IF YOU AREN'T PARANOID THEN YOU AREN'T PAYING ATENTION.

Massive amounts of Federal money, our money, is being poured in to arm and equip local police and paramilitary forces.  I have stood and seen them used against us.  We are under surveillance by hundreds of sophisticated HALO cameras funded by, again, Federal Funds.   

 Federal money=Federal Police.

We are----rapidly--- headed to having a National Police Force.  By allusion, illusion, collusion and deception.  If you think the local cops are bad, ----you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Check out the National Defense Security Act of 2012.  I believe some ‘law and order’ folks think this would be a good thing.  But they haven’t been arrested-----yet.  There seems to be an expanding insinuation of men and women in military garb on our streets ‘assisting’ or ‘advising’ local law enforcement..  Remember when we had advisers in Vietnam.  After a while we accept them as being friendly, helpful,  young people.  Is this what we want? 

Even as I write the government is magnanimously reducing our Army.  An Army exhausted, battered, worn and dehumanized by years of steady redeployment in wars that make no sense.  Come to think about of it, no war ever did.  “Hey, thanks guys, but we don’t need you anymore.”  People with all kinds of combat related mental disorders will be released with little support system into a civilian population already burdened with no job market and an economy several years into a depression.   Many of them will join the growing number of unwelcome homeless Travis Bickles’ who are being shuttled from street to park to street.  And, I suspect, a number will be absorbed into our police forces and prison systems paid for with federal funds.  Someone has to keep dissent down.  I am already seeing the police wear more khaki than blue, and with riot gear, they look like storm troopers.   You do not want to see these guys running through your backyard toward your back door.

Barney Fife is certainly gone but with him went Gary Cooper in High Noon.  

The Shadow--------Who guards the guardians?

THE POLICE ARE THE PRODUCT OF THEIR ENVIRONMENT.

They follow orders.  They serve their masters.  (Some of them seem to serve with a malicious, sadistic glee.)  They let testosterone participate in overkill.   The police are afraid of the people they are hired to protect.  Interestingly the Power Elite are afraid of everyone else.  That’s a hell of a note.  Therefore they respond with overwhelming force.  Not coincidentally, this is the same mindset as the military.  This explains the massive police presence in an attempt to quell a lawful peaceful protest.  Lately the Occupy movement encampment across from the capitol.  About 200 well equipped cops and photographers and reporters against maybe 40 cold and hungry kids.  Protesters that apparently struck a cold and unnamed fear into the hearts of the Downtown Businessmen.         

If Mountain City would spend the money they pay out in lawsuits involving police misconduct, for better training and higher salaries, we would all be better off.  Many cops have a control thing.  The perfectly pressed blues, shiny brass buttons and cartridges, and gleaming leather lend an atmosphere of authority.   It is the Top Sgt. in the Army calling me “Sir” with just the amount of pause before the “Sir” to show utter contempt.  Some find it easier to make the law rather than uphold it.  It becomes easy to beat some punk senseless in a dark corner.  Your partner will not rat you out because you may be the one to cover him when he gets into a tight spot,

It is my perception that Mountain City and other municipalities are picking people who have a tendency to take a sadistic pleasure in their jobs and putting them in SWAT and other like teams.

One should avoid the police at all costs.  But when you are in trouble who are you going to call?

THE POLICE ARE THE POLICE, WHETHER HERE OR IN GERMANY

                        ------------She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to be menaced by one.  Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman----for she had never thought of them as being very bright----seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it.  Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own.  For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless. / Another Country / James Baldwin

You learn to become a policeman by attending the police academy.  Then you learn to become a policeman by riding as a rookie in a patrol car with a veteran.

 And this is where the police culture steps in.  Many people would like to forget that 50 years ago the Mountain City Police ran the biggest burglary ring in the country.  And, true, those times and those men are long gone.  But I have to wonder if this attitude and these legends have not permeated the cop culture, changing it for the worse.       

It is the police culture that is engrained.  The police operate under an us or them, good guys and bad guys, siege mentality.  Mountain City and Englewood police departments want to be like LA cops.   Might makes right and right makes might. 

   The last chief of Mountain City police played politics and kept his job for 12 years while his department ran wild.  The new chief is an import from the mid South who is here to change the police culture.  If you think this will happen, there is a cruise ship in Italy that I will sell you cheap. 

