Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part One
NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...
Back in the old, bad days, police used to do this thing where, if they shot someone, they’d plant a gun, if they couldn’t find a gun, on the dead person, to make it look like they shot in self-defense. If nothing else, this made the paperwork easier. Then came all this exposure in the 1950s and 1960s about how they were planting guns, so most of that stopped. Most.
All the while, during that time and forward into the 1970s and 1980s, as American workers were losing their unions, thank you, Republicans everywhere, American police forces were gaining and strengthening their unions. And their unions were lawyering up. Often the lawyers were ex-cops, so, they knew the ropes, had some streetwise expertise. Every cop went through a sort of union training with these new, smartass lawyers. They were told: If you’re ever caught in a situation where you’ve shot someone, just tell whoever asks that you feared for your life, you shot in self-defense. Figure out a story to fit the situation, one that fits the motive. And stick to it.
“But what about a gun?” Some cop would ask, often some rookie.
“You don’t need a gun. Anything can look like a gun! A screwdriver, a wallet, a paper bag.”
Of course, speaking on behalf of the police, during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there were dozens of people like Terpil selling guns cheaply off-market here and there. And real guns also look like guns.
Now comes that horrible part. Cops are going to deny this left and right, but it’s true. Some cops—and I emphasize some, a few—started carrying things that they could say looked like guns. Combs, hairbrushes, whatever. Just in case. Even plastic guns. So, we were back to the old, bad days again, but in a new way.
Sane people know that being a police officer is one of the most difficult jobs a human being can possibly handle in life (and this even before the war on drugs or 9/11). And bad things do happen. And thank goodness most of us—white people, and even most people of color on a good day—never spend time being affected by any of it on either side. But some people do, and some to a degree that isn’t at all pleasant, and not through any fault of their own.
But instead of them, just imagine it’s you.
Imagine that cop knocking on your door to say your daughter has been killed, shot in the head three times by another cop, in the dark, because he thought she was going to shoot him, but it turns out she was only brushing her hair. Yet, you know, you know, she never does that, never brushes her hair in public, doesn’t even carry a hairbrush. What do you do? You, nice white person who loves the police. And he’s so sorry it happened. He didn’t mean for it to happen. Just a terrible accident. And then there’s your daughter’s two kids… Well, nothing to be done about that, you see, because…he didn’t do anything wrong. Self-defense, because he thought his life was in danger. Therefore, the state is not responsible for compensation. He didn’t do anything wrong.
Period.
Tough. Isn’t it? Like I said. Horrible. But. There you go.
Ronald Reagan loved the police. He should have. We all should. He also talked about taking personal responsibility. A lot. Made a big deal about it. He should have. We all should. Funny, all Presidents love the police. They have to. The police have guns. And the police all talk about taking personal responsibility. But nobody listens. Least of all these certain policemen. And the Presidents. And certain others to whom we give guns.
Listen to this: Between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2015, police in Great Britain fatally shot a total of three people. That’s three people in three years. Read that again, please.
Between January 1, 2015 and June 30, 2015, police in the United States fatally shot, on average, 2.6 people each day. Almost three people a day.
Training, training, training. You think? Or, perhaps, guns.
Why? Because everyone here has guns. Oh, you say, Second Amendment.
When I was growing up, this thing happened in a place called My Lai, a village in Vietnam. We were at war at the time. The government, our government, called it a war, at least. Our government had something of a sense of humor. If you want to call it that. Still does.
When the press found out about My Lai, and what happened there, they went what soldiers call “ape shit” about it. Frontpage headlines, photospreads in big magazines. So, the government made certain of two things. First, that this one guy, Lieutenant Calley, would be held responsible. This is what the military calls “the goat.” Second, that it would be made to seem like some kind of one-off incident. Like I said, a wonderful sense of humor. Like, “Hey folks, this sort of thing never happens...”
But this thing, this incident, this massacre of people and complete destruction of an entire village for no good reason, was not the responsibility of a single “goat,” not a “one-off” as it turned out, but simply one in a long and wide series of events guided by organized group-think. You know, what we call the “herd mentality.” And even though such things had occasionally occurred in wars previously, our wars and others’ wars, this was part of a new pattern of behavior in the American military. Apparently. We had a sense of group honor about war, or so we were told, and now we were losing it. And it became worse over time. This disillusion about the illusion of honor I mean.
Because we were losing this war. A war we had no business fighting in the first place. People, if you want to call them that, at the Pentagon, didn’t like losing that war. It left a bad taste in their mouths. Made them seem like...losers. Cost them lots of money, which they didn’t particularly care about, except that they lost the war in the end.
