably in our orange jumpsuits…unless, of course, the victim had been a black teenager and we’d been standing our ground, like Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.  Post-racial America?  Not even close.

BW

On Today’s Menu: Crow

Sometimes you find out that you’re wrong about something.  Sometimes that happens a little more frequently than other times.  Me being me, when I find out that I’m wrong about something, I typically make the leap to the conclusion that I’m wrong about everything…which, of course, makes no sense at all, unless you’re willing to accept that the sky is orange, gravity is the property that allows pigs to fly, and Justin Bieber is the greatest vocalist since Sinatra.

A couple of months ago, I spent a lot of keystrokes and a lot of virtual ink declaring that Michael Brown was an innocent victim of Darren Wilson, who was clearly just another brutal racist cop who shot Brown for little more than the crime of WWB (Walking While Black).  Even as I was writing those columns, I could see those cartoon characters sitting on my shoulders, an angel on one and a devil on the other.  That devil was my old blogmate Cory, and having already gone through a months-long online debate with him over the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, I could just hear Cory berating me in his usual droll and mocking tone: “Not so fast, grasshopper,” and then going on to intricately dissect the evidence fact by fact, pointing out inconsistencies and building an alternative hypothesis.  In the Trayvon Martin case, that alternative hypothesis was that somehow at some point, unseen by any witness, Martin had assaulted Zimmerman, provoking him to shoot Martin in justified self-defense. When Cory built that hypothesis, the one eventually sold to a jury, he used a detailed timeline and reams of the available forensic evidence, a la Columbo.  I used emotion and intuition…Zimmerman had a history of being a racist asshole with a love of firearms, so he was probably still a racist asshole who used a misguided Florida law to justify what amounted to a murder.  Want to guess which argument prevailed in court?

In the last week, there’s been a gradual trickle of leaks from the grand jury and coroner’s office regarding the Michael Brown case.  This is probably in advance of the grand jury calling the Michael Brown killing a righteous shoot and not indicting Darren Wilson.  Maybe, just maybe, they have a point.  The two bits of forensic evidence that have been leaked (again, almost certainly deliberately by the Ferguson police and prosecutor) are that Michael Brown’s blood was found on Darren Wilson’s gun and on the door of his police cruiser and that Brown had a close-range bullet wound in his hand.  Both those forensic findings, if true, would tend to support Darren Wilson’s claim that Michael Brown attacked him in the police car and tried to grab his service weapon.  It still doesn’t excuse Wilson shooting Brown subsequently when he had his hands up and was attempting to surrender, but that won’t matter.  We can all understand how a cop might start shooting when a suspect tries to grab his gun and then not stop shooting until the suspect was down…in this case, terminally down.

At the same time, I was pretty much convinced that Ebola was about to get much much worse in the US, but that, in fact hasn’t happened.  So far the only two cases contracted here are the nurses who had direct contact with Eric Duncan, who caught it in West Africa.  None of the secondary contacts has become ill and there have been no new primary cases arriving from elsewhere.  At the same time, all of the Americans treated for Ebola so far, whether contracted in Africa, like Kent Brantly or Nancy Writebol, or caught here, like nurse Nina Pham, have survived their disease, calling into question the 70% mortality reported in the African epidemic, and adding credence to the contention that Ebola is survivable with the benefits of modern US tertiary medical facilities.

So the upshot is that I was…wait for it…quite possibly…and all the evidence is not yet in…WRONG…in at least two instances.  In the dull lingering fog of my shattered self-esteem, that translates into my being wrong about everything.  That would be a very good thing where yesterday’s column is concerned.  I’d love to be wrong about the GOP taking over all three branches of the federal government and returning us to the Victorian era before you can say “intelligent design”.  But I won’t back down on Justin Bieber being a talentless hack.  If I’m wrong about that, there’s no point in going on.

