alias Bruce.

Trump gun accomplishments checklist.

Trump gun action checklist as of 2018's 22nd school shooting, 5-18-2018:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 ✓  Send thoughts and prayers

 ✓  Support the NRA and accept its money

 _  Ban military-style assault weapons that make mass killings easy

 _  Close the gun show background check loophole

 _  Tighten age requirements and background checks for buying guns 

 _  Do anything at all to reduce the USA's world-leading ratio of 1+ guns per citizen

Introducing Poemmentary.com.

It's news headlines and political commentary -- but exclusively through poetry. Wherever it is found, seen, heard, or scrawled. Its motto is "Freed Speech."

For a different kind of reporting,  go to Poemmentary.com. The April 6th story, for instance, is "Illegal Immigration Is A Touchstone For Anger."

I launched the site this week after years of daydreaming about it. There is much, much more to come. In all kinds of directions. Please visit as it grows.

How do we treat police as people?

 

Two stories:

 - A friend told me yesterday about a guy she knows who is a Baltimore City Police Officer. She sees him around in ordinary civilian life, she says, and he's a nice guy, peaceful, friendly, kind, open-minded, funny. Then she saw him again after he had been called to riot duty, lining up in formation to face off against angry city citizens in his shield and armor during the Freddie Gray uprising, and she saw a different guy. He talked with a slightly wild gleam in his eye about the adrenaline rush of being in battle, and how a protester kid had taunted him to his face, and how he had fantasized killing the kid on the spot, and what a fucking amazing rush it all was. My friend felt herself physically backpedal away from him, this genial guy she had thought she had begun to know.

 - Another friend of mine is a communist and a member of a self-described revolutionary organization that sometimes refers to police officers as "pigs." She and I have a running argument about this, among other things. I argue to her that police officers, even in service of repressive and racist state power, are human beings and wage slaves like most of us who at some level have a vested interest in not being under the thumb of a plutocracy that purchases American politics, and that even as we fight the role so many cops accept, it will not advance our agenda to pronounce them all "pigs." She argues to me that police officers, particularly in the nation's most poor and vulnerable communities, have made a Faustian bargain to park their humanity on demand in exchange for the rush of personal and institutional power, and that their chosen dehumanizing role deserves a dehumanized label. I am not sure how she feels all of this reflects on the character of actual porcine animals. I need to ask her about that. 

Where the two stories come together is in how we choose to deal with fellow human beings when they occupy more and more starkly opposing roles in an effective state of war. War makes living a life of humanity harder in every way, and American policing in large cities and in majority-white control of black and brown communities has for most of its history been a war. That includes the years since the Reagan 80s, when the full-throated War on Drugs, with its hypocritical approach to urban versus suburban drug use, flooded urban police departments with military hardware, military attitudes, and federal money. In a state of war, it is hard if not impossible to enjoy ordinary human experience with someone who gets a professional hard-on about pummeling people who look like you. It is hard to roll down the street on militarized patrol and not see a potential assassin on every street corner. It is hard to evade the crushing pressure -- or some would say the raw necessity -- to treat others as enemies. 

War. It is what assassinations by police look like. It is what assassinations of police look like. It is what mass imprisonment looks like. It is what armed white convergences on mosques look like. It is what a rush of half-brained presidential candidates shouting "kill them" sounds like. It is what Brown Shirts look like.

We're about there.

Most tragically ironic statement yet by an NYPD officer after the police murders:

“It’s made me paranoid when I’m in my vehicle."

So spoke an NYPD officer, quoted in the Guardian, after the murder of two NYPD officers by a man swearing vengeance for the deaths of Eric Garner and other black men at the hands of police.

Uh, yes, officer, we black civilians know about being afraid in our vehicles.

We black civilians know the fear of driving – and the fear of walking and riding and standing – very, very well. It has been taught to us, actually, by police. And by the decades of wrongful stops and arrests and deaths of people of color at the hands of law enforcement.

I have no doubt that the officer in question is mortally afraid. I can empathize with that. I wish that anguish on no one, and I wish that it were not so. I also know nothing of that particular officer's mind, heart, and behavior on the job.

But the spectacular irony here is that the NYPD as an armed organization, finding itself now as much a target as a targeter, is making like the world's biggest crybaby thug. The NYPD and its backers, in a move that political scholar Corey Robin chillingly warns is "Weimar-y", have managed to intimidate the city's mainstream political leaders and to shift the official tone from acknowledging civilian casualties to appeasing police power. They blame protestors for the rage that created the protests. They blame the new mayor for spilled police blood after decades of civilian bloodshed at the hands of police. 

It is ironic for an armed force to grab at abusive power as it weeps for its own victimhood. But it is not new. And it is no joke.

Why a two-year-old shot his mother dead with her loaded gun in a Wal-Mart.

The very idea of our having a policy conversation about an Idaho concealed-carry law that allows a parent to carry a hidden loaded pistol into a department store with her two-year-old is ludicrous.

