Flash: No Young Unarmed Black Men Shot And Killed By Police Today

But the day’s not over, and to be fair, I haven’t reviewed the news feeds from every major metropolitan area in the country, so I might be missing something.  For the last few weeks, it’s seemed you can’t turn on your TV, radio, or laptop without seeing another story of another kid gunned down somewhere by a policeman “just doing his job”. Here’s the really sad part: None of this is really news.  Not the black teens and pre-teens being brutalized, shot, choked, and otherwise dispatched by bullies in blue, and not the prosecutors, commissions, and grand juries who have a chronic “move along, nothing to see here” attitude about holding the cops accountable for their actions.

Richard Pryor was well before his time both in his comedy and in his social commentary.  In a stand-up routine in 1979, Pryor talked about the police proclivity for “killin’ niggas”, both with their magnums and with a little something called a “chokehold”.  Pryor described it thusly: “Two grab your legs and one grabs your head, and SNAP…hey, check the manual and see if it’s ok to break a nigga…yep, it’s right here.”  And please don’t start with me about the n-word.  I’m quoting Pryor, and nothing he says is anywhere near as offensive as the practice he’s describing, a practice that’s gone on not just for ten months or ten years or even fifty years, but dates back to the 19th century and the KKK, and the centuries prior to that when blacks weren’t real people but real property.  Back then if you “broke” a black man, your main regret was that you couldn’t return him at the slave auction for a refund. Aside from all that, just take another look at the video of Eric Garner’s death and see if it doesn’t conform exactly to Richard Pryor’s prescient description in 1979.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

If Richard Pryor struck precisely the right tone in his comedy routine, the members of the NYPD are virtually tone-deaf in their response to the Eric Garner killing.  Rank and file cops in NYC feel that they’ve been unfairly demonized in the Eric Garner incident.  They claim that Garner was “overweight and in poor health” and that that somehow contributed to his own death…you know, the one that occurred when Officer Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold that has long been banned by the NYPD, and he and half a dozen officers dropped him to the pavement while Garner repeatedly pleaded that he couldn’t breath.  The cops go on to point out that if he was saying he couldn’t breath, he was clearly breathing…which completely ignores that Garner must have been accurate in his pleas, since he subsequently stopped breathing…forever.  By the way, if you’re wondering what ever became of the video of the brave gentlemen of the police force performing CPR on their breathless prisoner, you’ve got a long wait, because they never attempted to revive Garner.  They left that task for the paramedics, who arrived just in time to confirm that the prisoner was dead.

In a sad reprise of the common lament heard all too often in Nuremberg, the NYPD cops are claiming they were just following orders, abiding by a policy of making “quality of life” arrests on minor non-violent criminals so as to maintain order on the streets.  They say Garner would still be alive today had he not “resisted arrest”…which roughly translates into “he didn’t immediately wet his pants and lay prone on the ground” when officers tried to arrest him for the dangerous crime of selling cigarettes on the sidewalk.  At least Garner was given more of a chance to instantly comply with police orders than Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old gunned down in Cleveland.  Again, in a case of “Who are you going to believe, me…or your lying eyes?” the video shows Rice being shot immediately as the police car speeds onto the grass and an officer emerges, gun out in both hands…and Rice goes down.  It’s really hard to accept the police account of Rice being told to drop his weapon and being shot when he reached for his waistband…especially when the 911 operator had been told by the caller that the suspect in the park probably had a “toy gun”.  I suppose that little piece of essential information wasn’t relayed to the responding officers nearly as quickly as Darren Wilson got the heads-up on the convenience store robbery.

If you’re waiting to see if maybe there will still be some modicum of justice in the Tamir Rice case, don’t hold your breath.  In a recent interview with a couple of civil rights lawyers, Sam Stein of Huffington Post heard that police in these cases don’t “more often than not” fail to be indicted, but it’s more like “never“.  Jason Cherkis of HuffPo summed it up best: Police “are the Harlem Globetrotters.  They never lose.”  I guess that would make the rest of us the Washington Generals.