BW

Celebrities Behaving Badly: Ted Nugent Off The Rails

Ted Nugent must have eaten one too many fricasseed squirrel brains, because it sounds like he’s come down with some kind of mad cow disease.  Which is to say, he’s even more batshit insane than he’s been in the past.  Nugent took to World Net Daily to give us the true story of Ferguson, Missouri, where he shares with us why the heroic police officer involved had every reason to profile his victim: “Based on crime stats in Ferguson and elsewhere, it would be a safe bet to assume the two thugs the police are looking for are black males between the age of 15 and 25.”  Nugent goes on to place blame where blame is clearly due: “The road to peace and prosperity in America is to reject the big liberal lie and all those who endorse it. Liberalism is a lie. Liberalism is a scam. Liberalism is a killer.”  Well, that clears that up.  And here I thought it was Darren Wilson and his service weapon that killed Michael Brown.  Who knew?  Turns out it was Obama all along!

Meanwhile in a case of reality TV becoming a little too real, Teresa and Joe Giudice of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” were sentenced to 41 months in the federal pen, $441,558 in restitution, and 15 months in federal prison and $441,558 in restitution respectively.  As it turns out, it’s not all about screaming obscenities at your botoxed and plastic surgerized girlfriends and displaying a complete lack of taste and restraint in your home decorating.  Apparently the federal government also insists that you report your income on a yearly basis.  How long has this been going on?

While we’re on reality TV, here’s a little example of nearly instant karma coming back to literally bite you on the ass: Dick Donato, winner of “Big Brother” season 8 in 2007, who was such an incredible dick that his nickname became “Evel Dick” (he somehow won the game by making every other houseguest so uniformly miserable that they basically begged to be evicted), announced on current reality show “Couples Therapy” that he’s HIV positive.  He’s not sure how he contracted the disease, but perhaps those hideous tattoos covering every visible inch of his skin might have had something to do with it.  Just sayin’.

File under “Stop your whining.  No one cares.”: Anne Hathaway, in an interview with British “Elle”, confides: “This fame thing? Fucked me up for a really long time.”  Boo fucking hoo.  Pull up your Dolce and Gabana big girl pants and dry your tears with some hundred dollar bills.  (Note: I’m completely ready for fame.  It can’t possibly fuck me up any more than I already am.  Bring it on.)

On a happier note, the only thing that’s a bigger deal in the world of the rich and famous this week than Princess Kate being preggers with another royal fetus was the wedding of George Clooney and Amal Alamuddin in Venice, attended by everyone who was anyone, in a complete overdose of dazzling smiles, perfect complexions,and designer gowns worth more than my house.  Somehow my invitation was lost in the mail.  Not to be a cynic or anything, but I place the over/under at three years.  Hope there’s a solid pre-nup.

Hey, now that Tiger Woods seems to have put golf on the back burner, he’s firing up the front burner for a new restaurant in Palm Beach, Florida.  No name has been announced, but I’d go with “The Magic Putter”.  Reservations accepted by text only.

Finally, in the category of “build your own joke”, comes this headline from Monday’s Huffington Post: Jennifer Lopez Rear-Ended By Drunk Driver.  Stop me, just stop me.

BW

 

Ray Rice, Roger Goodell, Oscar Pistorius, And Michael Brown: Shoot First And Ask Questions Later

There is so much outright lunacy, injustice, and criminal stupidity in the air this week that I don’t really know where to start, or how to weave it all together, but it seems as if we’re gripped by some kind of global virus clutching at our neurons and snapping at our synapses,  urging us individually and collectively to march in lockstep over the lemur cliff of our own schizophrenic death wish.  What the hell is going on?

After what seems like another endless two-year tortured OJ spectacle trial, Oscar Pistorius has dodged the biggest deadliest bullets aimed his way.  Would that Reeva Steenkamp had been so lucky.  Pistorius was found not guilty of murder or even manslaughter after blasting away through the bedroom door at what he claimed to be an intruder.  Defense attorneys everywhere must be laughing in their bloated retainers, thanking the gods and the founding fathers and the jury consultants for the cherished stronghold of “beyond reasonable doubt”.  This is the ultimate example of “money talks and bullshit walks”.  Pistorius was wealthy enough to hire the best defense team money could buy.  When he killed his girlfriend in his own bedroom, there were only two witnesses, and one of them left in a body bag.  I’m reminded of the legendary Racehorse Haynes, a defense attorney famous for his acquittals of wealthy River Oaks socialites and doctors in Houston in the 1970’s.  With Racehorse defending you, you could literally be caught with a smoking gun in your hand and a bleeding body at your feet, and still, “the first one was free”.

