Revisiting a Classic II: American Propaganda

The word propaganda has sinister connotations. Hearing the word makes me think of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister for Propaganda, whose secret to success was defined in his famous quote: 

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

It's also makes me think of the current dictator of Russia who recently used the feckless Tucker Carlson as a vehicle to distribute nonsense, trying to justify his criminal invasion of Ukraine to any American willing to listen.

But propaganda is not the sole domain of tyrants, and while it implies bias, it needn't consist of misinformation or outright lies.

Does that mean there can be good propaganda? I guess that all depends upon whose propaganda it is and which side you're on.

In the mid-1930s, Americans were reeling from the Great Depression. Many men in this country who were approaching middle age were still living with the memories and the effects of what was arguably the most terrifying war from the viewpoint of the average soldier, World War I. 

The same was true in Europe only more so. The big difference is in Europe, another war was on the horizon. And the vast majority of Americans at the time wanted no part of it. Who can blame them?

The support for isolationism and non-intervention in foreign wars among Americans in the thirties was overwhelming. So much so that Congress passed several neutrality acts late in the decade, which not even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in marked opposition to them, would dare veto.

The chief problem with those acts is that they were blanket declarations, forbidding any kind of participation or aid in a foreign conflict, even in support of an ally who was attacked. Roosevelt understood the threat that Hitler and the Nazis posed to the free world, but politically there was little if anything he could do about it until September 1, 1939.

On that day, the Nazis invaded Poland resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. This changed American public opinion only slightly. FDR managed to push through arms sales to the Allies on a cash and carry basis which passed with only a small majority in Congress. Eventually the Allies' reserve of liquid currency began to run out and Britain, alone in Europe in the fight against Hitler after the Nazis marched into Paris, was desperate.

Enter Lend-Lease, Roosevelt's plan to send arms and materiel to the Allies free of charge with the stipulation that the supplies be returned after the conflict. The president used marketing, (another word for propaganda) to explain his plan to the American people by appealing to their sense of self-interest. He used the simple analogy of a homeowner lending a neighbor his garden hose to put out a fire. The logic was that A) putting out the fire while it was still small not only would save the neighbor's house but perhaps also the home of the lender and B) the hose would be returned when it was no longer needed. 

Roosevelt succeeded in passing the Lend-Lease Act which was signed in March of 1941. Again, much of the country balked. 

That is exactly where the United States stood when the main action in the film Casablanca takes place.

In one of the film's most famous scenes, Rick is alone, drinking himself into a stupor after earlier that evening, the love of his life walked into his nightclub in the arms of another man. It is very late, long after the joint has shut down for the night. Sam walks in and tries to console his friend but to no avail. Rick asks Sam a curious question: "It's December, 1941, what time is it in New York?" "My watch broke" replies Sam, We understand the question better with Rick's next line: "I bet they're sleeping in New York, I bet they're sleeping all over America." 

 

Then comes one of the most famous lines of the movie: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

I saw Casablanca probably a dozen times before I noticed the "It's December, 1941" part. During all those viewings I just assumed Rick was commenting on how really late at night it was; if they're asleep in New York, it must be at least 3am in Casablanca, if the rest of America is asleep, even later.  

But if it was December, 1941, they were also figuratively asleep all over America, as Europe and the Pacific were going up in flames. On the seventh day of that month, we were finally awakened.

Until I noticed Rick curiously pointing out the date, the ambiguity of that line was lost on me, along with one of the film's most important aspects. Along with being a splendid wartime drama and love story with elements of film noir, mystery, suspense, and even comedy thrown in, above all, Casablanca was a propaganda film.

The message the film was marketing to the American people and to the rest of the world was clearly anti-fascism. We learn in the film that in the years before the action takes place, its protagonist Rick Blaine had actively fought on the Republican side against the Franquistas in Spain and had run guns to the Ethiopians in their struggle against Fascist Italy. Meanwhile the other hero Victor Laszlo was busy fighting the Nazis. 

The line with the double meaning was written before December 7, 1941. but the film wasn't shot until the following year, well after the United States had entered World War II. Why then bother including the line in the film which wasn't originally set to be released until 1943, long after we as a country had supposedly woken up?

My theory is that as much as Casablanca was making a clear statement against our enemies in the war, the film is also a critique of American society, at least the part of it that still had reservations about our participation in the war, many of whom had sympathies with and philosophical ties to the Nazis. 

There was a great deal of anti-Nazi sentiment during the thirties in Hollywood. Warner Brothers (who produced Casablanca) was especially active having closed all its operations in Germany back in 1934. But American film companies were hesitant to make anti-Nazi films as the Hays Office (see my last post), strongly discouraged production of movies that had biases against foreign countries including Germany, out of fear of offending both the country, and this nation's German speaking population,

So rather than making overtly anti-German films, in 1937, Warner Brothers produced two movies that were set in the United States, but were unmistakable allegories for what was going on in Europe at the time. Black Legion, (with Humphrey Bogart) was a fictional story about a white supremacist group in Detroit modeled after the KKK. They Won't Forget (with Claude Rains), was a fictionalized account of the real-life story of Leo Frank, a young Jewish man who was (by most accounts wrongfully) convicted and lynched for the murder of a 13 year old girl in Atlanta. 

In 1940, after the war began in Europe, Warner Brothers purchased the rights to Everybody Comes to Rick's, an anti-Nazi play written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison. The film company paid a king's ransom for the work, all the more so as the play had never been produced. By then, other film companies felt the time was right to make anti-Nazi propaganda films. Some were forgettable such as Hitler-Beast of Berlin, others were classics like Charles Chaplin's The Great Dictator. 

Yet there were still Americans who felt the time wasn't right to offend the Nazis. In 1941, members of Congress conducted hearings investigating Hollywood's anti-Nazi "motion picture propaganda". The two senators who initiated the hearings were Gerald Nye of North Dakota and D. Worth Clark of Idaho.  Both senators had ties to the America First Committee, a group founded in 1940 to promote isolationism. Two of the group's most prominent members were industrialist Henry Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, both barely concealed anti-Semites. On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh who had Nazi sympathies, gave an infamous speech in Des Moines where bemoaning "the Jewish problem", claimed that Jews were controlling "our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government” all in the effort along with FDR and the British, to lure us into the war. 

