Florida Police Exploit Homeless People

Finally homelessness is in the news again, sort of.

Kissimmee, Florida, made the national news last week by having a couple of police officers pretend to be homeless guys hanging out at an intersection. They were there in order to spot traffic offenders for ticketing by cohorts a block away. This trick has probably been done thousands of times elsewhere, but Kissimmee officials were decent enough in this instance to allow reporters to watch the proceedings, so we get to know about it.

Before going on, let's pause to make our expected crack about the name of the town: No, Kissiyyouou, Florida. There, now we can relax and get to this story about fake homelessness.

Back to "Operation Vagrant." Two things seem to irk homeless advocates about this story. First is the fact that it shows once again that people are quite thoroughly aware of the problem. I mean, if the Kissimmee police thought that homelessness were uncommon, they wouldn't have imagined that by posing as homeless they would have blended into the scenery, would they? But what are they doing about that realization? They are exploiting the ubiquity of homelessness to catch people who turn right on red without stopping. This doesn't help homeless people.

The other thing that irks is that now when someone is driving around northern Osceola County and happens to see a homeless guy in the median, instead of thinking, "When am I going to do something about the homeless problem in this country," they'll think, "Uh-oh, better slow down to the speed limit." There is a certain dilution of concern that can be expected.

Some homeless advocates, namely those who are uncomfortable with the police altogether, may fear that a pervasive distrust for the cops could rub off on the homeless. So you're walking down the street and you see a disheveled guy sitting by the curb on a milk crate. In the past you would have said, "Get a job, bum!" Now you would say, "Get off our backs, pig!" That is, if you were already inclined to say things like that. So for these homeless advocates the fear would be that the homeless all might be confused with the police, creatures held in lower esteem.

I see the problem more as a personnel issue.

Let's consider a similar issue and see if we can spot the problem. Everybody remember blackface minstrel shows? Remember why they were so offensive? Because it was racism, right? Yes, but what else was it?

It was a personnel issue. The issue was, they already HAD black people who could sing and dance. They didn't need to hire white people to put on blackface and pretend to be black. They could have hired the existing real talented black people instead.

It wasn't so much the blackface itself that was so bad as it was the usurping of roles. Why does Pat Boone give us the creeps? Because he was getting the radio play when we should have been hearing Little Richard, that's why. He was usurping Little Richard's place at the table. And while we're at it, I think Little Richard should have been in Journey to the Center of the Earth, too, and shot out of a volcano, and landed naked up a tree. Who really wants to see Pat Boone's skinny white ass up a tree?

Likewise, what we have right there in Osceola County is a pair of police GETTING PAID THE BIG POLICE BUCKS to pretend to be homeless people and use a two-way radio (or I don't know, a stupid cell phone) just to call up their buddies and snitch on drivers.

I don't know very many actual homeless people who can't sit on a median strip and snitch on bad drivers. So why won't Kissimmee hire the real thing? Why do they pay for fake teeth and fake tattered clothing and fake ripped off shopping carts when the real deal is already out there courtesy of the real people?

I Feel His Pain

I've always been one of those people who are most happy getting away from everybody and entertaining myself in solitude. But I am not completely asocial. I want to remain in touch with my fellow man and my fellow woman. Mostly my fellow woman, but I don't want to get off the subject with that.

What I'm saying is that one of the ways I keep myself entertained is by Trying to Relate. Trying to Relate is this solitary game I play where I try to keep in touch with the rest of the species by trying to relate to things that I hear or read about them doing. It is a fun game that can keep me busy for hours and hours.

Take for example this guy Aron Ralston who got his arm caught under an 800-pound boulder and chewed it off to get away. The news said he cut it off but when you read the details and find out how dull the knife was and the fact that he had to break both forearm bones first you realize that the "chew" metaphor is more appropriate than the "cut" metaphor. He chewed his arm off with a piece-of-junk knife. "Hacked" might work.

Trying to Relate takes me down many avenues of fun. I don't have to confine myself to trying to relate to Mr. Ralston. I can try to relate to the reporters, too. So right now I'm trying to relate to the guy who first wrote that it was an 800-pound boulder and I'm asking myself the question, "Who hiked back the ten miles from the highway with the scale and weighed the rock?" And I am imagining the reporter asking this question and getting a blank stare. This way I am relating.

