Samir Chopra's Blog, page 121

Returning to Writing (And How It Sucks)

On Wednesday, I resumed work on a philosophy book project that has been on the back-burner for a while. More precisely, I have not worked on it since July 2012. (The fall semester of 2012 saw me teaching three classes, all of them essentially new preparations, and then, like, a baby was born.) Back in the summer of 2012, I had recommenced work on my draft notes after a gap of more than year, for I had taken a hiatus from them to finish my cricket book (essentially all of 2011). All of which is to say that I returned to work on a book on which my concerted efforts have been spread out over a period of almost three years. In the summer of 2010, I had engaged in a frenzy of note-making with little attempt to organize them beyond extensive annotation at some points, and in the summer of 2012, I had taken more notes and added some annotations. There are some skeleton arguments in there, some suggestive points to be developed, and so on. In short, it’s one big mess, awaiting clean-up, consolidation, and whatever it is that you are supposed to do when you try to grow a collection of notes into a book.

This week’s experiences, in returning to this shambolic mess, have been an eye-opener.

On Wednesday, I spent my entire editing session adding annotations to a skimpy section of notes. There were many little scribbles which still seemed suggestive and enticing, and invited elaboration from me. Writing went easily; I wrote over fifteen hundred words and then feeling tired and euphoric, called it a day.

On Thursday, I returned to my notes, and attempted to impose some structure on them. Unlike Wednesday, I added very little to no new content, but simply spent all my time reading and re-reading sections–if you can call them that–of my notes and tried to figure out how they hung together, and how they fitted into the outline that I have had in mind for some time now. This was frustrating, tedious, and anxiety-inducing; I cut and pasted and moved some sections, imposed new headings, all the while struggling with panic as I would encounter one mass of disorganized thoughts or notes after another. I ended my writing with traces of anxiety still lingering in me.

Today’s session was a disaster. As I trawled through my notes, I found many small sections that seemed simply irrelevant to my thesis; why on earth had I ever imagined these to ever be useful or illuminating? I opened up a ‘bit bucket‘ file and began deleting material from my notes file and moving it there. When I was finally done, some five thousand words had been moved. I also continued Thursday’s work  of trying to find and impose structure.  When I ended my writing for the morning, I was in a black mood; the self-doubt and fear of failure that seems to be a persistent, painful companion to any writing that I have done was back in full force.

My writing process remains the same as it ever has: I make a lot of notes and then I work them into shape. I have never worked with outlines. This has always meant that the intermediate stage of my writing–from notes to a draft–is acutely anxiety-and-panic provoking. I am now in that phase; a long, unpleasant journey lies ahead. I can only console myself with the reassurance that this one, like the others before it, will find a reasonably happy ending.

Marriage: It Ain’t a Religious Thing

Last year, I wrote a post on same-sex marriage, or rather, on Barack Obama’s evolving views on it. In that post, I handed out some unsolicited advice to the President, suggesting he view marriage in its social and economic context, and noting that there were too many similarities between the explicitly institutionalized racism of the past and the current strains of homophobic opposition to same-sex marriage to permit any vacillation on his part when it came to affirming support for it.

This week, as the Supreme Court debates the constitutionality of same-sex marriage I won’t repeat that same argument. (Besides, it seems to me, from my biased perspective, that the cases at hand are easy ones; the rulings are only a matter of suspense because the present Supreme Court contains ideologues like Scalia.)  Rather, I want to briefly note that marriage as a social institution opened itself up to the kind of abuse we see perpetrated by opponents to same-sex marriage the moment it sought divine sanction. Or rather, once a pair of human beings decided that the best way to signal to society that they were in a committed, enduring, sexual relationship, entailing extensive companionship, home-building and the rearing of children was to seek permission from a religious body, book, and ritual, the game was up. The path had been cleared for abuse of that social institution, and the means prepared for its ideological distortion.

Once marriage became a religious ritual, once marriages were made in heaven, much of the nonsense that has underwritten opposition to same-sex marriage became possible. But not just that; it also allowed the abuse perpetrated on women in ‘traditional marriage’–much of which was the target of feminists’ ire in days gone by (and today). Once marriage ceased to be a human, social institution, it ceased to find its grounding in particular social, economic and romantic contexts and became associated with things not of this earth, with transcendent realities. Those unsurprisingly, provided ample, powerful, cover for marriage’s utilization in a host of repressive political strategies: that the divinely ordained roles for women were procreation, child-bearing and housekeeping or that only certain kinds of people could marry.