In response President Roosevelt commented:

When I read Lindbergh’s speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by Goebbels himself. What a pity that this youngster has completely abandoned his belief in our form of government and has accepted Nazi methods because apparently they are efficient.

It all became moot after December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days later the America First Committee was no more. We were at war with both Japan and Germany and work was well underway to turn Everybody Comes to Rick's, which the writer James Agee claimed was the worst play ever written, into the screenplay for what was to become Casablanca, which some to this day claim to be the best movie ever made. 

My argument that Casablanca should be in the running to be considered among the best of the best*, is the fact that over eighty years after its release, it continues to speak to us in its universal themes of love and sacrifice, of values and forgiveness, of right and wrong, of the importance of looking beyond our self-interest, and the lengths we would go just to survive. 

In light of the last decade, especially the last two years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine and even more recently, the war in Gaza , Casablanca is especially relevant today. 

My current obsession with the movie was inspired by the resemblance of the late Alexei Navalny, the heroic Russian opposition leader, to the character Victor Laszlo. Mind you it is only a superficial resemblance at best. Once out of harm's way in a German hospital after being poisoned in Russia, the real Navalny returned to Russia to carry on his work, where he knew he would end up in prison, standing a good chance of meeting an untimely death as is the case with everyone who runs afoul of Vladimir Putin. That chance became a reality this February 16 in a gulag in Siberia.  

Navalny's life and tragic death touched people's lives far and wide. Even Putin's two most useful idiots in the United States couldn't stay silent. Without placing any blame, Tucker Carlson said: "The whole thing is barbaric and awful. No decent person would defend it." Donald Trump went one step further paying Navalny the greatest compliment his twisted mind could come up with, comparing Navalny's ordeal with his own.

The fictional Victor Laszlo's life was peaceful by comparison, escaping Europe for the relative safety of America. But there is one particular line in the movie that by changing a few words, could define Navalny's legacy. 

As he is interrogated by the antagonist in the film, Major Strasser of the Gestapo (Conrad Weidt), Laszlo is offered his freedom if he divulges the names of the resistance members all over Europe with whom he has been in contact. After refusing to comply he explains to the Major the inevitable futility of the cause of the Nazis and all totalitarian movements: 

And what if you track down these men and kill them? What if you murdered all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands, would rise to take our places. Even Nazis can't kill that fast.

Relevant or not, an eighty-year-old movie is bound to appear dated, especially when it comes to current attitudes, values and sensibilities, and Casablanca is no exception. I generally shy away from judging the past through the lens of contemporary standards; however I believe that blindly dismissing acts of the past as simply products of their time is a cop-out. 

One objection I've read about Casablanca is that despite being a movie about refugees from Nazi Germany, no Jews are depicted. On one hand, this is a curious assertion as while there was no attempt to identify characters in the film as being Jewish, there is absolutely no reason to believe they were not Jewish. The fact is a great number of people responsible for making Casablanca, from the authors of the play it was based upon, to the screenwriters, the director, and the producer of the movie, to the owners of the company that made the film, were Jewish. Even more telling is that a high percentage of the cast was Jewish, themselves refugees from the Nazis. 

Perhaps the film makers elected to portray World War II as a crisis affecting all of humanity by not singling out any one particular ethnic identity as its victims. 

On the other hand, the dark side is that the makers of the film had to have been cognizant of the fact that had they emphasized the Jewishness of the refugees, they would have been called out in the antisemitic climate of the U.S. by folks such as Lindbergh, as being producers of Jewish propaganda.  

Another bone the filmmakers threw at potential American censors including the OWI, (Office of War Information, the official department of U.S. wartime propaganda) was to give the impression that America was the great beacon of hope for the world's oppressed, who opened its arms to anyone who sought refuge here. That could not have been further from the truth as the U.S. imposed strict immigration quotas even on refugees, based upon ethnicity and race. 

In 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis departed Hamburg with 937 passengers aboard, nearly all of them Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The ship was bound for Cuba where the refugees hoped to stay until visas for them to enter the United States were granted. During the trans-Atlantic voyage, the government of Cuba rescinded its offer to accept the refugees. When the ship docked in the port of Havana, only a handful of passengers, those with the appropriate immigration documents were allowed to disembark. The ship with rest of its passengers aboard sailed north toward Miami where they hoped to land safely. But the immigration quota of the U.S. was already filled, there was in fact a waiting list a mile long and welcoming the refugees aboard the St. Louis into the country would have meant they would have "jumped in line" ahead of those who had already applied for entry. 

Rules are rules after all.

The United States could have raised the immigration quota on humanitarian grounds but the vast majority of Americans, many of whom were sympathetic to the plight of the refugees aboard the St. Louis, were still opposed to changing the quota. The same situation applied in Canada. 

Without any other option, the ship sailed back to Europe where some of the passengers were granted asylum in Great Britain. Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones ended up in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, all of which would become occupied by the Germans. Some of those refugees were eventually able to obtain immigration visas to the United States. Of the rest who did not, 254 souls, more than one quarter of those who departed Hamburg on the St. Louis for a new life in America, perished in the Holocaust. 

The refugee situation only got worse in the States as the war waged on. Among the refugees aboard one ship headed for the United States was a confirmed Nazi spy. The government used this bit of anecdotal evidence to mount a case for the inherent danger of allowing refugees into this country, and further restricted immigration, despite the mounting evidence of genocide in Europe.

While the race and ethnicity of the refugees depicted in the movie were never established, the character of Sam was unequivocally black. That goes back to the original play, where the character of a different name who would become Sam in the movie, was identified throughout the play's script simply as "the NEGRO". The screenwriters gave Sam a little more humanity, identifying him by name in the film script, but they wrote his lines in what could best be described as a white person's idea of the way black people speak. 

