Am I Blue..?

One of the Portland newsweeklies is doing a worthwhile civic service; turning the paper over to members of Portland's Black community to talk about The Oregon Problem Which Dare Not Speak It's Name; systemic i.e. "institutional" racism.

Of all the places in this country I've lived Portland (and Oregon) is the whitest place I can think of. The racism is baked in, going back to the original Oregon Constitution of 1857. Here's the Oregon Encyclopedia on the subject:

"Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution."

Hell, I wrote a whole post about it a decade or so ago. 

Oh, and I love the part about the Oregon Bill of "Rights" being clear that while you had rights to trial by jury, free speech, and from not having GIs in your guest bedroom, you didn't have a right to be Black and Oregonian.

Nice.

One of the most visible, and intractable, pieces of this racist history that isn't just history is the Portland coppers.

They were lethally racist fucks then, and by and large they are now.

We've gone through a covered-wagonload of schemes to change that and it hasn't worked. Portland's Thin Blue Line is both racist and lethal to people of all colors; as the first linked article points out, they killed 78 people over the past four years up from 51 between 2014 and 2018.

But mostly Black.

So I'm with Mr. Smiff, the goatherder of the Mercury piece; the problem is the cops, and the problem is bred into the whole outfit's bones. It's not "reformable", it's not "redeemable". The only real solution is to burn the fucker hull and sticks, break up the ashes, and start again from scratch.

Call it "defund the police"? Fine. The point is that this blue village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Then...what do you do?

And there's the big question. Because here's my theory: Portland police aren't bad just because they're lethal racist fucks. they're lethal racist fucks because of policing.

At least the way we here in Portland (and much of this country) do policing. And that, to a massive extent, is because of who we Americans are.

 

Specifically, the "occupation" model of policing - a relatively small number of coppers racing around in cars responding to emergency calls - means that the cops themselves typically only work with:
1) drunks and dopers,
2) belligerent assholes, and
3) poor people.

And many of these people are armed; indeed, the number of guns lying around means that if you have to try and deal with whatever fucking thing they're doing you kind of have to start from the assumption that they're strapped.

That's kind of it. 

People don't call 9-1-1 when they're having a nice day. They don't need cops when they're being friendly, or happy, or peaceful, or content. The cops only get involved when somebody's mad, or whacked out, or scary, mean, violent, or some other form of assholery, and as often as not with a deadly weapon.

Lots of these people are poor, and lots of them are Black because it's way more likely that you're poor when you're Black; that's how we roll here in the Land of the Free. And poor people don't have the options that better-off people do, especially if they're on the street, but just in general it's harder not to end up breaking the law which forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread if you're poor.

And there, told to enforce that law, on "those people", are the cops.

Think of how you'd feel about your work, and your co-workers, if it meant constant irritation and aggravation dealing with assholes?

After not too long you'd probably conclude that most people are assholes, many are dangerous assholes, and that almost all poor, Black, and poor Black people are dangerous assholes that you'd need to shoot first to stay alive. 

In other words, you'd be a lethal racist asshole.

Even if you didn't start that way, the way the United States works now goes a long way to ensuring you'd end up that way.

So how do you change that?

My only thought is that you'd effectively have to change 1) U.S. society, and 2) how we police it.

You'd have to get rid of the fucking guns, for one thing.

If any interaction with an asshole, or even just someone having a bad day - angry, depressed, even suicidal, argumentative, irrational, out of control - might involve a firearm? Then anyone whose job involved stopping that bad day would have to have lethal force, if not in hand at least at hand, and be mentally prepared to use it.

That's the kind of hypervigilance that produces "combat stress" and PTSD  in soldiers. Until the cops don't have to start from there? Every cop incident is going to have the potential to go lethal pretty quick smart. With the expected consequence of the cop starting every incident halfway to drawing down on someone.

Then you'd almost have to have a cop living, or at least walking around, in every street in every neighborhood.

Because the other part of this is the "working with nonstop assholes" thing, remember?

To change that the cops would have to interact with other kinds of people; happy, peaceful, friendly, non-asshole people. They'd have to see the good side of the people around them, instead of seeing them as random "civilians", randos they jump out of the car on, who are either useless NPCs, or assholes that need a beatdown.

Remember "Officer Friendly"? Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to be friends when you only drive in once or twice a year to thump some asshole and haul them off to Detox. 

And then there's the whole "right of the people to peaceably assemble" thing...

...yeah, that. 

This is a long way around to get to the part where I say "I don't see any simple, easy, straightforward way to fix the cops".

Do we need some sort of police? Yes.

Do we need the police we have now? As I think I've made clear; no. The current cop model is broken. It doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't solve crimes, not very often, and often not correctly, given the number of people whose convictions turn out to be mistaken or, worse, deliberate frame-ups.

But ISTM that "fixing" that involves "fixing" a huge chunk of modern American life; society, economy,  politics...and we can't even agree to get a fucking ketamine-addled Afrikaaner's fucking long nose out of our collective governmental pocket, or send a corrupt and predatory grifter and former real estate slumlord to the pokey instead of the Oval Office.

WASF.

The State of THE Union, 2022

Like any good American, I started this with a long post al about memememememeMEEEEE! because that's who we are. Americans, the People of the Ego. It's ALL about us, speshul snowflakes that we are.

Which, I should add, goes a hell of a long way to explaining WHERE we are and how we got there.

But that's part and parcel of this post, about the city and state and country I (and many of you...) are living in. 

Let's start local; Portland.

I wish I had a nickel for every "OMFG! Portland is OVER!!!" I've read in everything from the local digital fishwrap (since I can't recall the last time I saw an actual dead-tree Oregonian) to national opinion columns. This assessment seems to rest largely on two pillars:
1) The 2020 protests, and
2) the "homeless crisis".

Those, in turn, seem to come from, in order:

1) The reporting on the protests that made it sound like all of the city was in flames because a six- or eight-block area around the courtshouse/Central Precinct cop-shop were Ground Zero for the combat between Portland Police Bureau (and, later, a trashbag assortment of federal cops and cop-like entities...) and people who don't much like Portland Police Bureau. And

2) The frequent, highly visible, presence of homeless people in almost every public space from parks to streets to open waste ground.

Let's take them apart.

The first is pretty simple; Portland is always been a pretty shitty town to not be a straight white guy. And Portland cops - who have always been, like most Portlanders, white - tend be shitty; shitty cops, for one, and shitty people in general.

I mean, you kind of have to be sort of an asshole to be or want to be a cop to begin with. Your job, how you earn your living, is mostly going to involve pushing people around, as well as constantly dealing with shitty, awful people, or people who are having a bad day, or troubled people, or insane people, or just people who are looking for trouble.

