BE FAT WITH ME, MISTER MOYERS

It has evidently become policy in death-penalty states to ignore almost all exculpatory evidence, including that which casts a serious pall on the original trial.

Something touches every free man deep inside when he reads a line of Hunter Thompson. Some make a career of biting him, although some wind up simply biting the drug-frenzy culture that sprang up around him, aping his carriage or his sense of adventure. That is not what that is. Neither one is. This is just a response.

Thompson cut to the heart of what made Vegas as a business, but like many others he swept in heading east from San Fran, thundered through the high desert and parachuted in. In Fear and Loathing he can barely tell if he is in Boulder City. Someone coming in from any direction but California way could never mistake the two. They lie on opposite sides of an invisible border, one of a dozen identical borders that define life between Kansas City and Yreka.

Reno used to be much the way we were, but we got more high-octane and weird after the decision to sink a major dam into the Colorado on the Nevada-Arizona border became a reality. All of a sudden there was another big wave of spicks and micks and Jocks and polocks and every type of God’s own wop, and once the work was done the mob saw in us the last place in this awful state that labor was a buyer’s market. It was a little vision of Paradise for the thing that would become America after our industry died screaming, a monetarist American Dream. Thompson was looking at it in its hideous caul, back when the Mob still ran things and the casinos had a stake in a good crop of tourists raising real hell.

Reno, though, Reno was sitting on top of Carson City, part of the giant pre-auto cluster-fuck that evolved from Virginia and her sister lodes. It grew out of services provided to silver miners, and you can’t fob off men who work with dynamite and quicksilver with pussy and poker alone. The Biggest Little City On Earth, they call themselves – a sort of vile Moral Majority taunt, a formal craven-call treaty between the Valley Baptists and the Mormon tide. We never got the way that you got in California or Oregon or Washington, even British Columbia and Alaska, the big isolated cities serving a cross-section of humanity and the local religious nuts seething in the wilderness. They got into one of them big cities of ours good and early.

The Biggest Little City On Earth. I mean, listen to that shit. The fix was in, wasn’t nobody lying about it. Johnny Cash could only barely tell, on his clearest days, that you could kill a man there without winding up in Sacramento or Salt Lake.

—

Anyone who has lived here has gone to a casino not just without gambling, but without even the faintest interest in gambling. Until you have, you’re a tourist. It’s where the shows happen, it’s where you find the closest we have to good food, it’s where the theatres and auditoria are. You have to walk through two floors of casino to see a movie in the whitest burb of this Goddamn town. For legal reasons, they have to mark off what is Casino and what isn’t, but the carpet and walls are the same – driving your feet and body inexorably towards video poker. (You see, with the Colorado emptying into the Mexican dirt, we don’t drain to the sea any more. It’s ecologically irresponsible to throw human trash out just anywhere. Thus: video poker.)  You are always either in a cozy little womb or a vast domed arch, and the wombs are falling out of fashion. Caesar’s Palace even has its own meticulously-maintained, obviously false sky – and you shop there. The smoky haze lifts year by year, to the point that this day you could spend all week in even the shittiest purpose-built casino withut getting cancer. You drink to pass the time paying to play a shitty video game; the tables are for Aryans of good pedigree. That hokey Don’t Gamble With Marijuana sign is hardly necessary any more.

—

It’s a common misunderstanding among tourists that the people they see represent part-timers or working stiffs. The ones manning the pulpits are no common monasts but little lords in the making. From the very beginning, the casinos have done all they can to create a class of well-off private eunuchs born into the maroon, grab ‘em out of high school with too much money to know what to do with. The visibles, they’re well-off. They might not like their jobs – God, who does? – but they pay fantastic, and they have no cross-applicable skills; nobody but another casino can poach your lumpenbourgeois. The only other human beings who ain’t in there to play carnival are the help; Eastern Europeans, these days, the predictable casualties of our exported supply-side revolution, but it takes all kinds. Brown a plus. English not required. The American eye is trained to politely ignore them for everyone’s convenience.

The lower-middle-class stiffs are similarly out of sight. They work in support industries, catering and keeping up our Potemkin shops, but that’s the glamor of Vegas. Get Mickey while he’s young, keep him lily-white, and put up with a little labor expense for his glove-wearing ass and everyone will believe you’re the happiest place on Earth. An endless succession of unnecessaries, bellhops and valets and doormen and retainers, taking tips they don’t need to make the clients they’re not doing anything substantial for feel like some kind of decadent Southern patriarch, but with a heart of gold. We’re a town of scraggle-moustachioed Mormon pimps and fresh-faced young idiots with welcoming mouths. No wonder Penn and Teller set up shop here.