The Mayor is new and is already compromised.   The Chief is so new he still has to ask where the toilet is.  The Governor, while I am sure is still quite involved in Mountain City is standing on the East steps of the Statehouse listening for the call of the Great (Kinda’) White Father.  I have personal experience on coming in from the outside and trying to change Jack.  If I were Chief White I wouldn’t unpack my bags.

This will be continued and picked up on my next post.

                                                                           

                                                                                 The Shadow Knows------Oh, How Very Well!

THE POLICEMAN’S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE / THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE / Gilbert & Sullivan

                                                           A general take on The Thin Blue Line

   

I have had varied experience with the police.  From big city cops to small town marshals.  Some individual cops are great and others are not so great.  Just like all people.  They have families and mortgages and braces for their daughter’s teeth to worry about.  They are called to walk into some of the most unbelievable carnage imaginable.  Babies that are put into the clothes dryer.  Crackheads that take an axe to their grandmothers and cannot tell you why.  I have been in on some of this myself.  You don’t sleep well after one of those evenings.  Their job can be dehumanizing and can dehumanize them.  Some of my experiences with them have been great and some not so great, but all memorable.

Cops are sworn to uphold the law and sometimes they break the law they are sworn to uphold.  They give orders and they take orders.  And they will obey orders because to not do so means the end of everything they have worked for.  Some of them drink a great deal.  My impression is that women who are cops seem to have something to prove.  Something about cojones.   But I have seen one female cop stand down three strapping 20 something young men on the apron of a gas station.  I knew better than to ask her what it was all about.  She had no backup but you could hear the entire force on the way.  I think she was scared; so would I have been.  But it was one of the finest displays of sheer ‘balls’ I have ever seen.  She was on one knee, yelling freeze, and covering the three of them with the biggest handgun I have ever seen.  Except for the one that once was held about an inch from my left eye. 

Which leads me to the old saw about the officer’s pistol being compensation for something lacking.  I am in a position to comment on that but don’t think I will.

This post is to be continued.  Stay with me.

                                                The Shadow

WELCOME TO MOUNTAIN CITY PARKS

Welcome to Mountain City Parks

No smoking

 No Spitting 

Do not walk on the grass

 Do not lie on the grass

Do not sleep on the benches

Do not sit on the benches

No Bicycles

No flying of kites

No swimming

Do not pick the flowers

Do not smell the flowers

Do not feed the animals

No hunting

No fishing

No skateboards

No roller blades

No copulating

No profanity

No camping

And, of course, no begging

TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED

ENJOY YOUR STAY IN THE PARK

Mountain City Parks and Recreation

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XaI5IRuS2aE    

SCHOOLS OUT

It was a warm spring afternoon in mid May and 12 years of boredom, humiliation, and torture had finally come to an end.

I had graduated from Bloomingsburg  High School.  I had gone through the traditional meaningless ceremonies designed to cast me out into the world, ill equipped to accomplish anything useful.  Yale and Harvard were not for us.  Perhaps Ball State or a Voc Ed school but more likely, the farm, or if we were lucky, the Studebaker plant in South Bend.  Rock Solid.  They had made wagons for the Union Army during the Civil War.  A good dependable place to work.  In four years they would be sucked dry by the badly mangled Packard Corporation and cease to exist as such.  (At the same time I was learning from a very wise man that “Nothing is constant.  Everything changes”).

There had been 12 in my graduating class of a school that had balked at consolidation when that would have been the only sensible thing to do.  The premise being that a basketball team made up of five relative dwarves could overcome all odds, beat Gary Roosevelt and do a repeat of the small town Milan upset of 1954.  Never in your wildest dreams!  They wouldn’t even make a movie out of it.

Behind our house there was a summer kitchen with a leanto woodshed attached to the rear.  It was an easy climb up a farm gate and onto the sloping roof of the shed.  From there I could climb up and hold onto the peaked roof of the summer kitchen.  It faced the South and caught the warmth of the early spring sun.

I don’t think I even changed from my good clothes but I remember that after the last hurrah of the class of 1958 of Bloomingsburg High School,  Bindweed County’s best and brightest, I went home and climbed to my favorite spot in the warm sun.  There, shielded from the house, I could meditate in privacy. 

At 17 I had my whole life ahead of me.  I remember standing there on the weathered wood shingle roof of the woodshed, staring at the back of the farm where it bordered Sheid’s Woods and thinking over and over “I am free.  I will never have to go back to that place again.”

THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT. / George Santayana

The Reichstag Fire

          

                         http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kfQiy0_6BIo

           THE SHADOW    I WAS THERE