If your ego supersedes your ability to get your job done, you may have committed a Pelosi.
Disturbing….again.
This is really worth a read. It’s a report about a couple of former Explosive Ordinance Disposal soldiers who attempted to sell about $200,000 worth of high end weapons, accessories, and explosives they stole. Check it out.
Life on the Rez — A Cowboys and Indians Movie it Ain’t
I’m old enough that I remember the anti-pollution ad featuring a native fellow, dressed in traditional garb, paddling through the woods and then coming upon the garbage that signals that white people have been there. The closing shot shows him staring stoically at the camera with a tear falling from his eye. As hokey as it was, I must admit that it was a pretty powerful ad. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7OHG7tHrNM
I never liked Western movies, so my conception of Natives was probably more influenced by this sappy commercial than by Hollywood’s Bigotry Factory. Regardless, I never saw or read very much about the people we stole this country from until I saw a movie called Smoke Signals and read Ten Little Indians by the author of the source material for the movie, Sherman Alexie. I know nobody ever listens to me, but please, see the former and read the latter. While we’re at it, I insist you also read Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, a sweetly painful and mostly autobiographical coming of age story that takes place mostly on an Idaho reservation.
I was thus pleased to see the show Reservation Dogs on my Hulu queue. Like a lot of new shows, it’s pilot season is short, so I’ve already watched it through twice. Originality is not my only criteria for liking a TV show, but it’s definitely a priority.
As far as I know, it’s the first major TV show or feature length movie for which the cast is nearly 100% native, as well as its creative team. The result is a story of a group of native characters created by nobody except other natives.
It also is a revelation because I have heard about the existence of native “reservations” since I was little, but I had no idea what they even looked like. True, it turns out that the town where it was shot (Okmulgee and other locations in Oklahoma) looks a lot like any other Midwest town, except it is populated mostly by natives. Still, the “Indian Reservation” was created by the federal government, presumably to care for the Native survivors of the so-called “Columbian Exchange.” I think it would benefit both native and non-native people to see the nose-holding result of the government’s minimalist native care. For the time being, I’m not even going into the inconceivable crime of forcibly sending native children to re-education schools, an astounding and disturbing tragedy that is much bigger than this review.
What I have found so intriguing by this work is the similarity between Willie Jack, Cheese, Bear, and Delaura and some of my former students like Lavera, Tyrese, Darnell, and Erianna. Both groups have little in common except that they are/were petty criminals, young, poor, and from groups of people who repeatedly outraged America’s cultural majority by existing.
“Go ahead and putt. We have a minute or so until the blast hits us.”
Letters to the Editor
Dear Madame/Sir:
It is unfair and species-hostile of you to keep accusing us of being like Roger Stone. Stone is a flagrant racist, an unprincipled liar, a cheat, and is so slimy he could slide easily over broken glass. Plus, he mates with any female who will have him.
Shingleback skinks, on the other hand, don’t hate other skinks for the color of their scales, we don’t lie or cheat, and we mate for life. Sure, there are some gila monsters and newts, and snakes I wouldn’t trust. The majority of us are, well, better than fing Roger Stone! Even if he were a reptile, he would be shunned. Have you seen those stupid sunglasses he wears!? Pick on biped mammals instead!
Hurt,
Jeffrey P. Skink
Perth, Australia
Joker Again
I so very wish I could watch Joker for the first time again. His alienation was so deeply affecting to me. It directions showed such deep understanding of the character’s pain at feeling bullied and/or ignored by the world. Moreover, Joachim Phoenix’s performance was truly inspired.
Father’s Day, 2020
This will be an extremely personal entry. On October 20th, 1984, I went to my psych 100 class. The TA was a nice person but a weak teacher. At the beginning of class, she gave me a note that I should call my sister at the given number. This was odd. Although Lisa and I have never been close, we were about as close at that time as we ever would be. Regardless, she had never gone out of her way to call me.
The news was obvious (I knew that phone prefix, and remember, this was nearly 20 years before cell phones were common), but I rushed to my room, called her, and found out that our father died from a heart attack that afternoon. I fell apart. of course. I am a highly emotional being. My odious room mate chose that time to come home. I’ll never forgive him for invading that moment in my life. I can go on about him for hours, as he was the Reagan administration version of a trumper. Anyway, after running around half of Allen Hall, losing my mind, I headed home on the bus. Oh my Universe, I sobbed without shame for three straight hours.
This was my first funeral for a close family member. Jewish funerals are an enormous burden for surviving loved ones. We were never devout hebes, but we did have the funeral within 24 hours, as dictated by tradition. I remained a pitiful mess that whole time. His boss, Tony, delivered a powerful eulogy, which I still occasionally read over.
