OJ And Me in the Lonely Crowd

Ever try to imagine the internal conversations of people who turn up in the news?

Did Michael “Kramer” Richards think to himself, “I’m a great comedic actor, but I’m having trouble getting roles these days. Hey, why don’t I try stand-up for a while? That’s got to be easy.”

Maybe the Pope thought, “I know what will show Muslims I’m cool. I’ll go to a predominantly Muslim country and let my people drive me around in the Pope-mobile and show them all how cute and harmless I am. They’ll love me for sure!”

I’m not going to try to guess exactly what OJ was thinking when he came up with that book idea of his. I’m afraid that if I ever got myself to think that way my brain would get stuck in that state and I’d never be able to fake normal again. But I’ll guess part of what he was thinking was “Hmm, money.”

Let me risk seeming to change the subject entirely. I’ve been noticing a pattern in the news lately. A lot is coming down to conflicts, real and imagined, between individual and group rights.

Example: Why should we have hate-crime legislation? Doesn’t that give rights to groups that individuals can’t share in? Why should it be worse to beat up someone because you don’t like the group they belong to, than to beat the same person up because you just don’t like their looks?

Come on, people, that one’s simple. The hate-crime beating is worse to the extent that, in addition to the immediate harm done to the immediate victim, other people are also threatened with future violence. Such threats amount to terrorism.

Here’s an example where the conflict appears genuine: Recently in Montreal the police had a brief internal discussion over whether it might not be good, when engaging with certain extremely patriarchal ethnic communities within that diverse city, to leave the police women in the back seat of the police car, so to speak. Apparently the discussion lasted just long enough for someone to write a memo about it, and then the decision was: no way that’s going to happen. I learned about this from an editorial I found that framed it as a case of women’s individual rights vs a minority group’s rights. But is it?

Wasn’t the decision really to go with offending the tiny minority groups rather than offending the one huge majority group of women? I’m betting the Montreal police department wasn’t looking out for any one woman’s individual rights.

If I’m wrong about that, then what do we make of the veil controversy in France? Veils are losing out there. Why? Because the majority of French women don’t care if they wear veils, that’s why.

Getting back to the questions that started this, the news says that the hecklers that Richards spewed racist language toward are interested in receiving monetary compensation. That puts the whole Michael Richards’ career-in-flames story in a whole different light, one that swings the focus radically from group to individuals.

Suddenly it becomes an issue not of how racist Richards is, or how offended African-Americans everywhere are by the man’s language, but how hurt were these two guys in the audience, and how much would it take to make it better. What we have here is a triumph of the individual-right perspective over the group-right perspective. The hecklers are individualizing the common demand for reparations.

I’m warming to the idea slowly. I’m seeing possibilities, as my individual sensibilities are pummeled wherever I go.

Just the other day, a motorist gave me the finger for delaying him while I used a crosswalk. I’m thinking, that could be $5, right there.

If Benedict XVI sets off World War III by stirring up trouble in Istanbul, I am personally holding him responsible, and I will sue him and the Vatican $100 for each day I am made miserable by the consequent global conflagration. After all, I can’t leave for another planet.

Hmm, money.

Horsemeat and Other Indelicacies

Recently Andy Rooney started one of his 60 Minutes essays talking about spinach making people sick and ended with some observations having to do with the eating of horsemeat. I’m not actually sure what he was saying in-between because I was drowning his voice out with my screams. Later I spoke to Timothy “Perfess’r” Harris, our director, and asked him to shoot me if I ever wrote like that and he indicated that in that case I’d be shot about once every four weeks.

This may be one of those times. I’m high on NyQuil and I feel an irresistible urge to lead you all on a tour of my mind.

Speaking of tours, I was watching Rick Steves’ Europe the other day, and he was touring Turkey. While my eyes were watching, my mind was spinning with thoughts of cattle swimming the Bosporus, the cow jumping over the moon, and questions like, “If Turkey can be part of Europe, then why do we have wars, and why can’t we all have vacation property on Bora Bora?”

As my questions went unanswered I noticed that Rick Steves was playing backgammon with some Turkish people on the screen, and I listened long enough to hear him say that you can’t make a bad move in backgammon when playing the Turks, they won’t let you.

