Rhyming History

Here's an apt quote for the day, one often mis-attributed like so many others, to Samuel Clemmons, aka Mark Twain:

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The following is an even better quote which is in fact from Mark Twain:

It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

Re-examinging one of the most famous and significant chapters in Chicago history in preparation for a forward to a book I have been asked to write, I've been struck by how issues that tore our city and country apart almost one and one half centuries ago, still resonate today. Not that we re-construct history brick by brick, but it's clear that we create the same problems for ourselves over and over and over again.

The event is the Haymarket Affair, the late nineteenth century struggle for workers' rights which led to a disastrous confrontation between workers and the police on May 4th, 1886. Eight police officers and an untold number of protestors died as a result of a bomb thrown toward a phalanx of officers as they tried to break up an otherwise peaceful rally in Haymarket Square on the near west side of the city. The business community as well as the general public, who were influenced by biased and incendiary coverage in the local media, were shocked and appalled by the deaths and demanded that the organizers of the event, most of whom were not even present when the bomb went off, pay with their lives for the deaths of the police officers. Even though the identity of the bomb thrower was never known, four men, all well known leaders of the workers' rights movement, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel and Adolph Fischer, went to the gallows on November 11th of the following year. A fifth defendant, Louis Lingg, cheated the hangman by committing suicide the night before his scheduled execution. Three other defendants had their sentences commuted and were eventually pardonned.

Today the trial that condemned the five men known to this day the world over as the Haymarket Martyrs, is by and large considered a sham, a show trial, and a gross miscarriage of justice, with neither the judge nor the jury making any attempt to disguise their prejudice against the defendants and their cause.

Obviously we don't hang people anymore for allegedly inciting riots, so we're not, literally at least, repeating that part of history. Yet reading about the buildup to the Haymarket Affair, one cannot help but see the connection to current events such as pitting the rights of one group of people against another, the role and the mistrust of police in society, and most important, the resentment, fear and sometimes outright hatred of newly arrived immigrants to this country. In fact the anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by prominent members of nineteenth century society, while perhaps a trfile more bellicose, seems to hauntingly reflect the statements of some current day pundits on the subject .

Consider these words from lead States Attorney Julius Grinnell in his closing argument at the Haymarket trial. Describing how scores of working people in Chicago, mostly German and Bohemian immigrants would react should the "jurymen unjustly acquit the anarchists", Grinnell told the jury...

...all the slimy vermin who have taken cover in the holes and byways of the city during this trial, will flock out again like a lot of rats.

That statement was met by a cheer of approval from spectators at the trial as well as from members of the jury.

A particularly vocal critic of the workers movement was former Chicago mayor and owner of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill who once wrote in an editorial in his paper about the day when he joyfully imagined:

...communistic carcasses decorating the lamp-posts of Chicago.

Granted the threat of violence from the workers as witnessed by the Haymarket Riot was real, but much of it was a reaction to violence committed agaisnt striking workers by the police and by private security companies hired by the companies they were striking against. In fact the May 4th  Haymarket rally was a direct response to the killing of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works complex on the south side the day before. Parsons and Spies, who had both been radicalized by the brutal treament of striking workers, spoke at the rally. It is said that Spies only agreed to speak if the mention of protestors arming themselves was deleted from pamphlets advertising the event. After Parsons spoke to the assembled crowd, he left the rally and was not present at the time of the bomb blast. One of the condemned, George Engel, was at home playing cards during the entire event. Only two of the Haymarket defendants, Spies and Samuel Felden who was speaking at the time the police began their advance on the crowd, were present at the time of the blast.

So what was all the fuss about? The issue was fairly simple; the over-riding concern of the workers was the enofcement of a state law banning companies from forcing their employees to work more than eight hours per day. That law which was put into the books in 1867 had no teeth, and was consequently all but ignored. The argument of the industrialists was that no one was forced to work for them and there were plenty of people in those economically depressed times willing to replace striking workers. The argument of the workers, who were paid on average $1.50 per day which was cut by 25 cents during particularly difficult times, was that such demanding hours, often 12 to 15 hour days, six days a week, essentially enslaved the wage earner to his job which didn't provide him the time to develop other skills in which he could enrich his life and better his situation. In other words, the struggle was between the rights of the capitalists to make the rules in their own compnies and the rights of the workers to earn a fair and living wage under reasonable and humane conditions.

