The Horns of a Dilemma

 "Does a writer ever actually retire?" Just about every writer.

Get up in the morning, make so coffee, scan the news and the social media... Whuuuut?

Writers write so readers can read. So said fictional novelist William Forrester. The only problem with that statement for a small-market writer - that's me - is that readers won't read something if they don't know it's available. In a very real sense, writers write so they can pester people into reading. You can quote me on that.

Social media is an appropriate, if not fabulous, place to alert people that you are selling something. Appropriate because a lot of people visit social media. Not fabulous, because: first, a site may not contain enough, if any, of the demographic toward which your writing is directed and; second, there is a lot of stupid with internet access. A wise and intelligent psychologist warned me about that. But, I already knew.

Nevertheless, I will hardly turn down an opportunity to write, even when the audience is not entirely receptive. Even then...

Do you know - I'm just asking a question derived from a web site discussion involving normally intelligent people - that most public servants, including police officers, are thuggish morons (or moronic thugs, when the writer runs out of descriptive gas) unfit for any other work? Their jobs are cushy, their paychecks fat. They should stop depriving their fellow citizens of their constitutional rights, no matter what they are ordered to do. None of them are educated enough anyway for work in the private sector. It's a fact. I am confused, and need guidance.

To paraphrase fellow cancer patient and former NYPD cop and Secret Service Agent Dan Bongino, readers of Bikecopblog have figured out what is about to happen.

Are police officers just a bunch of dumb, uneducated thugs who can't find a real job, or constitutional scholars empowered to act independently of the legal system into which they fit? I'm just asking, so I know. I'm an old retired guy, and I'm trying to blend.

Where did all of this start? Apparently, there was a health inspector who arrived at a restaurant in California, on a mission. One of the shops on his route was serving take-out (because COVID) but, and this is the rub, the customers were not going immediately home like good little girls and boys and eating where the 'Rona can't get them. They broke open their food and ate in public.

I know, right? But, the health inspector has no jurisdiction over people sitting on a park bench eating take-out. So, he chose the next best venue - he threatened to close the restaurant unless the owner reigned in his customers.

Don't get bogged down in the details (like, really, that's the ditch you want to die in, Mr. Health Inspector?), because this is where the fun starts. The business owner is incensed, and parks his monster truck behind the inspector's car so he can't leave. "I can't work, you can't work" is approximately what was expressed. Well, guess who ends up getting invited to this little party?

Police officers circa 2020 are trained to handle this kind of situation, which essentially is "Don't take sides, keep them from killing each other. Enforce the law, when appropriate." It isn't like 1979, when I started. Then, I got three weeks of field training, worked on my own for a couple months and then went to a police academy. Now, officers get average 24 weeks of academy training and 16 weeks of field training before anyone would think to put them on the street alone. 

The men and women who showed up to this call deescalated the situation. They talked sense to the guy. They suggested some reasonable alternatives for him to follow, including the restaurant guy asking the inspector's boss WTF? (Only, the boss apparently had ordered this.)

"Nope. Not listening. Too angry, too frustrated. End of my rope, etc."

This is where the social media experts, setting aside their primary jobs as immunologists and epidemiologists, dusted off their roles as constitutional scholars and went after the cops. And, where I asked my entirely reasonable question.

As we've discussed previously, while police officers are invested with considerable discretion, one of the things they are obligated to do is follow the lawful orders of their superiors. Just about every police department and sheriff's office has that in their manual. Failure to do so is called "insubordination" and is grounds for termination.

Are you with me so far? My friends on social media suggest that officers are thugs, brutes and morons because they are enforcing the rules set down by their state. Those laws are unconstitutional, they argue, and the police officers are too stupid, too comfortable in their mundane public sector jobs and too happy to lord it over their fellow citizens to recognize that they are one step away from loading people onto railroad cars.

This is something we've discussed, Jacobson, police powers and all of that. Remember the dude with his hat on backward, the guy telling other cops to refuse lawful orders?

Some of you are saying "But, the governor of Cali has no problem going to $300 an entree restaurants to celebrate his birthday. What the actual frick? Isn't this whole thing an invention of Dr. Fauci so he could get on TV?" I get that. It isn't about whether the governor is a dick, or if The Good Doctor is a showboat. It's about whether the law enables the governor to issue public health orders, and makes people respect them.

