Come Out With Your Hands Up

Lt. Bender (Art Evans): Mr. Stone, you may be guilty of obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting a known felon, accomplice to a kidnapping and possibly murder. If you really want to clear yourself, my advice to you is to drop your gun and give him back the bag. We have 140 police officers, 75 police cars and two helicopters. I promise you, he WON'T get away! "Ruthless People" (1986)

The known facts of Charlie Kirk's murder - the known facts - are basic. He was engaging in his signature public appearance, in which he has an open-air exchange with people who disagree with him. Someone on the roof of a building about two hundred yards away fired one shot from a thirty caliber scoped rifle, which struck and killed Mr, Kirk. After the shooting, the sniper fled, but was photographed by several video cameras. Law enforcement pursued the leads, ultimately releasing stills of the video, and some of the video itself. Eventually, family members identified the person captured in the pictures and facilitated the peaceful surrender of said individual. Did I miss anything?

I think there are two words in that paragraph which could be considered value-laden. "Fled" - which suggests the shooter was intent on evading capture, and "peaceful" - cooperated with the lawful orders of the officers who took him into custody. The writing was meant to be so.

There has been plenty of writing available to persuade the reader in a certain ideological direction. Some of it is accurate, some not. Some is tolerant, some inflammatory. There is a lot of misinformation out there. One article, in particular, caught my eye.

The article described an exchange between the alleged murderer (I still believe in employing that phrase) and members of law enforcement setting the context for the surrender plan. It was suggested that the suspect would comply with officers only after they agreed he would not be harmed in any way. The title was "Cops give in to demands of (suspect)." That title was apparently meant to invite clicks on an opinion accusing police/FBI of being somehow soft on a criminal.

"Morons," said mine boss Percy Garris (Strother Martin). "I've got morons on my team."

I'm retired, so the statement that generally begins, "If I had a nickel..." has taken on a whole new meaning. In the ten years I spent as a SWAT negotiator I gave, heard, authorized, repeated... We were always prepared to give that assurance even to those "lower than the lowliest dogs." We were there specifically to get desperate people with nothing to lose to walk out the door with their hands up. If it meant telling them we'd give them food (a suicidal person), a smoke (a robbery suspect) or a chance to meet the young woman he was talking to (a parolee) then we'd do it. Tell an armed suspect we'd treat them gently and with respect in exchange for a resolution where no one gets hurt and the bad guy surrenders? Hell, yes.

In a situation where a young man has been murdered in front of his family and friends, where an already divided America has taken sides and begun constructing ramparts, what wouldn't you say to the person who might have pulled the trigger? Well...

You wouldn't say - "You're an asshole, and we're going to beat the fuck out of you, just on GPs." What good would that do?

We called it the surrender ritual. You make them feel good about it. You put on the handcuffs, you turn them over to detectives and then you put away the gear and go rehydrate. And, everyone gets to see the sun come up the next morning.

Years ago, a very desperate wanted person (he'd killed several people) was barricaded in a hotel room near Colorado Springs. He demanded to speak to a member of the press. A very brave press person stepped forward, interviewed the guy and then - the surrender ritual went without a hitch. That wasn't the end of the story.

Morons popped up everywhere. Using members of the press in police operations so...directly was frowned upon by typical department protocols. But, the poor guy really heard it from his colleagues. "Cooperate with the cops, how could you?" That's nonsense, and I said so in a letter to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News.

It became my first published writing piece. 

All of that is how you get to be an old retired guy, sitting in front of a laptop, wishing he had a nickel for every time things worked out because a "Mouth Marine" sweet talked someone into surrendering without a fight. I worked with some really good people in those years. I watched them do amazing things just by being human beings about very volatile situations. There is nothing distasteful to disclose.

Give in? Sure. That's the game. We played it well. So did the cops in Utah.

My Old Man

My old man's a refrigerator repairman, what do you think about that?

He wears a refrigerator repairman's collar, he wears a refrigerator repairman's hat.

He wears a refrigerator repairman's raincoat, he wears refrigerator shoes.

And every Saturday evening, he reads...Playboy.