I immediately thought of Sudoku, to which I have lately become addicted. Sudoku isn’t remotely like backgammon, except that it’s a game. For the purposes of my immediate thought the only significant feature of Sudoku is that you do it by yourself. Therefore the great thing about doing Sudoku, the thing that makes it so appealing for me, is I don’t have to play it with some ego-crazed spoiled crybaby sitting across from me.

You see, I used to think that I might like to play chess. But I discovered that everyone within a radius of 3000 miles of me who was willing to join me at it was an ego-crazed spoiled crybaby. Thanks to Rick Steves I now know that I only had to move to Turkey to find people who could enjoy a friendly chess game like human beings. Provided I first hid their dice from them.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with eating horsemeat. Well, one of Andy Rooney’s points, or pointlets, was that he was an American and Americans don’t eat horsemeat, and he, for one, wasn’t about to start.

Likewise, I would like to make a point, or pointlet, that I am an American, and that we Americans are by and large ego-crazed spoiled crybabies, and I, for one, have just about had it.

I’m not talking just about the lack of civil discourse evident during the current political campaigns, although that’s part of it. I’m talking about all the mean-spirited and uncivil and unsportsmanlike conduct that is revealing itself throughout our society at all levels, especially the highest, where it does the most monumental harm.

How can it be that I now have to write columns arguing against pre-emptive warfare and torture?

Last week George Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which deprives almost all human rights to all non-Americans. It doesn’t prevent them from being tortured; it only requires torturers to avoid doing anything that might feel like organ failure or life threatening. So genital-electro-shock is out, thumbscrews are in.

The Act not only allows torture, it also lets the military tribunals use the evidence so obtained against the unlucky suspect. So if you are suspected of being a terrorist and they beat you or someone else into saying that you are a terrorist, then by the new rules, you’re a terrorist.

One of my former chess acquaintances made up the rule that he would always be White, because Black loses too much. I quit playing right about then. How soon before the rest of the world quits playing with America?

How long before the rest of the world catches on that our law treats them like dogs?

When Chickens Come Knocking

It’s been a slow week in the Emerald City. No off-duty police officers have shot anyone. No plain-clothes County Cops have beat up bicyclists our Seattle Police had dibs on. So I’d like to take this time to breathe deeply and to reflect on a general trend I see establishing itself here.

I think what epitomizes the trend is the Supreme Court decision last month which excluded the exclusionary rule from the ways civil libertarians could hope to enforce the knock-and-announce rule.

Just a little more than a decade earlier a differently constituted Supreme Court told us that our Founding Fathers, writing the 4th Amendment, considered the common law principle that the police knock and announce themselves before breaking into your home a key ingredient of a reasonable search.

Not that they didn’t have other ways in mind that searches should be reasonable. Madison may have been the anonymous author of a tract railing against searches that required house owners to say Please and Thank You. Ben Franklin is believed to have thought searches dressed in clown or chicken costumes were unreasonable. Tom Paine more than likely thought it was unreasonable to search for intangibles, like the color purple, shrugs and sighs, affection, etc.

But not knocking and letting the people inside know you were the police was considered by our Founding Fathers the height of unreasonable. Why do I know that? Because it IS the height of unreasonable! It was unreasonable in the Middle Ages, it was unreasonable in 1776, it’s unreasonable now!

If they don’t let me know that they are the police, how do I know criminals aren’t invading my house? How do I know the people breaking in aren’t going to rape my kids and then kill them and kill me for being a witness? I’ll tell you how I know that. I know that ‘cause I’m going to use my Second Amendment guaranteed arms to shoot them all when they come in. Hey, even if they say they’re police, if they don’t show me badges and a warrant, maybe I should shoot them anyway. How do I know they aren’t lying?

The point is, knock-and-announce, and warrants, and badges, and uniforms, are all reasonable because without them the police are indistinguishable from a criminal mob, AND PEOPLE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DEFEND THEMSELVES.