But the disillusion spread out like a sick amoeba as our veterans returned home, and as the public became more aware of what was going on “over there,” infecting every aspect of American life, each level of American society, and every Sacred Cow we possessed. It disrupted families and governments, schools and police departments, businesses and factories, unions, churches and museums. Within a decade of My Lai, hardly anything in America resembled itself any longer. The disillusion was complete.
And that’s why people turned to Ronald Reagan and his lies. To take us back to the “good old days” before My Lai.
As if he could.
He tried. Nancy tried. She said “no.” Like some old actress saying no could stop something. Nobody could. Because those good, gold old days didn’t really exist. But someone, lots of someones were hanging around, holdovers from the Vietnam era, especially in the Pentagon, waiting to make just the “right” changes to “correct” the problems.
It’s been hell ever since. It’s like trying to take the napalm off that running naked child in that famous photo. Physically impossible. Morally impossible. That’s what napalm does. You can’t stop it. You drop it from the sky and...oops. Thank you, Dow Chemical, you wonder of modern science and capitalism. You physical metaphor for the shitstorm we’ve been living through. The house has been burning down ever since.
The military tries to train people, but, as the saying goes, you cannot train people to be decent unless you train them to be decent. You can train them to be something else, though, if you try hard enough. Once more, mon lecteur, that wonderful difference between the exquisite metaphorical and the dynamic ramming down the throat. And after Vietnam, boy howdy, did they start ramming.
So, some of those Vietnam holdovers, like Donald Rumsfeld when he became Secretary of Defense for “Dubya,” changed the nature of our military, not wanting to lose another war, by dropping every metaphorical ounce of human and ideological decency from the military code. You cannot today wipe the indecency, the immorality from certain—not all, but so many—veterans’ behaviors, behaviors that have been taught to them by a military society that likes indecency, which then becomes pounded into them, usually, by a military that prefers them to become robotic and puts guns into their hands and tells them that people not like them are their enemy. Expect that kind of behavior from them, therefore, when they join our police forces at the local, state and federal level. Warriors they call themselves. Not soldiers any longer. Soldiers are now wimps.
Those vets then become our police officers and federal officials, like Border Patrol and TSA agents. And you don’t even have to have a gun or a fake gun any longer. You just have to “be in their way” now. Just stand there and if they don’t want you to be standing there you won’t be standing too much longer.
Back in the old, bad days, police used to do this thing where, if they shot someone, they’d plant a gun, if they couldn’t find a gun, on the dead person, to make it look like they shot in self-defense. If nothing else, this made the paperwork easier. Then came all this exposure in the 1950s and 1960s about how they were planting guns, so most of that stopped. Most.
All the while, during that time and forward into the 1970s and 1980s, as American workers were losing their unions, thank you, Republicans everywhere, American police forces were gaining and strengthening their unions. And their unions were lawyering up. Often the lawyers were ex-cops, so, they knew the ropes, had some streetwise expertise. Every cop went through a sort of union training with these new, smartass lawyers. They were told: If you’re ever caught in a situation where you’ve shot someone, just tell whoever asks that you feared for your life, you shot in self-defense. Figure out a story to fit the situation, one that fits the motive. And stick to it.
“But what about a gun?” Some cop would ask, often some rookie.
“You don’t need a gun. Anything can look like a gun! A screwdriver, a wallet, a paper bag.”
Of course, speaking on behalf of the police, during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there were dozens of people like Terpil selling guns cheaply off-market here and there. And real guns also look like guns.
Now comes that horrible part. Cops are going to deny this left and right, but it’s true. Some cops—and I emphasize some, a few—started carrying things that they could say looked like guns. Combs, hairbrushes, whatever. Just in case. Even plastic guns. So, we were back to the old, bad days again, but in a new way.
Sane people know that being a police officer is one of the most difficult jobs a human being can possibly handle in life (and this even before the war on drugs or 9/11). And bad things do happen. And thank goodness most of us—white people, and even most people of color on a good day—never spend time being affected by any of it on either side. But some people do, and some to a degree that isn’t at all pleasant, and not through any fault of their own.
But instead of them, just imagine it’s you.
Imagine that cop knocking on your door to say your daughter has been killed, shot in the head three times by another cop, in the dark, because he thought she was going to shoot him, but it turns out she was only brushing her hair. Yet, you know, you know, she never does that, never brushes her hair in public, doesn’t even carry a hairbrush. What do you do? You, nice white person who loves the police. And he’s so sorry it happened. He didn’t mean for it to happen. Just a terrible accident. And then there’s your daughter’s two kids… Well, nothing to be done about that, you see, because…he didn’t do anything wrong. Self-defense, because he thought his life was in danger. Therefore, the state is not responsible for compensation. He didn’t do anything wrong.