After 36 years, I think I can accurately say that no event has had a more profound impact on my life. I let it fester at times, behaving self-indulgently. I was already on my way to a drinking problem, but I let that grow and grow. The event influenced lots of later decisions, such as enlisting in the service, public service as a profession (I was never going to be a physician like him, but he was greatly driven by service to humanity), a desire to write, keeping my narcissistic, odious biological father out of my life, trying (not always succeeding) to be what I could only guess would be a proper son to him. Three decades later, I have no idea if he would have been proud or scornful of me for my mediocrity or my (ahem) baser tendencies. I remember taking a girlfriend to see Amadeus a few months after his death. Maestro Saliere’s fixation on his own non-success stuck with me a life long fear of failure.
The most important way it affected me was in my role as a father. Without reservation, what I am most proud of is being my daughter’s father. My father’s persona was always present (he truly was bigger than life in his personality and accomplishments). He was, however, seldom available for Dad/Son time. He was a member of the WWII generation, and although he was an affectionate father, he had work and ceded much of the job of parenting to my Mother.
This was not going to be the case with my daughter A. No matter how long my days as an AP were, for example, I was always home to make dinner, give her a bath, and read to her before tucking her in. We regularly went for walks, rides, watched airplanes land at O’Hare, shopped, played miniature golf, etc, and talked.
She’s now thirteen. Yes, I am biased. But seriously, she has about 50 IQ points on me, scored higher on the verbal portions of the ACT in 7th grade than I hit my Junior year of high school, is more funny than I am, and has insights that often dwarf my own. She is also deeply caring, profoundly sensitive and so…….for want of a better word, GOOD. If I would have realized 30 years ago that I was going to love fatherhood so much, I would have made a herd o’ babies. Oh well, once time has passed, it is gone. No do-overs or times-out.
This all has stayed with me throughout my illness two years ago, which really almost killed me. The cardiac surgeon who went into my chest to fit me with a new mitral valve told my wife I had a 50-50 chance of survival. I later was enormously relieved that I was in a coma at the time. To be polite, if I was awake and knew that my life was about to be decided by a coin flip, my wife and daughter would have seen what Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once called, “a very human performance.”
This is why Covid has concerned me so much. After 13 years of being a Dad, I am not ready to check out until my Creature is fully grown. I have to be frank with myself. I’m kind of a nobody. But A’s happiness, astounding maturity, and genuine cleverness make me so very happy for my pointless little life.
Out here.
How many half-wit, knuckle-dragging, cousin-f*cking red-necks does it take to spread Covid-19?
Soundtrack for this entry: Baby Blue
Just one with the virus, no mask, and an ignorant attitude. And they have half a stadium full. Enjoy, troglodytes.
Also from my twitter, regarding the slack-jawed, gun toting celibates at the rally: Let’s allow natural selection do the heavy lifting from here.
Another thought: Maybe the many people that didn’t show up to the Tulsa rally gargled this morning with just a little too much bleach (as a common sense precaution).
Cops in Schools – A Love Story it Ain’t
— Mister Thrope
I suppose I should contribute to the public opinion on this subject. From 2007 to 2011, I was an assistant principal in Chicago Public Schools. During that time, I had the mixed experience of working with several off and sometimes on-duty police officers. Ergo, I have some real life experience dealing with something that Her Honor, Mayor Lightfoot is going to have to rule on. Overall, I found that I really had no way of knowing if the police would solve a difficult problem (which they sometimes did), or take a bad situation and make it worse (which they also sometimes did).
As an AP, my first school was located on Chicago’s lower west side, not far from University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). This was a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, because UIC had been steadily using its status to take over Maxwell Street, as well as the homes of many of our former students, even as far as Pilsen on the near south side. The school was about 85% African American and 15% White and Latino. We had two police assigned to the school as part of their beat, and three police hired part time (at different times) .
The assigned police were two women. One was white, with a name that only 60’s flower parents could have given her. Her partner was a Latina, who told me once that every holiday she had to deal with her idiot gangster relatives. They were unquestionably fantastic at settling problems in the school and at telling us what had been going on in the neighborhood. With no attempt at sarcasm or hyperbole, they were a gigantic help.
One part time officer we hired for afternoons. I liked and trusted him. One day he brought a kid to my office in cuffs, who had clearly been pummeled about the head. He told me that the kid (refer to him as W), had been acting crazy in the lunch line and that he had taken him out of the line to talk. Then, he said the kid got angry and tried to put him in a head lock. After years of thinking about this, I’m still not sure where I fall on what actually happened. I had to take the police’s word for it, because our security guard had witnessed it. Still, that guard’s word proved to be questionable later in the year (it was my first year there). Although this kid was a real ass, in retrospect, I have trouble picturing him manning up on a real cop. Still, I had to go with it at the time, and after a long fight, we got him expelled (just from the school. He went to another building and still graduated from 8th grade).
The guy that replaced him was much less aggressive. This was true even though there were several instances where the kids challenged him directly. One awful 3rd grader actually threw rocks at him, which he did nothing about. That wasn’t going to work either.