The Pistorius case supports my contention that turning a blind eye toward violence against women is not just an American sickness, but a global pandemic.  Face it, if Ray Rice had cold-cocked Janay Palmer outside the view of a video camera, he’d still be suiting up for the Baltimore Ravens tonight on Thursday Night Football, and the commentators would all be lauding him for being the fastest toughest meanest little bulldozer to ever line up beside a quarterback…and that’s even if his girlfriend had shown up in an emergency room looking like the victim of a three-care pile-up.  It’d be “he said she said” and what she said would be roundly dismissed, because, hell…she probably had it coming to her anyway.  I’ve seen multiple comments in multiple blogsites suggesting that there are always two sides to every story, that Rice must have been provoked.  The apologists are all over the airwaves and internet.  Even Indiana Pacers star forward Paul George got in on the shameful defense of Ray Rice with tweets like:  “I don’t condone hittin women or think it’s coo BUT if SHE ain’t trippin I ain’t trippin..Let’s keep it movin lol let that man play!”  Boxer Floyd Mayweather chimed in with: “there’s a lot worse that happen in households. It’s just not caught on video, if that’s safe to say.”  Please note that Mayweather has himself been convicted of domestic violence and currently is being sued for another assault on another woman.

And what I said two days ago about the NFL not being truly concerned with this epidemic of domestic abuse (along with multiple other violent assaults in various bars and strip clubs and parking lots) is being proven absolutely accurate.  Roger Goodell can shuck and jive all he wants, but it’s clear that the NFL did have the elevator tape, and they had it months ago, and that their overweening concern was with putting butts in seats, not with players putting butts on the tile.  I’m with Keith Olbermann on this: Goodell should NOT resign…he should be summarily FIRED.

Pistorius isn’t the only one to get away with murder, and Ray Rice isn’t the only one benefitting from the rationalizers, apologists, and violence junkies.  You’ve got your mysogynists and your racists, and sadly, some of them aren’t wearing spandex and pads, but blue uniforms with a badge.  What with elevator-gate,  Ferguson, murdered Michael Brown, and officer Darren Wilson have fallen out of the 24 hour news cycle.  Brown’s been dead for nearly a month and Darren Wilson has been heard from exactly zero times while he’s on paid leave.  How do you suppose that grand jury inquiry is going?  In recent days, two more witnesses have come forward with descriptions of Wilson firing round after round into Brown while Brown faced him with his hands up, one saying Brown was walking slowly forward and one saying Brown was falling forward as he was shot. Anyone wanna bet that Wilson is exonerated with a “justified shooting”?  Just wait.

And by the way…we’re going back to war.  Not just Iraq this time.  Syria.  Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.  Schizophrenic death cult lunacy.

BW

Figuring Out What’s Important: Niki Minaj’s Wardrobe Malfunction Or Ten Gunshots In Ferguson

There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.  Being visually and auditorally assaulted for two straight nights, by the MTV VMA’s on Sunday and the Emmy’s on Monday, made me want to run to the shower and scrub down with copious volumes of Betadine soap, and yet, like a twelve-car pile-up on the other side of the road, I couldn’t help but stop and stare.  Last night around nine, when I’d had just about all the narcissism, self-congratulation, maudlin sentimentality, and flawless skin that I could stomach, Mrs. Left said to me, “Well, would you rather watch this or Rachel Maddow talking about bullets in Missouri and Russians in the Ukraine (or words to that effect)”?  To my eternal shame, I sheepishly replied with something like, “Well, I do want to see if Billy Bob Thornton wins for Fargo”.  And in the back of my mind, I wondering why in the fuck I could possibly have the least concern for the success or failure of a guy who’s seen Angelina Jolie naked or a bunch of producers who ultimately just want to keep me glued to the screen long enough to convince me to buy a year’s supply of Cialis from Eli Lilly.  Scanning the news wires this morning, I want to read the stories about the Ukraine and Michael Brown and immigration and Ebola and ISIS and Syria and the clouds of war…but I keep clicking on reviews of Taylor Swift’s dance moves and Nike Minaj’s butt (one glowing and one not so much…you figure out which is which).  Karl Marx remarked that religion is the opium of the masses, but he didn’t live long enough to get daily updates from People Magazine and TMZ.  The cult of celebrity is the new societal heroin, and I’m just as addicted as anyone.  It’s Monday, and today my devotion to keeping up with the Kardashians makes me feel dirty.  By Friday, it’ll make me feel like a poor man’s Perez Hilton, my fingers professionally palpating the pulsebeat of modern life.  What a difference a week makes.

