The Other Side of the Asile

If you're like me, you might have winced ever so slightly when Republicans accused Twitter and Facebook (and by extension—“cancel culture” Democrats) of denying Donald Trump his First Amendment rights. His right to free speech.

Of censorship and banishment.

And um, I agree. In the tiniest, most-literal sense imaginable.

But this is Donald Trump. The cancer who stood in front of a mob of right-wing nut jobs and exhorted them to do his bidding for him. To march on the Capitol building and prevent the “stolen” election results from being etched in stone—by any and all means necessary.

But like so much of what emanates from the mouths of Republicans, we needn't have worried.

Republicans have taken it upon themselves to administer their own brand of censorship by their efforts to remove, silence or, at the very least, censure those in elected office who didn't march in lockstep with president 45 on everything.

Up to and including sedition.

Sadly, the poster child for this foolishness is Liz Cheney, a congresswoman from Wyoming. Her words, more than any other, articulated the dismay so many of us felt after the events of January sixth.

She said Donald Trump had betrayed the oath he took when he became president. Yes. Betrayed. As in cheating a spouse. Jilting a lover. The word carries a powerful human component of hurt and loss. Of being lied to. It is the perfect choice.

If that weren't enough, Cheney had the temerity to vote for impeachment of Crazy Don, an act which didn't escape the notice of the Wyoming GOP. They voted 66 to 8 to censure her.

Want to talk to me again about the First Amendment, gentlemen? Oh that's right. Only Democrats censor people. You're just ensuring party homogeny.

Sore loser Darin Smith even went so far as to publicly answer the question 'You want to know how far down the Trump rabbit hole I am?' by speaking thusly:

“We need to honor President Trump. All President Trump did was call for a peaceful assembly and protest for a fair and audited election.”

Which he got—weeks before this charade.

I'm trying to imagine the Republican response had it been President Obama speaking Trump's words in front of a crowd of BLM supporters. Telling them “You need to fight like hell! Because if you don't, you're not going to have a country any more!” Or having Obama's faux Giuliani suggest “Let's have trial by combat!”

Yes, Republicans would be falling all over themselves to hang Obama from a tree. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

But coming from Trump and addressed to an angry, roiling mob armed with guns, ammunition, helmets, bullet proof vests, police shields and filled with a soon-to-be-acted-on murderous rage?

Nah. It's just Don being Don. 

If you say so. 

The Trump Tantrum: Day 64

With an unbalanced and deranged man presently heading the United States, you have to ask yourself what's next?

This creature, completely unable to process the events of November 3^rd, is suffering a catastrophic psychological episode and everything—everything—is on the table that might reconcile his battered psyche with what is no doubt an unimaginably twisted sense of retribution.

This man is a terrorist. He needs to be treated as such. Twitter understands this. For starters, he must be censured. Then he must be removed from office.

On a more humane note, he should be checked into a psychiatric facility until he is well. Then it is critical he be made to face the mountain of charges filed against him. Accountability has never been needed more-urgently.

By rights, he should be stripped of his presidential pension and his lifetime of taxpayer-supported security. It is obscene that those who have suffered at his hands financially, materially and health-wise be made to ensure a lifetime of safety for him and his family.

Supporters embraced Donald Trump because he was an outlier. A maverick. I've never fully understood how a billionaire real estate developer from Manhattan qualifies as an outsider, but then I have a brain. 

An outsider as president is a good thing because? 

Finally, isn't it pitiable that the abundant law enforcement agencies in and around Washington DC didn't treat this as a BLM march? Just imagine the scores of heavily-armed militia that would have ringed the Capitol building!

Sigh.

As a nation and a society, we have nowhere to go but up. I pray we make it.

Black Privilege? (Number-two)

Dear Black Lives Matter,

I want to stand with you. March with you. And wear your t-shirts. But I just can't. It is because you so frequently act as wantonly and as recklessly as the white power structures you deride.

Last Sunday afternoon, yet-another police shooting occurred on the south side of Chicago. Typically, before a single element of the event had been proven or disproven, social media was ablaze with rumors and threats.

That evening, a caravan of cars, trucks and vans converged on Michigan Avenue, which if you're not familiar with Chicago, is our version of New York City's Park Avenue. It is awash with high-end retailers of clothing, jewelry and anything else people with unbridled amounts of money and time need to fill the hollowness they feel after chasing—and getting—it all.