I really think the average American, and I’m including Supreme Court justices in the average for the purposes of this sentence, don’t understand these principles because they’ve all been too privileged and too empowered and too ensconced in a majority of their own mental making to even imagine what it’s like to have total strangers, dressed in chicken suits, breaking into your home without warning, pointing guns at you, and screaming in your and your family’s faces. Hint: it looks just like terrorism, when it happens to you without cause. And it does happen without cause often enough to be safeguarded against. The Founding Fathers safeguarded against it with a mass insurrection.

We could safeguard against it by applying the exclusionary rule against evidence procured by unreasonable means, but the Supreme Court just complicated all our lives by preventing that. Thank you Supreme Court! We are now all officially living in interesting times!

Anyway, the trend is: you never know who’s going to beat you up under the color of authority next. They don’t have to tell you they’re coming in. They don’t have to be wearing uniforms to demand that you bend your knees to them. They only have to say, “You’re under arrest,” and that is supposed to justify any force they use, and constitute proof that they are entitled to use it.

And, who needs a secret police when you’ve got a whole army of off-duty cops to do the work of one?

And, what good is a democratic society if any clown in a chicken suit, or whatever, riding a motorcycle, or not, can shoot a bystander at 2am and get away with it because they happen to be cops 9am-5pm?

Potatoes Don't Grow On Trees

Last week my copy of the American Civil Liberties Union 2006 Workplan arrived in the mail. Having experienced something of a windfall last year I had dished out some cash to the ACLU in order to fulfill a 13 year old wish to be a “card carrying member” of the organization, just like Dukakis. So now I’m on their mailing list, and by the way I’m also on the mailing lists of countless other organizations seeking money to correct societal ills, because for all their talk about rights to privacy the ACLU apparently doesn’t mind sharing my name and address with the whole world.

But I’m not going to whine (anymore) about that. After all, it hasn’t been so bad. The begs for money just fill my mailbox and there’s a wastebasket right below it, so I don’t have to carry them too far. Plus I find some opportunities that I appreciate. For example the NAACP offered to make me a card carrying member for a price that I thought was quite reasonable, considering that I could use the card for fun things, like convincing dumb people that I’m an honorary Person of Color. Oh yeah, and I like some of the work they do.

Of course you can join organizations without liking everything they do. Believe it or not, even though I’m on the board of this rag-plus-do-good entity, I don’t agree with everything they do. For instance, I think vendors should be able to get papers on Sunday. Or, to take a better example, I think I should be paid for writing this. I would accept the Calvin Trillin /Village Voice deal: one column, one baking potato. Taking into account the fact that Washington grown Russets are now hovering near 30 cents per pound and that single potatoes average less than half a pound, I think that would be eminently reasonable. But, “no, if we paid you a potato, we’d have to pay everybody a potato,” is all I hear.

Anyway, when I got my ACLU 2006 Work Plan out of my mailbox, Anitra Freeman was there. Ms. Freeman happens to be a Raging Granny, so she is under surveillance by the FBI for such things as singing parodies that might or might not hurt politicians’ feelings, wearing silly outfits, and lying down on city property, pretending to be dead. So she appreciates a lot of what the ACLU does, but when she saw my mail she complained “the ACLU doesn’t see homelessness as a civil rights issue.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” I thought. “Of course they do,” I thought. For instance they’ve fought LA’s version of a No Sitting Ordinance, not just because they care about the right of ordinary citizens to sit down on sidewalks, but specifically, they care about the right of homeless people to do so. Or, there are the lawsuits in a number of places to stop police from confiscating homeless peoples’ property. Or, there's work that could prevent homelessness, like lawsuits to stop wrongful evictions. A recent case took a landlord to court for trying to evict a battered woman. The landlord didn’t want her out because she was battered. He wanted her out because she called the police. She was supposed to just take it. So the ACLU got involved. So there, Anitra.

But then I read the Workplan itself and could not find homelessness addressed in all 8 pages.

Would it have taken too much ink to mention, somewhere among the ten paragraphs under the heading “Defending the Right to Vote,” for example, that the right of homeless persons to vote has been increasingly under attack in this country? How about mentioning somewhere that the work to protect the right of homeless people to their property is barely begun?

After that I set myself down with pen and paper to think of how many ways homelessness is a civil rights issue, and in two minutes I had two pages of notes on the subject.

Hey, ACLU, you could do that too.