Combined with the Ferguson and Clayton police preparations, McCulloch’s entire demeanor seemed to say, “Your move,” and either way the black community was fucked. If they didn’t riot, then the rotten system that lets white cops get away with killing black kids and prosecutors get away with using the law to absolve them works. Even a peaceable demonstration of disgust and refusal to some extent absolves the machine that churns up bodies. You have your vote, you have your First Amendment, and if nothing changes, then that must mean what we have is the most just compromise we can strike. Even if striking it requires turning your town into a fortress to make sure that we can all shake on the deal and walk away.
But they did riot, and you could see the smug radiate off Twitter from every white armchair general in the modern American race war. “The blacks” sank to the expectations set so low by images of the fortress state of their town. Set aside the fact that turning a town into a fortress to “contain” the calls for redress from a population is an act so offensive that it itself should provoke a riot. The great authoritarian trick about preemptively implying that everyone in a town is a lawless goddamn animal is that there is no immoral law or immoral selective suspension of the law that they can then rebel against without confirming the echoing pre-judgment that they are animals.
How, after all, do you not resort to lawlessness when the law shows an inherent disinterest in upholding the law, if the preservation of the status quo takes precedence over the pursuit of justice? Or, more pointedly, how can you legitimately do that if you’re the wrong kind of person? What constitutes appropriate rebellion is an easy question to answer for every armed neoconfederate asshole with an annotated Glenn Beck version of the Constitution. Unrest and revolt is 100 percent OK within the right kind of demographic, which is why white dudes can parade around government buildings with AR-15s on their backs in a display of political unrest as “heritage,” while ACORN registering votes and preventing predatory lending constitutes organized crime. It’s the same reason why midwesterners can look at blacks vandalizing police cars — symbols of oppression and murder from an unaccountable overclass — and condemn it while unironically celebrating the political vandalizing and looting of the Boston Tea Party. A riot and the tea party — acts of force — are impossible to mute in a way that signs and petitions are not, and white men with guns know this. You can’t politely shut the door and say, as McCulloch and his ilk did in August, “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but this isn’t the time.” A riot knocks on the door and, when it stays closed, kicks it back open. But who we charge for the door is prosecutor’s discretion.
McCulloch ended his presser with mealymouthed platitudes about working together to ensure that events like those in Ferguson would never happen again. What he didn’t acknowledge was that he had been working for months to ensure that this one happened and lots more will follow. A thug in a suit boosting the law to make it do what he wants ensures that someone else will try the same thing, regardless of his wardrobe or his standing on the social spectrum. What separates McCulloch from those he inevitably creates is only appearance.
Ultimately, the high-minded civic bullshit and even the historical narrative-saving protests of the white protester is just a temporary pose. It’s costuming for a day, with the resumption of life awaiting the player the moment he gets tired, takes off his clothes and returns to being himself every day. McCulloch can go home, and every hippie or anarchist kid can get a haircut and a pair of flat-front chinos, and the moment they do, they all take their place among the civitas, with all rights to acceptance and recreational disobedience embodied therein. But a black dude can listen to every Cain, Carson, Cosby, Elder, Keyes, Sowell or Williams in the country and pull those pants up, and wherever he is and whatever he wears, he’s still a black man in America. And we don’t let those people disobey here.
Except now we’re all becoming the underclass but the 1%. The times they are a’changin’. Why is Obama keeping 10,000+ combat troops in Afghanistan? Because every other country making up the NATO mission is leaving at the end of next month. The new agreement signed between NATO and Afghanistan requires that NATO’s force be at least 12,000 troops. So the US is contributing 10,500 of those soldiers. The other 1500 are coming from 20 other countries. Why is every country leaving Afghanistan except the US? Are we that stupid? Or has Obama been pressured by the neo-con/Zionists warmongers to stay the course or else?
The white dogs have finally started the race war they’ve wanted since the last one ended, as if it ever did. I have been lurking about for some time now ferreting out the hint of harbinger, the lynchpin, the moment historians, not unlike the moment in December 2000 where an ideologically stacked activist court effectively ended America, mark as when it all boiled over. The white dogs have the race war they’ve wanted, but not sure they’ll be able to keep it.
Gotta’ get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down. Should have been done long ago…
From my archives, somewhat updated: Gotta’ hand it to the racist assholes, it’s pretty damned impressive how they’ve started the race war they’ve long wanted… on top of the two chicken-shit paid for on my grandkids’ credit card wars, having bankrupted both the national and international economies by facilitating the simultaneous transfer of both pretty much all of the public assets to the private sector and pretty much all of the private debt to the public sector, reignited the war on women while regressing the country to a level of Jim Crow racism we haven’t seen in at least fifty years… and have managed to blame it all on the black guy. That is pretty damned impressive.
That’s their game but unfortunately for them the end zones have moved and the distances between the yard lines have been expanded. That’s do to the intertubes. On top of which the names of the masterminds are revealed in real time instead of 50 years after the fact like in the old days. This time the rule book is accessible to all of us rather than to just the Bohemian Grove attendees. The White Buffalo has been revealed.