"My Old Man",  Smother's Brothers, think ethnic!, (1963) 

My old man was actually an engineer, for RCA Victor, for General Dynamics and finally for Xerox. But, I digress...

The American Folk Music Revival era was in full swing when groups like the Smothers Brothers burst on the scene. Like the usual suspects, Dick and Tommy Smothers combined pleasant voices with real talent as musicians. They were also accomplished comedians who used turns of phrase and an imagined dullness on Tom's part to have a bit of fun along the way.

"My Old Man" was a lighthearted combination of satire and tongue-twister. Dick sings the verses of his old man as a "cotton-picking finger-licking chicken plucker" even as Tommy urges good-natured caution. Tommy? Of course, his dad repaired refrigerators...

What does this have to do about anything?

Pat got up from reading a few nights ago to dish out some dessert and discovered water on the floor of the kitchen. A lot of water. It was the refrigerator.

More specifically, it was the ice maker, which was making zero ice. In fact, the fridge was making zero fridge, too. Both fridge and freezer full of food - never remain calm when panic is the order of the evening. We needed to fill the camp coolers with ice... No ice. I got ready to run to the neighborhood Sevvey - no glasses. They were in our new truck, which was in the shop. Yeah, it had been that kind of week.

 So my lovely wife weaved her way through the street folks mingling around at 1030 PM while I loaded the neighbor's freezers and fridge with our most fragile perishables (among other things, our cocktail cherries and Angostura Bitters). We were able to (mostly) get organized and begin troubleshooting.

Do you know how much dog hair, lint and filth can accumulate on the air vents of a fridge in a short 18ish months? Enough that I had to use a vacuum to remove it. Enough that our ailing and infirmed appliance breathed an audible sigh of relief and began fridging again. By morning, it was it's old self - except the ice maker, which apparently has decided to go where ice makers go after they expire.

I called a service tech the following day and told him the symptoms. He said - no kidding - "Clean off the air vents." Apparently I should do this yearly. But, with nary a struggle, we're holding 37F in the fridge, 2.7F in the freezer.

Repeat after me, kids:

"My old man's a refrigerator repairman, what do you think about that?"

Oh... Every Saturday evening I read Clairmont's book review. Just sayin'... 

A Good and Decent Man

 

"When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." Chief Tecumseh

Noting the passing of Canadian actor Graham Greene.

 It was before dial up...

Pat and I married in the spring of 1992. Technologically speaking, it was the stone age.

Some friends gave us a week in their condo in Steamboat Springs. We did some cooking, we did some touristing and then we decided to watch a relatively new movie called Dances With Wolves. So...

It being the Stone Age, we went to a local VHS rental store, got a small portable player and the movie and sat in front of a small TV in the living room. In 2025 we would have just streamed it down to a laptop, but... No laptop, no wifi, no streaming. A tape, a player and a TV.

The story was about Lieutenant John Dunbar, a Civil War hero who takes a post in the West, to see the frontier, "Before it's gone." Upon arrival, he and his travel companion Timmons ("The foulest man I've ever met") discover that the post is abandoned. Timmons is killed on his return trip to the fort from which they set off. Dunbar is alone, and forgotten. That's when everyone's world changes.

Graham Greene plays a Lakota Sioux tribe's medicine man - Kicking Bird - who is empathetic to the soldier's lonely plight. He and Dunbar build a friendship, two men trying to find meaning in a deeply changing world.

The on-screen relationship works, in large part, because the character Greene crafted is a good and decent man. One can easily make the case that Greene is acting from the heart, that he embodies the many virtues he has imparted in the character he plays. Even primarily speaking a language not his first, he conveys a warmth that makes him the sort you'd like as a friend.

Mr. Greene had many roles over the course of his long career, but Kicking Bird was my favorite. It may be unfair to distill down a person's achievements into just one most meaningful to the observer, but...

Dunbar is trying to ask his new neighbors, over coffee, if they have seen any buffalo. Kicking Bird does not know what that means. A pantomime takes place, with Dunbar mimicking the snorting, stomping creature of the plains. At the moment of revelation, Kicking Bird's face lights up in delight. Two men from vastly different backgrounds and cultures have found their first word in common.

The best acting reveals truth. May he find eternal peace.