How Did We Get Here Anyway?

By Garrison Keillor, The Washington Post

29 August 17

 

n old man gets absorbed in our national drama, same as you — the paper is full of it, the madman who has moved into our lives — and then suddenly I am distracted by the memory of lawn mowing. I once loved mowing, then I hired young men to do it, and now a gang of them comes every week and they roar around for half an hour while I read the paper. Maybe I would be happier if I mowed instead.

Mowing was my mother’s remedy for a boy’s melancholy. She didn’t believe in melancholy. Her point of view was: So you’re lonely — do something about it. There is nothing special about feeling bad. Nobody needs to hear about it. Don’t be a whiner. You think you’ve got it bad, think again: Children in China would be overjoyed to have what you’ve got.

So I learned to keep it to myself. If you moped around, Mother gave you two options: Go outdoors or do something useful. Or both: Go mow the lawn. Dad worked hard all day; it wasn’t right that he should come home and have to mow the lawn while he had a big strong 14-year-old boy to do it. So I did it. And found lawn mowing very satisfying — the repetitiveness, the roar of the mower, the sense of progress, turning raggedy grass into a model lawn, and when you shut the mower off and raked up the clippings, you’d earned the right to sit in the shade with a glass of grape Kool-Aid, and when you did, you realized that your misery had dissipated.

I was an ordinary 1950s misfit, scrawny, squinty behind wire-rim glasses, bookish but not so smart, timid, a daydreamer, a frequent moper, and once, when my mother was tired of my moodiness, she gave me a book to read, “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs,” in which good Bible-believing Christians like ourselves were tied to the stake by French papists and, as the fire was lit, prayed that God would forgive their persecutors and, as the flames enveloped their bodies, sang hymns in praise of the Savior with their dying breath.

“Foxe’s” gave a moody boy a certain perspective: It could be worse. Much worse. Nobody is piling kindling around your ankles. You are not a Huguenot hiding from mobs of crazed enemies carrying torches. You have a home, a bed, a cat who loves you and a cookie jar in the kitchen. And there is a public library nearby where you can sit and feast on books. Be grateful.

Somehow, this cheerful stoicism seemed to lose traction in the culture and we got bombarded by neurotic anger — the Beat poets, bad boys in movies, outlaw mythology, troubled rock stars, spectacular burnouts, the wounded, bitter, addicted, nice middle-class kids trying to be tortured artists — which is all very interesting, but still the norms of everyday society prevail. Angry neurotics are more interesting at a distance; when you have one under your roof, it’s exhausting. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” wrote Allen Ginsberg in a long, angry poem that inspired a great deal of bad poetry, but when you met Allen, he was kind and thoughtful. An angry young man on the page, but in person he was as nice as could be.

I suppose it’s necessary for every boy to horrify his father, swagger, read trash, listen to deafening music, get ugly tattoos, but it doesn’t lead to much that’s worth the trouble, whereas learning a useful trade — carpentry, math, raising tomatoes, baking bread, reporting, cleaning hotel rooms — leads you out into the world beyond your ego and into unexpected friendships and discoveries, valuable experiences, an enduring respect for laws and limits and for the energy of optimism, and eventually you can learn to be a good person.

This is common wisdom, shared by stubborn conservatives and airy liberals alike, and no wonder we are all fascinated by the raging alien who is president of the United States. The smirk, the scowl, the New Yawk con-man talk — so-and-so is a “great, great guy,” it was a “beautiful meeting,” the “incredible support,” “fantastic,” “unbelievable” — the compulsive bragging, the inability to admit mistakes, the blindness to ethics. What is this jerk doing in the White House? How soon will he disappear?

Sessions Speech on Militarizing Cops Shows Deadly Misunderstanding of What Public Safety Actually Is

By Alan Pyke, ThinkProgress

29 August 17

A twisted portrayal of what police reformers want -- and why they want it.

ttorney General Jeff Sessions struck a new blow in his war against police reform on Monday, announcing that President Donald Trump will rescind an executive order from his predecessor restricting local cops’ access to hardware designed for war zones.

The long-predicted move puts grenade launchers and bayonets back on small-town police department shopping lists. It also guts accountability measures for a much longer list of defensive equipment and military tools which had remained available to police under President Barack Obama’s reforms.

But the most striking thing in a speech riddled with falsehoods was Sessions’ presentation of the thinking behind the administration’s move — dismissing police reform efforts as harmful to public safety.

“These restrictions that had been imposed went too far,” the attorney general said before the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) in Nashville. “We will not put superficial concerns over public safety.”

Sessions was speaking to a receptive audience. Tennessee’s Commissioner of Safety and Homeland Security, David Purkey, opened by characterizing police as soldiers in a war for decency.

“You, my young friends, stand in the gap for this country. This country offers inspiration, and intimidation. We offer intimidation through our military,” Purkey quoted Marine Corps Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis as having told soldiers in the field. “When I look out on this crowd,” Purkey went on, broadening the warzone sermon to include the police audience in Tennessee, “I see a group of men and women who stand in the gap for this country.”

Sessions later characterized the new Trump order as part of its broader rejection of civilian complaints about police.