Throw in that your job also involves making sure that the Good People - that is, the nice, well-bred, wealthy people who largely pay your wages - aren't bothered by Those People. And that our country's history and many of our institutions ensure that Those People are somewhat darker-colored than the Good People.

Means that you stand s pretty good chance of coming off like a racist bastard even if you aren't personally...

(hint; that's what "Critical Race Theory" pretty much predicts - that we've set things up, even here in "liberal" Portland - so that the effect of the Law In It's Impartial Majesty has the effect of making huge swathes of the U.S. being effectively pretty goddamn racist...)

...which, so far as we can tell, a hell of a lot of Portland coppers are when they're being honest with themselves. And as the link shows; the PPB knows they're hiring these freikorps wannabees and don't care. They just send them out to fuck with the people that you'd expect an American Nazi to fuck with.

So you had a perfect shitstorm; Portlanders - sick and tired of being pushed around by blue bastards and angry because the resurgent Republican "fuck you, I'm a racist Nazi bastard, what you gonna do about that?" crew of Proud Boys, Threepers, and Oathers had been goose-stepping through downtown with the ostentatiously visible love and tongue-bathing of said blue bastards - finally snapped.

And the result was - if you knew Portland coppers - depressingly predictable; the coppers ran wild bashing, macing, and arresting everyone. 

And what happened after that?

Nothing.

Nothing was done to make the Portland cops less shitty, so they're still the same bunch of gormless freikorps-fondling fucksticks they've always been, and nothing was done to make things better for the people they constantly fuck with, Portlandrs of color, the mentally troubled, and the homeless.

But - here's the thing that makes the whole "Portland, it's SO over" bullshit bullshit - it was just downtown, and just a tiny part of downtown, at that.

It didn't make Portland better.

But it didn't make Portland any worse, either. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Portland and Portlanders had no contact with and were not impacted by the protests or the cop response.

The "reporting" was copaganda crap, and if you believed the reporting you were being played for a fool.

And the "Portland is Over" line is a constant stream of wingnut projectile vomit spewed (mostly) by the "People for Portland" gang responsible for the ads like the one at the top of this section. These jokers want to put the "rich, the well-born, and the able" higher on top and are using this ooga-booga scare noise to try and do it.

They're hard at work state-wide, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.

Now.

Homelessness.

This one is a subject that's hard for me to be objective about, because my part of Portland, North, seems to be overrun with people living in tents amid mountains of trash and shit, or in trashed-out campers parked in our little residential streets.

Plus we had our very own homeless crazy lady parked in our little street, screaming and muttering, taking her clothing off...

(the morning I found her at the bottom of our steps, smoking - and how the fuck do you afford smokes at fifteen bucks a pack or whatever they cost now if you're a jobless homeless crazy lady? - and muttering between bouts of begging remains a pretty memorable one. I asked her to go smoke somewhere else, please, and was met with a screech of nuttiness that culminated in her proclamation that Jesus (her nuttiness had a strong religious taint) wanted me to see her tits and her yanking up her grubby clothing so I could. Let's just say that I'd have appreciated Jesus' ideas more had said tits been both cleaner and more attractive...)

...who had my daughter, in particular, massively creeped out for weeks.

Like a hell of a lot of Portlanders, I'm heartily sick of being run out of our own public spaces by reeking piles of trash and whacked-out campers. Tired of having anything moveable stolen, of having parked cars broken into, of being unable to visit parks and trails without stepping around discarded tweaker trash and soiled underwear.

I just want the problems to go away.

But - and this is what makes this whole thing a lot less simple than "exterminate the brutes" - I also realize the "problems" are other human beings trying to make human lives for themselves.

This isn't some sort of mindless orkish horde invading our city. 

The people making this happen are just people. Some are troubled - with addition, with mental or emotional problems - but a hell of a lot, probably most are just poor and down on their luck in - and this is the most important part - a town that has done nothing and worse than nothing to provide actual places for poor, down on their luck people to live.

It's not fucking rocket science.

Portland, like a lot of the rest of this country, has too few places for poor people to live.

Seriously.

That's it.

It's hard to be poor and find a place to live because your supposed fellow-Americans have either made it hard to find places for poor people to live, or don't care.

Sure, a handful of the people living in the tent camps along the Cut would need more even if you got them into a little house or an apartment. Counseling. Medical care. Social interventions of various sorts.

But a hell of a lot would simply need a home and a decent job and a way to get there and back.

We the Good People aren't doing anything to help with the home. 

We're not doing anything to help with the job. 

And we're sure as hell not doing anything about the "getting there and back" think with our bad-and-getting-worse transit.

What's frustrating as hell to me is that it's pretty simple.

You change the zoning laws and subsidize (or force) building houses and apartments poor people can afford.

You subsidize - or just create - work that poor people can do that pays them enough to afford that housing.

You create enough bus and trolley and train routes to get people to their jobs and back home (since if you're poor all you can afford is a beater piece-of-shit car and those are less reliable and worse for everyone than a bus ride).

You pay for people to help where it's needed; physical and mental health care workers, counselors, addition care people.

And you tax the rich fucks and their businesses to pay for it all.

Will that "solve" homelessness and the attendant problems?

No.

Will it improve the situation, probably immensely?

Yes.

Will it happen?

No. The Portland City government has already given up trying anything but force, might, beatings. The "homeless sweeps" are the "answer", so the City has directed the coppers (see above...) and the city cleanup crews to chase the poor bastards from one place to another.

Like so much else in the U.S. circa 2022, there's an obvious social, political, and economic solution to an obvious social, political, or economic problem.

But because the solution would require Americans to abandon their prejudices and make hard choices and financial sacrifices, they won't even be seriously discussed, let along tried. 

Take all this larger, and you've got the same problems.

Oregon has a bunch of red-state wingnuts roaming the less paved parts of the state.

Do they have answers to these problems outside of blabbering about illegal aliens and woke capitalism?

Don't make me laugh.

Instead they want to join their fellow wingnazis in Idaho. That pretty much tells you about the condition of Oregon's goober politics.

The country at large?

The United States has a massive, indigestible minority - something between a quarter and two-fifths of the country - that want caudillo-style dictatorship if the alternative is not getting all the guns, Jesus, tax cuts, and ability to call people they don't like rude names they want.

They're not going to change. Nothing that we've seen proving the unparalleled shittiness of Republican "policy" (such as it is other than "whatever Donald Trump wants me to suck...") or the hammering that Republican governance will give anyone not in a two-yacht family will persuade them to back anyone other than the reddest of red-meat Bircher Trumpkins.

The institutions and political structures that empower these hayshaking fucksticks mean that they can rule the rest of us unless the other three-fifths of the country 1) gets off their collective dead ass and 2) votes against every one of these C.H.U.D.s...and this is a country where barely two-thirds of the eligible population bothers to even show up in the most important elections.