While we reassured ourselves that the guy who used to be the dad in “Malcolm In The Middle” was the most dramatically gifted meth dealer on cable and that women in prison are more than just a meme in porn videos, the world continued to be a violent, dangerous, corrupt, and supremely unjust place.  (Best line of the night at the Emmy’s, from Bertram van Munster, producer of “The Amazing Race”: “The world is not such a bad place, actually.”)

Things have quieted down in Ferguson.  The streets are nearly empty and the kids are back in school.  The evidence has been presented to a grand jury.  One thing that can reliably be depended upon is the short attention span of the American public.  Outrage calms and anger fades and fatalistic acceptance of the status quo prevails.  Today an audio of Michael Brown’s shooting was released, unconfirmed by the Ferguson authorities, but already investigated by the FBI.  In the recording, you can hear the man who released it sexting with his girlfriend, which gives credence to its authenticity, since it’s at least mildly embarrassing.  In the background you can clearly discern at least ten or eleven gunshots in two groups of five or six, with a pause between the groups.  It’s hard to imagine a scenario that required Darren Wilson to fire that many shots at Michael Brown, but I think one of the commenters got it right: “The last five shots were to make sure Michael Brown never testified.”

Another report came out that Officer Darren Wilson’s career started with the police department in Jennings, Missouri.  That department was deemed to be so racially biased that the Jennings city council ultimately disbanded the entire department and fired all the officers.  I doubt that any of this will make the least bit of difference.  Wilson could have positioned Brown against a wall, taken five steps back, aimed, fired, and delivered a coup de grace, all recorded on five video cameras and witnessed by two nuns, and the prosecutor would still find a way to declare it a justified shooting…which is almost certainly what will happen.  After that, the Justice Department, in order to forestall what might otherwise devolve into an outright rebellion, will bring federal civil rights charges against Wilson, which is a form of justice, but a diluted and ultimately unsatisfying justice.

But hey, “Modern Family” was the best comedy for the umpteenth time in a row, so hand me the remote and the chips.  Life goes on.

BW

NOTE: The hyperlink to the audio tape of the Michael Brown shooting was misdirected.  The correct hyperlink has been inserted.  It’s worth a listen.

 

 

A Little To The Left Of Mahatma Gandhi Is Not Always The Most Comfortable Seat In The House

There are days I really don’t feel like writing this blog.  This is one of those days.  Readership is down from a peak of nearly 100 a few weeks ago to just a few dozen now, and yes, I know, whining about it doesn’t do a thing to drive traffic.  But I find myself upset when even my most devoted followers post comments in opposition to my fervently held convictions.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love comments, even the negative ones, but like any pundit, analyst, or commentator, I ultimately seek validation.  I like a lively debate as well as the next guy, and I always try to reply to negative comments in an intelligent and nonconfrontational manner, and to employ evidence and logic to support my points, whatever they may be.  But it’s lonely out here in the thin air of extreme liberalism.  There aren’t a lot of people huddled around me here on the leading edge of the bell curve.  I’d appreciate a call from Rachel Maddow or Dennis Kucinich or maybe just a text from Al Sharpton, but I guess I’m not in any of those Rolodexes.