But of course the story is about Mr. Ralston and most of my fun naturally gravitates toward trying to relate to what he did.

I am reminded at this juncture of the recent news of a study, done by actual scientists, that determined that (duh!) some people hurt more than other people. Now, "relating" requires just such comparisons between people. To be precise, in relating to Mr. Ralston I would be relating two people, namely him and myself. Therefore I must consider how much would I hurt, were I to hack myself.

Well. It so happens that I am the sort of guy who can't even touch his nipples with his fingertips without screaming in agony. For me, popping a pimple requires that a local anesthetic be applied by a qualified nurse. To remove a band-aid from hairy skin on my arm I shower frequently until it falls off or decays. I am not exaggerating one bit.

So the answer to the question of how much I would hurt if I were to hack myself is: gobs.

There is absolutely no possible way that I could chew, hack, or even cut my arm off, and then later say to the world, "I felt pain and I coped with it." The word "coped" would not be part of my description of what happened. I would say something like, "I felt pain and I screamed bloody murder." Or something like, "I felt pain and I passed out and bled all over myself and then I woke up puking and alternately screaming bloody murder." Or, "I started to cut myself and I couldn't do it and instead I passed out and woke up in this hallucinated press conference and now I'm going to die trapped under this rock."

What I am suggesting here is the heresy that Mr. Ralston was able to do what he did because he was constituted differently from some of the rest of us. He evidently does not feel pain as much as some people, namely me. I actually suspect that he is the sort who feels less pain than most of us. Why, I wonder, is it so important for him to climb every 14,000-foot or higher mountain he can, in cold weather no less? Could it be that he's desperately running around trying to feel anything?

But, hey, I'm not saying that what he did isn't still very impressive. Just because he couldn't feel his arm as much as most of us can feel ours, doesn't mean he wasn't attached to it. I'm sure that he's going through a grieving process now as serious as any I would.

Now, grief, there's something I can relate to, while we all wait for Paradise to fall on us.

The Good, the Bad, and the Invisible

The good news: Saddam Hussein is effectively gone. The bad news: Bush and company can't tell the difference between doing something good and doing something good in a way that doesn't screw up everything else in the world.

You can't learn from a mistake you can't see. The administration is too busy dancing around the ball to realize they're in the wrong end zone. We haven't stopped terrorism. We've gone begging for it.

Meanwhile I have a cold. I had this cold two weeks ago, see, and I didn't want it, so I gave it to Anitra "on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept" Freeman. I gave her my cold in a duck-licking frenzy. I am not proud of it, I'm only reporting the facts.

But then, two days ago, Anitra gave me my cold back. No fair! She was supposed to pass it on! Now I will have to punish her by holding the cold just until she loses it and then giving it back to her again. That will teach her not to break the rules.

I'm just kidding, of course. The only rules here that matter are the rules of viruses and bacteria and immune systems and biology in general. This however brings up the subject of homelessness.

The crime of allowing homelessness to happen is a form of rape. Rape occurs when someone's own body and bodily functions are turned into weapons against them. Rape doesn't require penetration. It's already rape when you tell someone that they can't use your bathroom, forcing them to go in the alley and get arrested. It's already rape when you refuse to let someone sleep even in your cold doorway, so they have to sleep in the colder alley and get run over by a truck.

Boy, there's nothing that brings the humor level of a conversation down faster than the word rape, don't you think? Rape, rape, rape, rape. But what can I do? It's a fact. Sleep, urination, and defecation are physical necessities, and if you deny them to people it's no different than forcing them to participate in one of your BDSM fantasies without their permission.

Evidently I can complain about the crime of allowing homelessness to happen for seventy-seven years, and no one's going to do anything about it just because I say they should. So I keep looking for ways to make the point that it's wrong without sounding like I'm complaining. Maybe appealing to people's sense of self-preservation is the way to go.

You can't learn from a mistake you can't see. If you've never been homeless you probably can't understand how it could be regarded as a form of rape. The lesson may be lost on you.

But, hey, you have a vulnerable body too. You are not invincible. Have you been following the progress of SARS? OK, maybe SARS isn't the plague that's going to do you in. But the CIA says SARS is just the beginning so get ready for worse.

Here's a heads-up for everyone: when a disease becomes endemic you are only as safe as the most vulnerable populations among you. If there are people among you whose health is consistently neglected the disease will spread like wildfire among them, and you will be in line for it.