—

There are two types of house of worship: the inspiringly oppressive and the sleepily comforting. Cathedrals and chapels. Chapels have gone out of fashion – every church a megachurch, there to remind you that God is bigger and more important than you, and come with top-of-the-line remote-controlled presentation scrollsheets to convince the faithful that He needs your money. That represents a leap of logic it used to be vaguely obscene to even suggest, and it’s one we pioneered out West: business and faith, together at last. Denver worked on the faith, we worked on the business, both animated to new heights in actual depravity by a shared terror Mormonica. We were the last, best hope of what was becoming America.
In Vegas, Disneyland crowded out the mob and cozy, welcoming obscenity of the circus, and unlike those Denver quitters, we never let the side benefits to cancerous growth get in our way. A couple of dudes strung out on speed was all it took to knock Denver out of the good grace of their capitalist God; it only made our Capitalism-God stronger. Family Values muscled out the Family and the figurative circus replaced the real one, and tits sprouted on billboards like mushrooms in rainy weather as the town’s strip clubs and whore houses went moribund. No country for dick suckers here – nobody even notices any more that prostitution is illegal in Clark County, even the ones who spent their entire trip at the Bellagio.

That poor fool Thompson! Still obsessing over a man quaint enough to bug his opponent as our friends in Iran coronated Saint Reagan, still chasing big winners in an era of strutting, regal losers. He never had any damn idea.

—

These days only a few vestiges remain of Vegas as the nerve center of the Man, the place your bosses went on vacation to abandon their puritanical lives. When our mayor, a vaguely corrupt mob lawyer who shilled a specific gin to children, a man who embodies all that the Clark Containment Pact stands against – a drunken old mobby Jew with an irrepressible decadence – inevitably descends from power, he will be replaced almost without fail by some service-industrial laborite or functionaire, either way another moderate Democrat without opinions about developers. A land-developer or one of their white serfs; the way it’s always been in Reno, where all it takes is flipping a truck stop and being a good Temple and Party man to qualify you as Il Duce.

—

The casinos are laying off their wealthy catamites, a seeming first, and everyone has grown proper spooked. The Bush era was good for us, because we’ve become a sort of embodiment of American collective delusion, the kind it doesn’t take drugs or depravity to produce. Our business model has de-evolved exclusively to middle-managers coming back from an illegal hand-job thinking of themselves as pagan chieftains of Turquery, and you can only shine up being a member of the bad luck crowd so far. When the bloom wears off, we’re just another bullshit tourist town.

—

Washoe County used to be one of the country’s more Republican urban counties, and this year it went for Obama by margins typical of the rest of the left coast. This threatens a break, or perhaps represents a cleavage already in progress, in the accepted agreement in Republican politics in Nevada – Reno gets funding and political power under Republican administrations out of proportion to usual rural-resentment patterns as long as they help keep a lid on Clark. In my optimism in the wake of the election, I saw this as a sign that Reno had welched; and so after did the lame-duck Republican government pull UNR funds and other spillover perqs with an unreserved furor. But the reality is that the pact is obsolete. Our civic genius these days is Wynn, representing all the filthy white Dubaihis who banked on the bullshit economy lasting forever. The mayor, not the Governor, is the walking dead.

Goodbye Raoul Duke! Goodbye “Las Vegas”!

(EDIT: Well, supposed to be brief, anyway. You know how I am.)

In my Soc 101 class I had this talented West African professor who had to learn to basically go through the motions, because 101 classes are basically teaching high school. 300 was recent and there was presumptive support for the position that torture be used for intelligence. Fuck yeah, said the man who nearly drunkenly murdered a friend while slaughtering drugged-up game birds, we torture.

As it must eventually, we came up to the Milgram Experiment. They had footage, and it went exactly the way you learn: these people said they wouldn’t hurt someone in X way, insisted they were moral people, and then, under pressure from authority, all but one smoking man – though fretting a little at some point, after the screams stopped – kept on going.

As the actor screamed in pain, started shouting for help, and eventually went silent – and with each expression of worry or anguish on the subjects’ faces – the classroom busted up laughing. The experiment was introduced in detail. It was understood that the subjects thought they were electrocuting a human being to death. Peals of laughter, every time. He watched wordlessly in a sort of shell shock as the students filed out at the end, and in an email I sent to him the next day I apologized for other people’s behavior for what I believe to be the first and only time in my life.