The proper place for marriage is the secular; the religious sanctification so beloved of many should have been a supererogatory choice; those that were religious and were not reassured by the promises of the here and now, who didn’t feel their own emotional, financial and temporal commitment was enough, who doubted the resilience of human pacts which depend only on the profane, could have sought a religious ritual if they wanted one. The separation we have now, so that those who want to marry have the choice between a religious ceremony and one that is exclusively secular should always have been possible, should always have been built into the notion of a marriage. The move to make marriage into an institution requiring sanction by the state was a partially correct, albeit problematic move; it injects the state into the personal and institutionalizes marriage as the only kind of social signal for the commitments mentioned above. But it did move marriage out of an exclusively religious sphere.

The legal recognition of same-sex marriage is correct for moral reasons; it also moves marriage closer to its true secular place.

Academic Arguments, Sports, and Urban Policing as ‘War’

In the introduction to The Social Construction of What? Ian Hacking writes:

Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements that plague contemporary intellectual life. I will continue to employ those labels, from time to time, in this book, for my themes touch, in myriad ways, on those confrontations. But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable, more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are….Wars! The science wars can be focused on social construction. One person argues that scientific results, even in fundamental physics, are social constructs. An opponent, angered, protests that the results are usually discoveries about our world that hold independently of society. People also talk of the culture wars, which often hinge on issues of race, gender, colonialism, or a shared canon of history and literature that children should master—and so on. These conflicts are serious. They invite heartfelt emotions. Nevertheless I doubt that the terms ‘‘culture wars,’’ ‘‘science wars’’ (and now, ‘‘Freud wars’’) would have caught on if they did not suggest gladiatorial sport. It is the bemused spectators who talk about the ‘‘wars.’’

Two quick responses. First, Hacking is correct to note that the invocation of ‘gladiatorial sport’ in the recounting of academic debate is an integral part of the rhetorical arsenal deployed to describe academic debate. This is presumably meant to indicate the extent of the disagreement extant between the parties in the debate, but over time it has come to characterize debate itself in too many disciplines. In philosophy, as I’ve already noted–much to the detriment of women philosophers–this has become the norm. An argument is an opportunity not to move toward discovery and edification but to destroy a putative opposing position. The conquest of one’s intellectual ‘opponent’ becomes our primary, normatively assessed responsibility.

Second, Hacking is also correct in indicting the usage of the language of ‘war’ to describe academic disagreement: it simultaneously trivializes war while dangerously lowering the standards of discourse in academic debate. In general, wherever the language of ‘war’ and ‘battle’ is thrown around freely, the standards of behavior in that domain decline.  Consider sport, where the all-too frequent reliance on military tropes results in the condoning of illegitimate play and questionable sportsmanship, and more generally, the attitude that games, like wars, must be won by any means necessary. Or consider urban policing, where the constant reference to ‘war zones’ results in a ‘shoot or be shot’ mentality that takes the lives of innocents each year. The trigger-happy policeman is already convinced he is a soldier on patrol, well behind enemy lines, surrounded by hostiles ready to take him out. The outcomes that result are grimly foretold.

Writer and Reader, Bound Together

Tim Parks, in the New York Review of Books blog, writes on the always interesting, sometimes vexed relationship between writers and their readers, one made especially interesting by the blogger and his mostly anonymous readers and commentators:

As with the editing process…there is the question of an understanding between writer and reader about what kind of reading experience is being offered. Readers like to suppose that their favorite writers—journalists, novelists, or poets—are absolutely independent, free from all interference, but the truth is that if an author indulges his own private idiolect or goes on for too long, he can at best expect to divide readers into those who admire him slavishly, whatever he throws at them, and those who set him aside in desperation. At worst he will be left with no readers at all. Is there a relationship between a writer’s respect for these conventions and the content or tone of what he writes, the kind of opinions we can expect him to have?

The blogosphere, with its wonderful but dangerous flexibility, can ruthlessly betray an author’s attitude toward his readers. Does he respect their precious time and keep things tight? Is he sensitive to their expectations? Is he willing to read the comments on his post and perhaps even respond to them? Dickens, one suspects, might have spent many hours online discussing the fate of Pip Pirrip or Little Nell. As for me, I’m glad to listen to editors and produce an article, and eager to have it widely read. But I’m relieved not to be contractually obliged to engage with readers afterward.