They have a gajillion reasons, from ignorance to indifference to actual "reasons" (my personal favorite being libertarians, who seem to think that the opposite of "government regulation" is "freedom" and not "rule of the most rapacious and powerful wealthy individuals and groups") but the overall effect is, again, to put these well-funded, rabidly active, right-wing nuts in power.

I have no idea what the hell you do about this.

It's not like the danger is hard to see. It's right fucking there, the iceberg not on a cold dark night but in broad daylight, visible for miles ahead. And yet the fucking U.S.S. Titanic seems determined to ram the goddamn thing, maybe just to see if letting these gomers put a massive hole in the Republic's hull will fucking sink it.

Maybe just for shits and giggles.

Either way?

Pretty soon we're going to have to decide, those of us non-wingnut, whether to bend the knee to these fuckers, or fight.

The only question is how willing I am to die on my feet.

Because when your country becomes Bosnia, you have no other choices.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 2)

 

Just look at 'em. 

The Uvalde, Texas Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics Team.

Pretty badass, aren't they? All dress-right-dress-and-covered-down, got their GI on, tac boots and blue fatigues, locked-n-loaded and ready to protect and serve, right?

Except they didn't.

When an angry but untrained young man with a similar weapon turned up to kill a bunch of the kiddies their P.R. claimed were the reason for their existence, these heroes stood around with their thumbs up their collective ass for an hour or so letting the dude wax those kids.

What you and I and every other American needs to get is that this was a feature, not a bug.

Think about who those coppers actually work for.

You? Me? Those kids or their parents?

C'mon. Pull the other one. That's enough to make a cat laugh.

The Uvalde cops work for "the City of Uvalde" just like the Portland Police Bureau works for the "City of Portland". 

When was the last time your city or town did something because you wanted or needed it?

That's not to say that the people who the cops do work for - the federal, state, county, or city governments and those who have outsized influence on them such as wealthy donors or corporations or political action groups - don't do things that help work for you.

But they don't do it for you.

And neither do the cops.

Instead, given the way most police in the United States have been infected with Soldier-Cop Disease, it's more likely that these rascals look at you and me as nuisances at best and enemies at worst. We're not why they do their job; we're a problem that has to be solved for them to do what they see as their job. We're the randos in Nisour Square that scare the shit out of them, that put them on edge and make them reach for their weapons.

Now.

I have a tiny amount of sympathy for the coppers, given the immense number of firearms wandering around the U.S. public. It's kinda hard to avoid being paranoid and trigger-happy when any rando could be a whackaloon with a hogleg and a hard-on for killing someone.

Not that they usually kill coppers, mind. That's hard and risky; it's a lot more fun and easy to kill kids or shoppers or folks in church or massage parlors.

But my sympathy is hammered pretty flat by the hard cold facts that those coppers will willingly shoot your or me but are unwilling to risk going in hard on some whackaloon with a black rifle.

Frankly, it's time and past time for We the People to get over the ridiculous tongue-bathing we give our coppers.

I get it; we've had years and years of copaganda, going all the way back to the old Dragnet- and The FBI-style TV shows, telling us that these jokers are the Thin Blue Line between us and anarchy.

But think about it.

Coppers don't "prevent" crimes.

Unless the copper is literally standing right there, the cop has no way to "prevent" crime. Or anything else, when you stop and think about it, from a riot to a hobo taking a dump on your lawn.

Portland has a whopping 0.0012 sworn officers - actual cops - per person. How the ever loving fuck is one-thousandth of a cop going to stop me from whipping up on your head. Like I said two years ago; what maintains our civil society isn't some thin fucking blue line. It's us, you and me, being good citizens and good neighbors.

Coppers don't "solve" crimes, either.

I'm old enough to remember Sergeant Friday locking up all the baddies every week. Crime didn't pay, at least not on TV.

In real life?

The cops barely clear half of all murder cases. Here in Portland? It's less than half.

And that's THE big crime, felony murder. Figure out for yourself how the Blue Line does with stuff like robbery, rape, or burglary.

Yeah, like that.

So what do these tax-fattened fucksticks do?

Largely exactly what their owners - the governments and wealthy government-influencers - want them to do; keep the canaille in line, show the flag so the plebs see who's in charge, do the minimum to intimidate the normies from misbehaving and to ensure that there's no visible opportunity to break loose and run wild.

I'm not against that, exactly. That's what We the People seem to be fine with, and, besides, someone has to roust the smelly crazy homeless people off the Safeway parking lot and it's sure as Hell not gonna be me.

But there's no reason to valorize or even defer to the people we pay to do that sort of stuff.

It's not like they're going to charge a looney murderer with a rifle for us, right?

No.

The coppers won't save us from these lunatic killers and their semiauto hard-ons.

Next time, let's discuss what, if anything, is possible.

Get Strapped or Get Stripped

I'm not going to go deep into the weeds on the Rittenhouse verdict. It was prima facie from the moment the trial opened. Between the trial judge's Trumpkin antics to the jury selection, the odds were tilted towards getting the little bastard off.

But when the result of this decision produces crap like this:

Let me phrase it this way. Do you believe liberals need to bring guns to their protests?

Carrying a firearm is a personal decision, and more people on both sides need better education about what it means to carry a firearm in the public sphere so that they can make those decisions for themselves. I’m not trying to get around that question. That is a big, complicated question. And my answer to that is everyone needs more training.

 ...my country has a serious goddamn gun problem. And politics problem.

Yeah, it's Slate. I get that. And I have no idea who "Lara Smith" is other than she's a gormless nitwit.

But one of the most misunderstood Bob Heinlein quotes is that damn "An armed society is a polite society" one from Beyond This Horizon. The context - that the speaker is essentially advocating a sort of eugenics through firearms "kill(ing) off the weak and the stupid" - is never mentioned any more than the "well-regulated militia" part of the Second Amendment is cited alongside the keep-and-bear-arms part.

Because an armed society isn't "polite". It's barely a society at all. When you have to back your political ideas with armed force, every debate will inevitably degenerate into a gunfight. Smith basically admits that; ""everyone needs more training"? Seriously? That's your recommendation when your political opponents come at you armed? Spartakists versus Freikorps in the streets of Portland?

The Rittenhouse verdict sends a clear message to the political opponents of the Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers - you have two choices; arm yourselves or be at the mercy of being shot down whenever the armed wingnuts show up.

I know what my choice would be.

I also know that if I brought the bullet launcher to a protest that the Portland coppers would be all over me and not to pal around comparing cool rifles. 

As the Homestead strikers or the Stonewall rioters or the Freedom Riders could tell you; the police are the natural allies of the Right. If you're out there raising hell against the Authority the cops are your natural enemies, anyway, and when the Rittenhouses turn up armed and looking for trouble they will get a tongue-bath from the Blue that you, the dirty antifa BLM radical commie hippie bastard, will never receive.