Like Spies and Parsons, the newly arrived immigrants from central Europe and Scandinavia, many of whom were already aquainted with the work of Karl Marx and other writers promoting radical change, were deeply concerend by the over-zealous reaction of the powers-that-be, and the ruthless sometimes deadly force used against them by the police. The few who chose to arm themselves, admittedly encouraged by people like Spies and Parsons, did so for their own self-defense.

Not surprisingly, native born Americans, many of whom could only claim one or two generations of American ancestry themselves, reacted bitterly to this new wave of immigrants. Because of the relative few who committed violent acts, they painted all immigrants who came to these shores with the simple intent to better their lives, with a very broad brush, protraying them as  interlopers who seemed hell-bent on destroying the American way of life.

Sound at all familiar?

Death in the Afternoon

I had an unexpected day off work this week after my daughter fell ill as I was driving her to school the other day. Days like those can be a welcome respite from the everyday work-week. Sick as she was, I convinced my little girl to eat something and she began to perk up to the point where the two of us were able to have some quality time together. I was also able to take care of a few things I have a hard time accomplishing between work, family commitments and sleep. Despite all the great plans I had for the day, three o'clock rolled around and along with it, my body clock reminded me it was my low point of the day. So I took advantage of one more thing that I don't normally have the luxury of doing, taking an afternoon nap.

As I was planning on being quite useless for an hour or so, I decided to turn on the TV for that extra decadent edge. The plan to get some rest ended up being for naught as the local TV stations had pre-empted their regular programming due to a "breaking news" event. Today, those words don't have the same impact they once did. If you watch TV news at all these days, you're used to the words "breaking news" displayed across the bottom of the screen all the time. The problem is, news stories no matter how relevant, serious, or interesting, all have to break at some point. Flashing "breaking news" on the screen today is simply a way to draw attention to the story, the video equivalent an exclamation point. However, isn't the entire point of exclamation marks
lost if you use them at the end of every sentence?

On the other hand, breaking into non-news programming, as was the case the other day, is a different story. To this day I get chills whenever a program I'm watching is interrupted by a news report. It brings to mind words I heard for the first time over fifty years ago: "We interrupt this program to bring you a news bulletin." Those words are seldom followed by good news.

That was certainly the case the other day. Below the words "breaking news" on the screen, the bulletin was spelled out plain as day, a police officer was shot and killed in the middle of Chicago's Loop, in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. It seemed the two sets of words on the screen contradicted each other; the news was no longer breaking as the event had already concluded. The officer was shot, he died, and oh yes, not spelled out in the written bulletin, the shooter had been apprehended. The only thing breaking by the time I turned on the TV was the reporters filling in the details.

The most significant detail was the identity of the fallen officer. Mercifully, police officials were withholding his name pending notification of next of kin, and presumably allowing time for the immediate family to arrive at the hospital where he died. Sketchy reports trickled in that tactical officers from the Chicago Police Department had been pursuing a person of interest in a shooting that took place a few days before. A struggle ensued and the officer was shot. I had particular interest as I have a family member who is a member of a CPD tactical unit. When it was reported that the deceased was a district commander who joined in the pursuit, not a member of the tactical unit, I breathed a sigh of relief, followed by feeling tremendous guilt that my relief came at the expense of someone else's tragedy.