My interaction with ‘my readers’ here has been a mixed one. I still get very few comments on my posts, but some who comment do so quite frequently. Sadly, I am guilty of often not responding to comments. There is a large backlog of them on this site right now, and I keep telling myself that I will sit down and take care of them. But parenting is taking up a lot of time, as are my reduced work duties, and of course, so does the rest of my life (and blogging itself). Ironically, sometimes, it is the really thoughtful comment that gets lost because I hesitate to reply too quickly and say something silly. More often than not, this results in that comment remaining unanswered (and on at least two occasions has led to readers accusing me of not wanting to address their critical commentary).  I hope I have not lost too many readers this way. I have also, as noted before, lost a couple of readers, frequent visitors to the comments space, who had grown offended by my political stance. (This will probably happen again.) Those were visible, but obviously, some show up here once, and then leave because they do not find my writings congenial to their politics. (This must have happened during the period when I wrote several posts on the BDS controversy at Brooklyn College.)

While I do not think I will be able to address the issue of offending people by what I write here, I remain committed to answering comments as often, and as thoughtfully, as I can. I hope you’ll stick around and take my word for it.

Ten Years After: War Criminals Still Walk Free

You call someone a ‘mass-murdering war criminal’, you best not miss.  And so, when I use that term to describe the unholy troika of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld–as I have in the past–I should have very good reasons for doing so. Fortunately, that isn’t hard to do: a pretty systematic case for the appropriateness of that description can be found in this piece by Nicholas J. S. Davies–author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, a book length development of the same argument. Many others have made similar cases; googling ‘Bush war crimes’ , ‘Cheney war crimes’ and ‘Rumsfeld war crimes’ nets a pretty decent catch; similarly, crimes committed at Gitmo–torture, abuse and murder–implicate a host of other folks too: former deputy assistant attorney general John Choon Yoo, former assistant attorney general Jay Bybee, and former counsels Alberto Gonzales, David Addington and William Haynes, for instance. (And of course, the prosecution of the war did not just hurt Iraq–and kill Iraqis–it hurt the US–and killed Americans too–as Juan Cole points out.)

This description can no longer be considered hyperbole. At the very least, even if one grants the highly offensive premise than an Iraqi life is worth less than an American life, it is clear a war conducted on false pretense–an illegal exercise of executive power–sent thousands of Americans to their death. Just that bare fact should convict the prosecutors of the war of mass murder.

So, what’s left to do? You could ask for prosecution of the criminals by the US justice system but the Obama administration has made it clear there will be no movement in this direction. That is entirely unsurprising, given the blending together of the national security policies of the two administrations. This obliviousness to the compelling moral logic of the war crimes case against the Terrible Trio should not however, blind us to the fact that,

[I]t is also a well-established principle of international law that countries who commit aggression bear a collective responsibility for their actions.  Our leaders’ guilt does not let the rest of us off the hook for the crimes committed in our name.  The United States has a legal and moral duty to pay war reparations to Iraq to help its people recover from the results of aggression, genocide and war crimes….

Turns out therefore, it is not enough to say ‘it was the Bush folks wot did it’ and do our best Pontius Pilate impression.  The responsibility for the Iraqi war is the American people’s.

PS: The killing hasn’t ended yet in Iraq:

Iraq closed a painful decade just as it began: with explosions reverberating around the capital.

Beginning in the early morning Tuesday with the assassination of a Ministry of Finance official by a bomb attached to his vehicle and continuing for hours, the attacks were a devastating reminder of the violence that regularly afflicts Iraq. And they somehow seemed more poignant coming on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the American-led invasion, which is being marked in the West by new books, academic studies and polls retesting public attitudes a decade later.

By midmorning, the familiar sight of black smoke rose above a cityscape of palm fronds, turquoise-tiled mosque domes and squat concrete buildings. By midafternoon, the numbers stacked up: 52 dead and nearly 180 wounded in separate attacks that included 16 car bombs, 2 adhesive bombs stuck to cars, and 1 assassination with a silenced gun.