Period.
Tough. Isn’t it? Like I said. Horrible. But. There you go.
Ronald Reagan loved the police. He should have. We all should. He also talked about taking personal responsibility. A lot. Made a big deal about it. He should have. We all should. Funny, all Presidents love the police. They have to. The police have guns. And the police all talk about taking personal responsibility. But nobody listens. Least of all these certain policemen. And the Presidents. And certain others to whom we give guns.
Listen to this: Between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2015, police in Great Britain fatally shot a total of three people. That’s three people in three years. Read that again, please.
Between January 1, 2015 and June 30, 2015, police in the United States fatally shot, on average, 2.6 people each day. Almost three people a day.
Training, training, training. You think? Or, perhaps, guns.
Why? Because everyone here has guns. Oh, you say, Second Amendment.
When I was growing up, this thing happened in a place called My Lai, a village in Vietnam. We were at war at the time. The government, our government, called it a war, at least. Our government had something of a sense of humor. If you want to call it that. Still does.
When the press found out about My Lai, and what happened there, they went what soldiers call “ape shit” about it. Frontpage headlines, photospreads in big magazines. So, the government made certain of two things. First, that this one guy, Lieutenant Calley, would be held responsible. This is what the military calls “the goat.” Second, that it would be made to seem like some kind of one-off incident. Like I said, a wonderful sense of humor. Like, “Hey folks, this sort of thing never happens...”
But this thing, this incident, this massacre of people and complete destruction of an entire village for no good reason, was not the responsibility of a single “goat,” not a “one-off” as it turned out, but simply one in a long and wide series of events guided by organized group-think. You know, what we call the “herd mentality.” And even though such things had occasionally occurred in wars previously, our wars and others’ wars, this was part of a new pattern of behavior in the American military. Apparently. We had a sense of group honor about war, or so we were told, and now we were losing it. And it became worse over time. This disillusion about the illusion of honor I mean.
Because we were losing this war. A war we had no business fighting in the first place. People, if you want to call them that, at the Pentagon, didn’t like losing that war. It left a bad taste in their mouths. Made them seem like...losers. Cost them lots of money, which they didn’t particularly care about, except that they lost the war in the end.
But the disillusion spread out like a sick amoeba as our veterans returned home, and as the public became more aware of what was going on “over there,” infecting every aspect of American life, each level of American society, and every Sacred Cow we possessed. It disrupted families and governments, schools and police departments, businesses and factories, unions, churches and museums. Within a decade of My Lai, hardly anything in America resembled itself any longer. The disillusion was complete.
And that’s why people turned to Ronald Reagan and his lies. To take us back to the “good old days” before My Lai.
As if he could.
He tried. Nancy tried. She said “no.” Like some old actress saying no could stop something. Nobody could. Because those good, gold old days didn’t really exist. But someone, lots of someones were hanging around, holdovers from the Vietnam era, especially in the Pentagon, waiting to make just the “right” changes to “correct” the problems.
It’s been hell ever since. It’s like trying to take the napalm off that running naked child in that famous photo. Physically impossible. Morally impossible. That’s what napalm does. You can’t stop it. You drop it from the sky and...oops. Thank you, Dow Chemical, you wonder of modern science and capitalism. You physical metaphor for the shitstorm we’ve been living through. The house has been burning down ever since.
The military tries to train people, but, as the saying goes, you cannot train people to be decent unless you train them to be decent. You can train them to be something else, though, if you try hard enough. Once more, mon lecteur, that wonderful difference between the exquisite metaphorical and the dynamic ramming down the throat. And after Vietnam, boy howdy, did they start ramming.
So, some of those Vietnam holdovers, like Donald Rumsfeld when he became Secretary of Defense for “Dubya,” changed the nature of our military, not wanting to lose another war, by dropping every metaphorical ounce of human and ideological decency from the military code. You cannot today wipe the indecency, the immorality from certain—not all, but so many—veterans’ behaviors, behaviors that have been taught to them by a military society that likes indecency, which then becomes pounded into them, usually, by a military that prefers them to become robotic and puts guns into their hands and tells them that people not like them are their enemy. Expect that kind of behavior from them, therefore, when they join our police forces at the local, state and federal level. Warriors they call themselves. Not soldiers any longer. Soldiers are now wimps.
Those vets then become our police officers and federal officials, like Border Patrol and TSA agents. And you don’t even have to have a gun or a fake gun any longer. You just have to “be in their way” now. Just stand there and if they don’t want you to be standing there you won’t be standing too much longer.
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