I have never lived a day in the mythical America that is immortal and above decline or reproach. That is one of the few gifts of being born poor in a nation that so celebrates wealth and power. But I am white. So I have lived in the America where oblivious white people comfortably think of racism that they will never face as something both puzzlingly abstract and largely overblown. An enigma lying between the Other's "exaggerations" and a truly nasty thing that is dismissed as a long-gone relic of the past. The America where millions sleepwalk around in a life of imagined safety living inside a couch-cushion fort of assumed societal stability because the perceive themselves as safe. The surreality where "we fixed racism, that's why that school my kids don't go to is named after Martin Luther King" is an actual, and not all that odd, sentiment.
It's a dire evil to have any cultural, political, or institutional tolerance for lynching by badge. But you don't get to the point where you have a national crisis from that without some pretty highly placed enablers and gatekeepers in elite places. Malignant tumors benefit from a well-suppressed immune system, and a nation that has a nagging sickness in its body is no different. I find it a breathtaking compounding of injustice to have a man like Bob McCulloch at the wheel at the exact time that you fundamentally needed his opposite. At a point when our nation needed to cement the vitally important message to everyone in the land that, yes, you can have full faith in the rule of law. What this nation needed was clear. Here. Look. Justice is possible. The system works. But that is not the message that was sent out in this dark time.
On some deep and fundamental level a disaster like MucCulloch will always fail to grasp how institutionally and systemically malignant his pathetic performance has been for our nation. People are going to die because of this man. People are going to be hurt as a direct result of his willful and ignorant negligence and neglect. Because he had priorities other than justice. Worst of all? He's not alone. America's interests are truly threatened by "public servants" who serve a thin and very narrow slice of the public's good, and who do so in so smugly and so overtly a fashion. This was a dark day in this nation's history, mistaken by a fool for a triumph. His rambling, self-congratulatory babbling brings my blood to a boil whenever I think of it. He tried harder to put Twitter on trial than a murderer who gunned down an unarmed man.
No enemy of this nation has the ability to lay America low this way. From the inside. Hacking and chopping away at the foundation like it's repairing a crumbling road or bridge to do structural damage to it. Here. This. This is what you get. This is how things are versus how you might imagine or with things could or should be. Stop complaining. This is the deal. Suck it up. It is very possible that, someday, a cop is going to be shot and bleeding, and somebody who could help him, who once might have helped him, is just going to mind his or her own business and walk away. "Live by the sword, die by the sword". Like the cop and the drug dealer are just mirror sides of the same coin. That's what a performance like McCulloch's gets you as a nation over time. A nation where people who have to buy in, don't bother. They don't believe.
This is a force multiplier for really bad outcomes. This compounding of evil just cannot stand. Recently, an impatient driver plowed into a large crowd of protesters in Minnesota. Nothing came of it. Now, if you are a person who is already out in the streets over the free-pass murder of Michael Brown, do you have any good will towards the authorities to give out any benefit of the doubt here? Or. Does this compound what is already in your heart and mind and take you to an even darker place? Everything in context. Everything in the context of the moment. Certain people can kill a person of color whenever they claimed to feel threatened. Now? Some can even mow down a crowd of protesters for the sin of being inconvenienced. Everything just feeding negative energy into the great puke funnel that is drowning a dream.
He was questioned by police, but the latest reports say he has not been arrested. Surprised?
The whole process has been such a blatant scourging of the notion that you can have faith in the institutions of justice. Osama Bin Ladin and Timothy McVie must both be laughing their evil asses off in Hell right now. First a monstrosity. Then an orchestrated travesty. Headlined by a performance that was clearly based around a cynically predetermined agenda to blatantly and overtly act as a defense attorney for a man who has done a great wrong than to adequately and competently protect the public. An agenda always meant to hand a golden ticket out of the consequences of being a reckless criminal with a gun and a badge. Because he's special. He's in "the" club. He's one of "ours" in that club. All for a cretin, somehow viewed as a brother and peer rather than as a defendant. Timed for the shitshow to end in angry blowback.
You can almost hear the ripping of the very fabric of the rule of, and the respect and belief in, the rule of law as you mull it over. The worst possible outcome. Treated as if it was all justice. Which is exactly why it sows the seeds for discord and future chaos. It's like prioritizing a piece of shit on the sidewalk over your community and country as a whole. It will get people hurt. Some of them cops, good cops, who are trying to do their job while they are being undermined by those with a misguided notion of what the public good really is, and what narrow and unequal outcomes are the ones that best serve that public good. I look at a Jay Nixon, and a Bob McCulloch, and I can't imagine how their minds work. How can you not see the peril in focusing on excusing yourself, or celebrating your good deeds and great leadership.