Despite no longer having a personal stake in the story, like the proverbial train wreck, I couldn't take my eyes off the continuous TV coverage. As the tragedy took place only one block from the studios of the particular station I was watching, there was more than ample news presence at the scene of the crime, with reporters tripping over one another to get their own angle on the story. By the time I tuned in, the massive Thompson Center had been evacuated of all but the most essential state employees. Its cavernous atrium was empty save for a handful of reporters and their crews with little to report other than how desolate the place felt. Another reporter out on the street didn't have much to report either, except at one point when a large group of plain clothes officers walked by. One of the anchors commented that, save for their badges which were prominently on display, they looked like ordinary citizens, which if I'm not mistaken, is exactly the point. Later, the same reporter managed to get an eye-witness to the event to speak to him. The witness said that the police apprehension of the suspect was remarkably calm and that the suspect was wearing a (bullet proof) vest, making the clear implication that the suspect may also have been a cop. Much to her credit, one of the news anchors made the observation that we shouldn't jump to conclusions by what was just said, what the man observed may not have been the apprehension but perhaps a normal exchange between officers on the scene. It turned out that what the man witnessed was indeed the actual apprehension of the suspect, yes he wore a vest, but no, he was not a police officer.

As there was so little to report at the scene, much of the coverage consisted of the voices of the talking anchors back at the studio reiterating the same points over and over again, accompanied by live shots from a stationary camera fixed on a neighboring building looking north on Dearborn past the Thompson Center showing a deserted street in the middle of what was soon to be rush hour, and another camera inside a news helicopter which hovered above the building showing more desolation.

The first meaningful contribution to the story came a little after 4PM when Chicago's Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson spoke to the press outside of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where the officer had been taken. A grief-stricken Johnson, close to tears, identified the policeman as 31 year CPD veteran Paul Bauer, who was commander of the 18th police district on Chicago's Near North Side. In his brief statement, Johnson said that while "any loss of life in this city is tragic, this one is (particularly) difficult."

Bauer's body was eventually taken to the medical examiner's office escorted by a convoy of several police and fire vehicles, a long-standing tradition of honoring fallen police and firemen and women similar to one I witnessed and wrote about almost eight years ago.

I have to say the continuous coverage of the story prior to Johnson's press conference did not serve the story well, nor did it make for particularly compelling TV.  Between turning the TV on where I learned all the significant facts of the story, until Superintendent Johnson gave his moving words to the press an hour later, I learned virtually nothing about the tragedy other than speculation about what might have happened, much of it turning out to be wrong.

Having just said that believe it or not, I don't mean this to be a criticism of the way the TV station covered the story. I have complete sympathy for the program director who was faced with a difficult decision: stay with a tragic, important story, even when there was nothing to report about it, or return to regularly scheduled programming, (and the ad revenue that goes along with it), which would have seemed trite and disrespectful, given the gravity of the situation.

They say that live TV news coverage was born with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the first time I heard the words "news" and "bulletin" used together. Walter Cronkite, one of the men who broke the news to a startled nation, said years later that back in those days, when news departments were the poor stepchildren of the TV networks, they didn't keep cameras "warm" in the studio. So when they needed to go on air immediately with an important story, all they could do was display a card with a graphic on the screen, while the voice of the reporter delivered the bulletin in the background. Hard to imagine today, but after those first bulletins that the president had been shot were delivered on the three networks, all of them went back to regularly scheduled programming until they had something new to report. I remember my kindergarten teacher furiously switching between channels to get more information, only to be frustrated when all she could find were the daytime soap operas. They finally got the tube-driven cameras warmed up and running by the time the news arrived that the president was dead and as far as I can recall, the news departments did not relinquish control of the networks until three days later after Kennedy was buried.

Since then it has become de-rigueur for TV news departments to take over the airwaves whenever a big story is breaking. Needless to say, technology has enabled the producers of news programming to get shots and to go places never thought possible back in 1963, but the essential ingredients of gathering news and getting the facts right before going on air with the story, haven't changed. It is, as we saw the other day a laborious, and frustrating process, fraught with many perils. As the German statesman  Otto von Bismark famously said: "Laws are like sausages, it's better not to see them being made." Perhaps we can add news gathering to that list.

Despite all that, with perfect twenty twenty hindsight, I think the TV station did the right thing by staying with the story, if for no other reason than out of respect for Commander Bauer and the police department.