My biggest fear right now is that SARS will spread to third-world areas of Africa, for example, where there is inadequate medical care. There will be no controlling it globally at that point. My second greatest fear is that American homeless shelters will be infected with it. Then there will be no controlling it in our cities.

OK, suppose you don't have that much sense of self-preservation. How about Wes-preservation? I live directly across from a mission. If you don't care about whether you get SARS or not, please have a care for poor highly infect-able me. Please help eradicate homeless shelters so there are fewer opportunities for viruses to attack my tender air passages. Thank you.

Syria's Friends Are Layabouts?

Periodically I encounter young people. And one of the things young people like to ask me is, "Why did you hippies screw up America back in the sixties?" "Ha, ha," I respond, "I wasn't a hippy, you ignorant child," but later I feel bad because I sense that I could have provided some insight to someone who was sincerely seeking answers. Then still later I watch the Simpsons and fall asleep.

Put another way, the question that arises is, what were all those long-hairs rebelling against back then? Well, now it can be known. Consider the following quote from Donald Rumsfeld.

"The (Syrian) government's making a lot of bad mistakes, a lot of bad judgment calls, in my view, and they're associating with the wrong people."

That, my friends, is a sixties dad. "That kid (alternately: my son, or that minority person, or that rock singer, or that protestor) is making a lot of bad mistakes, blah, blah, in my view, AND they're associating with the wrong people." Pure sixties dad.

Now multiply that by how ever many millions of sixties dads there were and count in the fact that most sixties moms were backing up this kind of clenched-teeth belligerence from the sidelines, and you can see what all the fuss was about. The long-hairs were rebelling against a zillion petty Donald Rumsfelds in various pants and skirts. (Women always wore skirts in those days. Or else.)

The one non-sixties-dad like thing about Donald Rumsfeld is that he writes poetry. However, when Donald Rumsfeld writes poetry, it is very recognizably the sort of poetry a sixties dad would write if he broke the stereotype and wrote poetry. So the stereotype doesn't really break.

In view of some recent events in the Middle East, some of Rumsfeld's poetry from the past starts to look like warnings of things to come. For example the 2001 "Situation" ends with the lines, " There will be some things that people will see. / There will be some things that people won’t see. / And life goes on."

Take the celebration in Baghdad when the statue near the Palestine Hotel was brought down by the tank. People saw the cheering Iraqis. But they did not see the limits of the crowd. Wide-angle photos that showed that the crowd consisted of fewer than two hundred people were available on the internet but not discussed in the major US media -- things unseen. Also unseen was evidence that the Iraqi participants in the celebration were primarily Iraqi freedom fighters brought into Baghdad by our military.

Credit has to go to our Army and Marines for doing such a fine job of propaganda. This is what we pay them the big bucks to do. It is of course desirable to convince your enemy that you have won the support of the people as soon as possible, so that they will give up the fight. It is unfortunate that in the process you also end up lying to everyone else in the world, including the people you are supposedly saving from future terrorism. But hey, life goes on, right?

Well, for some of us anyway. Not for Rachel Corrie and Tom Handoll.

You probably know Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israeli army bulldozer a while back, when she could have simply been handcuffed and arrested. You may not know that Tom Handoll, a British activist, was murdered a few days ago by means of a shot to the head, fired at him while he was trying to herd Palestinian children away from Israeli soldiers. When he could have simply been handcuffed and arrested. (They could have charged him with "giving a damn for Palestinian children," apparently a capital offense in Israel now. At least he would have had a trial.)

Shades of the sixties. I remember it now so well.

To Israel: Please find another way.

To the reader: Please support House Concurrent Resolution 111, AKA the Rachel Corrie Resolution, which calls for an investigation into her death.

By the way, I know this column hasn't been very humorous. But as Anitra puts it, "They're giving you hell to work with."

Mainlined headlines

Let's hyperventilate!

Rumsfeld is right. I have become such a CNN junky. I watch the war news 16 hours a day on television and spend the rest of my time reading about it at CNN.com. I have strong opinions about what Aaron Brown has become. I recognize way too many retired army generals.

I know far more than I need to know about the 3-7th cavalry. Unofficial song: the Garryowen (I can even spell it!) Unofficial Martyr: General Custer. Battle cry: "Hoo hah!" And to think I used to credit Mad Magazine with inventing "Hoo hah!" along with "Axolotl?" and "What you mean WE, Kimosabe?" I know what a FARRP is. I know who the tip of the tip of the spear of the rolling wave of steel is, according to CNN's Walter Rodgers (namely the 7th cavalry, of course.)