The 1944 Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana Report

Today’s post continues a theme initiated yesterday: sensible views on drugs, expressed many, many years ago. Yesterday’s post referenced the New York Academy of Medicine’s 1955 report on opiate addiction. Today’s post goes back even further, to 1944. Then, as reefer madness swept the nation (WWII notwithstanding), New York City became the focus of a study on marihuana and its alleged effects. I’ll let Robert DeRopp take up the story in this excerpt from his Drugs and the Mind:

The cries of alarm continued nonetheless, particularly in the region of New York City, and so strident did the clamor become that some action seemed necessary. This action was taken by one of New York’s best-loved and most colorful mayors, Fiorello La Guardia, who sensibly concluded that his first duty was to discover the facts concerning the use of marihuana in the city, and on the basis of those facts, to take whatever steps seemed necessary. He accordingly requested assistance from the New York Academy of Medicine, which appointed a committee to obtain those facts of which the mayor was in need.

The report of the Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana, which was published in 1944, is a mine of valuable information, sociological, psychological, and pharmacological, concerning marihuana and its effects. The results are worthy of careful study because they place the whole phenomenon of marihuana smoking in the correct perspective and reveal the so-called “marihuana problem” as a minor nuisance rather than a major menace. In his foreword to the report, Mayor La Guardia himself remarked, “I am glad that the sociological, psychological, and medical ills commonly attributed to marihuana have been found to be exaggerated as far as New York City is concerned,” but observed that he would continue to enforce the laws prohibiting the use of marihuana “until and if complete findings may justify an amendment to existing laws.”

DeRopp describes these findings in some detail: the patterns of usage, the price of marihuana, the debunking of claims pertaining to its pernicious effects on crime, public morality, addiction and juvenile delinquency being the most prominent, and notes that the report concludes with the following words:

The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City are unfounded.

Unfortunately, as DeRopp goes on to note:

Needless to say, this calm report was not at all welcome to sensation-hungry journalists who saw themselves deprived of a valuable source of material for headlines. So after the publication of the mayor’s report there was much stormy correspondence, some of which invaded the pages of the medical press. Even the austere Journal of the American Medical Association abandoned its customary restraint and voiced its editorial wrath in scolding tones. So fierce was the editorial that one might suppose the learned members of the mayor’s committee–appointed, incidentally, by the New York Academy of Medicine–had formed some unhallowed league with the ‘tea-pad’ proprietors to undermine the city’s health by deliberately misrepresenting the facts about marihuana. 

This sounds extremely familiar. And there matters have stood for some seventy years now, even as the war on drugs continues in its idiotic, racist, misguided ways.

Note: The citation for the Mayor’s Committee report is: Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana. The Marihuana Problem in New York City. Jacques Cattell Press, Philadelphia, 1944

The New York Academy of Medicine on Opiate Addiction circa 1955

I’ve had a battered paperback titled Drugs and the Mind on my shelves for a while now, unread. As I’ve begun a minor purge of my shelves to get rid of books in bad condition, I’ve finally decided to give it a gander before giving it a toss. Written by one Robert S. DeRopp, it makes for depressing reading. This effect is produced by the realization that enlightened, less retrograde views on drugs and drug use have never been in short supply; they’ve just been steadfastly ignored.

In the chapter titled ‘Addicts and Addiction’ DeRopp quotes a New York Academy of Medicine report on opiate addiction, which after noting that ‘the punitive approach is no deterrent to the non-addict dealer or the addict,’ goes on to say:

There should be a change in attitude towards the addict. He is a sick person, not a criminal. That he may commit criminal acts to maintain his drug supply is recognized, but it is unjust to consider him criminal simply because he uses narcotic drugs….The addict should be able to obtain his drugs at low cost under Federal control, in conjunction with efforts to have him undergo withdrawal. Under this plan, these addicts, as sick persons, would apply for medical care and supervision. Criminal acts would no longer be necessary in order to obtain a supply of the drugs and there would be no incentive to create new addicts. Agents and black markets would disappear from lack of patronage. Since about eighty-five percent of the ‘pushers’ on the streets are said to be addicts, they would be glad to forgo this dangerous occupation if they were furnished with their needed drug. Thus the bulk of the traffic would substantially disappear….By a change in social attitude which would regard them as sick persons, and by relieving them of the economic oppression of attempting to obtain their supply of the drug at an exorbitant price, it will be possible to reach existing addicts in an orderly, dignified way, not as probationed persons or sentenced criminals. They would come under supervision in the interest of health, not because of an entanglement with the law. Thereafter, on a larger scale and in a humanitarian atmosphere, there would be an opportunity to apply persuasion to undergo rehabilitation. It is reasonable to expect that many might accept the opportunity.