Here's a little snippet of the script's dialog between Sam and Rick:

RICK:

Sam, Ferrari wants you to work for him at the Blue Parrot.

SAM: 

Ah likes it fine here.

RICK: 

He'll double what I pay you here.

SAM:

Ah ain't got time to spend what ah makes here.

Fortunately, Dooley Wilson who played Sam, toned down the patois considerably. 

In the line that immediately proceeds this dialog, the aforementioned Signor Ferrari (Sydney Greenstreet) offers to buy Rick's nightclub, along with its piano player Sam. Rick responds: "I don't buy or sell human beings." That line was obviously written to help establish Rick's left-of-center credentials. It was hardly revolutionary in 1941, nearly eighty years after the issue of slavery was resolved in this country. But you can begin to appreciate the line when you consider that a mere three years earlier, Hollywood produced Gone With the Wind, a movie that earnestly celebrated the antebellum South and the institution of slavery with as much glee as Mel Brooks's farcical music number "Springtime for Hitler" celebrated the Nazis. 

In his commentary to Casablanca that I linked to in my previous post, Roger Ebert argues that Sam, a black man and Rick, a white man are equals in the film, something unheard of in Hollywood at the time. Well, the being equal part is not entirely true as Sam is in Rick's employ. But he is Rick's best friend and only male friend whose relationship is not transactional. Yes, Sam gets a paycheck from Rick but as is made abundantly clear, he could do better elsewhere if he chose.

As tempting as it is to say that Casablanca was ahead of the curve if only slightly in terms of the way Hollywood portrayed black people, there is one word in one line of the film that sends everything into full scale retrograde. It's Ilsa's first scene where she and her husband walk unawares into the club owned by her former lover Rick. She spots Sam who was with Rick and her in Paris. Trying to play it cool and not let on about what happened while her husband was away in a concentration camp, she says to Captain Renault in front of Victor, "Captain -- the boy who is playing the piano -- somewhere I have seen him." 

Dooley Wilson was 56 when he played Sam, Ingrid Bergman who played Ilsa was 27.

It is the cringiest line of the movie and has been for at least six decades. No amount of explaining or putting it into the context of the era can change that.**

No one has ever accused Casablanca of being ahead of the curve as far as women are portrayed in the movies. By 1941, although it was the exception rather than the rule, Hollywood had given us a number of films featuring strong female characters in firm control of their destiny.*** Let's face it, Ilsa Lund, the spouse of Victor Laszlow, is no Yulia Navalnaya, the spouse of Alexei Navalny. After her husband's death, Navalnaya pledged to carry on her husband's work making herself not only persona-non-grata in her own country but also risking becoming a dead-woman-walking wherever she is as Putin's pathological fear of opposition and his homicidal impulses know of no national borders. 

By contrast Ilsa, not long after learning erroneously of her husband's death, falls in love with Rick in Paris. Then to the consternation of a great many contemporary feminists, once reunited with her husband, AND her lover, she tells the latter that she can no longer stand being separated from him and leaves the decision of how to proceed up to him. 

But for most feminists, far and away the most unsettling part of Casablanca is its treatment of the character of Captain Louis Renault. 

If you were to take the most corrupt police official you have ever read about in the news, then multiply that person's malfeasance tenfold, you would still come up a bit short of Louis Renault.

The crazy, inexplicable and for many, unacceptable thing about him is that despite being a despicable individual, he is one of the most likable characters in the movie, he gets the funniest lines and in the end, becomes a hero to the cause, so to speak. Among the many unspeakable acts and outright crimes he commits while abusing his role as the Chief of Police of Casablanca, Renault routinely extorts women by offering highly coveted exit visas to them, in exchange for sex. 

Casablanca was obviously made several decades before the women's movement gained momentum and several more decades before the advent of the MeToo Movement. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that while the attitudes about sexual harassment and the exploitation of women were different eighty years ago, there was no justification then or now for finding light in the actions of Renault, and that the filmmakers by making Renault a likable character despite his crimes are guilty of obfuscating and trivializing his actions. 

I have a slightly different take on that last part, namely that the filmmakers did not cover up the actions of Renault in the slightest, but rather made them crystal clear and out in the open. It is we the viewers who through our fondness of the character over the decades, have overlooked his actions and trivialized them. 

Let me explain.

The Spanish have a humorous expression: Mas lento como el caballo del malo, (Slower than a bad guy's horse). It refers to the predictable Hollywood Westerns of old, where characters were clearly defined, and the good guy always caught the bad guy because for some reason, the bad guy's horse was always slower.

In a widely referenced and decidedly not so silly essay despite its title: Casablanca, or, the Cliches are Having a Ball, philosopher Umberto Eco describes the film as a pastiche of several historical literary and dramatic themes, taken from works ranging from Homer to the most current popular entertainment of the time. According to him, set into those themes are characters who, like the Spanish idea of American Westerns, are "stock figures, either all good or all bad." 

 

It's at this point in the essay where it appears that Eco and I had not been watching the same movie.****

From my point of view, there are only two characters in Casablanca who fit Eco's "stock figure" description. Representing the forces of good versus evil, in one corner is Victor Laszlo, the noble Resistance fighter risking life and limb to defend freedom and democracy. In the other corner, equally devoted to his cause of preserving, protecting and defending The Third Reich, is Major Strasser of the Gestapo.

In the end, just like the Westerns, the horse belonging to good guy dressed in white, Victor Laszlo, ended up being faster than Major Strasser's, as if by design.

As portrayed in the film, Victor Laszlo is an extraordinary person. I suppose in his one-dimensionality, so too is Major Strasser. The rest of the characters in the film are ordinary people doing their best to survive under extraordinary circumstances. 

In other words, they're complicated.

I honestly can't name any character in Casablanca (with the exception of Major Strasser) who is all bad, but Captain Renault comes mighty close.

His trademark line "round up the usual suspects" defines Renault's approach to his job, that is to say throw as much shit against the wall to see what sticks. If nothing sticks, at least it looks like he's doing something. 