I stopped watching after Superintendent Johnson's comments and got on with my day. As usual for me, I had the radio on in the background. I was only a little bit surprised that the radio station, our local NPR outlet, had a much different take on the story. It occurred to me that the radio was on all day and yet I had absolutely no idea of the shooting which took place at least one hour before the TV came on. After I switched back to the radio, the only mention of the tragedy was during the traffic reports, steering listeners away from the area where there had been a "police shooting". That choice of words made it impossible to determine if an officer had been shot, or did the shooting. Later when the procession to the medical examiner's office took place, the dispassionate voice of the traffic reporter told listeners to avoid the area of such and such because of a "procession of police vehicles." Little if any effort was made to connect the procession with the shooting. Later, a local news segment led off with the story of Commander Bauer's death, but it was immediately followed by an unrelated story about a corrupt policeman being acquitted of some charges. If you weren't paying close attention to the reports, you could have easily tied the two stories together, as my wife did.

One could easily say that the TV station over-played the story while the radio station under-played it. The takeaway from my experience of that day is that it's wrong to assume that one and only one news outlet has the key to all the facts, let alone the "truth." If we have any interest at all in being well informed, it's essential that we question everything we read, see and hear, and always remember to "touch that dial", better yet, crack open a book or a magazine on top of that.

In the end of course it hardly matters how the story was handled by the different news outlets in town. Without a doubt all that matters is the tragedy of a life cut too short, of a daughter losing her father, a wife her husband, neighbors, friends and acquaintances losing someone dear to them. It's the tragedy of the city losing someone who by all accounts was a dedicated professional, whose 31 years of experience in a difficult job was indispensable, and will be impossible to replace.

My thoughts are with Commander Bauer, his family and his brothers and sisters in the Chicago Police Department as he is being laid to rest today. May he rest in peace.

A Sniper in Dallas

Where have I heard those words before?

Back in college drama class, our teacher asked if anyone knew who J.D.Tippit was. Only one person raised his hand. It was my life-long obsession with the JFK assassination that enabled me to know that Tippet was the Dallas police officer who was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald (although JFK conspiracy theorists would beg do differ on that point), during the manhunt for the killer of President Kennedy.

The point of the question was to examine the nature of Classical tragedy whose subjects were inevitably the high and mighty, not your average Joe. In this case: the deaths of two people in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 were intrinsically tied together. Both victims were shot by the same man (allegedly), both were World War II veterans roughly the same age who left behind grieving wives and small children. In the general sense, both deaths were tragic, yet one sent shockwaves around the world and has been recorded in history as a major event in American if not world history. The other decedent, while receiving some press coverage at the time of his death, has gone on to become a historical footnote. Scores of articles, books, films, plays, even an opera have been written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As far as I know, not a single book, let alone opera has been written about J.D. Tippet. By virtue of position and his tragic end, one name to this day is known by the majority of people on the planet while the other name is known, as my classroom experience nearly forty years ago proved, by only a shrinking handful.

There is one concession to the dead policeman and his place in history, a historical marker in Dallas commemorating Tippit and his sacrifice, although it took 49 years to build it. At its unveiling in 2012, a state official said:

Officer Tippit did what hundreds of Dallas police officers do and have done every day... He did his job, and as a result he gave the ultimate sacrifice, and we as a community should never forget what happened on that day.

Sadly we'll be hearing similar words in the weeks to come, describing the five Dallas police officers who were ambushed during an otherwise peaceful demonstration, protesting the deaths of several African American men across the country in recent years, killed by police officers. The most recent of these deaths happened just this past week, one in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, the other in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And like the deaths of Officer Tippit and President Kennedy, the deaths of officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith, will be intrinsically connected to the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and dozens of other African American men who died at the hands of police in the last couple of years.

While each of those deaths is equally tragic, there is a disconnect between the deaths of the police officers and the men killed by the police. Rather than placing equal weight on every loss of life, to many individuals in this country, the narrative of these men's deaths will be colored by the political ideology of the individual.

For some, the men who were killed by the police were resisting arrest, they may not have deserved to die, but definitely played a role in their own deaths. For others, the Dallas police officers may or may not have themselves done anything wrong, but all police are in some way complicit in the abuse of their authority and the institutional racism that is a part of their profession. To some, the violence against police brutality, especially as it exists in relation to the African American community, while not acceptable, is understandable.