De Ropp interjects at this point:

The report goes on to detail exactly how, though properly supervised clinics, the addict could be injected with the minimum amount of drug needed to keep him free of withdrawal symptoms.

and then continues the excerpt:

….All the while unrelenting attempts would be made to persuade the resistant addict to undergo therapy to break the habit. It will be seen that this recommendation is a humane, reasonable, and promisingly effective method of distribution….Every addict will get his drug. Under the present law to do that he must ‘push’ , rob, steal, burglarize or commit forgery. For he is desperate when he is without drugs.

1955. Read it and weep.

Note: The citation for the New York Academy of Medicine report is: Isbell, H. Medical aspects of opiate addiction. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. 31:886-902 (1955). In a future post, I will post excerpts from the 1944 Mayor’s Committee on Marihuana report. The commission was appointed by the then Mayor of New York City, Fiorello La Guardia. That’ll make you weep too.

Physical and Psychological Affordance

According to Wikipedia, ‘an affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling.’ (A photograph of a tea set in the Wikipedia entry bears the caption, ‘The handles on this tea set provide an obvious affordance for holding.’) Later we learn that James J. Gibson introduced ‘affordance’ in his 1977 article “The Theory of Affordances”; he ‘defined affordances as all “action possibilities” latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them, but always in relation to the actor and therefore dependent on their capabilities.’

I do not now remember where I first encountered the term–perhaps in my readings of embodied cognition literature  in graduate school, probably. It has always struck me as a marvelously evocative term, and one of those that almost immediately serves to illuminate the world in a different light. We are physical beings, minds and bodies united, caught up in a tightly coupled system of world and agent; the world provides us affordances for our particular modes of interactions with it; we modify the world, modifying its affordances and change in response; and so on. The dynamic, mutually determining nature of this interaction stood clarified. Thinking of the world as equipped with affordances helped me envision the evolutionary filtration of the environment better; those creatures with traits suitable for the environment’s affordances were evolutionary successful. Knobs and cords can only be twisted and pulled by those suitably equipped–mentally and physically–for doing so.  Babies learn to walk in an environment that provides them the means for doing so–level, firm surfaces–and not others. An affordance rich environment for walking, perhaps equipped with handles for grasping or helpful parents reaching out to provide support, facilitates the learning of walking. And so on.

But ‘affordance’ need not be restricted to understanding in purely physical terms. We can think of the world of psychological actors as providing psychological affordances too. An agent with a particular psychological makeup is plausibly understood as providing for certain modes of interaction with it: a hostile youngster, bristling with resentment and suspicion of authority restricts the space of possibilities for other agents to interact with him; the affordances he provides are minimal; others are more capacious in the affordances they provide. A psychological agent’s life can be viewed as a movement through a space of affordances; his trajectories through it are determined by his impingement on others and vice-versa; he finds his responses modified by those that the space allows or affords. As parents find out when they raise a child, theories of learning and rearing only go so far; the particular make-up of the pupil feed back to the parent and can modify the rearing strategy; the child has provided only some affordances that work with the child-rearing theory of choice. An inmate in jail is stuck in a very particular domain of psychological affordances; he will find his reactions modified accordingly.

Thinking of our exchanges with the world and other human beings in this light helps illuminate our dependence  and influence on them quite clearly; we are not solitary trailblazers; rather at every step, we are pressed on, and push back. What emerges at every point and at the end bears the impress of these rich relationships with our environment, both physical and psychological.

A Crossfit Party with Strong Women

Last night, I attended a Crossfit party. During the party–held at Crossfit South Brooklyn–two very strong and fit women, Annie Thorisdottir and Lindsey Valenzuela, performed a grueling workout for ten minutes. (Perform as many rounds as possible of the following combination: five shoulder to overhead movements of a seventy-five pound barbell, ten deadlifts of the same barbell, followed by fifteen jumps on to a twenty-inch box).  There were bright lights, an MC, television cameras, loud music, a raucous, enthusiastic, admiring crowd that clapped and cheered as the two athletes went flat out, performing a workload, which would leave most normal human beings, if not dead, then at least violently sick. (Most folks in attendance were Crossfitters themselves; thus, at the least, they had performed versions of the workout themselves and known just how difficult it is to sustain that kind of non-stop physical effort for ten minutes.)

