Can videos save America?

The video camera is the major factor in police reform during recent decades.  It came into prominent notice in the case of Rodney King.  On March 3, 1991, King, a black man, was driving on Interstate-210 in Los Angeles when police thought he was behaving in a drunken manner.  They gave chase, and he gave high-speed flight.  When they finally stopped him, they put him on the ground and did a drum-corps routine on him with their billy-clubs and stun guns. A guy named George Holliday captured the performance on film from his apartment house balcony and sent it to the local television news station KTLA.

King was charged with the felony of evading the police, but the charges were dropped and the police chief said the four police would be disciplined.  When King was released from custody, the press interviewed him as he sat in a wheelchair.  He had a broken right leg in a cast, a cut and swollen face, a bruised body, and burn marks on his chest from the stun gun.

The four policemen were charged and brought to trial in a state court.  The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, which caused Los Angeles to erupt in a riot that lasted six days.  Sixty-three people were killed, 2,383 were injured, more than 12,000 were arrested, and estimates of property damage were over $1 billion.  The National Guard, the U.S. Army, and Marine Corps were needed to help control the situation.  

However, two of the officers were convicted later in federal court for violating King's civil rights.  He also sued the City of Los Angeles and was awarded $3.8 million in damages.  

Hundreds of videos of misperforming police have circulated in recent years.  When in situations involving  the police,  savvy citizens turn on their iPhone recorders.  One of the most notable is the video 17-year-old Darnella Frazier took of George Floyd being choked to death by a policeman.  That young woman's video literally set the world on fire by recording 10 minutes of America's holocaust.  The constant shooting of unarmed, often guiltless, black people is the moral equivalent of putting Jews and other minorities into gas ovens because of the race of which they are a member.  Darnella's video captured one of America's atrocious failures as a democracy and showed it to the world.  

People of the United States prefer to deny the failures of their country, for the most part.  They have neither the intelligence nor the courage to confront them. and they call that deficit patriotism.  They think the protests of Black Lives Matter and the antifa groups are unAmerican.  We've got the point where some politicians cite Hitler as an inspiring figure.  America has become the kind of country that we once fought against.

The videos of the American police state form a record of a nation in serious intellectual and moral decline.  One may hope that when people watch those videos, they come to a realization of what we have become as a nation, that we have abandoned the premises on which our Constitution was written.

But people move to states like South Dakota to evade any attempts to confront the ways in which the nation is rebuking the ideas of liberty, equality, and justice for all. When they chant make America great again, they seem to be recalling the antebellum South.

And so, we look to those people camera recorders and mobile phones to take the pictures that might save us from ourselves.

The thing about Trump that is seldom mentioned

There is a fact about  Donald Trump that is seldom broached in accounts of his behavior.  But it is apparent in what he says and does.  Donald Trump is an incredibly stupid man.  He has the intelligence of a bucket of rocks, and he constantly puts it on display.

Lately, however, some news sources have compiled accounts of Trump's stupidity.  Salon put together a list of Trump's most stupid acts:

1)That time Trump suggested injecting household cleaners into people's lungs to cure them of the coronavirus.

2) That time he looked at a solar eclipse without eye protection — after everyone was repeatedly told not to look at the eclipse without eye protection. 

3) That time he couldn't admit he was wrong when he tweeted that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama, and so he drew on a weather map with a Sharpie to make it seem like he was right. 

4) That time he threw paper towels at people in Puerto Rico who had just endured Hurricane Maria.

5) That time he asked members of the National Security Council if they could nuke hurricanes rather than letting them hit the U.S. 

6) That time Trump was told to talk about Frederick Douglass at a Black History Month event, clearly had no idea who that was, and while trying to bullshit his way through the talk, implied that Douglass was still alive. 

7) That time he suggested that his much-desired border wall could just maybe be buttressed with alligator moats. 

8) That time he asked Canada's prime minister, Justin Trudeau, "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?”

9) That time Trump "liked" a tweet praising Rihanna. 