Just like the murderous little bugger did in Kenosha.

Regardless of the circumstances of the individual case, the Rittenhouse verdict presents the American Left with a stark choice.

Arm yourselves, or be destroyed whenever your Proud Boy enemies choose.

And that, my friends, is not a sane way to run a nation.

Petard

 So you might recall that over the summer we here in Portland were In Flames!!!

The antifa hordes were rampaging through our streets, the dead were rising from their graves, dogs and cats were living together, and only the Thin Blue Line of Portland Police Bureau was holding us back from being - even though we were, mind you, the President hissown self said so! - an "anarchist jurisdiction".

But...remember back in June? 

When I asked you whether we would face the brutally obvious reality that "policing" in the United States fucks with and kills poor and dark and mentally disturbed people at a ridiculously inflated rate? What we would do if no amount of "reform" had changed or would change that? What we would do now, after decades of useless wanking had left us with a Police Bureau that is a sort of Proud Boys Local #432 only all with blue clothing?

And I answered my own question with:

"I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades...I knew perfectly well (that this) was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that."

And, as surely as the sun still rises, we - we here in "anarchist jurisdiction" Portland did...

Nothing.

Instead we re-elected the empty-suit-cop-fluffing incumbent mayor instead of his lefty challenger who promised to take the fucking cops by the stacking swivel. A large part of that was because us commies, once again, managed to form up the circular firing squad - another local activist, Tessa Raiford, ran a very organized write-in campaign that siphoned off about 13 percent of the vote, all from the Left - and shot ourselves dead square in the ass because it was in a race that the OTHER lefty candidate, Iannarone, lost 40 to 46 percent.

Do the math.

Fuck. We're our own worst goddamn enemies.

So the end result of all that protesting and voting and clamor for justice is that we're stuck with the same bunch of useless bastards that sat around with their collective thumbs up their collective asses while the Portland coppers went all kinetic on the BLM protestors.

Surely as the sun rises even the hardest-core street radical can see the brutal facts in front of her, so the protests drizzled away with the autumn rains.

The summer of BLM is over and the fucking cops won.

The usual suspects - the rich white people in the West Hills and the Portland Business Alliance - voted for the empty suit in droves, terrified of the propaganda spewed by the Thin Blue Line of Bullshit and the idiot news stations. 

The same idiots are fulminating about our homeless explosion - imagine, people are losing their squats in a Plague that is killing businesses and low-wage jobs! Whoodathunkit? - and want the empty suit and his cronies to "do something"...as if anyone can "do something" without a massive infusion of tax dollars and social and actual engineering - build cheap goddamn houses, you fools! - that the richie riches and the PBA will never accept or agree to.

Which will just mean more "homeless sweeps" where the coppers kick the hoboes out of wherever they are. They will just rise and scatter like a flock of scruffy starlings to land in someone else's tree until the sweeps come through again. It's the homeless version of the whack-a-muj that worked soooo well in Southwest Asia only with fewer command-detonated mines.

Nobody is willing to think their way out of this, largely because the actual stuff that works is difficult and expensive and time-consuming and even here in Portland we're Americans, by God, and we don't do difficult and expensive and time-consuming. Fuck that noise, we're cowboys and we think with our six-shooter. 

Meanwhile we're marinating in the Plague just like the rest of you, and our wingnuts are as wingnutty as the ones all over the country, squawking and clucking about freeedummmmm!!! while the 'rona tickles their nostrils and they strut around with their festering uncovered meatfaces belching their disease all over the rest of us. The dumb fuckers have invited Mister Grenade to the party while the rest of us try to just stay in cover long enough to duck their goddamn shrapnel until the vaccines arrive.

I'm just tired.

I'm tired of the Plague. I'm tired of missing my old life; my friends and my little joys and my city, tired of being worried and afraid and nervous as a cat around crowds, wondering which one is the fucking numbnuts is that's walking around shedding the virus like rain.

And I'm really tired of this country, which has such a bright and shining promise, which has the potential to be so good and great and one but instead is dominated by the selfish, the small, the weak, the stupid, and the willfully ignorant.

I'm tired of trying to be decent and intelligent and thoughtful and careful and judicious only to look across the way at a bunch of four-year-olds squalling in a tantrum triggered by belief in utter nonsense so transparently obvious delusional foolishnessthat even  a poop-flinging monkey would sneer.

And I have no good and happy answer to how to change all that except the answer of any siege; watch and wait and keep my head down and kill the traitorous bastards trying to open the postern and try and ensure that the other sonsofbitches don't get over the wall all the while knowing that it's usually us who get blown up by our own goddamn petard.

At ease, cats. Back to grim politics.

By now you've probably all heard about the Antifa/New Black Panther riots savaging my city, and held in check only by the mad riot control skilz of Portland Police Bureau and their support echelons from the Federal Agencies That Shall Not Be Named. As you know, we white folks are huddled in our basements, eyes red from the tear gas smoke, dreading the knock that means the BLM Revolutionary Guard has arrived to deliver swift and final Social Justice.

It's true. It's all true, and I have pictures to prove it.

See? There he is! There's 's the black-clad Antifa terrorist, surveying the site of his next atrocity.

It's hell, I tell you, a dystopian hellscape, the American Carnage our President warned us about three years and more ago. We're all doomed.

Ooookay, now, let's quit kidding around and talk some simple facts.

No, there's no mad riots going on downtown. No, there's nothing that Trumpy and the Junior Freikorps need to "save" us from. He's full of shit, they're full of shit, and the Portland Police Bureau is, as usual, full of shit.

No, here's what's going on:

That's the "Wall of Moms" confronting our heroic Law Enforcement Heroes with...a lullaby.

So of course the fucking cops and feds shot them with tear gas and flashbangs.

Here's what you need to know about Portland cops; they're shit, and they've been shit for decades.

Triggerhappy? Check. Racist? Check. Brutal n' stupid? Check. Nazis? Ummm...yeah. That, too; a Portland copper who had a Hitler fetish back when he was a sergeant in the Nineties and Oughts? He made Captain by the mid-teens when his youthful Nazi...ummm..."indiscretions" were erased in 2014. He retired/ with a full pension and some sort of cop medal, presumably to go with his Iron Cross.

So people here in Portland are reeeeally sick and tired of these worthless coppers. We'd like them to be less stupid, brutal, racist, and generally worthless, but we'll settle for burning the fucking plague ship to the waterline, hull and sticks, so something more useful could be built in it's place.

That's why we're SO done with them.

I'm not sure what Trump and his cosplay Guardia Civil want, but my guess is just red meat for the base. He's completely screwed the COVID pooch, so he needs to distract the rubes from the fact their kids are wheezing and Gamma's dead...so, look! Antifa! Ooh! Bad! Scary! Evil!