I went home dazed. To this day, the incident remains the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed, and I watched my grandparents attempt to neglect my severely ill mother to death. At the time I could muster nothing but fury or tears.

This is how I usually end that story, or with the 300 analogy. (I’ve beaten that horse to death by now.) But now I look back on it, I remember the smoker. I don’t recall if they gave his name, but he was a raw-looking chain-smoking man who reacted with outrage to the proceedings. He stopped shocking the man after it became clear he wasn’t conscious. In the interview before they debriefed him, he seemed almost remorseful about it, but insisted that whatever they were after wasn’t worth his conscience. Society does a good job of twisting people into monsters, but there is enough courage in the human animal that some will sooner break than bend. And those fuckers didn’t seem to think he was so funny.

Via Greenwald, here is Digby on the taser and its accompanying rise in social torture and authoritarian police behavior. I link this for two reasons: (A) I agree with her 100% on this and (B) I once supported the development of microwave non-lethal weaponry, at least in theory. I’ve increasingly come to believe that American politics makes it simply too tempting to trust domestic forces with. (Not that, what with indifference for the actual rape of Posse Comitatus instead of imaginary FEMA death camps, that distinction is going to matter long anyway, but we might as well postpone the inevitable.)

The tea-party assholes have hilariously worthless precedents – Slacktivist’s favorite, because he’s been on a semi-laudable indignation kick lately, is a group of petulant idiots that called itself Indignation in the 50s and 60s. What they represent right now is the right-wing fringe dusting the rust off of its paralegal oppression skills; while they didn’t technically control Bush II or his Barebones Parliament, placating them with shows of state force was a major objective of Republican policy for long enough that they’re now a major component of the GOP as an organization – too major to beat down or ignore in polite company.

Like the fascists before them, the teabaggers’ animating spirit is one which worships authority figures by general acclaim. They were loyal squadristi for Bush, and the unprecedentedly awful selection of Palin was in large part a misguided effort to get their gatekeepers to accept the Republican ticket as a new batch of Bold Leaders worth following off a cliff. Because of what drives people into the political right in modern America – identification with a mythologized white, monocultural rural ‘Heartland’ by people dependent on townships or large cities – Palin’s mob were middle-aged office types pretending to be angry old rural cranks. In groups they indulged in the only thing driving them as an ideology – a deferred culture. These are people who couldn’t tell cow from steer to save their lives and who subscribed to sappy Georgics by wealthy jagoffs; people who imagine black hordes teeming in the inner cities waiting to take their land away but who live and worked in the cities  and own the land on which their house sits if any at all; people who had never uttered a word in righteous anger but imagined themselves right-revolutionaries; Aryan separatists without any particular desire to separate themeslves; people who have bought a gun more than once but never a box of ammunition. White-flightists without anything to fly from, Goetz cheerleaders who would not save a fellow man if his mugger was an octogenarian.

It is only among one another, and when accompanied by their ever-indulgent cultural and political authority figures, that they can find cultural satisfaction. The Heartland per se has a rich and varied cultural life, but they want nothing to do with it and would generally mistake the average camper, shooter, or other outdoorsman for a hated DFH. So they must in some capacity attach themselves to leadership figures – little else provides cultural validation for the kind of person who tells others they like country music (I’ve heard this repeatedly, in spite of ‘country and western’ being the preferred term for what they mean) and yet will not sit through a C&W track that isn’t about ragheads.

They’re easy to please, these starved creatures; a lot of liberal writing about Palin misses how profoundly lazy she was even about what she was supposed to be good at – race-baiting. All it took was her butchering ruralist panacea by Hitler admirers to get them shrieking for blood on their own. It has been a hard time for them, because Palin – in spite of their fervent hopes – has been shown weak, and they cannot tolerate that even with all the media-blaming they’re capable of. They’re without a leader and desperate, and every time one comes along it turns out he’s unsuitable – philandering, brown, a terrible speaker, not willing to demand Samantha Smith be exhumed and burned at the stake on whistle-stops. The tea-party movement inadvertently gave them a new, inferior outlet; the idiots responsible, Armey and his 2.0 scene creatures, simply concieved it as another in an endless supply of corrupt Leninist vanguard spectacles; instead it took on a life of its own, a way of reliving that fascist Woodstock that was the Palin campaign.

