2014 or 1914?

The casual racism and insensitivity may be in the mode of 21st century branding—

Federal officials intervened Friday to stop police in Ferguson, Mo., from wearing "I am Darren Wilson" bracelets in solidarity with the police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old there last month.

Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson agreed to bar his officers from wearing the bracelets while in uniform and on duty, and to ensure that other local police agencies did too, according to a letter released Friday by Christy Lopez, deputy chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

But it's not trivial cluelessness— not when the St. Louis area has a long history of violence against blacks.

East St. Louis, 1917: rampaging whites incited by a familiar narrative—that blacks were coming to take their jobs and steal elections.

Public Servants

David Ehrenstein, on the apology forced in Ferguson.

Charles Pierce, on new episodes of police violence against unarmed citizens, and old stories

Something has gone badly wrong in the relationship between local police and the citizens they are supposed to serve. It has taken a long time to get to this point. It probably began during the early days of the "war" on drugs, in which local police were encouraged to believe that almost anything was permissable because they were facing a well-armed and well-financed "enemy" in the streets. This introduced the "Powell Doctrine" of overwhelming force to local law-enforcement, with all that entailed, including arming local sheriff's departments as though they were heavy-weapon platoons advancing on Bastogne. This attitude, and the equipment available to act it out, naturally bled over from drug busts to local police work in general.

As should be sadly obvious, black folks were the first to notice what was going on. In 1990, in Boston, when Carol DiMaiti Stuart was murdered by her husband, Charles, the murderer threw out a fairy tale about a black perpetrator that sent the Boston police on an absolute rampage through the neighborhood where the shooting occurred. It didn't stop until Stuart confessed by throwing himself off the Tobin Bridge.

He concludes his piece with this comparison

In February of last year, two Muslim men were sentenced in a London court for butchering a British soldier named Lee Rigby to death in broad daylight on a public street. The two demanded that onlookers take videos of their barbarity as the two of them literally dripped with blood. When the London police arrived on the scene, the two killers charged them. They were shot. But they were only wounded. They were alive to stand trial, to be convicted, and to be sentenced. They were not killed in the street next to their victim. They were shot by police but they were alive today, which is more than can be said for Michael Brown, killed for being big and black, or John Crawford III, killed for holding a BB gun while black. Something has gone badly wrong in this country.

Retired Captain Ray Lewis (R) of the Philadelphia Police department displays a sign during a peaceful protest on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri on August 23, 2014, two weeks after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown (AFP Photo/Michael B. Thomas)

Derangement

Notes on an anniversary.

Considering the latest, Digby recalls this statement—

All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies… So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. --- Osama bin laden

Tengrain re-posts "Falling into History"—

...originally from the SF Chronicle from 2006, which seems like a lifetime ago; It was written by Neva Chonin, who has long since gone from The Chron. I still think this essay remains the best writing about September 11 that I have encountered. This essay has fallen into the void and is no longer on their servers. I want to ensure that it remains on the web...

Charles Pierce—

So it is the 13th anniversary of the day on which America was successfully encouraged by murderers to lose its mind and, last night, the president gave a speech entangling the United States in another combat situation in another place in that same part of the world against a different group of murderers who have taken it on themselves to encourage America to lose its mind....

The president, says Pierce, is

... groping, still, to find logic to the derangement that broke out on this day, 13 years ago. He is groping, still, for a way out of the profitable trauma.

Undead, Again

A history re-write that's just a little too much, too soon?

The NYTimes suddenly remembers that Dick Blam-Blam Cheney was actually not the president.

Correction: September 9, 2014
An earlier version of a summary with this article misstated the former title of Dick Cheney. He was vice president, not president.

Oh well, perhaps it's an easy mistake for a stenographer. After all, Dick Cheney is a very important man who gets around.

As does Henry K.—who is currently on the book tour and bland revisionism circuit.

Cheney snowglobe
Philip Toledano - America, The Giftshop

Impunity

Some more national notice, of this bizarre police shooting in Ohio—at the instigation of a false report. The couple who made it, sound quite untethered (but... white).

And more of police behavior in Ferguson.

Fifty Years Later

Freedom Summer anniversary; "hands-up" demonstrations.

Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg

Brad Friedman, "Tale of Two Protests: The Armed Bundy Bunch and the Peaceful Demonstrators of Ferguson"—

It was peaceful citizens, with their empty hands in the air --- not pretend "patriots" aiming long guns... who may ultimately be seen as the ones who helped begin a national rollback of the absurd militarization, perhaps better described as "Hollywoodization," of our nation's law enforcement organizations.

Now, as fifty years ago: different treatment for different protests—or for just being on the streets—

A man, his shirt stained by blood running down his face, is cornered in a doorway by club-wielding police early August 30, 1964 in North Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The man had been clubbed for refusing to move along. (AP Photo)

Demonstrators shout at policemen who ask them to move on along City Hall in New York, Sept. 24, 1964 as they protest a Board of Education busing program aimed at increasing racial balance in New York City schools. (AP Photo/Harry Harris)

Both photos (and very much more), from 1964: Civil Rights Battles

Roy Edroso sums up the right's response—

After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson on August 9 and word started to get around that the killing might not have been as kosher as the cops said it was, many of the brethren went about dealing with this dead unarmed black guy the way they deal with all dead unarmed black guys: slurring the deceased, and portraying the negative reaction of his friends, family, and community as proof that black people are thugs, the real racists, etc.

Charles Pierce says what should not be forgotten—

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

Hands Up

Even if the narrative of unarmed black teenager killed by police is entirely too familiar: this time around, there's a special motif of pictures, and it's leading the story in remarkable directions.

When police left Michael Brown's body in a Ferguson street for several hours, witnesses took photos and spread the story to social media, and to the world.

The apparent abandonment of the body added a new outrage to old reasons for outrage.

Media coverage was predictable, and outbursts unrelated to the peaceful protests garnered the usual "if it loots it leads" treatment.

But protestors' hands-up theme created powerful counter-images.

In words and pictures: one eyewitness account of protest and arrest.

In the context of covering the right-wing punditry beat, Roy Edroso—

To see a middle-American cop gun down an unarmed black kid, and then see his colleagues go colonial on his black neighbors while arresting MSM reporters in a vain attempt to conceal it, and then say it's Obama's fault -- that is some bullshit. And it beautifully encapsulates a conservatarian strategy we've been seeing a lot of lately: Stroke the bigots who are mashing down black folks with one hand, while pathetically pressing the other against your brow and weeping crocodile tears for the civil liberties you claim Democrats stole from you.

At Roy's police go colonial link: a very large screenshot (from NBC coverage), that is something to behold.