Then, a couple of days into the conflict, I learned that "stay behinds are eating up our soft logistical tail" from retired Colonel David Hackworth. Thus I began to hyperventilate, precisely as Rumsfeld has described.

It's all those ups and downs of 24-hour coverage. It's the up of watching a rommel of tanks race across the desert a hundred miles unopposed, followed by the down of hearing about an ambush and capture of POWs, followed by the minor up of Gen. Myers calling our strategy "brilliant", followed by the extreme down of watching the British conduct "psychological warfare" as they bulldoze murals of Saddam. Like anyone's dumb enough to fall for that trick. ("Hey, where did big picture of Saddam go? Me guess war is over." – I wonder how much they're saying that in the outskirts of Basra.)

Is it any surprise I need a paper bag to breathe into? I am experiencing the fundamental stress that all thinking organisms experience when we need intelligence and all we get are unconnected facts. This is what I call an adventure in poetry. It's the anxiety that adheres to so-called military intelligence operations like peanut butter to the roof of a dog's mouth. We know all kinds of stuff, but we don't know what matters.

Let me give an example. According to our great spy agencies the Iraqis still had weapons of mass destruction as of March 19, when we started to shoot at them. The whole excuse for shooting at them was the presumed fact I just mentioned, coupled with the equally presumed fact that the Iraqis were willing to USE the afore-mentioned WMDs on us in the future.

But the question that mattered was HOW willing were the Iraqis to use those WMDs.

I mean, what the hell does it take to get an Iraqi to gas you? How much do you have to throttle one of these guys before he blows VX in your face? Don't they know we're conquering them?

OK, maybe by the time you read this the Republican National Guard will have gassed the 7th cavalry and given smallpox to the 101st Airborne, but that won't change the fact THAT THEY HAVE WAITED UNTIL WE WERE ON BAGHDAD'S DOORSTEP. That is not much of an indication of a "willingness to use weapons of mass destruction on us." That indicates instead an unwillingness to use weapons of mass destruction on us except as a last resort (which is by the way when I personally favor using them.)

Our "intelligence" got it wrong because the Saddam regime used weapons of mass destruction on "his own people", hence proving that he was evil, hence proving a willingness to use WMDs on us at the drop of a hat.

Well, that logic didn't work.

Apparently Saddam Hussein, who regards the Kurds as less than animals, respects Americans and British as moral equals who deserve better treatment.

Perhaps he sees himself in us.

Blow This Up, Sonny, You'll Feel Better

As I write this it is the morning of March 17, the day George Bush has set as the last day for Saddam Hussein to do I know not what before bombing the hell out of the Iraqis and invading and conquering them. There are people looking forward to this, praying that Saddam doesn't do anything that even remotely resembles disarming for fear that a glorious opportunity to dominate with sheer violence will be missed.

It's times like this that writing an alleged humor column is like making balloon animals for a kid whose dog just got run over.

No, it's worse than that. It's like, I'm the kid whose dog just got run over, and here are these balloons, and I'm supposed to make animals out of them to cheer everyone else up.

It doesn't help that we're on a cusp and I have no idea what will have happened by the time you are reading this. All I can say is that if it isn't spring yet, it will be by tomorrow. The network news says the day and time to attack has already been set but only the generals know, of course.

What's a guy supposed to make fun of in a situation like this? How 'bout those Dixie Chicks?

I'm so slow when it comes to popular culture that I constantly find myself wanting to call them the Chicksie Dix. As a result I have difficulty retaining in my mind an accurate image of them. I forget whether they are a country-western girl group or some female punk group ridiculing and taunting sexually insecure males. I wish they were the latter but I'm afraid not.

The reason for bringing them up at this juncture is of course that one of them, Natalie Maines, said at a March 10th London show, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Subsequently radio stations all over the place have been boycotting their music and fans have been throwing out their CDs.

Since I don't have any Dixie Chick CDs to throw away I can view this whole situation with remote amusement. Our glorious leader is about to commit our country to the commission of what could very well be declared by an international war tribunal down the road as a war crime, and the Dixie Chicks are worried that people might think less well of Texas.

