As the Sheriff Remarked: I Had No Business Being There

Below the fold furious and empty barking and hectoring about Baltimore in particular and clusterfuck in general. The links are worth reading, and I stand by my sentiments, but the wave of blarg has passed and I'm done barking and hectoring for now, if you don't want barked at and hectored (now, ever) who am I to make you.

• Did you notice I changed the BLCKDGRD in the masthead to red last week? No? I ask in lieu of typing what I want to type but won't, what I don't want to type and won't. 
• OK, this: this worked out better than Triskelion ad execs could have dreamed when they planned it.
• UPDATE! Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett on the events in Baltimore: “Now the discussion is about why the demonstrations turned ugly, as opposed to how we can evaluate what happened to Mr. Gray,” Leggett said. “It really was an opportunity for us to use this as a healing moment to correct what’s wrong and hold those accountable, but also to make sure we have a better system. Now it’s going to be awfully hard for us to get back to that.” Exactly, you dumb motherfucker. Now try blaming the provocateurs.
• Baltimore.
• OK, this: Imagine the next upgrade of police militarization using money squeezed from austerity imposed on the people scheduled to be brutalized by that militarization. Rinse, repeat. 
• Precarious existence and capitalism.
• Why Baltimore rebelled.
• The brutality of police culture in Baltimore.
• Nonviolence as compliance.

Focus will be on destruction caused by protesters. But this is the destruction capital has visited on the community. pic.twitter.com/QAactZFoV5
— Shawn Gude (@shawngude) April 27, 2015

• In defense of looting.
• Baltimore uprising in context.
• Baltimore been burning.
• Outside agitators.
• No fingerprints.
• Motherfucking Obama supported police in every excessive-force case.
• UPDATE!: Fuck motherfucking Whole Foods - the thousands of Baltimore school kids who get their weekday lunches at school go hungry while these motherfuckers feed the motherfucking police.
• OK, this:                                            ,                                :                                  . Oh, and fuck the motherfucking police.

ON A HIGHWAY EAST OF SELMA, ALABAMA

Gregory Orr

July 1965
   

As the sheriff remarked: I had no business being there. He was right, but for the wrong reasons. Among that odd crew of volunteers from the North, I was by far the most inept and least effective. I couldn’t have inspired or assisted a woodchuck to vote.

       In fact, when the sheriff’s buddies nabbed me on the highway east of Selma, I’d just been released from ten days of jail in Mississippi. I was fed up and terrified; I was actually fleeing north and glad to go.

       -

   In Jackson, they’d been ready for the demonstration. After the peaceful arrests, after the news cameras recorded us being quietly ushered onto trucks, the doors were closed and we headed for the county fairgrounds.

       Once we passed its gates, it was a different story: the truck doors opened on a crowd of state troopers waiting to greet us with their nightsticks out. Smiles beneath mirrored sunglasses and blue riot helmets; smiles above badges taped so numbers didn’t show.

       For the next twenty minutes, they clubbed us, and it kept up at intervals, more or less at random, all that afternoon and into the evening.

       Next morning we woke to new guards who did not need to conceal their names or faces. A little later, the fbi arrived to ask if anyone had specific complaints about how they’d been treated and by whom.

       But late that first night, as we sat bolt upright in rows on the concrete floor of the cattle barn waiting for mattresses to arrive, one last precise event: A guard stopped in front of the ten-year-old black kid next to me. He pulled a freedom now pin from the kid’s shirt, made him put it in his mouth, then ordered him to swallow.

       -

   That stakeout at dusk on Route 80 east of Selma was intended for someone else, some imaginary organizer rumored to be headed toward their dismal, godforsaken town. Why did they stop me?

       The New York plates, perhaps, and that little bit of stupidity: the straw hat I wore, a souvenir of Mississippi.

       Siren-wail from an unmarked car behind me—why should I think they were cops? I hesitated, then pulled to the shoulder. The two who jumped out waved pistols, but wore no uniforms or badges. By then, my doors were locked, my windows rolled. Absurd sound of a pistol barrel rapping the glass three inches from my face: “Get out, you son of a bitch, or we’ll blow your head off.”

       When they found pamphlets on the backseat they were sure they’d got the right guy. The fat one started poking my stomach with his gun, saying, “Boy, we’re gonna dump you in the swamp.”

       -

   It was a long ride through the dark, a ride full of believable threats, before they arrived at that hamlet with its cinderblock jail.

       He was very glad to see it, that adolescent I was twenty years ago. For eight days he cowered in his solitary cell, stinking of dirt and fear. He’s cowering there still, waiting for me to come back and release him by turning his terror into art. But consciously or not, he made his choice and he’s caught in history.

       And if I reach back now, it’s only to hug him and tell him to be brave, to remember that black kid who sat beside him in the Mississippi darkness. And to remember that silence shared by guards and prisoners alike as they watched in disbelief the darkness deepening around the small shape in his mouth, the taste of metal, the feel of the pin against his tongue.

       It’s too dark for it to matter what’s printed on the pin; it’s too dark for anything but the brute fact that someone wants him to choke to death on its hard shape.

       And still he refuses to swallow.