As has been the case in this country for a long time, national tragedies such as these, instead of bringing us together as they should, have hardened hearts and torn us even more apart. The disconnect between the African American men killed by the police in recent years and the police officers killed in Dallas last Thursday night, is a perfect metaphor for the hardening divide we are experiencing in this nation today.

It is that divide that prevents individuals from thinking clearly and forming rational opinions. It's true for both the left and the right. We've slipped back into the habit of labeling people as groups rather than recognizing them as individuals. To some, all police are corrupt, brutal and racist; to others, all black people have the potential for violence.

That is the reason why every civilian death at the hands of police is treated equally by some. As I pointed out in my post about Laquan McDonald last November, that is a mistake. As you may recall, McDonald was a Chicago teenager on a vandalism spree who was shot sixteen times by an Chicago Police Department officer. From a video of McDonald's death taken from a police car dashboard-cam, it is very evident that while the teenager was indeed resisting arrest, he posed no imminent threat to anyone, including the officers on the scene. The cop who emptied his gun into McDonald and was re-loading when his partner told him to hold his fire, has been charged with murder and is awaiting trial.

The McDonald case, along with its subsequent cover-up by the CPD and the City of Chicago to me represents nothing less than the most egregious example of governmental malfeasance and criminal behavior on the part of the police. However, in each of the other well documented cases over the past several years, many of which were also documented on video, none were so clear cut. That is not to say the killings were justified, rather from the evidence presented, the acts of the police and the victims were ambiguous, and different interpretations of their motivations and actions are possible. While every civilian death at the hands of the police is a tragedy, no two are the same, nor should they be treated as such.

It has been pointed out that African Americans and other minorities are singled out by the police and treated differently from whites. The people making these claims have a point, but the extent to which that is true is debatable and the issue has been grossly over-simplified by the press and social media over the past few years.

Of the 484 people killed by the police in this country so far this year. 238 of them were white, and 123, or 25 percent of them were black. That number is still disproportionate to the population of African Americans in this country which stands at around 13 percent. In all fairness, it must also be pointed out that violent crimes (including the murder of police officers) are committed by African Americans in numbers disproportionate to their population as well. The reasons for this are many, but it is still an indisputable fact. It is also a fact that the victims of violent crime are disproportionately black. It should surprise no one that there might be a cause and effect relationship between the crime rate in the black community and the response from police, yet a casual observer whose source of news comes from one particular point of view, might assume that police only harass and kill black people in this country, while white criminals are given a free pass. The numbers simply do not support that assumption.

That is not to say that horrendous injustices involving the police do not take place far too often in this country. On the other hand, it is simply wrong to lump all police men and women together as brutal, racist thugs who abuse their authority.

The deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling last week bring a new dynamic into the picture. Unlike many of the well publicized deaths of black individuals at the hands of law enforcement officials, these two men were armed with guns during their confrontations with the police. Castile was stopped in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, on the pretext that his car had a broken tail light; the cops apparently thought he matched the description of a robbery suspect. In order to avoid any misunderstanding. Castile responsibly informed the officers that he had a valid conceal/carry permit and in fact had a gun in his possession. When he reached (presumably) for his drivers licence as requested by one of the officers, the other officer opened fire (again presumably) assuming Castile was reaching for his gun. Castile's girlfriend and her four year old daughter were in the car at the time of the shooting.

Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside a food store in Baton Rouge. Someone, reportedly a homeless man, approached Sterling asking for money. When the man persisted, Sterling allegedly produced his weapon, prompting the man to phone the police. When they arrived, a struggle ensued and Sterling was shot when the cops discovered his gun.

As individuals carrying weapons presumably for their own protection, both Castile and Sterling it would seem, would be poster children for the gun crowd, who advocates the arming of private citizens. But the NRA has remained uncharacteristically silent after their deaths. No cries of foul that the police violated the men's civil rights to bear arms were sounded. Now it's true that Sterling as a convicted felon, could not have legally obtained a carry permit, but all indications lead to the fact that he was carrying the weapon for his own safety. Castile as we saw was authorized to carry a gun and was well within his legal rights.