Here, in these two reader comments accompanying a Guardian story on the tragedy, is the entire catastrophe in a nutshell:

gettinggolder
33m ago
Well more than half on the people in the US want something done. There is a failure of action related to allowing corporations, in this case gun manufacturers, to buy legislators with campaign money, or just to threaten to fund opponents. The same problems arose with health care, lots of money from health care insurance and drug companies to defeat a one payor system.

LostintheUS
11m ago
It's not that we don't care, we care desperately This is about corporate ownership of our government and only that. The NRA owns Congress AND most of the state legislatures. I have personally seen them in action in the Wisconsin capital. They get whatever insane legislation they want. Citizens have worked and worked for protective legislation from this death lobby to no avail.

NRA money buys the legislators who pass the laws that enable these killings of children, women, and men. Campaign finance reform will cut off the money and bring policy into the realm of sanity. That's all there is. There is no more need for a societal "discussion" about this than there is a need to have a discussion with a runaway dump truck or with a two-year-old wielding a loaded pistol.

We will see an end to this nightmare when, and only when, we as citizens are ready to jointly do what it takes to stand up to big money. Until then, we will get what we've got.

Why black males can genuinely relate to the NYPD.

Read this headline and excerpt from Friday's Guardian:

NYPD on alert after spate of anti-police threats in wake of officers' shooting

The New York Police Department has ramped up security at several precincts and seven people have been arrested for making threats against police officers in the days following the fatal shooting of two officers last weekend. The NYPD has warned officers to act with increased vigilance while on- and off-duty and to maintain heightened awareness of their surroundings.

Now read that same paragraph this way:

Black males on alert after decades of racially-profiled threats, arrests and shootings

Black communities have ramped up self-protection throughout New York City and thousands of officers have been implicated in the rise in racially-propelled police actions in the years since the onset of Stop-and-Frisk and Broken-Windows policing. Parents and community leaders have warned black males to act with increased vigilance while on and off the street and to maintain heightened awareness of their surroundings.

The second version, though, could have been written decades ago, even without the later additions of Stop-and-Frisk and Broken Windows. Most African-American males, including me, have been on high alert all of our lives. And we have not had to wear blue uniforms to find ourselves in that position.

No one, but no one, deserves to be jacked up or shot down by contemptuous formula. No mother or father or daughter or son deserves to lose one they love to reckless slaughter. No one, not a person or family in this world, deserves to be targeted for that kind of suffering. We black males, and our families and communities, have known this for a very long time.

But it adds to the tragedy that the NYPD, with its doubled-down fury of entitlement after the past week's terrible killings, still does not.

Let's face it: Saturday's brutal murder of police officers was all too likely to happen.

Yes, I said it. As some others have also said in recent weeks, whether in hushed voices away from public hearing or in louder but publicly unwanted declarations of grim warning. If you are black or very possibly if you are not, you have heard the forbidden undercurrent in post-Ferguson Post-Eric-Garner conversation: "It is only a matter of time."

And now that time has arrived. An apparently very troubled black man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, reportedly shot his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore, hopped a bus to New York City, posted on social media what he had in mind, and then in broad daylight walked up to a squad car and shot to death two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. Brinsley reportedly then went to a subway platform and put a bullet in his head.

So many of us act so surprised at this horror. But the elements were there for the seeing. The political and emotional physics of this long-running tragedy have been scrawled in chalk around bodies on sidewalks thousands of times. In New York City, home of Stop-and-Frisk and Broken Windows Policing, the proof has been shouted and pummeled and bulleted into the bodies and psyches of people in black and brown communities for decades upon decades. The equation is ruthless and there is no more running from it: When police steadily harass a population without provocation and arrest without cause and kill without reason, at some point someone on the other end of the gun, most likely a hopeless someone who feels they have nothing left to lose, is going to decide to pick up ammunition and turn the tables.

One-way craziness can only work for so long. At a certain point in a society brimming with guns, a don't-give-a-shit police culture juiced on unprovoked violence will come up against a don't give-a-shit individual juiced on random wanton payback. In this case the trigger, as it turned out, was a video that showed the world an irrefutable example of police atrocity American-style. Followed by a grand jury that shrugged and walked away. It was a moment when terrible forces simply lined up.

You could say, in a way, that Ismaaiyl Brinsley was America's first -- or at least its first recent -- anti-police-brutality suicide bomber: a troubled, mad-with-rage member of a battered population who one day simply lost it and chose to make a last grand gesture of killing two officers of the occupying force. If you feel your blood run cold at that awful parallel, you should.

So here we are, with two police officers, married with wives and children and alive with joys and dreams, shot dead at point-blank range while minding their own business. Their families are shattered, their comrades weep with rage and scream for justice, their spokespersons speak furiously of public leadership that has betrayed them.

And the black and brown communities who police are sworn to serve take a long look at the two bloodied bodies in blue, and they gravely nod and they say to the grieving and the outraged, "Yes, I understand. I know exactly how you feel."

Ebola + ISIS = brown fever.

It is time for more people to call it out. Right now in the United States, what whimpers just beneath the surface in everyday sidewalk throngs and crowded bars and restaurants is, "Are they here yet?"