At any rate, the mob smashed windows and emptied those boutiques and shops of every piece of merchandise within.

Judging by your tone-deaf and anonymous press release the morning after, the looting was an entirely-justified response to what Black Lives Matter assumes is another racist and unwarranted police shooting.

Furthermore, since when do “protesters” (as you refer to them) come to a protest with glass cutters and hammers and rental trucks? Sunday night's looting was as spontaneous as sunrise—an entitlement its participants felt was justified because the Chicago Police Department—wrongly or rightly—shot a Black man.

Do I dare call it Black Privilege?

As with our current president, facts don't matter. Just your knee-jerk indignation does.

And while I'm questioning you, may I ask another?

I confess to not keeping tabs on every event you stage, but I am unaware of Black Lives Matter ever mounting a protest at the corner of say, Lake and Cicero, and calling out the scores and scores of Black gang-members who indiscriminately kill their own in service of the drug trade.

Don't those black lives matter? Or is it because there is no established (i.e. white) authority you can threaten/berate/criticize? You'll have to excuse me, but from my vantage point Black lives matter only when taken by white hands.

If I am uninformed as to the depth and breadth of your efforts, please set me straight. In all seriousness, I would be delighted to be wrong.

A French philosopher once observed that we become what we hate. And in the case of too many of Black Lives Matter's responses to serious events crying out for fact-based clarity, you are as assumptive and presumptuous as the police you loathe.

Again, like the police you say need to be defunded, re-organized, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, you are better at escalating conflict than you are at de-escalating it. And if that is your goal, congratulations.

But if you seek to educate and reform public and law enforcement perceptions, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face. Take it from a long-time viewer of Botched: nasal reconstructive surgery sucks.

Best of luck to you.

Signed,

An Old White Guy

Rayshard Brooks Is a Martyr? Seriously?

The dynamics of a police shooting are so skewed when viewed by, well, us. We often only see law enforcement's reaction rather than the provocation which initiated it, giving us a really crappy and incomplete idea of what actually happened.

Again, I don't send three-figure donations to the Fraternal Order of Police. But neither do I subscribe to the idea that every single police shooting of a black man is unjustified murder.

Atlanta's Rayshard Brooks makes a nice case in point. And for a change, there is lots of video available.

Okay. Rayshard had too much to drink. Now he's ferociously hungry. He's jonsing for a double cheeseburger (never frozen) with fries and pulls into the local Wendy's drive-through.

Everything is sweet and dandy.

Except for one thing. He passes out. The police are called.

They administer a completely legal and by-the-book sobriety test, which includes a breathalyzer sample. Brooks fails.

Again, all of this is completely legitimate and above board. There is no profiling. There is no stereotyping. Rayshard is drunk and behind the wheel of a car. It's open and shut.

Even 2020 Americans can agree DUI is not a good thing, right?

But as the police attempt to handcuff Rayshard, he resists. He hits the cops seeking to make an entirely-justifiable arrest and manages to steal one of their tasers. He runs away.

When the cops pursue him, he fires their taser at them.

Seriously, Rayshard? You're snagged passed out behind the wheel of your car and you're going to fire tasers at the police for catching you? Really? Put down the meth pipe, bro. You're really fucking messed up.

Let me ask you, good readers of The Square Peg: what are police to do when they encounter a law breaker who gives every indication of doing whatever he needs to do to extract himself from the situation?

Invite him (or her) out for beer and pizza?

Buy them the newest, most up-to-date video gaming console in the hopes it will keep said offender off the streets?

Realize it's break time and head for the nearest Dunkin' Donuts?

Or detain them for arrest and pending charges?

We need to think very, very carefully about what we are asking of our police. I, for one, don't want them neutered when they encounter a law-breaker. Or a violent felon. 

Do we really want anyone who resists arrest to be let off the hook, scot-free? Really? Is that the desired outcome?

I don't like laws and regulations any more than you do, but I will admit that yes, we kinda sorta need them. A society needs a framework within which to exist. And we need really skilled people to keep us within it. 

For whatever reason, Rayshard Brooks couldn't man-up to the simple, uncontestable charge that he was DUI. He escalated the entire stop by fighting, stealing an officer's taser, running away and then and firing that taser at police, which I hope we can all agree is a fairly aggressive act.