So why the silence from the NRA? Is it because as some people suggest they are a racist organization who would have cried bloody murder had Castile and Sterling been white? Or do the tragic deaths of these two individuals serve as yet another reminder that the stance that we'd all be safer if we carried a gun is ludicrous? I suppose only the NRA knows the answer to that question and they're are not talking.

Finally there was the terrible shooting in Dallas where a former soldier opened fire and killed five police officers and injured many more, including civilians, apparently in retaliation for the killings of black men across the country by law enforcement officials. Ironically, the Dallas Police Department has a relatively good record when it comes to its relationship with the sizable African American community of that city. Not to go into a psychological profile of the killer, but it seems clear to me that like so many Americans, he was swept into a frenzy because of the current obsession of the press and social media, concentrating on the misdeeds of cops toward the African American community, without putting them into context.

A video that has gone viral shows a black woman from St. Louis commenting about violent protests that took place in her city over an African American man who was shot and killed by police after he pulled a gun on them. That same evening she points out, in the suburb of Ferguson, a young black girl who was doing her homework, was killed by a stray bullet that came from a gun used in a drive-by shooting that found its way into her bedroom. Not a soul protested the little girl's death. The truth is far more black people die at the hands of other black people in this country than by police. Yet in some circles, this is irrelevant as it is apparently not an appropriate topic for discussion.

Then there are the guns. The events of last week showed time and again how ridiculous is the notion that civilians carrying guns in public is a good idea. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile lost their lives because they were carrying guns. And it took an army of well trained, heavily armed law enforcement officials, with the help of an exploding robot to bring down the Dallas sniper. Imagine if armed protesters at the demonstration had decided to do a little freelance police work on their own, no doubt dozens of innocent people would have died. Instead, the civilians at the protest, many of whom we can assume were armed (it was Texas after all), ran for their lives, which turned out to be the sensible thing to do.

The pro gun crowd constantly complains about folks on the other side who use a terrible tragedy to promote their anti-gun agenda. Well it turns out terrible tragedies involving guns are occurring at a rate of about two or three per week these days so tell me, where is the opportunity to talk openly about guns when no such tragedy occurs? They say that laws restricting guns only affect law abiding citizens, since criminals who by nature of their being criminals, aren't going to be concerned about following any law. Fair enough. But consider this: our ever increasing relaxation of laws prohibiting firearms has a direct effect on the number of weapons manufactured. No one knows for sure but most data suggests there are more guns in the United States (approximately 300 million) than there are people. It has also been estimated that there are about twice as many guns today in this country than there were fifty years ago. Criminals don't make their guns themselves, they either buy them or steal them. And the overwhelming supply of guns in this country makes them ridiculously cheap and easy to get, including weapons of mass destruction like the semi-automatic assault rifles used in the Orlando mass shooting a few weeks ago, and in Dallas last week. Those guns are capable of discharging as many rounds of ammunition per minute as the shooter is capable of pulling the trigger.

As for the idea of "good guys with guns", well as someone put it in an online comment, the Dallas sniper, a U.S. Army veteran, was once a good guy with a gun.

Let's face it, we have many serious problems in this country, and finger pointing, marching and posturing, satisfying as they may be to the people who engage in them, aren't going to do much good. These problems, just like the deaths mentioned above, are all interconnected; cherry picking one problem or another based upon our political convictions simply will not work. We can't address the abuse of police authority without also addressing black on black crime, white privilege, and racism. We can't address racism or black on black crime without addressing poverty and a lack of jobs and education in the black community. We can't address those issues without addressing issues like the rapid decline of the two parent family and the idea of personal responsibility. We can't address the issue of crime and violence without addressing all of the above AND the availability of guns. And like it or not, we can't address the issue of the availability of guns without addressing the issue of how we can control the sale, manufacture and possession of firearms without violating constitutional rights. Until we find a way to listen to the other side, work out our differences, be willing to compromise, and honestly come to terms with issues that are inconvenient for us, we can only expect more of the same.

All the catchy slogans in the world aren't going to solve any problems. Yes I get it, black lives do matter and guns don't kill people, people kill people.

It's just so much more damn complicated than that.