His replacement was a bad, bad dream. His worst act was in defending me. I locked this kid’s illegal cell phone in a desk and said he’d get it back when his grandmother came in for it. He lost his mind, broke open the desk, took his phone, and pushed me out of the way as he ran out the door. C, the cop, ran after him and ended up bringing him in to the station. I saw a picture of him later, and C messed him up pretty badly. The kid was a sphincter muscle, and deserved some serious juvenile trouble. But he did not deserve to get beaten up. I started to keep my eye on C and noticed that I was coming up with issues with his every action. He made more arrests including some that were questionable or unnecessary. I resolved not to hire him the next year. Then the building got turned into a charter school, so I had to find a new job. My decision became irrelevant.
The next school was in West Englewood on the south side. The school was nearly 100% African American and no gentrification of this neighborhood was happening anytime soon. The school was located along the border between the Madville and Blood Money crews. When they weren’t fighting, stealing cars, or dealing, they thought of the school as the local Wal Mart. In addition, West Englwood was where many people who used to live in the Robert Taylor homes (formerly the world’s largest housing project) ended up. In some cases, they brought with them family rivalries going back decades.
Our assigned officer was Sergeant B. We didn’t get along at first. Our first week, we had a multi family melee which he helped break up. He got on his hind legs with me, because I was a little upset after having to disarm a parent who was going to brain someone with a standing coat rack. If you know me, then you know that I am no martial arts expert and the fact that I had to get involved in this would have been funny if it were happening to someone else. Anyway, the Sergeant and I ended up getting along. He helped me a couple of times when shit just got out of hand. I remember he once took down this 13 year old boy who was always threatening me or our Dean of Students, or just about any other adult. Sergeant B threw him onto the floor and let him know he couldn’t just do anything he wanted. But he didn’t abuse him or bring him into the Audie Home, or any other more severe measure. In other words, he acted like a cop.
We hired one part time officer (I’ll name him M). He was very good. He stayed out of everything unless it truly was a police matter. I remember we had to chase a big 6th grade boy who had punched out a girl from his grade and her family was looking for him with the unsmiling intention of sending him to County hospital or to Gatlin’s Chapel. I didn’t particularly like the kid but I didn’t want him to get badly hurt or killed. Officer M helped me chase him down, and after getting on the horn, he said “Officer needs assistance.” You wouldn’t believe how fast the response was. Anyway, he was a help, but had to leave when his regular work hours were changed.
The officer we then hired had, believe it or not, a teaching certificate. I forgot his name. He was one of those cops that thought that you dealt with a kid who threw a raisin in the cafeteria the same way you deal with a car full of gangsters at 2:30 in the morning. We had one 8th grader who was a real thug. But he was also smart and personable, and he performed all of his dirt outside of school. He said something to another student that rubbed the officer the wrong way and he roughed this kid up, then putting him handcuffs that obviously were too tight and hurting him. This event I missed, but our middle school teachers saw the whole thing. 3 out of the 4 of them were black women, and they were all outraged. We got rid of him, but the damage to our relationship with the students was done.
It is incumbent upon me to come up with a recommendation. I empathize with the notion of not having police in the elementary schools. On the other hand, there is a small groups of kids who recognize no authority, including that of their parents. This is true at practically every school (including the affluent one I attended). At the same time schools in CPS have largely dispensed with suspension except in the most extreme cases. I know there as other ways of dealing with difficult children. But if we are going to use peer juries, restitution, counseling, and check in systems, we have to all understand that it will cost more, not always be effective, and requires the effort of the problem children, their parents, the victimized children, their parents, the administration, and ultimately the entire community. Without all of that, it will be another failed reform attempt.
All of the police except for the first two were black males. If you think that means that this is not a race issue, you’re lying to me or to yourself.
I’m adding this because a solution must be able to deal with situations like this: On a 2009 morning, an 8th grade girl attacked another one in the cafeteria. She was fast and angry, and before I could get over there, the aggressor had torn off the other’s shirt as they starting punching each other. The resulting fight included at least 10 girls. Our principal was a black woman who grew up less than a mile from there. Attendance was one way that we were being judged as a school. Despite that, the boss said we had to be perceived to be the ones in charge of the school. I thus wrote up six 10-day suspensions and at least three lesser ones. We didn’t have more problems like that during that year. We did, however, get seriously chided for low attendance. This is what we sometimes have to fix.
Out here.
Shameless Commerce
“It is just as likely that Martin Gugino is an “ANTIFA provocateur” as it is that Trump’s followers are human beings.”
–Mike Pence, not realizing he was on a hot microphone, Prayer Breakfast, Luxton, IL, June 6th, 2020.
This statement was in apparently response to this appalling incident, among so many others.
Bittersweet Abattoir 