You know: Them. The Africans carrying the Ebola virus. The ISIS operatives ready to transmit beheading videos from American hotel rooms in which they have taken ordinary folks hostage. You know what I'm talking about. You know people are thinking it. You know the volume is building toward a wider shrieking sound.

Days before the stories broke about people presumed African reportedly being shunned in retail establishments and neighborhoods in Dallas amid that city's Ebola panic, I and I know many others, particularly people of color experienced in being profiled, were already muttering to ourselves that it would only be a matter of time before the African profiling started. I considered blogging about it in advance but, again no doubt like many, I didn't want to be among those planting the suggestion to folks who are already too suggestible. That was a silly reservation on my part: it's not as if anything I do on this little blog could alter the motion of American public impulses that are so deeply ingrained and so continually remanufactured. That machinery is built to last, baby.

The same goes for our view of the ISIS conflict. While we Americans worry about being snatched in an alley by an ISIS sleeper cell, the actual cataclysm has now embroiled Turkey as well as Syria and Iraq in real and bloody war and internal insurrection -- including, as I write, violent tumult in Turkey over whether to join the battle for Kobani, a city on the Syrian/Turkish border. If the ISIS juggernaut continues to gamble successfully on the cynicism and patience of Western corporate powers for whom continually decimated nations of color and a fearful American public are just part of the dirty job of managing global capital, then we can expect more howling and jostling here in the Homeland beneath the threatened encroachment of the Black Flag. And we can brace for a lunge into frothing hysteria if any local acts of ISIS-sympathist terror actually take place here.

Meanwhile, we quietly accept that more Americans will die by gunfire per capita than in any other industrialized country, that this month alone 50,000 of us will die of heart disease and another 50,000 of cancer,  and that the corn- and cattle- and chemical-fueled enterprises that underpin our deadly diet continue to enjoy the subsidied, panic-free favors of the state.

Call it Brown Fever. Watch for it in your neighborhood.

Is the NRA as crazy as it acts?

It sure looks that way, doesn't it? After all, in the wake of an almost-inconceivable succession of spectacular recent gun murders, what sane organization would choose to stonewall even the limpest suggestions for public gun safety when it is on the wrong side of the opinion polls on most gun control issues? How nuts does an organization have to be to publicly denounce reforms (such as widened background checks) that most of its own membership favors? How can any brain-active gun advocacy group today not understand the need to cut its losses and offer at least minor concessions to a Congress addicted to both gun money and voter poll numbers? I mean, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, the Webster NY firefighter ambush, the gun show shootings – how many neon signs for the need to yield some public ground on guns does even the cultish NRA leadership need?

It may well be that Wayne LaPierre and his fellow White Geezer Gunners at the helm of the National Rifle Association are just plain wacked: shrieking zealots who have lost touch with their own organizational interests as well as the basics of human morality.

But I think it is just as likely that the NRA's top brain trust is crazy like a fox. I see one demonstrated reason for this, and also an unproven but evilly feasible reason.

The demonstrated reason comes from the chief axiom of America's increasingly frightened White Far Right: the best strategy for a right-wing white fringe that finds itself losing both the demographics and the public debates is to become so audacious, so bloodthirstily provocative and wildly uncompromising, as to scare money-whipped politicians and terrified white voters alike into whimpering agreement with NRA ideas that are way out of whack with voters' deeper desires and interests. This has been the tactic, for instance, of the Republican Party since 2008, and while it may appear suicidal in the long run, it is actually the sensible option for a cadre that has nothing to lose. With the NRA, as with the GOP, if they hard-line it the worst that can happen to them is the kind of defeat that would happen anyway if they were to yield now to demographics and the public's better instincts. And their best-case scenario is that they secure wins for their agenda that protect their power in spite of the fact that their arguments make no actual sense. So the NRA, ruthless power broker that it is, is going for it.

And then there is the not-yet-proven but evilly feasible reason: Even if the NRA, like the Repubs, sacrifices itself on the altar of broader public opinion, it wins a victory in consolidating the fear and fury of a sector of the white electorate that will accept increased state violence against designated "others" (blacks, Latinos, Muslims, the poor) in exchange for whites' perceived "freedom" to protect their own personal stature with guns. And it so happens that this political transaction serves and pleases those who most aggressively underwrite the Republican Party and the NRA: the very meanest of the rich.

Seen this way, the NRA's ignoring broader public wishes in order to whip up the loyal fury of its relatively narrow base is one of the few practical – and profitable – gambits it has left.

New York acts on guns while Washington ducks.

Good for New York (my home state, I'm happy to brag) for pushing at least some action to curtail gun-happy madness while President Irrelevant and most of Washington remain politely jacked up by gun money and influence, even in their alleged resistance to the gun lobby.

What a spectacle: to see the President and Congress so timidly and congenially address a landscape of such bloody insanity. A national "conversation" about an industry of carnage? Please. Obama's gun speech today, with children and families as supporting players, will be the usual mix of emotional sincerity and practical inadequacy. He will utter gun-control words but he will fight for nothing.

As with any civil rights issue (in this case the "life" in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"), the long-term outcome in the gun battle will be driven by those who fight for what is just, not by those who accommodate what is expedient.