10) When he called the Second Epistle to the Corinthians "Two Corinthians."

This leaves us to ponder about the intelligence level of the nation that elected him to be its president.

Profile of a shooter: abject nihilism

The school shooting in Texas came at a time when a man I correspond with had raised a question about whether our society is creating an entire class of alienated people who get desperate for some sense of equity within that society.  We were discussing the motives of mass shooters and had noted that some seem motivated by racial hatred, like the one in Buffalo, N.Y.,  and some by a sense of retaliation for being excluded from the category of those whose lives matter.  

We were recalling a mutual friend who was a high school guidance counselor who had received recognition for his successes in helping troubled young people find their ways to more untroubled lives.  Our mutual friend is no longer with us, but the principles of respect and fairness he lived by stay with anyone who knew him and the school he worked in.  He said that a functioning high school did not allow social hostilities to develop  on campus, and he was adept at helping students find constructive pathways to the recognition they sought. Violence on campuses reflects social problems in the community.  The hard task for educators is to make schools a refuge from those community hostilities, providing students with a vision of a beneficial way of life.  American public education was notable for its successes in that regard--until politics intruded into it.  The counselor said that many students believe the world is out to oppress and defeat them, because that is the face it shows them.

Salvador Rolando Ramos

He made the point that while counselors advise students on academic matters and their plans for the future, the aspect of their work that was most demanding was dealing with troubled adolescents.  What troubled young people in school the most was the problems they brought with them from their families and the outside community--racism, gender attitudes, religious bigotry, and social and political prejudices.  The counselor developed policies and programs in coordination with school administrators and teachers to insure that those attitudes were excluded from the way the school operated.

When schools launched anti-bullying campaigns, he upset many education officials when, in a speech he made at a teachers' convention, he said that any educator who glibly talked about bullying didn't know what they were talking about.  He said it was a misleading term because people think it is a matter of students physically intimidating the weaker kids.  That is not the problem.  The problem is students bringing prejudices, hatreds, and bigotries from the outside into the school setting.  Students bring to school personal histories and experiences  and the attitudes they absorb from families and the social milieu in which they live.  The term "bullying" is used to cover hate-motivated acts of prejudice and discrimination practiced in the community. The  counselor said he objected to the term because it was used to cover up more insidious motives for student misbehavior, such as racial, religious, and gender hatred.  

When the counselor retired, he was often hired as a consultant to school districts who were reorganizing to address issues they were facing.  This was shortly after the Columbine massacre, and he was asked to explain the reasons that a couple of young men could hatch such a plot.  He said he couldn't; reasoning was not part of it.  He said you have to begin with the fact that the majority of adolescents "can't think beyond lunch."  To say that is not a disparagement of teen-agers, but an acknowledgment of the stages of human development.  Kids are making the transition from dependency to independence and need to understand that education is provided to save them from living by trial-and-error, which few of them would survive.

As for the Columbine shooters, much conjecture has been made about what motivated them, but the counselor said there was one irrefutable fact that is known:  they had reached a state of abject nihilism.  It is true of many of the mass shooters.  They plot the mass killings and then kill themselves.  The big question is how and why they reached that state.  The answer will be complex.

It was reported of the Uvalde shooter:  "The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said."  But the most troubling question is why he chose to kill elementary school children.  

And, of course, there is the matter of easy access to weapons of war.

Mass shootings have become a routine part of American life.  But there are also many who claim that the contention that America leads the world in mass shootings is a myth.  The nation is unable to deal with mass shootings, so they keep happening and keep increasing.

Abject nihilism defines us.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/06/03/why-so-many-mass-shooters-young-angry-men/

He's gone, but the disease isn't.

Voting Trump out of office was like surgically removing a malignant tumor.  The noxious growth is cut away, but infected cells are left behind to spread and attack the body again.  America is in a state of remission, but diseased cells are festering away in the body politic, evolving to flourish again in a deadlier form.