Sadly, the officer chasing Brooks didn't enjoy the same option, as his taser had been, well, you know.

Rayshard, I'm sorry you weren't the sharpest knife in the drawer. I'm sorry you panicked. If you hadn't, you'd probably still be alive today. But you're not.

Even worse, an engorged society already filled with legitimate indignation over police brutality has unthinkingly included you in their pantheon of social injustice victims. But we know differently, don't we? 

Let's be clear, people. Rayshard Brooks is not Laquan McDonald. He isn't Ahmaud Arbery. Not George Floyd. Nor Breonna Taylor. Bestowing martyrdom on a man who wanted to fuck with the police for (correctly) arresting him is questionable at best and blindingly ignorant at worst. 

Exactly what are we telling our children?

Random Thoughts, Vol. 7

It has been a hideous year. A wretched, stinking, hideous year. It was the kind of year that immerses you in hopelessness. The kind of year where even a raise was turned on its head and became a liability.

Not surprisingly, the thoughts that collect in your brain resemble the pus that pools in an open wound. They are yellowish and opaque and resemble congealed gravy.

Most of them are sour. A few are jocular. Some aspire to profundity. Of course, there is a difference between aspire and success. Consider this your warning.

This is the caustic send-off 2015 deserves. You will be exultant to see it pass. And if it doesn't, you will cut it out with a knife—with or without anesthesia.

Is there a more-perfectly named basketball player than Tim Duncan?

The tragedy of the eighties was that Hinckley missed and Chapman didn't.

If the Koch brothers earned a combined $910,000 per hour in 2015, can't we make $15?

The FBI processed more background checks in 2015 than in any other year on record, meaning more fire arms were purchased than ever before. Are we safe yet?

Does former Bears coach Lovie Smith deserve early consideration for the Hall of Fame because he reached the Super Bowl with a team quarterbacked by Rex Grossman?

If not for wrapping your brain around the myriad of exclusions, exceptions and conditions that affect your coverage, predicting your needs for the coming year and dealing with the reams of paperwork that arrive (none of which contains the bill—at least until three days before it's due)—all under the threat of a government-imposed fine—we wouldn't need health insurance.

Is there a more-appropriately named street in America than Wall Street?

Do black lives matter only when they're taken by white hands?

Anyone who votes for Donald Trump deserves Donald Trump. But leave those of us with IQs out of it, OK?

And speaking of America, wasn't it a great idea?

The Wrong Men

No one enjoys a good, old-fashioned protest more than I. People not only getting angry, but getting involved and organizing and devoting time to the expression of that discontent is at the very heart of my definition of democracy.

We the people countering a war, Wall Street greed or police brutality forcefully but peacefully is such a powerful thing. I mean, Twitter rants are wonderful, but they're just not the same.

But protests can be misdirected and ill-informed just as often as they're consciousness-raising, life-changing events. Case in point would be the Seattle chapter of Black Lives Matter interrupting a small public get-together celebrating Social Security and Medicare.

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unwittingly became the target of these passionate—but misguided—protesters when they took the stage and demanded those in attendance hold Sanders accountable for police brutality and gentrification and the disparity of Seattle's public schools.

Perhaps they had confused Sanders with Baltimore police chief Anthony Batts or some generic law and order, right-wing Republican. But publicly harassing Sanders on the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's death and demanding that he be held accountable?

Wow. Just wow. Guess all us white folk look alike.

If I was only mildly supportive of Black Lives Matter before this event, you can imagine my enthusiasm afterwards. Sorry, but I am not convinced that each and every police shooting of a black person is unjustified or the act of a runaway law enforcement agency drunk on its own authority.

Yes, there is a great deal wrong with the relationship between law enforcement and African-Americans, and only a moron would say otherwise. Yes, it definitely needs an infusion of understanding and mutual respect.

But I would like to see the folk who constitute Black Lives Matter march through the ghetto with their message and confront the gang-bangers, drug dealers and garden variety thugs who kill young black men at a rate that dwarfs that of the police.

Just for starters, I would like to see a gun-toting gang-banger informed that black lives matter. Then we can move on to law enforcement.

People, let's be clear: Michael Brown is not a martyr. And Bernie Sanders is not your enemy.