CAMDEN/UNIONS

As a kid in Newark, New Jersey, when I got home from school, I would turn on the television to watch Officer Joe Bolton.

He hosted a show that featured the Three Stooges.

When you are 10, Moe, Larry and Curly are the funniest people in the universe.

And Officer Joe…?

I knew when I was watching Officer Joe on TV that there was a fourth stooge. He wasn’t a real cop. He was a pretend cop.

As I got older the television continued to program police dramas. An Oxford University paper has documented a TV history of 300 cop shows, which indoctrinate, distract and distort everyone’s view regarding folks who wear badges.

I was raised not to trust cops. I was told: Don’t talk to cops; they aren’t your friend.

But that is unusual.

That is not how most kids are raised.

Most people do not grow up in a racially polarized city where cops have a menacing presence.

For the average person, contact with a badge seldom amounts to more than a speeding ticket.

Linked to this column are numerous videos of recent police riots in the wake of recent police killings.

Plural, as in too numerous.

Here is a chance for everyone to see local police in action.

Here is contact, up close and personal, between cops and crowds of, largely, white people

White privilege?

White privilege evaporates near any god-damned police precinct in America.

Black privilege? . . . that’s never existed.

WATCH: Videos of Police Violence in the Wake of the George Floyd Killing

The tediousness, the repetition of peaceful protest underscores how singular this moment is, a moment which has been sustained now for weeks.

After a lifetime of marches, you understand that they are all a parade of sorts . . . a dance actually, a dance where the steps are understood, the words, the chants . . . part of a choreographed repetition that in Phoenix happens at 105 degrees . . . no matter how large the issue, marches are, in the end, are lamer than a square dance.

It is a shame that protests do not bother to steal from great dance sequences in, say, movies.

The best dance sequence in recent film?

It wasn’t Pulp Fiction or the nauseating La La Land.

It was Joaquin Phoenix embracing his mad turn as a deranged Rockette descending the Gotham stairwell.

One of the darkest movies in your lifetime, The Joker, wraps up with chaos in the streets and scenes of apocalyptic violence perpetrated by wild ones in clown masks. This bedlam apparently is where Senator Tom Cotton lives in Arkansas, if we are to judge by his Trumpian column in The New York Times.

TOM COTTON: SEND IN THE TROOPS

“This week, rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy, recalling the widespread violence of the 1960s…bands of looters roved the streets . . . nihilist criminals are simply out for loot and the thrill of destruction with cadres of left wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit (George) Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes . . . ”

And so on until he makes it quite clear that the solution to this messy 1st Amendment convulsion is the United States military.

You know, the folks who combat America’s enemies.

Wait, wait . . . it gets better.

The journalists inside The New York Times building threw a hissy fit that the op-ed page had . . . an op-ed.

YES!

There was rending of garments. Thesauruses were thrown.

The editorial page editor, James Bennet, apologized to all of the paper’s employees in an all-staff virtual meeting.

And then his real self was forced to resign.

One simply could not tell what was worse.

Senator Cotton, raging away in some planked cabin in the middle of an Arkansas loblolly pine brake, or cadres (see above) of New York Times drudges wetting their shorts.

Is it any wonder they are tearing down statues in America?

Columbus is an obvious target.

His image was attacked in Boston Massachusetts and St. Paul Minnesota. A bronze of conquistador Juan de Oñate led to gunfire and a shooting when revisionists and traditionalists clashed in Albuquerque.

We had that sort of uproar over a Columbus statue in Phoenix. A local lawyer with (then) Brown and Bain — a street guy with a law degree — Joe Martori, moved the edifice to the outside of the Arizona Italian American Club on 12th Street, where it still resides.

Bad art and red sauce . . . I want seconds.

Confederate statues were also attacked recently in Richmond Virginia, Nashville Tennessee and Montgomery Alabama.

North of San Francisco, in some of America’s pinkest precincts, you have Point Reyes National Seashore, once the dominion of Miwok Indians until Sir Francis Drake dropped anchor. The locals are now raising hell over Sir Francis Drake Boulevard because Drake had slaves.

But if slaves were the agreed upon crux, there were, apparently, other issues . . . in Golden Gate Park they attacked memorials dedicated to General U.S. Grant as well as Francis Scott Key.

It’s not burning books, but . . .

You should learn from history, not destroy it.

These measures are the civic side of Karen.

The only reforms that matter address accountability for cops.

I think a country devoid of its history, particularly dry-cleaned of its mortifying history, would be as appalling as wandering around Disneyland.

I don’t want to drive through the village square and find Alice in Wonderland on Main Street.

Bitch is annoying.

George Washington had slaves. A lot of them.

He was still the father of our country.

When I roll down my window, I want to see John Dillinger. Lucky Luciano. Patty Hearst. Charles Keating.

I want to see everything except Catholic priests.

This is gangster country. You can’t doubt that. For Christ’s sake, we’ve turned Mexico into one big Amazon drugs warehouse.

You raise up mo-rons if your hoodlums and hoodlettes only get the sanitized American catechism.

And we got enough morons.

Exhibit A . . .

People are busting on Darnella Frazier.

She is the 17-year-old heroine of the George Floyd murder, the kid who whipped out her cell phone and taped the cop killing that man.

She has since been mauled on social media and forced to respond:

“Im doing it for clout?? For attention??What?? To Get Paid ??

“Now y’all just sound dumb and ignorant!! I don’t expect anyone who wasn’t placed in my position to understand why and how I feel the way that I do !! MIND YOU I am a minor ! 17 years old , of course I’m not about to fight off a cop I’m SCARED wtf. I don’t give 2 fucks about what y’all would’ve did because was y’all there ?? NO. Fighting would’ve got someone else killed or in the same position George (may he Rest In Peace ??❤️) was in !”

Returning to the scene of Floyd’s killing the day after, and clearly distraught, she told onlookers about what she had seen.

“It is so traumatizing,” she told them.

This young lady’s cell phone tape filled the streets of America with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators for nigh onto three weeks. Every night. In 140 cities.

Every night.

You about statues?

Maybe instead of tearing shit down, you might help erect a statue to Darnella Frazier.

Because a statue of Frazier might be the only result in Minnesota where the state house killed police reform legislation.

Also by Michael Lacey:
COP KILLERS: An opinion column by Michael Lacey
and
Cindy Lou Who? The Truth About Cindy McCain