So, here is my question. Do people expect their cops - when they are not neutralizing active shooters and evacuating people in the presence of an RV bomb and almost getting killed in the process - to also be constitutional scholars able to make fine distinctions Johnnie Roberts and his eight goofballs can't agree on, when half the people you serve think you're an idiot, and the other half applaud you for enforcing rules many citizens think are not nearly strict enough?

Just about every officer I served with, or met along the way of my 40 years in the justice system, is a fabulous person trying to do a damn difficult job. If there is a solution to my quandary - let's hear it!   

 

The Right Stuff

 Mourning the passing of Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager, USAF (ret).

"So Yeager takes [Project Engineer Jack] Ridley off to the side in the tin hanger and says: Jack, I got me a little ol' problem, here. Over at Pancho's the other night I sorta...dinged my goddamn ribs. Ridley says, Whattya mean...dinged? Yeager says, Well, I guess you might say I damned near like to...broke a couple of the sonsabitches." Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, (1979).

In fact, a few days prior to attempting the first official supersonic flight, Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager had been thrown from a horse and broken two ribs. Rather than see the base doctor (which might result in his grounding) he rode an old motorcycle his friend Pancho Barnes (herself a pilot and owner of Pancho Barnes Happy Bottom Riding Club - a dude ranch and bar) and had them treated on the sly. So far, so good.

However, it meant that he could not shut the entryway door from inside the cockpit of the tiny, temperamental X-1. Jack Ridely, an accomplished test engineer and pilot, fashioned a solution using a length of broomstick handle. The rest, on October 14, 1947, is history.

Chuck Yeager grew up in West Virginia, and entered the US Army Air Forces as a private. He became an aircraft mechanic, then a non-commissioned pilot. He was shot down once, evading capture and assisting local partisans until he could be return to Allied lines. He resumed flying duties - why wouldn't he - and shot down several more aircraft, including one of the new jets deployed by Germany.

Yeager returned to the US after the war, and became a test pilot. This is where he steps onto the front page of aviation legend.

Aeronautical engineers once believed that the "Sound Barrier" actually represented something finite, an absolute wall. Hear again Tom Wolfe:

This led engineers to speculate that the g-forces became infinite at Mach 1 [the speed of sound], causing the aircraft to implode. They started talking about "the sonic wall" and "the sound barrier."

Not being an engineer, Yeager didn't believe the "barrier" existed.

How pervasive was, or is, the Yeager Legend? How deeply did his influence go in the aviation world? Wolfe:

Anyone who travels very much by airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot...

It was the [Appalachian] drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

 There are no old, bold pilots. Somehow, a man who made a profession of testing cutting edge aircraft, who served in three wars (including combat missions in Vietnam) made it to ninety-seven.

With thanks, from a grateful nation.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker

 "It's not that I'm smart. It's that I stay with the questions much longer." Albert Einstein.

What memories do you have of your father?

My father was no ordinary man. He grew up in the city, but loved the country. He was small in stature, but backed down to no one. In 1943 he and a friend patted the side of the Liberty Bell in his home town of Philadelphia and then enlisted in the Marine Corps. He survived a battle in a place called "The Meat Grinder," among the many other places he fought. He came home from the war to work in the US Space Program, raise a family and retire.

He was Irish, the grandson of a man who moved his family from Donegal.  Consequently, he had something of the poet in him. He had committed to memory countless verses, which he could recite seemingly at will.

Lest one think they were some of the better known of Yeats, or Joyce... Usually, they were ribald limericks about a man from Nantucket, or a hermit named Dave. He had a sufficient repertoire that, while on guard duty after Japan surrendered, he would write them on the outsides of the vehicles he was supposed to be guarding without being repetitious. The company commander was unamused.

And then, there was the free verse poem about a legislator from Arkansas who took offense at how the name of his state was being pronounced. My dad would burst forth: "Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker you bald-headed old son of a bitch. I've been trying to get your goddamned attention for the last half hour..."

My mother, who grew up in a more refined part of Philly, was openly horrified at the things my father could recite. One, a Christmas poem based in a penitentiary, made her swear.

Out of curiosity, over many years, I tried to locate the source of my father's Arkansas poem. Even in the internet age, it eluded me. Then...