On the other hand...there is a precedent for this sort of damn thing, paramilitaries doing the dirty work the caudillo can't trust the police or the Army to do for him. The brownshirts - and before them, the real freikorps, in Germany and the blackshirts in Italy. The "dignity battalions" in Panama. AAA in Argentina.

These feds don't have the sack to bring on the Ford Falcons. Yet.

But if you're a small-r republican, you should be alarmed and infuriated that your supposed republic is flirting with making it's very own little Falangist Civil Guard.

I sure as hell am.

But, sadly...I'm too old , too slow, and too liable to the plague to be out there beside the Moms. So you're not going to read a "Letter from Wapato Jail" from me anytime soon. I'll stay boring and safe in my little house in my little job doing my boring little things.

Just wishing the moms and them the best of luck. It's not that I don't WANT to be out there.

Because fuck the worthless goddamn Portland Police Bureau and all its works.

And - this is a larger political point worth making here - it's really time to break up the damn "Department of Homeland Security" (and as an aside I think we can all agree that "Heimatsicherheitsdienst" sounds better in the original German) and restore it's Frankenstein parts back to their original pieces; FEMA to, well, FEMA. The Coast Guard to Transportation. Customs back to Customs, The INS back to Justice (or, better yet, to Labor where it really belongs).

There's no real reason for this monster to exist other than the stupidity and panic that resulted from 9/11. In it's existing condition it is entirely too useful for some Mussolini wannabe like Trump to turn into his goon squad, and it's too sprawling to be useful for actual "security", as the recent goon squad adventures in my hometown show quite plainly.

So while I hunker down in North Portland, let's all see about defunding the damn Portland cop and dismembering the damn DHS.

Time and past time, I'd say...

Fort Loser

This is me in 1984, a perky young SP-4 waiting patiently for someone to auger into Sicily Drop Zone at Fort Braxton Bragg, North Carolina.

At the time I couldn't have picked Braxton Bragg out of a police lineup or told you what the hell he'd done to get a ginormous Army post named after him. But, then I was young and stupid, as young men often are.

Know I know better.

And now ol' Braxton is in the middle of a ginormous shitstorm revolving around the way my country spent a long time treating - and in a lot of ways still treats - those of Us the People a whole bunch of the rest of We figured were more useful as property than actual people.

And, of course, if there's a shitstorm there's a Trump stepping in (and stirring up) the shit:

I'm not going to even bother making an argument about this. The nonsensical notion of naming places where American soldiers live and train for people who fought against and killed American soldiers would be so far beyond ridiculously stupid that it would create an entire dimension of "ridiculously stupid".

These names are a living monument to the racism that has poisoned the nation for so long that they simply need to be cornered as quickly as possible and beaten to death with the dispatch you'd club a cannibal plague rat.

Plus there's a whole bunch of GIs who have already made the argument and more eloquently than I ever could.

So, nope, my point here today is just to recall that not only were these sonsofbitches traitors, not only were they murderous traitors, not only were they murderous traitors for one of the worst possible fucking causes in human history but that, as officers and commanders of traitorous troops they were massive fucking losers, and that there was no bigger loser in the bunch than Braxton Fucking Bragg.

Let me give you a quick taste (and a nasty flavor it is) of the man, from his Wikipedia article:

"In June 1862, Bragg was elevated to command the Army of Mississippi (later known as the Army of Tennessee). He and Edmund Kirby Smith attempted an invasion of Kentucky in 1862, but Bragg retreated following the inconclusive Battle of Perryville in October.

In December, he fought another inconclusive battle at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the Battle of Stones River, against the Army of the Cumberland under Major General William Rosecrans. After months without significant fighting, Bragg was outmaneuvered by Rosecrans in the Tullahoma Campaign in June 1863, causing him to surrender Middle Tennessee to the Union. Bragg retreated to Chattanooga but evacuated it in September as Rosecrans' troops entered Georgia.

Later that month, with the assistance of Confederate forces from the Eastern Theater under James Longstreet, Bragg was able to defeat Rosecrans at the Battle of Chickamauga, the bloodiest battle in the Western Theater, and the only major Confederate victory therein. Bragg forced Rosecrans back to Tennessee, but was criticized for not mounting an effective pursuit. In November, Bragg's army was routed by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the Battles for Chattanooga and pushed back to Georgia. Confederate President Jefferson Davis subsequently relieved Bragg of command, recalling him to Richmond to serve as his chief military advisor. Bragg briefly returned to the field as a corps commander near the end of the war during the Campaign of the Carolinas.

Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Most of the battles in which he engaged ended in defeats. Bragg was extremely unpopular with both the men and the officers of his command, who criticized him for numerous perceived faults, including poor battlefield strategy, a quick temper, and overzealous discipline. Bragg has a generally poor reputation with historians, while some point towards the failures of Bragg's subordinates, especially Leonidas Polk, a close ally of Davis and known enemy of Bragg, as more significant factors in the many Confederate defeats at which Bragg commanded. The losses which Bragg suffered are cited as principal factors in the ultimate defeat of the Confederacy."

So, in the course of about two years, this idiot:

1. Tried to invade Kentucky, couldn't whip Don Carlos Buell (who was a pretty conclusive nitwit himself), and ran away like a whipped dog,
2. Couldn't beat fucking Bill Rosecrans, who as a commander couldn't beat a carpet if you spotted him the bat and the carpet,
3. Then got outmaneuvered by Rosecrans, which is like winning some sort of Nobel Prize for "crap generaling",
4. Finally whipped Rosecrans in a bloody brawl but needed Longstreet, one of the best rebel officers to do it,
5. And when the U.S. finally 86ed Rosecrans and replaced him with a competent commander Bragg managed to get his ass comprehensively whipped despite fighting defensively in one of the strongest defensive positions ever held by an armed force in the history of combat (look up the "Battle of Missionary Ridge" sometime...).

Finally even Jeff Davis - not exactly a military genius - had enough of Bragg's incompetent ass and got him out of the chain of command.

This guy was a complete and utter military moron.

Taking his name off the Home of the Airborne wouldn't just be a recognition that We the People shouldn't "honor" people who betrayed our country for the notion that other people could and should be owned like a box of Cap'n Crunch.

It's be a recognition that this particular traitor was not just a traitor but a spectacularly incompetent one, at that.

Then rename the place for George Thomas, who said this:

"[T]he greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty, justice, humanity, equality, and all the calendar of the virtues of freedom, suffered violence and wrong when the effort for southern independence failed.

This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand in hand with the defenders of the government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains; a species of self-forgiveness amazing in its effrontery, when it is considered that life and property—justly forfeited by the laws of the country, of war, and of nations, through the magnanimity of the government and people—was not exacted from them."

Now that would be a perfect, chef's kiss, sort way of correcting the history books. Fort George Thomas.

Do it.

Now.