Before we even meet him in the film, we witness one of those brutal round ups he speaks of, as officers under Renault's command terrorize the streets of Casablanca, capturing any character they deem suspicious looking.  One unlucky soul is even shot dead in the back as he runs away from the thuggish cops. Renault may not himself be a Nazi, but without people like him, the Nazis would never had been able to wreak the amount of havok they did. 

We don't see the death of Signor Urgate (Peter Lorre) while in the custody of Renault, we only hear the Captain mention his death while debating casually, as if he were deciding what to order for lunch, whether to report that Urgate committed suicide or was killed trying to escape. 

 

And we never see Renault assaulting women, he only alludes to those actions with little more than a wink and a nudge.

What we do see is a prolonged scene with one of his prospective victims deeply searching her soul, pouring her heart out to Rick by contemplating what appears to be the only chance to get her and her husband out of Casablanca. Check out my last post which features both a video clip from, and the script of that scene.

Yet bad as he is, at the end of the film Louis Renault gets to walk arm and arm into the mist with the hero Rick in the last shot of the movie, redeemed by his sudden conversion into a patriot, the beginning of a beautiful friendship. 

All is forgiven and our sense of justice is thrown askew because Renault's horse turns out to be the swiftest of all, not quite as we think it should be.

Is it an injustice of the filmmakers to portray a scumbag such as Renault as a likeable character?

Well in the real world, bad guys' horses aren't always slow, despicable people sometimes can be quite charming when they're not doing despicable things, and in a time of war, combatants don't have the luxury of screening allies for their moral character. Remember, by the time Casablanca was released, Joseph Stalin was our ally.

 

No, I think given the two distinct sides of Louis Renault, it's up to viewer to decide. It's the kind of moral dilemma that Alfred Hitchcock, a master of telling stories with moral dilemmas, would be proud of. *****

 

If we end up liking Louis, it's on us, not the filmmakers. 

Back when I was an impressionable youngster studying film, I pooh poohed Casablanca for its over-the-top sentimentality and its heavy-handed dialog, but especially because the film theorists whom I respected were dismissive if not outright hostile to it. In other words, it wasn't cool to like Casablanca. 

But I got older and stopped caring so much about what other people told me to like. I grew to love the movie simply because it was so entertaining, especially the performances from the leads, to the greatest supporting cast ever put together in a motion picture, to the bit players who only have one line of dialog if that, to the of hundreds of extras, a great many of whom were themselves refugees from the Nazis. It's spectacularly beautiful to look at, thanks to the efforts of the director Michael Curtiz and the cinematographer Arthur Edison. And the screenplay despite its hiccups, gives us a story filled with characters we care about, not to mention all the great lines that have become woven into American culture.

It's a movie that stands up to multiple viewings as every time you see it, you pick up on details you missed before. By now I've probably seen Casablanca fifteen times and am still discovering new things, whether they be unnoticed comic gems, or clues that give heretofore unrealized insight into one of the characters. Some of those moments from my most recent viewing helped guide these two posts. It's a work of extreme economy, there's not one superfluous scene or even shot that is not essential to telling the story.

Mostly it stands the test of time.

That's especially true given the current state of the world. We've always had police corruption, sexism and racism, but I never thought I'd see the following again, especially in the United States: 

• A return to pathological self-interest and isolationism as expressed by the term "America First."
• Indifference and outright hostility to the plight of the refugee.
• An acceptance of totalitarianism because of its apparent efficiency.
• Joseph Goebbels inspired "alternative facts" making a comeback. 
• A criminal European dictator with absolute control and impunity being admired and embraced by a good many Americans including a former and possibly future president of the United States. 

Before getting on that plane to Lisbon, Victor Laszlo's parting words to Rick are: 

Welcome back to the fight, this time I know our side will win.

Watching Casablanca today and exploring it in the context of the time in which it was made as we just have, makes us realize we've been through all this before. Today our world is not in an altogether different place than it was in the late thirties/early forties. Because of that, in our own time we share something with the original viewers of the film more than eighty years ago:

Our story is still being written.

The best either of us could do is hope and pray that Victor Laszlo is right.

More than eighty years after it was made, Casablanca still has something to say to us.

We should listen.

Here's looking at you kid.

NOTES:

* Well, in the top one hundred films at least, in my humble opinion.

** That's not to say people haven't tried to explain that line away. One explanation is that in French, the official colonial language of Morocco, the archaic colloquial term for waiter is "garçon", in English, "boy". It might stand to reason that for folks of a particular social strata like Ilsa's, there would be no distinction between the workers in a nightclub, as they would all have been considered "the help". Consequentially, restaurant staff whether they be waiters or musicians might all be addressed in a similar fashion. In the words of a comment I read, it would be "a classist" form of addressing someone rather than a "racist" one. 

I think the most logical explanation is the line was directly lifted from the play as were many others, and it simply didn't set off alarm bells in the minds of the screenwriters or anyone else involved, as it certainly would today. Regardless, the choice of Ilsa referring to Sam as "the boy" is a truly unfortunate, disrespectful one. 

*** Three strong female characters immediately come to mind: Rosalind Russel's Hildy Johnson from Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, the eponymous role in Ernst Lubitich's Ninotchka .played by Greta Garbo,  and much as Scarlet O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Gone with the Wind was not particularly admirable as a character, it would be hard to argue that she was not truly badass.

**** Umberto Eco over-plays his cliché card when he writes the following: "And so we can accept it ... when whores weep at the sound of “La Marseillaise.” The character he is referencing is Yvonne (Madelaine Lebeau). When we first meet her, she is at the bar at Rick's, obviously quite smitten by its proprietor and not a little tipsy. We can tell they've having a relationship or did, because he treats her shabbily. The next evening, Yvonne walks in with a German officer, obviously an attempt to get Rick's attention. Later that evening when the Germans start singing their patriotic tune Die Wacht am Rhein, Laszlo with Rick's approval, commands the house band to strike up the Marseillaise, and the voices of the rest of the patrons at Rick's singing along drown out the Germans. It's Yvonne's face we see in extreme closeup, tears in her eyes, singing the French national anthem more fervently than anyone in the room. When the tune finishes, she yells “Vive la France! Vive la démocratie!” That is her entire contribution to the movie. Did I mention that she was a prostitute? No, because there is no reason to believe she was, clichés be damned.