I sometimes get to the point where I self-edit, not out of concerns for style, grammar, or veracity, but out of a fear of offense.  I’ve been stuck on the Michael Brown story for the last week, and when it was current, I was glued to the Trayvon Martin saga as well.  My sense of outrage over this senseless shooting, that I can only think of as a police murder, grows with each new revelation and each new brutal police incident.  When I see footage of a St. Louis cop pointing his M-16 into a crowd and shouting, “I will fucking kill you!”, my personal bias is to view it not as an anomaly or single bad apple, but as typical of the generally brutal mindset of police everywhere.  When I see the video of two St. Louis police shooting Kajieme Powell on Tuesday, I’m struck by the unsurprisingly banal quality of the encounter, totally at odds with the verbal police account of a man attacking them with an upraised knife, and it reinforces my personal perception of police not as servers and protectors, but as self-appointed judges and juries and executioners.  And then I worry that if among my few dozen readers, there might happen to be a police officer, then I might be personally targeted for “special attention”.  It goes against my long-held mantra that the only way to remain unmolested in a police state is to never rise above the radar of those in control.  But beyond worrying about material adverse consequences, I’m concerned about inciting offense and suffering invective and maybe even losing the few readers I currently have.

When I really know that I’m on the edge of the envelope is when I run an idea past Mrs. Left, and she not only disagrees with my position, but suggests that I’d be well-advised to keep it out of print.  The thing is, that even in those situations, and I’ve had one recently, I don’t really believe I’m wrong.  In fact, I sometimes can’t quite understand why roughly 319,999, 999 other Americans feel diametrically opposed to my point of view.  Perhaps it’s mass hysteria or maybe it’s some genetic flaw in my own makeup.  Or maybe everyone else is right and I’m wrong…nah, that couldn’t be it.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll try to bang out some light entertainment in Celebrities Behaving Badly.  That’s unlikely to offend anyone, other than maybe Justin Bieber, and nothing in the world would make me happier than getting some personal hate-mail from the Biebs.  Stay tuned.

BW

We’re Already Living In A Police State

If you don’t believe it, look around yourself wherever you are sitting or standing, whether in a building or in your car or on the street.  I’ll bet you can find a CCTV camera somewhere within your field of view.  Even if you can’t see it, it can almost certainly see you.  If not a camera or a microphone, you’re already being monitored by your own cell phone or the black box in your car.  GPS is great when you’re looking for the nearest Starbucks, but also works spectacularly well when Big Brother is looking for you.  It’s also damned effective when your wife’s divorce attorney wants to document where you actually were last Tuesday night when you told the missus that you had a “late meeting”.

But the police state goes well beyond our complete lack of any expectation of privacy.  The police state is about…well…police.  It’s about racial profiling and police brutality and the arrogance of power.  It’s about young black men being routinely stopped, harassed, searched, and often arrested in major American cities every day for little more than the crime of “walking while black”.  It’s about innocent citizens being brutalized and terrified as their homes are invaded at 4am by squads of heavily armed special forces executing “no-knock” warrants for drug possession.  It’s about towns no bigger than my home of Bloomington being equipped with military surplus tanks and Humvees and armored troop carriers from Iraq and Afghanistan, filled with guys in camo and full body armor who look a lot more like Rambo than Muldoon.

Here’s a quote from an anonymous op-ed written by a cop in today’s Washington Post:

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

That’s the kind of power American police believe they have in 2014.  Constitutional rights?  We don’t have no constitutional rights.  We don’t need no stinking constitutional rights.  Do exactly as the man in blue tells you or he has every right to shoot your disobedient ass post haste.  That’s exactly what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and it’s what happens in uncounted other unpublicized incidents of murder by police every week in this country.  And in all too many of these cases, the cop who pulled the trigger walks away.

That shouldn’t happen with Darren Wilson.  If the authorities in Ferguson want to stop the nightly protests and simmering anger, they can do it quite easily.  Simply arrest Darren Wilson and charge him with murder.  It’s what would happen to any one of us under similar circumstances, and had the shooter been black and male and young, he’d have been in shackles and orange coveralls since five minutes after the shooting.  Darren Wilson may, in fact, have committed no crime whatsoever.  Maybe, by some stretch of the limits of credulity, he was justified in shooting Brown at least six times.  But if it was you or me or anyone without a badge, it would be a judge and jury making that determination.

That’s not the likely outcome in Ferguson.  The case is being investigated by the local DA, who is the son and grandson of cops.  He’s taking the case to a grand jury today.  One has to wonder what case will be presented, and just who will be on that grand jury.  Will it be like the police department in Ferguson, with three black officers out of fifty-two cops?

Welcome to the police state.  You’ll do just fine…as long as you do exactly as you’re told.

BW