Hyacinthum hora

"The sun has set, but night has not yet fallen. It’s the suspended hour… The hour when one finally finds oneself in renewed harmony with the world and the light," (Guerlain)

The sun has set on the brightest promises of the American Experiment.

Night has not yet fallen, but the darkness is visible in the person of Tom Cotton, the Republican Prince of Darkness that Charlie Pierce likes to call the "bobbleheaded slapdick from Arkansas" whose editorial in Wednesday's New York Times went full Nazi. He is the competent fuhrer that the GOP thought they had in Trump only to find that, while the Leader can be capricious and inane He cannot be too openly a buffoon.

Cotton is not a buffoon.

Dangerous. Unprincipled. Rapacious. Vicious.

But not a buffoon.

But here's why I think we're done, a dead republic walking; the current protests.

It shouldn't take genius-level civics to understand that a land where the state is openly run by and for the wealthy, where a substantial portion of the "citizenry" are obviously not citizens but subjects, bound by the law but not protected, liable to be arrested, injured, or killed by the state at any time, is not, in fact, a democratic republic ruled by "equal justice under law".

It should be painfully obvious to even the stupidest of inhabitants that if "they" can do to "them" what police regularly do to "them" that there is no legal reason "they" cannot do it to you.

No. The only reason "you" are safe is structural, and that structure is founded on oligarchy and built of racism.

We the comfortable, largely white, majority have never been willing to honestly see - much less actively tear out - the dark pillar of race and the ugly beam of plutocracy that support our house.

To do so would have required long and painful years and even decades of sacrifice and humility to tear down and rebuild our nation without those things. Humans have never been good at that; it's not like we're some sort of uniquely awful nation.

But that remains a uniquely difficult task.

To do the things the protestors are demanding; to rebuild the large police forces (and courts and legal codes...) across the country to provide that actual equal justice, to rejigger the national economy to provide true equality of opportunity, would require an M9-seismic-event level of change.

In a sensible nation, in a true democratic republic, dedicated to ensuring that all people are "We the People" these protests would have caused a massive national reflection, would have sparked a balefire of action, of decision, to make the sorts of changes that would provide and rejigger and do all those things.

Instead, this is a nation where roughly four out of ten "citizens" - who were just weeks ago prancing around with military rifle knock-offs claiming that having to wear a surgical mask and order pizza to go was the most horrific tyranny since the rule of the tsars, mind you - are at best silent and, at worst, prepared to use those rifles on the others of their own fellow citizens who are now in the streets demanding that equal justice.

That part of the People who are huge Tom Cotton fanbois and fangirls.

And because we are in fact a house divided there has been, after nearly a week of nightly protests across the nation, no serious discussion, much less action, about the changes in our nation and in our laws and how they are enforced, that would address what these thousands of people are in the streets demanding.

So it's not so much the line of armed and armored police that stand across the road the protests are trying to open.

Behind them stands Tom Cotton like a colossus and around his feet all the little Cottons who refuse those changes.

And around them...all of those people, like me, who are unwilling or unable to make the sacrifice to bumrush the line and risk ourselves and our lives to make them change.

We the People cannot even force our government to act sensibly about the Plague. We know better, we know how we can save lives, but to do so would require some of us to make sacrifices, to act with humility and patience, to spend money we have in excess but are unwilling to part with.

We won't, because enough of us won't, because enough of us are Tom Cotton and refuse to accept any alternative but a full-on charge through the minefield, because waiting for the engineers and the flail tanks is for cowards and pussies.

If we can't do that - in the face of a pathogen that can kill or maim any one of us - how will we take an even harder and more difficult path to equity when inequity only harms some of us, and those largely "them", the people the Tom Cottons despise?

Here's what I wrote thirteen years ago:

A nation grown suddenly great, enlarged by war, troubled by disturbance abroad and contention at home.
A people divided, made complacent by wealth and power yet enervated by political strife and economic uncertainty.
A government given over to the wealthy, whose vicious infighting consumes their ability to make sound choices for the betterment of the People, or the nation.
A military made hard, and indifferent to democratic ideals, by decades of professionalism and unremitting war.
An economy dominated by great corporations, relentlessly pressing down the opportunities for the individual and the small company.

Even the very structures of civilization itself crumble as, it seems, the nation both implodes and explodes.

So.

No.

It's been a long time fading but now the light seems to be failing fast. The darkness just seems all the more threatening loured by teargas smoke and backlit by the light of the flares and the flash-bangs and the burning barricades.

While we are still suspended in this blue hour it is difficult for me to see anything but darkness in the falling night ahead.

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay, listen up. Coupla things here, but we got a busy day so imma be quick.

Night bakers.

Can anyone here. Anyone? Tell me what the ever-loving-come-to-Jesus fuck inspired you people to set out what I am led to understand was a "deep fried Mars bar turnover" in the pastry tray yesterday morning?

Was it because you knew the battalion commander would be eating breakfast in our D-fac? And that he would be hosting the Brigade Sergeant Major, who is well known to covet pastries like a huge camouflage-wearing pizza rat covets pepperoni slices?

Because whatever the reason, I have been hearing from that pastry-fattened individual every hour on the hour since then about our dining facility, a circumstance which I am highly displeased with.

Goddammit, people. Donuts, maple bars, and apple-fucking-fritters were good enough for the Children of Israel as well as our hardy pioneer forebears and, as such, they are fucking good enough for our fucking mess hall. Whilst I appreciate your artistic flair and need for new challenges during what the Yadkin Road Ford dealership commercial last evening assured me were "trying times"...KISS, people. KISS. Keep it fucking simple. This is not fucking Kilmarnock and y'all are not standing with Mel Gibson facing down the fucking Sassenachs.

Donuts. And maple bars.

Fried Mars bars. Jesus wept.

Okay, only one other thing.

I am hearing talk about our being deployed to Charlotte or Raleigh to act in support of the civil power given the unrest there.

I am here to remind you that we are United States Army Airborne soldiers. We follow the lawful orders of our civilian leadership. If our national command authority through our corps and division and brigade and battalion orders us to load the riot gear into the 80-pax and hey-diddle-diddle up I-95 to stand around looking all billy badass, we will salute and move out smartly.

However.

Note that I cannot emphasize strongly enough the word lawful.

The Constitution that, if you people recall we all swore to support and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic, guarantees The People the right to peaceably assemble. It guarantees them the right to petition our government for the redress of grievances, and as such to speak freely, including the speech of act and deed. And in another foundational document our forefathers accused his royal highness King George of sending the goddamn redcoats to oppress them and deny them those very rights and that was cause for breaking the contract between citizen and sovereign government.

I am here to tell you people: We. Are. Not. Fucking. Redcoats.

You will need to rely on the Old Man. He is a stand up guy as well as a hell of a soldier and officer. He will not allow us to be used to beat the living shit out of peaceful Americans in the sort of shameful fucking ways that certain of our colleagues were used in the District of Columbia Monday night.

