Eschew Obfuscation –
By Michael Douglass –

You are here.

Michael Wade Douglass

No closer.

I keep paying attention to this.

I keep pointing it out.

There is just enough to keep the women and kids all fired up. Just enough to make us all afraid of things we don’t understand. Things they aren’t about to explain.

We can dance to it but we absolutely hate the beat.

At least the American impetus is often enough about race exclusively. Spectacularly. Race on the most granular level. Not only its institutionalization but the bones of the implementation. The talking points of bigotry. Calves the size of cantaloupes on drug mules threatening our way of life and diseases like Ebola flooding our borders every minute. Stealing our jobs and all like that.

It’s a goddamn political discipline.

The indiscriminate killing of young black men because they are young and black and because entire swaths of America have decided that they are a problem before figuring out they are human.

You know, the fundamentals.

White cop shoots unarmed black kid to death from like twenty feet away. Unarmed. With extreme prejudice. At least six times. Twenty feet away. Broad daylight. Almost two weeks ago. Eyewitnesses. No tazer. No backup. Walked around the body for awhile. Hasn’t even been charged. You gotta be kidding me. They need a grand jury. Might take until mid October. That’s some bullshit. Everybody knows who did it and it’s murder.
The cop never even filed a report. Think about that. He never filed a real goddamn report. Who’s kidding who here?

Fifth amendment about to become an eight hundred pound pain in the ass.

Everybody knows.

The local powers think it’s a secret. Really. They think they are keeping a secret from the world. Kinda like they believe they have superhuman abilities of deception and obfuscation and no one suspects anything at all. It’s like they don’t know that we can see. What kind of bubble are these abominable white men living in? They leak unrelated information, video, toxicology, they invent blunt force trauma injuries nearly two weeks after the fact.

What we have here is an entire municipality with lungs that turn oxygen into shit.
More than anything else, I’m fascinated by this dance in particular.

He was gunned down in the street for no good reason. He wasn’t armed with anything. We actually know who did it. And the dance is awesome. Damn near overwhelming. Everyone with a microphone keeps playing along. Everyone in front of a camera sways to one version or another. To keep the peace. To preserve some semblance of order.

Like if they stopped dancing and admitted that a kid was shot full of holes and the cop who did it was allowed to flee the state, we’d all go fucking nuts.

We might.

We should.

Because that’s exactly what happened.

They tell us he shoplifted. They called it burglary. Not true. Didn’t happen. Store owner and video. They call him a “thug.” Racist code for “nigger.” Fuck me I hate that word. Both of them.

But no, goddamnit, no. We breathe a sigh of relief and maybe exhale some gratitude and focus a little more on the problems at hand. We’re able to do that because the media is waltzing to insipid disco and refuses to belly up to the bar. Our cue to have another. See?

If only they could join us in our disgust.

Instead they relieve us of it.

What we have now is a pointless debate where none is necessary. There is nothing to argue here. A dirty cop executed a man in the street for no reason and we jump around pretending to figure out what happened and what to do.

Pathetic.

We know what happened and we know what should happen. We know what is right. We know what to say about it. We know what to do about it. There is no religion here. We kneel at the altar of a certain convenience of views. We recognize the folly of too much courage and too little.

One only feels respect when it’s mutual.

Or all we have to do is dance.

Drinks for my friends.

Republished with permission from BrainSpank.Org.