Rags and Bones

by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net

Shooting mental patients

A very high percentage of the unarmed people shot by cops are mentally ill folk acting out. I know something about this from the five years I spent on ambulances. Protocol was to have cops accompany EMT's on every “EDP” (emotionally disturbed person) call in case the individual was violent. However, the cops and “techs” had an understanding: if the individual was quiet and apparently peaceful, we went in first, while the cops hung back. Bragging Alert: One of my particular talents as an EMT was talking to crazy people (when asked why I was so good with EDP's, I answered, “I'm half crazy on my mother's side”). Reading a newspaper account of the killing of 66-year-old Deborah Dann in the Bronx, I had a visceral Flash of feeling that she might not have died if I had handled that call. A police sergeant, Hugh Barry, did not wait for the EMT's and surged in to Dann's room, escalating the situation; she picked up a baseball bat and he shot her, when I would have begun a conversation (“Hi, my name is Jonathan. What's yours?”) which I am fairly sure would have resulted in her accompanying me voluntarily to the “truck”. “Sergeant Barry, who testified in his own defense, said that when he arrived and learned from another officer that Ms. Danner was in her bedroom with scissors and refused to come out, he started talking to her, coaxing her to speak to emergency medical technicians”. That sounds like an instance of a rather mild lie by a cop: He is omitting the fact that it would have been my job, not his, to make that first contact. A Searing theme which emerges from reading about all these incidents across the nation: Your son/sister/ grandmother/neighbor is having a peaceful schizophrenic episode beyond your ability to manage them; you call 911 to get them a ride to the hospital; the cops come and kill them. I have called 911 many times in my life, but would personally think very carefully before doing so today.

The Ukraine

I believe Putin will invade in the next few days. He has won a world-wide staring contest, not by nuclear weapons, but by Internet troll farms; half of the United States now idolizes him, an astonishing outcome, especially for a KGB veteran with a brutal and arrogant, if somewhat subdued, public persona (but the idolization of the Trumpoid Object leaves all such surprises in the dust). Stalin and Kruschchev could not have dreamed of such popularity, but they lived before the Internet and Tucker Carlson.

The Chattering Class is fond of reminding us that the Soviets did invade Afghanistan in 1979. This is different, more like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia. Another way of looking at it, as a minority of the op eds point out, is that a nation in which elections don't mean anything, will invade one in which they still kind of do. I suggest looking at a map, as I did last night, to review the countries with which Ukraine shares a border: Poland, Slovakia, Hungary. It isn't far from Europe at all. We are re-enacting 1939 and 1940, but the outcome will be very different. Like Reichstag, Kristallnacht, Munich, Czechoslavakia in the run up to World War II, Ukraine may become a buzzword our great-grand children will use (assuming, well, you know) when they talk about the 2010's and after.

I-Zombie

On the guilty pleasure front, I have been watching this very strange and meta-theatrical series, wondering how much subtext is accidental and how much intentional: being scratched by a zombie makes you....very white and blonde, like a Proud Boys' dream girl. The show seems to be a comedy of white privilege: the heroine is pampered and cherished by everyone around her, who make sure that she has enough brains to eat, unlike the ragged, stupid, shambling, homeless zombies who didn't get the same care and attention.

Critical Race Theory

(Unnecessary Numbering Alert:) 1. Racism is built in to the American power-hierarchy, and those of us with white privilege must work ever harder to remain oblivious, because the evidence is in front of our eyes every day. For example, I was waiting in summons court in the front row reserved for attorneys with two colleagues, a Jewish woman wearing pants and a sleeveless top which revealed her many tattoos, and an impeccably suited Arab American woman, when the otherwise likeable, white court officer came up and asked...the brown skinned woman if she was a lawyer. As stories have proliferated of black motorists being shot reaching for their licenses, all white people should reflect that we do not fear that, because it never happens to us. 2. The rageful hunt for teaching of "critical race theory" in schools where it has never been heard of is actually an emboldened attempt to prevent teachers from suggesting (even, or especially, based on personal experience) that racism may be embedded in the machinery, rather than (as some of the laws astonishingly spell out) really just an accident, a Glitch, something bad which happened somehow, but is over now. 3. This is an ingenious kind of lethal dog whistle, patterned on the hunt for Communists in the 1950's, to use something which is barely present, as an excuse for a search-and-destroy mission against progressive and humane values.