At the end of it all, Ms. Thorisdottir had performed twelve rounds of the workout and Ms. Valenzuela eleven. (And change for both.) This was the second of the extravaganzas that Crossfit stages in the ‘Open’ section of its Crossfit Games: worldwide, average Joe gym-goers perform a series of workouts; some qualify for the so-called Regionals; and then another cut takes place for the Crossfit Games. (Described rather elegantly by a friend as the ‘World Series of Competitive Exercise’.) Last night’s event, as befitting an organization committed to putting on a show, was announced midweek on a live streamed program, with the workout performed immediately as a contest between two athletes known for their proficiency and fitness. Ms. Thorisdottir has won the Crossfit Games for the last two years running and is a serious contender to go for a third this year. Both Ms. Thorsidottir and Ms. Valenzuela are accomplished weightlifters; Ms. Valenzuela in particular is a national level Olympic weightlifter and perhaps has aspirations to compete internationally. (A difficult time awaits her; American women weightlifters have struggled to make a mark in international competitions thus far; perhaps Crossfit’s embrace and popularization of Olympic lifting might make a difference in this dismal situation.)

Writing on the Crossfit South Brooklyn blog today, I described the workout-party as follows:

The carefully choreographed production of spectacle, the deployment of mass media high technology, the showmanship, the human body beautiful and strong, the invocations of gladiatorial combat, the centrality of women athletes, it all was quite something to witness.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the evening was the open admiration of men for women athletes, one not  couched exclusively in terms of their physical attractiveness. (Needless to say, the women in attendance were equally awestruck.) Sure, there was much talk of sensational derrieres, but overwhelmingly, the men present were in awe of the physical effort on display. This made for an interesting change from a pattern often visible at conventional sporting events; men often disdain the women’s events or accuse them of not working as hard, or performing as well, or being overpaid or some variant thereof.   Crossfit still has a way to go in addressing gender issues that arise in its spaces–more on that anon, someday–but it has managed to work toward providing a forum where female athletes are equally worthy of appreciation. Just for that, the event was a revelation.

Killing American Citizens Without Trial: The NYPD Way

The New York City Police Department is always ahead of the curve. They have aspirations to be a domestic surveillance service–after all, why should the FBI have all the fun?–and to secure all the budget increases and prestige that goes with it. Besides, don’t the movies tell us that ‘secret agents’ always get all the chicks? It also has international aspirations, which will suitably ratchet up its glamour quotient. Thus we heard last year about the NYPD’s collaboration with Israeli police, and the opening of a branch in Israel. This would considerably enhance the NYPD’s grab-bag of tricks pertaining to searching and frisking, especially when dealing with a hostile, recalcitrant subject population. Not that they don’t already have considerable experience with the good ‘ol up-against-the-wall-spread-your-legs move.

There is another area in which the NYPD have long been known as trailblazers. While the nation is agog with frenetic debate about the use of drones to kill American citizens without trial or due process on American soil, and law professors, bloggers, and sometimes Republican lawmakers, talk themselves hoarse about its ramifications, the NYPD with little fanfare, and plenty of ammunition, has been doing the same for many years: offing American citizens with nary the hint of either. Suspect identified; suspect shot. Cap in the ass, cap in the back, cap in the head. One more down, several–not yet identified but surely out there–to go.

This remarkably efficient procedure, directed primarily against American citizens of skin hues that approximate those that have met such a fate thus far–one of whom, it must be said, shares my first name–has not been conducted on distant, sandy, parched lands littered with shimmering mirages. Rather, these dispatches have been carried out in the midst of American cities, in urban landscapes.

To that list of urban spots, soon to be marked with flowers, candles, wreaths, and photographs of teenaged boys, we can now add East Flatbush, where, on the night of March 9th, Kimani Gray, all of sixteen years old, went down after being shot at eleven times. Seven bullets found their mark; four from the back. He seems to have made a threatening move; perhaps he had a gun. But he does not seem to have used it, if he had one. He’s dead though. Just another casualty in the ‘jungle out there.’ The officers who shot him are on ‘administrative duty.’ Perhaps this is NYPD code for all the paperwork they will now have to do in detailing the expenditure of ammunition and the cleaning charges incurred on their firearms.

There will be demonstrations; the mayor and the police commissioner will call for calm; there will be calls to not rush to judgment (although no calls to not shoot so damn fast); the slow–very slow!–wheels of police procedure and perhaps state justice will grind. At the end of it all, there will still be grieving parents. And one more photo added to the placards that will be observed the next time a march is held to protest the NYPD’s killing of yet another brown or black man in New York City.