You will need to trust me to follow, and issue, only lawful orders.

I realize that requires a lot of trust. I hope that as your acting First Sergeant I have earned that trust. And I trust that you can and will behave in ways that will continue to earn mine.

But at the final remove you can trust me on this:

We.

Will not be the cause.

For breaking the contract between citizen and sovereign government.

On that you have my solemn fucking word.

That is...no, wait. One last item.

Remember; we are still in the fucking Plague Year. Keep your masks on and do not bunch up! If you do as surely as your doom followeth hard after you Mister Grenade will be there to remind you what a miserable buddy-fucker he is. Judas was a buddy-fucker, people, and look what happened to him.

Now that is all.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Blue on Blue

I don't really have anything to add here to the rage exploding across my country other than, yeah, well, what did you expect?

We have, those of us with the attributes that signify "meaningful" in our country; wealth, economic position, political engagement, whiteness...we've been fine that many of our cities are policed in ways that range from unpleasant to onerous to lethal for those citizens that lack those attributes. We didn't have to worry about fixing that busted taillight because we knew we wouldn't get pulled over for not signaling the lane change.

Or, if we did, we wouldn't get yanked out of the car and roughly body-searched and, if we got a little arsed about that, tased or arrested or just plain curb-stomped by somebody who felt no need to stop his inner asshole from coming out to play.

For example, I know for a fact that Portland Police Bureau has been the home for wannabe Klansmen and Nazis for decades. What have I done about that, other than vote for commissioners and mayors who have promised, usually ineffectually, to "do something" about what I knew perfectly well was so baked into PPB that the only way to "do something" would be to do a Saddam's Army on the whole outfit - just fire 99% of the sonsofbitches, burn the bastard to the ground, and start over?

Yeah, nothing. You, too? Thought so. Most of us who aren't a shade darker than that crayon color that used to be labeled "flesh" (and think about that for a moment...) haven't really been troubled enough to get het up over the problems.

So here we are.

Will we do anything about those problems now?

Don't make me laugh. You know better and so do I. We'll throw clubs and gas and "non-lethal" rounds at whoever makes a fuss. Christ on a crutch, we can't even do anything semi-intelligent about a fucking Plague, you think we're going to do anything sane about this, the miserable way we've treated our poor and our former slaves and current subjects, and everyone else who can't play the "get out of jail free" card?

Nope. I got nothin' for you on that.

What I wanted to make a brief comment on, though, was one of the stupider and more irritating American affectations all this rioting and anger over killer cops reminded me of: the "blue line" thing.

You've seen it. Fucker has it's own flag, forChrissakes. Even here in the People's Republic of Portland you see the little blue-line-flag stickers from time to time, on cop cars and even some regular old pickups and sedans and SUVs.

Anyway, the point of this blue line nonsense seems to be to try and impress people that the coppers are the only thing - the "thin blue line" - standing between civilization and a howling wilderness of Hobbsean war-of-all-against-all chaotic savagery.

And, hey...who can blame the coppers for wanting to believe this LARPing fantasy of heroic defenders of civilization, and trying to sell it to the public?

Beats the fuck out of accepting the reality that your grunt-level street cop is basically an over-armed mall security dude with better transportation who spends most of his or her day dealing with crappy little problems that can't and won't be solved by policework (Gee. Somebody clouted your car? That sucks. Well, fill in this report. Bye!) or, frankly, assholes. Any sergeant will tell you that ten percent of your people are the ones who'll give you ninety percent of your problems, and so it has to be with policing. Most of the people your beat cop interacts with are probably assholes, either because they're high and/or drunk, have some sort of mental issues, or are, well, just assholes.

I can see how that would make me want to think that breaking up pukey drunk-fights and dealing with speeders flipping you shit was manning the ramparts of Civilization against the Dark Hordes.

But there's no reason that us Dark Hordes need to buy into this cop cosplay.

Because it's pretty simple; the actual "defenders of civilization" is everyone. You, me, your Aunt Louise. We are the "thin line", and not that thin, either, that keeps our community and nation and civilization going.

Because the reality is that if the vast bulk of human beings weren't quiet and peaceful and generally "law-abiding"?

No number of coppers could stop them from running wild, anymore than the village watchman of Podoloversk could stop the Mongols from tearing the place apart.

No. The "blue line" bullshit is designed to convince us groundlings that whatever coppers do is "holding the line" of civilization against the Darkness. So when they blow up someone's house trying to arrest someone else who isn't there, when they kill someone in the process of "arresting" them for selling loose smokes or just being an asshole - and, let's recall that if being an asshole was a capital crime there's a whole bunch of people, up to and including a fairly significant portion of Trump Adminstration, who're dead meat - or when they go wild and start beating and shooting people, as you do every so often, y'know...to convince us that all this shit we'd normally look at and go "...the FUCK!?" and get agitated about our tax dollars going to fund this idiotic and destructive-to-civil-order nonsense is really Defending Civilization.

But run the numbers.

It ain't.

If We the People wanted to tear the living hell out of "civilization" we could, and no bunch of blue-suited mall cops would be able to stop us.

And the mere fact that this "blue line" bullshit is floating around out there and hasn't been viciously mocked offstage? The fact that paid-for-by-your-taxes coppers are apparently bought into and trying to broadcast the nonsense? The fact that our political "leaders" - from both Left and Right, I'm afraid; this truly IS a "both sides do it" problem - aren't willing to cram down on these idiot coppers and their Dungeon Defenders idiocy and tell them to STFU and go be good public servants and wrestle the pukey drunks and arrest the assholes without turning this into a war between The Force of Law and the people who the law in its impartial majesty prohibits from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges?

Says something very, very problematic about us and the country we've created.

Which, if you've been paying attention, shouldn't be news at all.

I could go on. About the insanity of coppers going Full Metal Jacket on regular people but palling around and sucking face with armed traitors (Amon Bundy, c'mon down! Proud Boys, represent!) and the ridiculous position of the "conservative" talking heads who were foaming with rage about the kneeling during songs that warned us that this day was coming if we did nothing but rage about kneeling.

But what's the point?

You know as well as I what the problems are, what should happen, and what won't.

Nope. That moronic "blue line" flag is really the white flag of our country surrendering to the reality that if you White, you Right.

Headshot

I was watching the Beeb last night about the protests in Brazil, comparing them to the protests in Turkey, and wondering about my own country.

Because it seems to me that two far-distant places are experiencing much the same political problems; both are democratic republics, both have a legal system in place for the citizens to vote for change. But in both a substantial minority of the people believe that their "votes" are meaningless, and that the way the system of government is currently set up that they have no hope of bettering the lives (or affecting particular issues they see as worsening their lives) within the democratic process.