Trump's critics habitually say that Trump brought American democracy close to failure. They are wrong.  American democracy did fail in many aspects during Trump's tenure.  Although Joe Biden won 81 million votes to install him as president, Trump nevertheless got 74 million.  When 47 percent of the people vote against the principles of equality and justice, we have already lost the republic.  The nation has descended into a state of dysfunction in which the principles of democracy cannot work.  In such a state, democracy can be considered, but not practiced.

The case is illustrated by what the many Trump cabinet officials have  said.  Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said:  

“If we do not as Americans confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society and among our leaders in both the public and private sector — and regrettably at times even the nonprofit sector — then American democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years.”

The people who voted for Trump made an explicit statement that they prefer corrupt authoritarianism over honest democracy when they cast their votes. In the states where they hold majority rule, the democracy is not merely in a state of decline.  It is dead.  The laws passed to limit voting rights and criminalize abortion are issues of a police state.  And the persistent lies  about voting fraud and the creation of a criminal class is setting up a system as oppressive as anything the Nazi regime or the Soviet dictators could devise.  Half the nation is not interested in freedom and equality, but in establishing a system in which it can imprison and execute people they do not like.  

Above are some South Dakota politicians who are proudly standing up for the traditions of lying (more than 26,000 lies on Trump's record as president), crotch-grabbing, malice toward all, and deep dives into incompetence.  They are the malignant cells, the pall bearers of democracy.   The criminal class  has its cheerleaders.

America was killed by its firing squad

America, rest in peace.

Every bullet fired in a mass shooting strikes the heart of America.  And America leads the world in the death rate from mass shootings.

Typical (Median) Annual Death Rate per Million People from Mass Public Shootings (U.S., Canada, and Europe, 2009-2015):

1. United States — 0.058
2. Albania — 0
3. Austria — 0
4. Belgium — 0
5. Czech Republic — 0
6. Finland — 0
7. France — 0
8. Germany — 0
9. Italy — 0
10. Macedonia — 0
11. Netherlands — 0
12. Norway — 0
13. Russia — 0
14. Serbia — 0
15. Slovakia — 0
16. Switzerland — 0
17. United Kingdom — 0

The press and most people do not want to admit that the shootings are the main symptoms of America's failure as a nation.  It has failed in meeting its purpose as laid out in the Constitution:  "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty."

That's because the prevailing notion in America is that the major blessing of liberty is the right to stalk around the country with an assault weapon and blast the life out of anyone you feel like.  That right takes precedent over any matters of domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, or justice.  The right to bear a lethal weapon any time or place you choose and blast away with it overrules your right to life.  Unless you are a fetus.  According to the prevailing powers that be.  

We had a great weekend highlighted by America's favorite patriotic sport:  the mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., one in Milwaukee; one in Laguna Woods, Ca.; and one in Houston.  Are we a great country or what?

When Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem to note one of America's defining failures regarding the shootings of unarmed black people by police, he was widely denounced as unpatriotic.   When Black Lives Matter organized to protest those killings, the brilliant retort was that all lives matter.  But week after week, the news reports that in America, lives do not matter at all.  And that is the will of the people.  It was affirmed in the jury trial of Kyle Rittenhouse in the killing of a couple of people in Kenosha, Wis., for which he was acquitted.

The America envisioned in the preamble to the Constitution is dead.  For some people, it was never alive.

Lynch them abortionists, burn them books

I have lived in South Dakota for 43 years, half of my lifetime. After four decades, South Dakota has never become home to me. The state has some attractive qualities, but they are overshadowed by some corrupting factors that are a serious malignancy. I ended up here because I found a professor's job here at a time when the U.S. higher education system had produced far more doctorates than there were jobs nationally. I felt fortunate to get the job. At the time South Dakota was not much different than its midwestern neighbors. But as the 21st century progressed, the state went on a regressive course that disqualifies it from being considered a democracy.