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Ray Rice And The Cult Of Cruelty

So TMZ came up with the elevator video of Ray Rice delivering a devastating left jab to the jaw of Janay Palmer, knocking her out cold.  If this had been Floyd Mayweather, and it had been another boxer instead of a woman in a cocktail dress, every commentator in America would be praising the fighter’s blinding hand speed and jittering defensive posture…float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.  Face it, we worship violence in this country.  We pay thousands of dollars to be ringside when guys like Mayweather beat the living shit out of other sweating warriors wearing nothing more shorts and grimaces.  We support teams like the Ravens paying guys like Rice tens of millions of dollars because we all stand up and scream like birthing women when Rice drives some hapless linebacker to the turf like so much paper mache’.  There are some people in this country who have such a love affair with violence that they proudly parade through grocery stores and churches and restaurants with a Glock on their hip and a Bushmaster on their shoulder, and their implicit message is, “Just give me a reason, motherfucker, just give me a reason.”  When balaclava clad lunatics in the desert post videos of beheadings, we bemoan our shock and horror at the barbarism, but then follow with bloodlust of our own.  I saw a post on Facebook yesterday with the heading “When Americans Are Beheaded, There’s Only One Proper Response” posted over a photo of a B-2 Stealth Bomber releasing a full payload of bombs…as if the women and children blown to literal bits by those weapons aren’t just as violated and terrorized and irretrievably dead as the poor fuckers with the knives at their throats.  Our horror and outrage at violence is matched only by our insistence on and fascination with violence.  If you have any doubt, just scan the TV ratings on any day of the week and note that if we aren’t watching a blood-soaked meth cooker, we’re absorbed with hords of brain-sucking zombies or watching roughly twenty versions of CSI, NCIS, SVU or multiple other productions that glamorize various forms of savagery and mayhem, and then applaud the avenging savagery and mayhem of the agents of what we continue to call “civilization”.  Civilization in this context seems to constitute “the guys with the bigger guns and the better aim”.  So, let’s not be so fucking shocked and disappointed when a guy who we as a society pay to be a thug acts like a thug.  It’s not that we shouldn’t be appalled and angry, and it’s not that there shouldn’t be severe and immediate consequences, but let’s just drop the facade of gentility and admit that we are all complicit in some small way.

Is the NFL complicit?  Damned right it’s complicit.  When Roger Goddell and the Ravens management saw the initial video of Rice dragging his unconscious fiance’ out of an elevator and dropping her on the tile like a bag of potatoes, they hit him with with a two-game suspension and stern rebuke.  What the fuck did they think?  That Janay Palmer had fainted in there and Rice was getting ready to call the medics?  They needed to see the actual punch before they canned this sack of shit?  And TMZ could get the elevator tape, but the multi-billion dollar juggernaut of the NFL settled for, “Sorry that’s unavailable at this time”? The NFL doesn’t want to discipline guys like Ray Rice.  The NFL has another thousand guys just like Ray Rice.  We call it “roid rage”.  NFL coaches call it “a nice hit”.  Raven’s coach John Harbaugh’s response to the new video was emblematic of the whole NFL attitude in its disingenuous laughability: “Everything I said in terms of what I believe, I stand by. I believe that still,” Harbaugh said. “I’ll always believe those things and we’ll always stand in support of them as a couple. That’s not going to change.”  Really?  So Ray Rice is just a poor misguided souls who had a little isolated anger problem on a bad day at the casino?  You had no idea previously, and the first video didn’t give you a clue?  What utter bullshit.

And one more thing.  I don’t understand the response of Janay Palmer (now Rice) to her own victimization by domestic violence, but it’s not unique, and it’s part of the problem.  Here’s what she posted yesterday on Instagram: “THIS IS OUR LIFE! What don’t you all get. If your intentions were to hurt us, embarrass us, make us feel alone, take all happiness away, you’ve succeeded on so many levels. Just know we will continue to grow & show the world what real love is! Ravensnation we love you!”

“I woke up this morning feeling like I had a horrible nightmare, feeling like I’m mourning the death of my closest friend,” Janay Rice wrote. “But to have to accept the fact that it’s reality is a nightmare in itself. No one knows the pain that the media & unwanted options from the public has caused my family. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a horrible thing. To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his ass off for all his life just to gain ratings is horrific.

Look, this problem is bigger than Ray Rice, and it’s about more than just domestic violence.  It’s about the glorification of violence in every part of our society, whether condoned or condemned.  It goes all the way from social media bullying to urban gangs to police brutality to Grand Theft Auto to “boots on the ground”, and until we somehow address the disease itself, we can’t profess to be surprised by the symptoms.

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