“We will always seek to affirm the critical role of police officers in our society, and we will never participate in anything that will give comfort to radicals who promote agendas that preach hostility rather than respect for police,” he said.

The rise of these so-called “radicals” and the spread of distrust for police from minority communities to a wider band of the American public is directly connected to the kinds of abuses of force that Sessions ignored in his remarks. While a new wave of public attention to individual police killings of unarmed black and brown people in recent years helped galvanize reform efforts, the drive for change draws on a long-running conversation about systematic rights violations by police.

Obama’s order came out of a deliberative process informed by input from police, civic leaders, private researchers, and Pentagon officials. Its new controls on military materiel were modest, flexible, and grounded in decades of police violence and unnecessary death.

Protests and violence in Ferguson, Missouri following the police killing of Michael Brown provided the immediate motivation for Obama’s reforms. The heavily armored police response in St. Louis County provided striking visuals of cops as an occupying military force — the tip of a counter-insurgency spear, not a shield that protects and serves.

But mass-protest crowd control is almost a more appropriate use of such heavy equipment than has been typical over the 25-year history of the “1033” program modified by Monday’s order. When a police agency obtains a new tool or stands up a new unit, its mere existence creates an imperative: Leadership must find some reason to use the new toys, send out the new tactical team. As paramilitary-style police thinking, tactics, and equipment found their way into even the smallest towns in America, where situations that actually require armored vehicles are rare, the imperative to justify equipment and personnel bred monstrous outcomes.

Sessions repeatedly depicted the now-canceled restrictions on Pentagon equipment dispersals to police as a cosmetic move born of a misguided focus on perceptions over reality. In his telling, concern about militarized policing inside U.S. borders is feckless posturing that endangers police and harms public safety.

Sessions was roasting a straw man. The actual argument is that police should act from a sense of unity with those they serve rather than from the mindset of an occupying military force. The claim Sessions sidestepped is that the cop-as-conquistador mentality actually brings more violence into communities, not less.

So-called “dynamic entry” police raids – the type of GI Joe police activity encouraged throughout the War on Drugs and enabled by Pentagon equipment – are deadly and prone to error. More than 120 civilians and dozens of police officers have died in such raids since the 1990s, including 94 such deaths from 2010 to 2016 alone. These numbers are almost certainly low, as statistics about police violence always are thanks to lax recordkeeping.

Raids that don’t go deadly can still inflict gore on innocents.When Georgia police burst into a family home before dawn in 2014, 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh was sleeping in his playpen. An officer chucked a flashbang grenade in with him, tearing a massive hole in the toddler’s chest. The child survived, and the officer was acquitted on federal charges after state officials declined to prosecute any of the police involved in the raid.

When officers are trained to think like soldiers on foreign soil, they learn to regard the “natives” around them with constant suspicion. That disposition makes investigators sloppy, eager to have their gut belief that something fishy is going on confirmed by any means possible. It only takes one cunning jailhouse snitch, familiar with the rewards of giving an officer the basis for a warrant he wants, to get a SWAT team dispatched to a sleepy family home.

Sessions never mentioned actual paramilitary tactics like these drug raids in his speech. Instead, he pretended that the Obama restrictions had kept life-saving gear like bulletproof vests and helmets out of police officer hands. That is a lie.

Only five categories of equipment were flat-out prohibited from the police recycling system: grenade launchers, bayonets, high-caliber ammunition, track-driven armored vehicles, and certain types of camouflage.

All other materiel covered by the 1033 redistribution program – including the safety gear Sessions cited in Monday’s remarks – remained accessible to local cops as “controlled equipment.” Departments were required to provide specific justifications for their requests, to establish training and use protocols for the gear, and to more closely track how officers actually use controlled equipment.

“These guidelines were created after Ferguson to ensure that police departments had a guardian, not warrior, mentality. Our communities are not the same as armed combatants in a war zone,” Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights head Vanita Gupta said in a statement. The rules would have meant greater scrutiny for the kinds of reckless assaults on civilian homes that lead to flashbangs in baby cribs and needless firefights between startled, sleeping homeowners and the black-clad invaders they do not realize are police. They would not have sent first responders into harm’s way in flip-flops and Jimmy Buffett tee-shirts as Sessions insinuated.

Still, the FOP convention crowd ate it up.

The most prominent U.S. leaders are not just walking back policies that curb law enforcement’s institutional instinct toward dominance and hard power. They are actively decrying police critics as radical cop-haters, diminishing their nuanced observations about the incentive structures in our criminal justice system into simplistic notions of good and evil.

The remilitarization of American policing — seen in both Sessions’ speech on Monday and in Trump’s blithe endorsement of police brutality in July — is sold by the administration as simply deferring to what police say they need.

Yet the portrayal of Trump as an open ear and blank check for cops doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. When police’s experience in the field leads them to conclusions opposite to Trump’s own preferences, he is happy to ignore them. Cops across the country have made clear that the administration’s push to deputize them into immigration enforcement work does grave harm to public safety in communities where people fear deportation. They reject Trump’s desire to enlist them into his crackdown on undocumented immigrants, specifically because it makes people less likely to call 911 or cooperate with investigators.

If the administration were serious about promoting public safety, it would listen to the people who disagree with them about where safety comes from and what role police play in ensuring it.