Come to think of it, didn't the Bushes originate from Maine? What do Maineites think of that? What kind of name is Maines? Why isn't Maines from Maine? My head hurts.

But there's more! To make matters worse, just four days later Maines apologized. She now says her remark was disrespectful to the office of the presidency. So in other words, she's evidently still ashamed that Bush is from Texas, but now in addition to that she's also ashamed of having said so. Maines goes on to say that she thinks whoever holds the office of presidency should be treated with the utmost respect. That should endear her to all her conservative fans, every last Clinton-bashing one of them.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I simply cannot regard William McKinley with the utmost respect, to name just one. I'm ashamed that McKinley came from my planet. I know, she means the current office-holder. But a president is a president, not a king, and he's not owed any more respect than he earns. There I said it.

While I'm here there's something else I want to say. I believe that justice happens. Justice happens eventually whether people speak for it or not. But if you don't speak for it you will be justly swept away when the universe finally rights itself. And I believe the people who speak for justice, wherever they are, are the ones who really deserve respect, not office-holders, certainly not office-thieves.

I respect Rachel Corrie.

Opinions Shouldn't Come Easy

So I was thinking about my minor faults, and I thought of another one. I'm useless. I'm useless in so many ways, but one of my favorite ways of being useless is as an opinionated columnist.

An opinionated columnist is supposed to, above all, have opinions. But, oops, I hardly have any. In fact half the work of writing these things every two weeks is spending the nine or ten hours it takes each time to force myself to have one.

I've just called it a fault, but actually I'm so un-opinionated in my un-opinionated-ness that I can't really decide whether it's a fault or not. Maybe it's a cute quirk. Or maybe it means I could be the world's greatest jury member. "Mr. Browning, I'm sure you've read the hundreds of stories in the newspapers describing my client as a blood-thirsty murderer. What do you think of that?" "Duh, I don't know." "I have no objections to this juror, your honor."

I was reminded of all this Wednesday a week ago as I was reading the Seattle Times. I kept repeatedly running across stories that I felt I should have strong opinions about but I couldn't decide what they should be, just because I am so lame.

There was the story about 200 people from all over the world who have volunteered themselves to Iraq to serve as "human shields" in the event of a war. Now I have no problem figuring out what I think about Iraq's use of involuntary human shields. That's totally wrong. Iraq did that last time, they will probably do it this time, and it's wrong. But if people do it willingly, what can I say?

Sure, these people superficially resemble the suicidal bombers that we all hate for, uh, suicide bombing. They've got the suicide half down, and there's bomb-action involved. But WE'RE the ones about to be doing the bombing. How is that their fault?

Then, at the bottom of the same page, I got the privilege of reading for the first time about our military's latest computer-military advance, the new computer program called "Bugsplat."

Did I mention that I was preparing to see a psychiatrist as I was reading this? Here I found out that our military has a computer program that analyzes the potential for "collateral damage" that any given bombing might have, so that our commanders in the field can judge what size and kind of bombs to use in an attack. The program displays the potential collateral damage graphically as images of bugsplats on a computer screen, they say. So, I thought, why was I the one seeing the psychiatrist?

OK, the real name of the program is FAST-CD (Fast Assessment Strike Tool – Collateral Damage.) OK, if they're going to have a war and bomb people, I can see the benefit of having a computer program warn when a lot of civilians would be killed. I can see it on a practical, or what do you call it, logistical level. But it sickens me to think that the program has a built-in tolerance for a degree of civilian death and suffering. The idea isn't to avoid all "bugsplats" but to "minimize" them. We are building a definition of what that "minimizing" should be into a piece of software, so that our military commanders don't have to use their own consciences to make those sorts of decisions. Isn't that evil?

So then I moved on to the local news, thinking that I would be safe there. Nothing but familiar issues, issues I had long decided upon. Did I mention that I was seeing that psychiatrist to talk about child abuse that happened to me 40 years ago? So what do I read, but that there is now a move in DSHS and the state legislature to open up child abuse hearings to the public.

Ouch. I want people to know what goes on in these hearings. I want the extent of child abuse to be known. But I want the children to be protected from exposure. They need to be protected from the public.

Why can't the decision to have a hearing open or closed be made the hard way, in each individual case, by a judge or jury faced with the specific circumstances of that case? Do we have to have an opinion about everything in advance, no matter who could be hurt by it?