I moved here from Illinois where I was a registered Republican, what is termed a Lincoln Republican. My special area of study and teaching is Native American literature. Before moving here, I had developed many contacts within the state with whom I met and corresponded in the course of my work. But after I had been here for a while, I noticed a coolness from my Native American associates. I mentioned it to a friend from Pine Ridge. He said the coolness was because I had become an employee of the state of South Dakota. Therefore, my contacts were not sure I could be trusted.

That situation was a reflection of a defect in the state that has grown into a major deformity. With nine tribal nations holding territory in the state, there has always been tension since the western Indian wars. But rather controlling and diminishing discrimination and racial hatred, the state has firmly developed in a way that establishes those defects of mind and character as an identifying part of the culture. It has established a single-party system of governance that solidifies and perpetuates a philosophy that is in basic contradiction to the moral and intellectual premises of American democracy. Ignorance and malice are considered admirable traits. When it came time for me to vote, I registered as a Democrat.

The problems in South Dakota are reflected in the daily news:

• A hotel in Rapid City posts a notice that it will not allow Native Americans to stay there.
• Some school board members announce that they intend to destroy some books.
• The people establish a referendum to decriminalize the possession of marijuana. It passes, but the governor finds a way to obstruct it.
• A panel of 40 people, many of them classroom teachers, produced a set of standards for teaching social studies in the public schools. The Department of Education edited out requirements for Native American history and sent it to the governor who rejected the entire project and appointed a panel of her pet hacks to create standards more to her liking.
• South Dakota still vies for top place in leading the nation in the brain drain, the loss of talented and educated people to other states.
• SmartAsset ranks the South Dakota higher education system as the worst in the nation.

South Dakota has created a fantasy that it is a place of honest, kind, hard-working people of good will. The news coming out of the state refutes that myth. So does the voting record of its people during the 21st century.

The facts show that if you wish to live in a place of good will, nice people, and a functioning democracy, South Dakota isn't it.

When you look in the mirror, do you see Donald Trump?

Long before Donald Trump became a political figure, he was known as a quintessential asshole:  "Whenever Trump has been in positions of power or authority, he has demonstrated a pattern of trying to enrich himself by abusing the trust others have placed in him — whether it’s creditors, contractors, charitable givers, Trump University students, regulators, or campaign donors."

The problem is, what does it mean when a country freely elects person of Trump's character as their leader?  Well, it means that they are either hopelessly stupid, or that they admire and share his depravity.  Click on the headline below for a quick summary of his offenses.

A rap sheet for a former president

To support and vote for Trump is a disavowal of what America is supposed to be.  He is the opposite of any of the things to which the founders aspired.  Except wealth.  And his was not earned.  It was inherited and increased through swindling and cheating.

There are many political observers who think Trump ended America.  There were 74,224,319 people who voted for Trump in 2020, who registered their objections to a liberty free from dishonesty and malice.  Trump is not the cause of America's descent into turpitude. He is its clarion.

Some people tend to dismiss objections to Trump as the usual partisan politics.  They regard Trump as just having a differing opinion on how the republic should be run.  To  hold that stance, one has to ignore the anti-democratic and corrupt things Trump has done and said.  With Trump as leader, the United States' reputation in the world has plummeted.  

The election of Joe Biden to president in no way redeems America.  It merely delays its failure for a time.  The anti-democratic forces are gaining dominance throughout the world. The failure of democracies is not because of the strength of authoritarians;  it's because of the weakness of the people.  Russia is a case in point.  After throwing off the Soviet regime for a short time, the people put one of its stalwarts--Putin, former KGB officer--back in charge.

Botox unmasked

South Dakota is a bellwether for the decline of America.  It is devoted to a self-preening bumbler of a governor who seems to think a recitation of Trump inanities and a grotesquely botoxed visage makes her presidential material.   She put the state in the national spotlight when she paid a half million dollars for a new state slogan:  "Meth.  We're on it."  She is the chosen image for the state.  

She along with her idol, Trump, are evidence that American democracy is circling the drain.  While some good things are happening in America, Trump and Noem are like malignant tumors on the political body.  They can drain the life out of it.