 

***** Ah but did the writers have the intention of setting up a moral dilemma for us, or was it just an accident? Did they simply assume viewers in 1942 wouldn't be bothered by Renault's actions? Let me point out one line that makes the answer pretty clear to me. When Rick first sets his eyes on young Annina, the Bulgarian girl set to be Louis' next conquest, the first thing Rick says to her is "Hey you're underage, how did you get in here?" Frankly I don't know how a typical 1942 audience would judge Louis coercing adult women to have sex with him. But extorting a child to have sex is another story. There was no reason to portray Annina as a minor other than to illustrate Loius Renault's depravity. The writers knew what they were doing.

Knowing Less and Less as I Grow Older

When I was 14, my daughter's current age, I knew everything there was to know about the world. Everything made sense, the good guys were always good, the bad guys always bad, and there was no messing with Mister In-Between. Most important, new ideas were always preferable to the way things had been done for basically ever. Why couldn't my parents understand that?

My father, God rest his soul, always took the bait and we'd end up in screaming matches so intense that it occurred to me one day that if there had been a gun in our house, one of us (not sure which one) would have used it.

Perhaps what all these years of life on this planet have taught me, is never  argue with people who have all the answers.

So unlike my father, I don't.

Yea me.

As I get older, I have more and more questions, and fewer if any answers, at least ones with any credibility. Surely for example I thought, several years ago after one of the most  the most heart breaking events of the century after 9/11, people would finally come to their senses and realize that the lives of first and second graders are vastly more important than the right to own semi-automatic rifles capable of killing people as quickly as it takes for the shooter to pull the trigger. 

What do I know? Today, nearly nine years after the Sandy Hook massacre, guns are easier than ever to procure in this country and there is a serious movement underway to push through the courts, new laws to make it even easier to carry a weapon of mass destruction out in public in the United States. Given the makeup of the current Supreme Court, these laws are likely to stick. 

Same thing a few weeks ago during the trial of Derick Chauvin, who in his role as a Minneapolis police officer, murdered George Floyd. The backlash from Chauvin's kneeling on the neck of an unarmed man and taking his life was so profound, surely I thought, police all over the country would have thought twice before using deadly force.

Once again, I was wrong, just moments before the guilty verdict was read in a court in downtown Minneapolis, there was another police shooting, this time in Columbus, Ohio. And in the weeks prior to that reading and in the subsequent week, there have been several others, two notable ones here in Chicago, one involving a 13 year old child. Their names were Anthony Alvarez and Adam Toledo. 

In all these well publicized incidents, the officer was white and the decedent was a person of color. As everyone knows, black people and other people of color, die in numbers proportionately greater than their population at the hands of the police.

That is a fact. 

It's also a fact that while not quite in numbers rersenting their population, white people also get killed by the police. In 2020, 457 white people (44% of all deaths at the hands of the police) were killed by the police in the US. 

By comparison, 241 black people (23% of all deaths at the hands of the police) were killed by the police last year as were 169 people (16% of all deaths at the hands of the police) of Hispanic origin. 

As roughly 12 percent of the US population is black, the death rate for black people at the hands of the police is nearly double that of the population of black people in this country.  Given that, it's not an unreasonable conclusion that there is a racial bias in this country when it comes to police violence against the general public, although as these numbers might suggest, not quite as much as we are led to believe. 

After all, today in virtually all the reporting surrounding police killing of civilians, the victims are people of color, and the police doing the killing are nearly all white. But as you can see from the numbers above, white people also get killed by the police, yet we almost never hear about it.

That is also a fact.

Another sobering statistic is this. In 2019 (the last year data was available for this statistic), 53 percent of all murder victims in this country were black, a number way out of proportion to the black population of the US.

And there are other statistics involving black folks in the US that are way out of proportion to their population, things like levels of poverty, education, and children raised in single, or no parent homes.

So what are we to make of these numbers? Well I guess that all depends upon how much you know about the world and especially which side of the fence you're sitting on. To the know-it-alls on the right side of the fence, one answer might be a lack of initiation on the part of black people. To those on the left, a one word answer will do, racism.   

But to those of us with less confidence in our knowledge of everything under the sun, there are no easy answers. True, the numbers are telling but in the immortal words of Benjamin Disraeli:

There are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

As we just saw, people can use the same set of data to tell a vastly different story. That's just the nature of things I guess. 

There are factors that run much deeper than numbers, sometimes you just gotta feel them in your heart. Take so called "white privilege." Like many, I cringe at the term as I feel it has become overused to the point where it has lost much of its meaning. It is now little more than a "talking point" for folks on the left. 

After all I too, a white guy, have had several encounters with the police in my life, none of them pleasant, including once being subjected to a humiliating body search in full view of the public. 

But here's the thing, yes, in every one of these encounters I complied with what the police asked of me, because I knew the police have the power to make one's life miserable. In other words I deeply wanted to avoid unpleasant things that might befall me such as getting thrown into  jail. On the other hand, never for one second did the notion that I might lose my life cross my mind.   

There in a nutshell is the critical difference between a typical white person's experience with the police, and that of a person of color. 

Call it what  you will, but as white parents, my wife and I have never felt it necessary to have "the talk" with our two children, explaining to them in great detail what to do when (not if) they have an encounter with a police officer, not so they won't get thrown in jail, but so the won't get killed. 

While every day I worry about our kids, including their personal safely living in a neighborhood where it's not all that unusual to hear gunshots, one thing I don't worry about is them being killed by a police officer. 

Sadly that's a luxury no black parent in America enjoys. 

Because of our personal experience, we white folks assume that if people of any color simply comply with what the police ask of us, there would be no trouble. But simply complying with what the police ask of us doesn't always work, especially if you're a person of color.  If you don't believe me, when you get to the afterlife, just ask Philando Castile. 