I purchased a book on Kindle recently, On the Warpath in the Pacific, the life story of Admiral Joseph James "Jocko" Clark. Born in Cherokee Nation in pre-statehood Oklahoma, Admiral Clark was the first Native American to graduate the US Naval Academy, in 1918. Navy was a bit rough around the edges, something the blue blood regular Navy officers tried to remedy. Jocko found himself caught up in a hazing scandal in which plebes were made to memorize and recite a poem called "Change the Name of Arkansas."

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Goddamn your ornery soul all to hell.

No wonder I could never find it. That is the most marginally re-printable sentence. That, and one suggesting that comparisons between Kansas and Arkansas is like comparing the "gentle oscillations of a little June bride to the frantic clutches of a Klondike whore."

I can hear the echoes of my mom... "Daaaaavvvve."

According to legend, and owing to the significant passage of time, the version recited by Naval Academy plebes was but one version, my father having access to a varient, perhaps one embraced solely in the Marine Corps. Whatever, over the course of fifty-six years knowing the man, his memory of the poem never wavered.

I miss the old guy, for no other reason than he could be obnoxious, he could be irritable, he could get under a person's skin. But, he was never dull. As we approach the tenth anniversary of his passing, I can only say that he was one of a kind. 

 

Happy Turkey Day

 Consider a turkey who is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests" as a politician would say. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving something unexpected will happen to the turkey. (On the problems of inductive reasoning), The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,(2010), Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In 2020, is WuFlu the Black Swan moment? Or, is the election?

Imagine you're some guy who is a politically engaged resident of a so-called Red State. You walked the soles off of several pairs of shoes, banging on doors. Spent hours on the phone, wore your hands raw pushing in lawn signs. You got your boat out for the parades, fired up the F250 on the weekends for the socially-distanced meets. Your wife made sandwiches, your kids pulled wagons full of pamphlets. Maybe you made the sandwiches and your wife banged on the door. Maybe your husband watched the kids. Whatever it was, you played your part, and cast your ballot.

Around you, something like 65% of your neighbors agreed with you. Upwards of 100% of your neighbors understand that, in a Constitutional Republic, the only way for the people to steer the Ship of State is for the ballot count to be fair. Your candidate wins because they got more votes. They lose because the other person did better. You sleep soundly.

You wake up the next day only to hear that "the other guy" is being dragged across the finish line because individuals in other states aren't nearly as principled as you. There are wild, unexplained swings involving hundreds of thousands of votes - almost all (99%?) in favor of "the other guy." The national press seems eager to play along, and social media blocks any attempt to call bullshit on what may be, or may not be, fraud.

There are real issues at stake in this election, fundamental to how you think America should work. You did your thing in Iraq, helped load a couple of your friends into plastic bags. Got a lot of their blood on you in the process. Maybe you were there when it happened, to hear them plead with God to let them live. And, here you are. Some asshole in some other state tipped the scales with a box of fake ballots and you're left asking yourself if your buddies died for all of this.

There are a very few Americans left who know what an existential threat to America feels like. We think it is our birthright to be fed by friendly politicians who are "looking out for our best interests." Candidate A wins, or Candidate B wins. We're all Americans, right?

If you say so, brother. I just wonder about that guy, his candidate's flags hanging from his porch. At what point does he drop "The Deuce" and start to seriously ask if it's time to cut ties with people who will lie, cheat, steal, murder, burn... Maybe he goes in to work in the morning and just figures "Fuck it, I'm okay."

What if he, and a lot of guys like him, don't? What happens when they get tired of playing the game straight, only to get fucked over without anyone giving a good goddamn? Countries have come and gone through history. Eventually, that guy gets pushed too far.

  That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

If you don't know where that paragraph comes from, you don't read enough.

I am advocating nothing. Just a cautionary tale - civilizations rely on one of two things to succeed. Force, or an unshakable belief among most of the citizenry that the system is equitable. You will win some, and lose some. The playing field is level, at least as level as humanly possible. In the absence of equity, the question becomes how much force leaders are willing to exert to stay in power. If you're interested, I wrote an excellent book about just how awful governmental violence looks, close up.

Happy Thanksgiving.     

Election Day 2020

 "They should be taught to deescalate. Shoot 'em in the leg."

Bikecopblog attempts to be non-partisan. We are not afraid to express an opinion. You are not required to like it, commit to it or even respect it. This is America. You are free to do your own thinking.