But the problem is that certain obstacles exist to what the mob can be allowed to do if it has a head. Palin, in her resentful, dim way, understood that; she had Sarah to worry about, and the moment those hick idiots threatened Number One they were out in the cold. Fascist moments aren’t really meant to survive their leaders; I don’t anticipate the teabaggers surviving in any serious form past 2010, because either they will so obviously alienate the rural and exurban populace they parade around in a crude, savage caricature of that the Party will have to crack down, or because the even marginal success of the GOP will lead to an orgy of overreach followed by bone-crushing failure. After all, the mob might be the same type of people, but their manipulators are distinctly subpar, jumped-up frat-boys like Armey instead of the slick, professional corporate thugs that pulled their forefathers’ strings. They don’t have any concept of laying low, their idea of grand strategy owing more to 300 or high-school football than Grant or Caesar.

Even so, the guns are an unsettling development, and worse is the smarmy, evil complex of responses by their unhinged quasi-leaders. Part of the problem is that degradation of those leaders; nobody who actually believes in gun rights would be such an impossible tool as to suggest that carrying at a Presidential function is appropriate, let alone validate that view by trying to make the debate into one about perfidious Wobbly thugs agitating against pre-adult employment. For someone who did, even the best-case scenario that would produce – the gun-toting nuts petering out and the incident simply passing as an awful and singular one – would be a serious threat to public acceptance of their Second Amendment views. The worst-case scenario is like being a Carcano stockholder in 1964.

Their leaders are not ideoogues, or to the extent they are are only second to their allegiance to Number One. But even so, if they were cannier manipulators they would understand how horrible this is for everyone involved, not least of which being them. But they’re not. After all, you have to break a few omelettes to give 110%, don’t be niggardly, huh huh huh. Hut hut hike! You have the floor, Senator Douchefag.

http://wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com/501535.html?thread=5053983#t5053983
The Gates arrest was terrible police work above and beyond any kind of legal question.
——

(Text of any linked articles under the cut.)
Read more »

critical links: Gawker’s story, twitter “Skip Gates”

(This article assumes familiarity with events.)

EDIT (7/28): In the interest of fairness, the headline here is formulated based on inaccurate information. More than one peckerwood idiot was involved (at the very least the moronic dispatcher and arresting officer, possibly the other cops at the scene), and the caller was actually very reasonable about it – she was calling the police on the insistence of an older woman who evidently watched two men forcing their way into a house without saying a word and then summoned someone else to call the police for her – so not just a racist cunt but a chickenshit one as well.
The caller not only noticed and pointed out the presence of luggage, but the 911 dispatcher responded dismissively to it (‘What do the suitcases have to do with anything?’) in addition to demanding a racial category for the entrants and botching other details of the call. So I stand by the headline, but I feel it casts aspersions unfairly on the caller and sincerely apologize. As opposed to almost everyone else in this sorry story, she made the best she could of a nasty situation. -ack

1) What the police do is essential, but the Broken Windows school of criminology along with the modern trajectory of American conservatism has turned them into a stalking-horse for authoritarianism; in the new ideology, we always need more police funded better and nothing they do is inappropriate enough to merit criticism. And what they are made to do, rather than keeping the peace and furthering public goodwill, is harass anyone who sticks out, make arrests on instinct rather than fact, and aggressively dehumanize everyone. While the massive influx of police did have a tonic effect on the crime rate for a time, it’s also generalized the antipathy for and fear of the police once limited pretty exclusively to minorities in large cities and the Border South. Worse, that antipathy and fear has become regarded as positive rather than damning.

2) We have all seen this happen over and over again. Some punk kid at a Kerry speech gets tased for acting a bitch; some skateboarder gets tased for using the word “dude” while cooperating fully with an angry officer’s unreasonable scrutiny; a young man having a seizure after enduring a heavy beating is tased repeatedly with electrodes stuck in his nipple and scrotum; riot cops at the RNC casually pepper-spray peaceable demonstrators (including a woman doing nothing but holding a flower), anti-terrorism resources are used to tail and intimidate journalists. We know this is happening. Why do we tolerate it at all?

3) If Henry Louis Gates Jr. wasn’t named that, and wasn’t a Harvard professor, he’d still be in jail and nobody would care.

4) When my dad was some punk kid and social neoconservatism was just the peculiar way things were done west of the Jello Belt, he had feathered long hair and a scraggly moustache; his parents had basically abandoned him and he lived a block from his fiancee in a house he had to take care of himself. One day, shortly after having a cast put on his leg, he was hanging around on his own lawn when a passing police officer, evidently believing his hair meant he was obviously a drug-dealing filthy hippie scum (mind you, it was 1980 or so!), harassed him, and in spite of his cooperation struck him repeatedly on his casted leg, breaking it more severely and inflicting an injury that remains painful to this day for no real reason. If he were black, he probably would have at least spent the night in jail for the privilege.