This is not to say the police are never justified in using deadly force. Sadly, sometimes it is necessary in order to protect innocent lives, and their own. This is why it is essential to not lump every act of police violence against civilians together. 

In the case of the above mentioned police shooting in Columbus, the victim was wielding a knife against another person when the officer shot her. I don't know the exact details, at this moment I don't think anybody does, but given that information, no one can deny there is a world of difference between the tragedy in Columbus and the one that took place in Minneapolis last Memorial Day.

The actions of Derick Chauvin that day against George Floyd were reprehensible, of that there is no question. There is no credible police officer in this country who can  reasonably defend Chauvin's strangle hold of a man who had already been subdued. 

Nor could any reasonable person defend the actions of Jason Van Dyke, the former Chicago cop who in 2014 emptied his weapon into Laquan McDonald, a young man who was carrying a knife, but at the time of his death, shown by video to not have posed an immediate threat to anyone. 

Both Van Dyke and Chauvin were rightfully convicted of murder.

But not all cases of police violence are open and shut like these, at least not for someone like me who doesn't have all the answers.

To me the question isn't always good cop vs. bad cop, but what is and what is not acceptable procedure. Take for example the tragedy of Daunte Wright who was killed by an officer this past April 11, about 10 miles from where the trial of Dereck Chauvin was taking place. Mr. Wright was shot by the officer who had apparently mistaken her gun for a taser. Of course the whole world asked the question: "how could anybody make such a mistake?" In all honesty I think I could have. But to me the more pertinent question is this: was it really necessary in that situation for the officer to fire a weapon in the first place? 

Again, more questions than answers but a far as policing goes in my opinion, much of the problem lies with the training of police officers in this country and the policies regarding their use of lethal force. 

And of course the eternal question of what is the proper role of police in our society.

To my simplistic thinking at least, unless lives are threatened, there is no reason why a traffic stop, even one where there is an arrest warrant pending, should end up deadly. 

Let alone an encounter with a unarmed man suspected of passing a counterfeit double sawbuck. 

And please, please, don't even get me started with Breonna Taylor.

But what do I know. 

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.

Our Turn

Add Laquan McDonald to the tragic list of young men whose violent deaths over the past year have caused a public outcry over police brutality and the perception that men of color are targeted by law enforcement authorities in cities all over the United States. Beyond the race of the decedents and the occupation of their killers, there are few similarities in the number of deaths at the hands of the police, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, a suburb of St. Louis, Eric Garner in New York City, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Jamar Clark in Minneapolis and now McDonald in Chicago. All were involved in petty criminal activity at the time of their deaths, all resisted arrest during confrontations with the police, and all but McDonald were un-armed.

Of all the cases, the one of McDonald, a 17 year old who was killed on the southwest side of Chicago in October of 2014, stands out in starkest contrast. For starters, his story did not become a full blown media event until last week, more than a year after his death. The attention came after a lawsuit was filed that forced the City of Chicago and the Chicago  Police Department to release a video made from a camera mounted aboard a police vehicle which recorded the shooting of the teenager.

It's understandable why the CPD and the city didn't want that video released. In the soundless video, we see McDonald surrounded by police vehicles. He walks away from the camera in the direction of the two cops pointing their guns at him but veering away from them to the right. At no time is he any closer than 15 feet from the officers. Then he suddenly drops to the ground and you can see puffs of gun smoke as the young man twists and turns on the pavement. You then see an officer kick an object (the knife) away from the motionless form of McDonald.

In the end, CPD officer Jason Van Dyke emptied his gun into McDonald, shooting him 16 times, most the the shots striking him after he was on the ground. When Van Dyke went to reload his gun with another cartridge, his partner, the cop who kicked the knife away from McDonald, apparently told him to hold his fire.

But that's only the beginning...

Shortly after the shooting, officers entered a Burger King that was close to the scene and asked to view surveillance video shot by a number of cameras mounted in and around the restaurant. The manager obliged and the officers spent about three hours alone with the video equipment. The next day when investigators returned to inspect the video, they found that about an hour of footage from the evening of the shooting had been deleted. Ironically what did survive were images of the cops inspecting and presumably, erasing video.

The police department continues to claim there is no "credible" evidence to prove that members of the CPD intentionally deleted the files that contained video that may have been pertinent to the death of Laquan McDonald, yet offer no plausible explanation for the missing video.

Furthermore, according to Craig Futterman, founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago and one of the plaintiffs responsible for the lawsuit forcing the release of the video, an eyewitness who screamed at the officer to stop shooting at McDonald after he had fallen to the ground, refused to leave the scene despite the insistence of police. She was taken into custody for a brief period of time and claims to have been "intimidated" and told that she "did not see what she saw."

This past Tuesday on the eve of the public release of the video, Officer Van Dyke was indicted on first degree murder charges in the death of Laquan McDonald. Why it took so long to press charges against the officer and release the video is complicated and the cause of much anguish about town in the wake of the events of this week.

The case of the death of Laquan McDonald could have fallen through the cracks and been forgotten had it not been for a confidential tip from an insider in the police department that brought Futterman's attention to the the police dashcam video which showed that the officer's contention that his life was threatened by McDonald was nonsense. On April 13, the Corporation Council of the City of Chicago, Stephen Patton announced to a panel of aldermen that an FBI probe, (joined by the Independent Police Review Authority and the States Attorney's office), on the shooting was underway. Given the severity of the case and the public climate relating to police vis a vis the African American Community, Patton recommended that the city settle out of court with McDonald's family to the tune of five million dollars. The city's finance committee and the full City Council agreed to the settlement.  Still, Mayor Emanuel and police commissioner Garry McCarthy objected to the public release of the video on the grounds of the FBI investigation into the case was still underway. In can also be assumed that part of their logic was to avoid the unrest that occurred in other cities around the US. For the record, Laquan's family also objected to the public release of the video of the murder of their loved one.

The public's response to the video was swift and predictable; the rage, understandable.