A vote for the Biden/Harris ticket is a vote against law enforcement. It is a vote to empower the Marxist Left who have advocated defunding and disbanding police departments all over the country. Both of the candidates have expressed their support for the defunding movement. Extreme radical members of the House have already stated they believe a Biden Presidency will be pliable enough to accomplish their agenda.

You don't have to take my word for it.

There is a reason the NYPD Union endorses Donald Trump. There is a reason the National Fraternal Order of Police endorses Donald Trump.

There is always room for improvement, reform. Hell, I just wrote a book about that. On these pages I've discussed police misconduct and the need for change. And, I know - Orange Man Bad.

What good are the millions of dollars spent on body cameras, if politicians stand by bleating anti-police rhetoric and facilitating unrest when officers clearly are defending themselves against a person with a weapon? What good is the "rule of law" when officers who are clearly responding to a lethal threat are indicted for political purposes? How many good men and women have turned their backs on a police career because they don't want to land in jail for the mere fact they went home at the end of their shift, instead of to a hospital, or a morgue?

We are not endorsing a candidate, or telling you how you should vote. All we're saying is this - the Biden/Harris ticket has expressly stated their support for the defunding/disbanding movement. And that's a fact.

Was This In The Brochure?

 "If I remember my training correctly, one of the lessons was titled 'Don't dig up the big box of plutonium, Mark.'" Mark Watney (Matt Damon), The Martian (2015).

I went to a pre-op conference with one of the surgeons who will be part of implanting the radioactive plaque on my left eye... Oh, did I miss a step?

About two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with a rare form of melanoma in my left eye. Apparently, only about 2000 people in the US hear those words every year. Believe me, I don't feel all that special.

This is a serious illness, but fortunately it was early and the PET scan (have you ever fallen asleep in a tube, woken up with a mask on your face and then had a panic attack?) was clear, so far. So, I have that going for me, which is nice...

I've enjoyed embarrassing good health over the years, to the point that the medical history I've had to share with about a dozen people usually includes a pause, they set down their pen and say "Nothing?" Our joke has been that when I get something, it will be a doozie. When I related this to one of the nurses, she said "You won't tell that joke again."

She doesn't really know us.

The prognosis is good, at least in the near term. I have surgery on October 7th and - amazingly - I will be too radioactive for Pat or the dogs to come near me for more than one or two momentary PDAs a day. There is a slight possibility the radioactive pellets might escape, in which case we - pick them up with tweezers, put them in a jar of water and set it someplace remote. One of the lessons...

After that, maybe double vision for a while, with no real way to know how much more sight I get back.

It's a long story and at some point I'll be available for margaritas, Mexican food and a story to tell. Until then, I can feel the strength and good wishes you are conveying. We'll make sure to keep everyone in the loop.

Until then - keep a happy thought.  

RBG

 Mourning the passing of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

It has become chic to occupy the parapets of partisanship, and become amateur political operatives at every opportunity. It is particularly so upon the death of a Supreme Court Justice. Friends and family members have not had time to digest the sad news before Washington moves on, if one can call it that.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg served her country in an indispensable way. She was a tireless advocate for equal rights, especially where gender is concerned. At a time when women were openly discriminated against - and the law permitted it - she began the long, arduous process of evening the playing field. A gifted and accomplished law student, she was initially deprived of the opportunity to serve as a judicial clerk because of her gender.

It is easy to disagree with Justice Ginsberg on matters of law. Were it not for reasonable differences of jurisprudential opinion, law would be a sterile and boring endeavor. It would not be very difficult to find an array of her opinions where even a cursory reading results in head shaking and tut-tutting.

It is also not hard to find a person fully committed to justice, equality and freedom. Her opinions were well written, precise and forceful. It was common during a Supreme Court term to select one of her missives and admire the pith with which she stated her position. Sometimes, grudgingly, I had to admit she changed my mind.

Justice Ginsberg served her country by being a strong advocate for her principles. They didn't change with the prevailing wind. When she wrote an opinion, it was hers - not, as so many mistakenly conclude, constrained by either rigid ideology or political party talking points. If the breadth of her work does not demonstrate that, one need only know that her closest friend on the Court was, until his own death, Antonin Scalia.

The law is more just and fair because you served admirably, Justice Ginsberg. Thank you.