So they take to the streets.

We had that here, not so long ago, with the Occupy protests, and to my mind the only real difference was in the reaction of the governments. In Turkey and Brazil the police agencies had and have a long, ugly history of brutal reaction to public protest. The initial beatings and gassings had the effect of reminding Turks and Brazilians how much they reeeeeally hated the way their cops beat and gas them, and the protests became as much about that as about the initial grievances.

Here our coppers have learned to be crafty and patient. Protest met with a riot baton wrapped inside a comfy pillow is protest that gradually loses its vitality. If it doesn't lay you out cold a rap on the skull just pisses you off. But an indifferent stare is boring. The U.S. coppers knew that the way to defuse Occupy was to make it boring, and they did. The U.S. public lost interest, Occupy lost it's momentum and has already faded into insignificance.

Which in my opinion will be remembered as a tragedy. The Occupiers had one burning insight; that from the mildly benign oligarchy it had been from 1932 to the late 1970s the U.S. is rapidly becoming a predatory toxic oligarchy through the rapaciousness of its oligarchs. This insight was lost in the foolish cacophony of noise the Occupiers generated and the criminally negligent reportage of the courtier press. I believe that we will one day regret that we did not pay more attention to the rise of the modern aristos.

The result has been a continued slide back to the rampant inequality and social division of the Gilded Age, with the concurrent erosion of the sort of stodgy bourgeois middle-class attitude of the "rest" of the U.S. public as it sees it's decent-wage jobs, it's pensions, it's influence, and it's security ever more crammed down and eroded away. Combine that with the overwhelming sense that gold now makes the rules and that the reopening of government to massive inflows of cash has made individual voting almost meaningless and you get a public that seems to me daily more vulnerable to a demagogue, a "man on horseback" that promises to make those changes that they can't.

And that vulnerability makes me think of perhaps the saddest image I've seen from these recent protests:

This young woman was first said to be an Egyptian visiting Istanbul; since then the Egyptian embassy has devowed knowledge of her. So we have no idea of who she is - or was, since she must have suffered massive head trauma from the direct gas-canister hit and is very likely dead - or why she was there, or what she was doing and thinking at the time that the heavy metal can turned that day into endless night.

Whatever drove her into that street drove her to her own doom.

That seems to be pretty much what happens when desperate, vulnerable people take to the street. Few popular rebellions seem to end well; as bad as conditions were before the Revolution it seems hard to imagine that Napoleon is an upgrade over the Bourbons or Stalin over the Tsar. The defenestration of oligarchy usually seems to produce autocracy and war, not liberty and law.

The promise of the United States is the chance to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Not to win them, but to pursue them.

But it seems to me that that promise now stands in the street we've built to let some of us drive towards increased wealth and power.

Will they collide violently? Will the streets explode in anger, as they have in Brazil and in Instanbul?

Will the result be that promise ending up lying in the street as she lay, dazed and barefoot, dying?

Sick man?

Something appears to be going on in Istanbul.



While the original protests do not appear to have had much, if any, political motivation at this moment there appears to be a relatively small but highly vocal series of protests going on against the government of Prime Minister Erdogan and his AK Party.

Why could this be significant?

Because - as our frequent commenter Sven Ortmann pointed out back in 2008

"Turkey is in a peculiarly important position geopolitically; It controls the Bosporus (exit/entry for Black Sea) and is NATO's access point to the Persian Gulf region (other than from the sea). Sea lanes through Suez Canal/Eastern Mediterranean can be threatened or blocked from Turkey's soil. It's the only almost-Western but Muslim country and could bridge the gap culturally between Europeans and Arabs, being in between both. I should add that the Pan-Turkic ideology (a nationalist party got about 1/8 of the votes in the 2011 elections) could put Turkey into a rival position to Russia in regard to influence in Central Asia (Turkic languages there). The West's encroachment has been stopped in Belarus (as long as the dictatorship doesn't crumble) and Ukraine (where any national election can change the trajectory entirely). Russia would not exactly be happy to face a Turkish challenge on its southern flank."

And, I would add that the intriguing aspect of these protests is the possibility of their bringing the Turkish Army out of its barracks, and I think that a lot will depend on the protesters themselves, the government, and how the Army perceives them both.



Here, for example, is a post from something called the "Social Action Network" that, I think, may overlook the possibility that the Army may step in if the Erdogan government appears to be in danger.

The author concludes with "This is not yet a revolution, but it is not only tear gas that marks the air in Istanbul. It is also a scent of revolutionary aspirations." without anywhere in the body of the article speculating or even acknowledging what might happen if the Turkish Army decided that the "revolution" threatened the Turkish state with either a leftist rebellion or an government-led Islamic reaction. The Army has a long history - beginning with the Ottoman years and continuing as recently as 1997 - of intervening in Turkish politics when things look sketchy.

The AKP was elected largely due to popular dissatisfaction with the military and the Army has so far respected that. At the same time I cannot believe that the Turkish Army is at all pleased with the openly sectarian policies, the pan-Turkish rhetoric, and the Syrian adventurism of PM Erdogan.



But...in the comments section over at MilPub one of our regulars there (thanks, BB!) links to a pretty good summary over at TPM that concludes that at this time the AKP has pretty much destroyed the Army's ability and willingness to intervene in politics.

That adds even more uncertainty to what's going on.

One of the big reasons I am peculiarly fascinated by this is the implications it has for the wider Middle East. Turkey and the political career of the AKP was until recently perhaps the only test-case for an "Islamic state lite"; the possibility that a polity with a largely Muslim population could, in the absence of an Islamic Enlightenment and a thoroughgoing rejection of sectarian politics, have an "islamic" party in power without that party using that power to attempt to implement islamic social policies. Much of the recent governing that the protesters are calling despotic centers around attempts by the ruling party to enact conservative islamic shibboleths into public law; restricting things like alcohol sales and advertising and public displays of affection.

If the Turkish islamic party cannot rule without imposing or trying to impose sectarian law on its secular fellow-citizens I think it bodes poorly for everywhere else in the Muslim world where the traditions and practices of nonsectarian government are less entrenched than Turkey. I consider this a big part of this story and I think that this aspect is being poorly covered. I suspect that to a degree this is "urban hipsters who want to go West" versus "rural hicks who like them some religious limits" but I can't get a feel for to WHAT degree.

I also suspect that the U.S. press, assuming that it bothers to cover this much at all, is likely to frame it in the context of the "us versus them" way that it has taken to reporting events from the Middle East, with the islamist AKP taking the "them" part. But that the larger import of potential instability, or military coup, or the potential failure of the "nonsectarian islamist project" in the pivotal nation of Turkey and its role in a fractious part of the world is likely to go unexamined...

Hard to tell at this point if all this will blow over or blow up, but I'd suggest that events in Turkey are well worth keeping an eye on.