The Unarmed Dead

Have you ever had the feeling that the police are killing unarmed Americans about once a week? The unarmed dead are in the news constantly, or so it seems. But does that reflect reality? Now the Washington Post has published a study of American police killings of totally unarmed citizens (people not even armed with toys, broomsticks or balloons), and the number of dead comes to about one a week. Oddly enough a disproportionate segment of these unarmed dead are African-Americans. So far the NRA has no program to get these people some guns.  
 

Two Inconvenient Theories

Recently a middle-period Picasso sold for $179,000,000, which raised the question: how much money is art worth? Adam Gopnik has proposed an interesting hypothesis. What art is worth depends on income disparity. The more really poor people you have and the more multi-billionaires, the more a Picasso will cost. 

Another theory is better established. That is the correlation between global warming (which causes climate change) and social instability.  This idea has been around for at least 15 years. For example, drought in Syria led to desperate farm families swarming into the cities and demanding help. The government attempted to suppress them, and the nation disintegrated. 

If I were a billionaire, I'd be putting my money into efforts to mitigate global warming. What the swanky class needs most is stability.  The slower change occurs, the more safely the hoity-toity can enjoy great wealth. When masses of people get hungry and thirsty, they rampage through the gated communities. (I doubt if Wall Street grasps this.)

The Politically Correct Right

Swanky people think of political correctness as a problem on the Left. Meanwhile, on the Right, folks are not allowed to say "Democratic Party." Instead they say, "Democrat Party" to demonstrate their correctness.  They wear American flag lapel buttons so no one will mistake them for Colombians.  In fact, although most Righties call themselves Christians, they worship the flag as a holy object that can never touch the ground. They consider the Bible holy, of course, but  how many keep in mind that "sooner shall a camel pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter Heaven."

America's Geniuses

When young I used to hear, quite often, that a genius was someone able to hold in her mind two contradictory ideas at once. The examples were many. Count all the Christians eager to go to Heaven but afraid to die. Or count the Republicans who fiercely maintain that Big Government is inherently error-prone, corrupt, tyrannical, stupid and "the problem," but they demand that Big Government administer the death penalty and tell us who can marry whom, while remaking Iraq. What reassures me today is the plenitude of geniuses right when we need them most.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

When I was in the army, the first sergeant to get my attention told me about an incident in Korea. In a forward area he had come across a private raping a Korean woman. The sergeant drew his .45 and ordered the private to get off the woman. The private refused, so the sergeant shot him in the head. I'm okay with that. The private had a choice. The sergeant had a choice.

I'm not okay with having the government ponder at length and then execute human beings. It's not because I care about Tsarnaev. He had a choice. I'm not a good enough person to care about a terrorist who committed murder. But why should we trust the bureaucratic system enough to sanction the death penalty? We understand that some innocent people get executed. What is worse, the government-sanctioned death penalty makes brutish official behavior almost respectable. 

We are used to stacked decks, of course. A jury in a case like this excludes any citizen who doesn't favor death. As Albert Camus might put it, that's absurd. In a democracy the jury pool should include us all.

Bow to the Oligarchy

President Obama was elected to work for everyone in the country from the 300 million ordinary people to the swanky few who constitute the dominant oligarchy.  I've backed him, but I have to admit that his economic advisers have mostly come from Wall Street and represented the interests of the intelligent super-rich. Like Bill Clinton, Obama ran for President opposed to free-trade agreements and then supported the agreements once he was elected. We can expect Hillary Clinton to do the same. That is how the system works.

Meanwhile we have a secure room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol where members of congress are allowed to read the nearly 1000 page Trans-Pacific Partnership draft agreement. No notes or copies can be taken. The treaty is top secret. No discussion so far. And no amendments to the agreement, which was negotiated by the oligarchy, right? We retain the right to bow and kiss the whip.

Shelter

On Tuesdays my brother, my cousin and I bicycle about 17 miles, some of them along a beautiful, tree-shaded greenway that follows Santa Rosa creek. That puts us cheek-by-jowl with homeless people, who also love the bubbling creek. We say hello and talk about safe topics.

In a fine op-ed piece in our local newspaper, Jason Tauches laid out why the homeless camp out along the semi-wild creek. Sonoma County provides enough public services to help about 20% of its 4,000 homeless.  The others often camp near the creek with a few friends. That's not legal. Every few days the police cite them, and we see the homeless moving to another partly hidden site. Or they go to trial and end up in jail for a few days. When they get out, their sleeping bags have vanished, their friends are hard to locate, and they need a tree to sleep under that evening. In short, our solution to homelessness is to drive these people from one grove of trees to another, confiscate their gear and jail them from time to time.

That solution is, needless to say, expensive. The cost of police time, court time, public defender time, jail time, etc., is roughly ten times what it would cost to house these humans as they do in Europe. But there's a catch. Providing shelter for the American homeless would not adequately punish them for their mental illnesses, bad luck, physical failings, low wages (some have jobs), etc. We pay ten times as much for a chance to sock it to them.

The Two Marys

We've been busy moving to Santa Rosa and downsizing, which verges on the impossible. I have been coming across lost items. When I was a child, I knew my great-grandmother, Mary Berry, which means I can remember my granddaughter's great-great-great grandmother. That seems odd.  I had always believed that Mary Berry came over from Ireland on the boat. But in my packing and sorting I came across a Xerox of a newspaper article on Mary Berry's death in Des Moines, and I realized I had conflated two Mary Berrys. The one who came over on the boat was the mother of the Mary Berry I had known. The original Mary had arrived here in 1865. The Mary my mother and father and I had believed was an Irish immigrant was actually the daughter of an immigrant, and all of our family history is now on tilt.
  

Andy Lopez and Freddie Grey

This is the tale of two district attorneys. In Baltimore the local state's attorney investigated the police homicide of a young black man arrested without cause. At the end of three weeks, she indicted the six officers involved. A year of so back, a terrified deputy sheriff near Santa Rosa shot a Latino child--shot him six or seven times--and killed him because the child was playing in a vacant lot with a toy gun. Our elected district attorney went into the usual long stall, hoping interest in the homicide would fade, and then eventually she ruled out an indictment. The scared deputy is back on patrol, so you may want to stay inside. And the strategy worked. The D. A. is doing fine, thank you, except maybe in the small hours of the morning.