5) We have all been locked out of our house; we have helped strangers into theirs; and Gates is old and was accompanied by another elderly man helping him with luggage. When would you possibly see that and think anything but “man stuck outside of his house”, let alone call the police rather than asking him? Answer: when he’s black and you’re a racist. [EDIT 7/28 - Hilariously, the lady that watched them break in and move in their luggage didn't even call the police herself, let alone establish the basic contact necessary to either scare off burglars or establish validity of presence.]

6) Even if we take the police report at face value (it overemphasizes his belligerence and omits several details that the lawyer’s statement and the reality of a police-home intrusion both support, i.e. the badge number, basic cooperation, etc.), it’s striking to read its general tone and sense of events – throughout the report, the officer is affronted by this awful man insisting he’s a figure of dignity and importance, this angry black man who calls racism at the first sign of a police officer barging into his own home, refusing to believe he has any right to be there, and automatically gainsaying everything he bothers to explain. In what seems most obviously like a fabrication, he uses broad and political language, overcompensatorily and non-specifically denouncing the officer’s behavior. If this officer has ever heard someone righteously angry, he has evidently never paid attention – he casts an elderly academic who is being harangued in his own home as a typical angry black criminal. In the officer’s version, Gates knows he has done something wrong and is truculent because that’s how those people are. How in the fuck could that even be possible?

7) Finally, note the fashion in which the officer treats the arrest – it’s perfectly reasonable, in spite of how terribly things have gone, to haul this man into custody. He sneeringly describes the pathetic old man whining about needing a cane to walk and the handcuffs being too tight. Shoulda thought about that before you started acting like you had rights, buckwheat.

8) Because this is a fantastic case, the officer responsible may well wind up falling on his sword. (In spite of an inevitable countersurge of hagiographies, aspersions, and race-baiting by the bigotry industry; in the Republican mythology he will become a sort of put-upon Aryan hero, a crass metaphor for the way they believe America thinks about Obama, rather than a jumped-up dipshit.) However, what he did was the result of how all of these cases normally go – the local community at most gets angry, the officer gets a slap on the wrist, the department has his back.

9) So here you have America: a country fallen so far into depraved authoritarianism that the police consider it their prerogative to mock old men for needing a cane on official documents.

• Peter Gabriel‘s song “Rhythm of the Heat” (Security, 1982), tells about Jung’s visit to Africa, during which he joined a group of tribal drummers and dancers and became overwhelmed by the fear of losing control of himself. At the time Jung was exploring the concept of the collective unconscious and was afraid he would come under control of the music. Gabriel learned about Jung’s journey to Africa from the essay Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams (ISBN 0-691-09968-5). In the song Gabriel tries to capture the powerful feelings the African tribal music evoked in Jung by means of intense use of tribal drumbeats. The original song title was Jung in Africa.^[56]

Elders are an important information vector in human societies, and a critical one in preliterate ones; they have a long memory, an uncommon education, and a generally high level of respect, time for reflection, and external support. One of the major watersheds between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon was the far more efficient care for the elderly among the latter. More members of your group living to old age meant that you would never live in a society without generations of learned experience. While all other things being equal women tend to live longer, in early man all other things weren’t equal – women had to expend enormous amounts of resources to go through pregnancy and childbirth, and the unprecedented likelihood of death during childbirth made it a risky endeavor.

Menopause was helpful here – it meant that women’s reproductive lives would end past their ability to survive the average pregnancy, costing little in reproductive terms and being of tremendous benefit to society. But there would have been a tremendous social advantage to the existence of spinsters – infertile or minimally-fertile women – in that they would be much more likely to live to old age than their fertile sisters.

While same-sex sexual contact is common among primates and other animals, homosexual pair-bonding is only frequently observed in adulterous species – those with marital bonds often broken by their participants. It probably serves a significant social purpose in decreasing the mating pool without decreasng the number of socially active adults or causing sexual tension; whatever its purpose in reproductive biology, the prevalence of homosexuality in human societies would have a desirable side-effect of producing spinsters, who would significantly boost the average number of elders in a group at any time. In purely natural-selective terms, being homosexual means your relatives are more likely to pass on their genes.

The result of more elders is an increased reproductive incentive towards intelligible speech, mechanical deftness, and innovation, and away from strong instincts. In social terms, it means non-elders live longer and better, have more time to think and participate in culture, and have more information to pass on to their children.

It might be an exaggeration to say that the existence of (near-)exclusive homosexuality is responsible for human civilization, but it might not be. And at the very least, it’s pretty important.