McDonald was behaving erratically, having been high on PCP at the time of his death. The young man threatened a person with his knife, which prompted the original 911 call to the police. He allegedly attempted to break into several parked vehicles and took police on a half mile journey through streets and alleys before Van Dyke shot him. Up until that point the police strategy was to corral McDonald using their vehicles to prevent him from coming in contact with passersby, while waiting for other cops to arrive with tasers which could have non-lethally subdued him. The video shows the police to have McDonald cornered when Van Dyke and his partner got out of their vehicle, guns drawn. Within seconds, Van Dyke opened fire.

While some police officers contend that the dashcam video does not tell the complete story of the tragic event, it is clear that it was unnecessary for Van Dyke to shoot McDonald once, let alone 16 times.

Since the release of the video there have been numerous peaceful demonstrations in the city. At this writing, the day after Thanksgiving, marchers are organizing on north Michigan Avenue, Chicago's prominent shopping district, on this, traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Clearly this is an attempt to gain as much visibility as possible, drawing attention to an abominable injustice that took place and arguably continues. That is the inalienable right of free people in a free society.

How it all plays out is anybody's guess; hopefully the demonstrations will be peaceful, and the police will to keep their cool. The best thing that can happen out of all this is reform and a real dialog between the police and the communities they have been entrusted to protect. I think the last thing anybody wants, with the exception of some people who might hope to gain personal advantage from the situation, is to bring back the turmoil of the disastrous events of  Chicago, 1968.

Once again, the whole world is watching.


POST SCRIPT: The March up Michigan Avenue protesting the death of Laquan McDonald took place on (Black) Friday, November 27th. It came off without much incident from either side, the demonstrators or the police, and life has returned pretty much to normal on the Magnificent Mile. The protesters did manage to prevent shoppers from entering the stores on that street for much of the day which no doubt cost businesses a great deal in lost revenue on their busiest day of the year. The Reverend Michael Pfleger, one of the leaders of the march stated that shutting down the economy was the one thing that would get the attention of the powers that be. That may be true but one of the things overlooked by the good reverend and the marchers was the fact that the folks who were hurt most by the store closings were not the business owners who have plenty of resources to keep them going, but store workers, restaurant staffs and other working stiffs who depend on commissions and tips for their livelihoods. If poverty is indeed one of the core causes for much of the trouble experienced in our cities today, the shutting down of one of this city's biggest economic engines on its most important day seems to me at least, foolish and self-defeating.

A Little Schoolin'

The viral video du jour, actually three of them, show a white police officer grabbing a female African American high school student while she was sitting at her desk in class, then flipping the girl and the desk over and dragging both of them out of the classroom. Not surprisingly, these videos shot by fellow students in a South Carolina school on their cell phones has drawn universal outrage, and the reactions as we have come to expect from the right and the left of this country, are entirely predictable.

To one side, this is an obvious case of a racist cop egregiously overstepping his authority. To the other side, it's a case of a teenager disrespectful of education and authority, selfishly disrupting a class thereby denying her classmates the opportunity to learn.

These reactions came well before any context surrounding the confrontation were brought to light. After the actual facts were brought out into the open well... nobody changed their mind.

The facts, some of them at least, are these:

• During class, the student was either texting of having a conversation (eye-witness reports vary) on her cell phone and the teacher demanded she stop. She refused. (Score one against the student).
• After a standoff, the teacher requested help from a school administrator. The student refused to cooperate again. At that point the cop, a "resource officer" who was assigned to the school was called to the room. The officer asked the student several times to get up and leave the classroom. Again she refused. (Score another against the student)
• After unsuccessfully convincing the student to leave her seat and the classroom, the cop grabbed the girl who continued to resist. This resulted in the ugly scene in the videos described above. (Score one against the cop and the student).
• It was later revealed that the student's mother recently died and that the young woman was in foster care. (Score one for the young woman).
• It was also revealed that the same officer has charges pending relating to incidents of a similar nature involving students of color. (Score one against the cop).
• The officer's boss, the county sheriff, before firing him, released a statement that his employee was no racist as he is currently dating a black woman. (No idea how to score that one). 
• Defending his firing of the cop, the sheriff also said that the officer's actions were "not typical of the job I expect (him) to do." (Score yet another against the officer).

Heard consistently throughout the coverage of this incident is the opinion that nothing the student did, at least anything apparent from the videos, justifies the officer's actions. Perhaps this is true. However, two critical questions that desperately need to be addressed, especially by police and school officials are these: why are policemen permanently assigned to schools in the first place, and secondly, what exact actions ARE typical of the job(s) that officers are expected to do when someone flat out refuses to comply with an essential and perfectly reasonable request?

I think it's safe to assume that the teacher's and administrator's reason for calling in a policeman was to remove a disruptive student from the classroom so the class could continue. It's highly unlikely they expected the officer to council the student, offer her words of encouragement, or invite her to tea. They could have done that themselves, perhaps they should have. When all else fails, short of building trap doors or ejector seats in classrooms (hmmm, maybe not such a bad idea), the only way to remove a student who simply refuses to leave, is by using the threat of force, and when that fails, use force itself. That's why the policeman was called. If the student responds in kind with force, as was the case with this particular child, things can get pretty ugly, which they did.

It has been stated over and over again that the officer acted irresponsibly and perhaps even criminally in roughing up the student, but no one, not even the sheriff could offer any clues as to how the officer could have acted responsibly while still doing what was asked of him.

A policeman's responsibility beyond dealing with bad guys and wayward students is to use proper judgement and restraint, and to act according to the rule of law while carrying out those responsibilities. Like other people who are paid to do unpleasant work, we expect the police to do a job that most of us are unwilling and/or afraid to do. Clearly the school administrator and the teacher felt the need to remove this student from the classroom, yet they didn't want to perform the messy, perhaps job-threatening work themselves. Perhaps they should have tried harder before taking the draconian step of calling in the police officer.

I asked my resident authority on such matters, my mother, (a long time teacher, administrator and principal of a large inner-city elementary school) what she would have done. Without missing a beat she said that if a student was stubborn about leaving the class and making a scene, she would have had all the other students leave for the library and left the student alone in the classroom to sit and think about her actions without the benefit of an audience. Had the situation been handled in that way there would have been no need to call in the federales in the first place, no violence, no viral videos, and of course, no blog post.