Yes. There are higher principles and philosophical reasons for why the rule of law, and respect and belief in the system, must be maintained. But there are also crude and base reasons. There is a reason the phrase "no justice, no peace" exists. It's not a mindless threat. It's an urgent and dire warning. You undermine the public's investment and faith in institutions, you grossly undermine the public's trust, at your peril. It's about more than what you learn in a civics class. Sometimes you have to be smart enough to see that you do the right thing not just because it is the right thing, but because a system that works is insurance against chaos and rioting in the streets. People who are not ignored don't riot. Sometimes I see politicians and pundits talking about civil unrest as if the streets are utterly divorced from the events that flood them.
At some point, reactionary and regressive people conclude that America is the first immortal nation. Eternal. Beyond erosion and collapse. It's one of the reasons why I look at modern Movement Conservatism, the tool of elites who see themselves as the natural ruling order and logical heirs to the royal families of past ages, as a national security threat. You can, in fact, break this country. It's justice system. It's economy. It's middle class. America did not fall out of the sky from Olympus. I feel as much rage and disgust about a Bob McCulloch as I do about a Darren Wilson. The Bob McCulloch's are why you can have a thousand Officer Wilson's above the law and consequences. The grease and the glue of regression and slidebacks when it comes to maintaining what has been achieved, and advancing those gains in the future.
No terrorist group could do to America what gross injury is done by establishing in millions of people's minds that harsh standards and applications of the law are really for the little people. If you have connections. If you belong to the right group, occupation, class, or club, then the rules are not only more flexible, but they might not even apply at all. I think every person who is not one of America's elite understands that there are obvious imbalances and inequities in America. Like 'the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer', there are some ugly and lingering realities that are just a part of American life. The difference is that a truly decent person sees them and fundamentally wants to deal with them. Seeing truly systemic bad things and seeing them like infections that have to be treated and not ignored? It only bolsters a nation.
But the repugnant pride and vain arrogance with these disgusting displays of "justice for me, but not for thee" are a significant, and significantly provocative, bar lowering in a nation with lots of unaddressed ills. A low-water mark in a nation that has been diving at low-water marks in fits and spurts. A cycle that is not something that is easy to repair because it involves a loss of faith in, and, as a direct consequence of that loss of faith, a lowering in the willingness of those who are the short end of the stick to let the system work and take care of injustices. Ultimately, Mr. McCulloch's America has to be abandoned, because his America can't stand. There has to be justice for all, and not some, because the alternative can and will kill. Nations and men. It's a form of sepsis. People who are asleep will wake up to it. One way or another.
What happened in Ferguson could happen to a person of color anywhere in America. It's a fact. You can legally murder a young black man if you also wear a badge and a gun and you can gin-up a bad movie plot of a backstory. Just babble your illogical gibberish after the victim can no longer speak in his or her or their own defense anymore. What could possibly be worse? That being followed by a meandering tortured begging line for justice where the victim is on trial, and then a prolonged and self-congratulatory backslap from the miserable mite of a man who actively insured that the worst outcome was the only possible outcome. Rubbing and grinding salt in an already weeping gash with a pride that defies decency. This screams 'Don't be invested in the possibility that justice is obtainable via peaceful means'. Don't you dare believe.
Don't you dare believe in the very things that are the bedrock beneath order and institutions.
And that? That is a national security threat to America. A lingering and sobering state of affairs that is made all the worse by the tortured plights of America's underclasses, of its unfavored sons and daughters, and all its other marginalized groups all being the favorite reality tv show of America's privileged classes and wealthy elites. Pop your popcorn and watch the riots on tv! For a long time now, I have thought that I knew all along why so many white people, especially white wealthy elites, fear living in a minority majority America so desperately. I concluded that all they can think about is that, when people of color are in charge, there will then be mass reprisals. Revenge. A great doing to them what they have done to others once those 'Others' get a chance. Sometimes? That's the only way Movement Conservatism makes sense as well.
I wonder if anyone like this realizes they are, in a way, kind of demanding their feared outcome, if all of this overlooked, minimalized, and rationalized evil doesn't simply tear America apart first. Thankfully, so far, regressive and reactionary people have been very blessed by the people that they oppress, marginalize, and hurt being better than that. Than them. When it comes to that.
But as America didn't fall out of Olympus, nothing can be torn and worn down like this forever.