In my book, the school officials are as responsible for what happened that day as anybody else. Calling in a police officer to handle a situation they probably could and should have handled themselves was only asking for trouble. Like I said, the officer was doing the job that was asked of him. Violent and ugly as those videos are, I am not in a position to judge if the officer acted inappropriately, and frankly with the unreliable information we have, I don't think most of us are.

As for the student, what if any responsibilities does she have? First of all I think it's reasonable to expect all students to act in the spirit of the class, if not by directly participating, then at the very least showing respect by refraining from disrupting the teacher and fellow students. Every student knows full well that using a cell phone in class is unacceptable. Except in an emergency, where the student should have excused herself from the class, there is absolutely no excuse for violating this obvious breach of common sense and respect for her teacher and her peers. It was the student's choice to violate both the spirit and the rules of the class by using her phone, refusing to stop when asked, and resisting the officer when he demanded she leave. Whether his actions were appropriate or not, the student brought upon the those actions entirely by herself.

This week, a friend of mine taught me a new word he encountered in his work in the field of social justice. That word is "de-opportuniteed", an adjective made up by social workers as a substitute for the term "at risk", used to describe children who have a good chance of falling between the cracks in society. The old term was neutral in that it didn't claim to place judgement on a child's circumstances, it merely flagged a problem. The new term by contrast explicitly states that the children in question are in their precarious position because something has been done TO them, thereby eliminating any trace of responsibility from the child.

Clearly we need to have compassion and empathy for children who lack the love, guidance, care and protection of a loving family. But there are two things that must be considered. First, not all "at risk" children are neglected by their families, and second, not all children with difficult backgrounds are at risk. At some point, all children regardless of their background must be taught to be responsible for themselves.

I see a great deal of harm in the attitude that this whole mess is entirely the responsibility of the officer and none of it belongs to the student. To me, that sends a very clear message to students all over the country that it is their right to behave exactly as they please in school, to ignore the demands of teachers, school officials and other authority figures, and that their education is entirely the responsibility of the school, and none of it their own.

And we wonder why we are falling behind the rest of the world in terms of education.

Finally, one last question has been raised over and over again in this discussion: "How would you react if that was your child?" To that let me state without any reservation that two of the most cherished people in my life are my son and daughter and if any harm came to them I would be devastated. While I refuse to lay a hand on either of my children in anger, I believe that in order to become engaged, successful individuals as well as good people, all children must be challenged to some extent in every aspect of their lives. At this point in their young lives, being a student is my children's job and they have the responsibility to do the best they can at that job. I think both of them understand that and both of them work very hard at school, even if they'd rather be doing something else.

To answer the question how would I feel if my kids were treated that way by a police officer: if one of my children at that age showed as little respect for their teacher, their education, their classmates and the police officer as the student in South Carolina did, then with much sorrow and regret I would have to say, yes, he or she would have had it coming.

#BLM

The other day I listened to an NPR interview with the woman who first put the hashtag in front of the slogan "Black Lives Matter", making those three words a public call to arms against the assault on the lives of African American people (mostly men) at the hands of the police and other individuals or groups entrusted with law enforcement. She expressed her discontent with the fact that the slogan has been appropriated by other groups who have replaced the word "Black" with whatever particular group they care to call out injustice against. The most recent controversy around the slogan has been the replacement of "Black" with the word "All". Several presidential candidates have made the mistake of proclaiming something so obvious that it doesn't need to be said at all. Those candidates, including Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, have been put in the peculiar situation of having to retract their claim that all lives matter.

This may sound like political correctness taken to its most ridiculous extreme but the funny thing is this, I get it. This country has a sad history of proclaiming that black lives do not matter, and there continues to be to this day, a divide between the treatment of black people in this society, and everybody else.

The righteous indignation over far too many deaths of individuals, most of them black, at the hands of the police, is justified in my opinion, The slogan, black lives matter rings loud and clear, standing on its own.

What I don't get is this. If black lives matter, why is the discussion of black people killed by other black people considered irrelevant to this conversation?

As an example, last year, 2014, Chicago had a total of 459 homicides. 353 of the victims, or 78.1 percent, were black. This in a city whose black population is around 32 percent. Of those murders that resulted in an individual being charged, 68.8 percent of the suspects were black.

In the same year, 17 people were killed by the police in Chicago. (I don't have the racial breakdown of the individuals involved or the circumstances of those killings). 17 deaths at the hands of the police in one city is certainly not a number to be discounted, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of homicides in Chicago last year.

To me anyway, these numbers suggest an epidemic of violence particular to the African American, and to a lesser extent the Hispanic communities of Chicago, which is a microcosm of the United States. We've been through this before, the causes of this epidemic are deeply rooted in history, racism, poverty, drugs, lack of opportunity, poor education, the dissolution of the family, lack of self-respect, and self-responsibility, the list goes on and on, depending upon the ideologies of the people you talk to.

The killing of black people by the police speaks to a brutal past, traces of which tragically exist to this day. But the grim reality of the present is that black people are dying at the hands of other black people at a staggering rate. All the indignation in the world directed at the police is not going to change that. Addressing one issue without addressing the other is either naive of intellectually dishonest.

But what do I know, I'm just an old white guy who should probably keep my mouth shut on this topic.

Here's what a black man has to say.

OK maybe this sports commentator doesn't have any more right to spout off on the issue than I do but I think his concern is valid: many seem to believe that the only black lives that matter are the ones that are taken by non-black people.

I'll add a new twist to the slogan. Saying that all black lives matter does not let anyone off the hook, not the police, the criminals or the politicians, not the community, its leaders, or the clergy, and not you or me. We don't live in a vacuum and that goes for our problems too. Pointing fingers or arguing about slogans won't solve anything. Only when we're able to honestly look at ourselves and talk to each other, especially those with whom we disagree, will we be able to start to address the issues that shape our community.

So far we're failing.