Which will stand and which will fall?

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24, 2020

The primacy of statues: In this morning's Washington Post, the op-ed page features two (2) columns about statues and statuary.

Aside from Halloween costumes, does anyone talk about anything else?

In her column, Kathleen Parker rolled her eyes about the primacy of statues. In a second column, Megan McArdle offered a wry aside about the man whose mental state no one's allowed to discuss:

MCARDLE (6/24/20): Chances are, you still remember clearly what President Trump said in 2017, after violent clashes in Charlottesville between white supremacists rallying around a statue of Robert E. Lee and leftist counterprotesters. “You had some very bad people in that group,” Trump allowed at an Aug. 15th news conference, “but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” Almost three years on, anyone who tries to deny that Trump is a racist is apt to have those words flung back in their face.

We recall those remarks, but most of us have slowly forgotten about what else Trump said, although it was almost as controversial at the time: “So this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”

"This came in for much derision," McArdle says as she continues. She's referring to the commander's question about the possible future status of statues of General Washington.

"Time passed, and now it seems everybody's having them dreams!" Trump's prophecy was mocked at the time, but serious questions now fly about concerning statues of Washington—even concerning the well-known name of a well-known western state! We saw a professor on TV last night discussing that very same thing!

To some extent, statues do matter. So, it seems, do Halloween costumes. Could adults possibly just agree to stop attending such parties?

To some extent, statues do matter! But here's a point which occurs to us whenever we see these discussions:

We spent the first dozen years of our adult life in and around the Baltimore City Schools. You know the great kids who appeared in the tragic videotape to which we linked this morning?

Here in Baltimore, we were teaching kids their age at that very same time!

We spent nine full years in the classroom, mostly teaching fifth and sixth graders. And from that day to this, we've seen plenty of discussions of the primacy of statuary and Halloween garb, but we're not sure we've ever seen a serious discussion of what happens, and what doesn't happen, inside urban schools.

We humans! We care about statues and Halloween garb. Do we give a flying fark about kids?

The things we noticed during those years involve academic procedures. They also involve the happiness of good decent kids—the right of children to be happy, to feel good about themselves, and then to proceed from there.

We don't see any talk about any such matters; we never really have. We did see a professor last night discussing the triage of statues, and the name of a western state.

Does anyone give a fat flying fark about the lives of children?

Anthropologists tell us the answer is no. No one cares less than the folks at the Times, or so these top experts have said.

TRAUMA AND REVOLUTION: The various lives of children!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 24, 2020

Terrified, 7 years old: Terrible things happen to children.

They drown in the Mediterranean, with their parents, trying to get to Europe. They see their parents killed by bombs as part of ill-conceived wars.

Some are raised by loving parents; others may be less lucky. In this country, who takes you home from the hospital after your birth? It's the ultimate luck of the draw.

In Monday's report, we posted a young woman's account of the trauma she experienced during her childhood and youth. "By the time I was 16, I had already experienced a lifetime of trauma," he had written in 2015. Her account proceeded from there.

She was 22 when she wrote the essay in question. It had been published by the Hartford Courant, directed at the operation of a certain Connecticut state agency.

As she told it her essay, that young person's story of trauma didn't have a racial or ethnic component. A report which had a baldly racial component did appear in yesterday's New York Times.

The Times report takes us back to the summer of '75. Had we been advising the victimized children in question, we would have advised them to view their experienced through this lens:

The Heartbreaking Dumbness of Others

In this case, the others were a bunch of kids who had been told they were white. They'd also been told that they shouldn't like other kids who were black.

An utterly sad event ensued; it was captured on film or on tape. One year later, Bill Moyers broadcast a PBS program about it.

To watch a chunk of that deeply instructive tape, you can just click here. A longer chunk of videotape is provided within the Times report.

For our money, the faces of the "black" kids in question can teach you more than anything which appears in the Times report. We don't offer that as a criticism of the Times. We offer that as a remark on the power of human faces.

Those kids learned a very sad lesson that day concerning, among other things, the spectacular dumbness of others. It's a recurrent part of the lives of others, and not just in the former East Germany.

The kids who were offended against that day expressed themselves with great eloquence about what they had seen and heard. We especially recommend the eloquence of the girl who describes the parade they had stopped to watch as a "gathering." For a youngster of her age, she offered a nice choice of words.

Did trauma result from what happened that day? No such claim is made in the Times report, except at one point, in passing. Regarding what can be sen on the tape, we'd guess that some of the black kids had received a lot of "good home training" within their various homes.

By way of contrast, some of the spectacularly horrible white kids had plainly been poorly served. That doesn't mean that they're horrible today, but they certainly were back then.

We mention this because we recently read about a 7-year-old boy who was described as "terrified" and who said he wants to leave the United States. The essay in question appeared in Slate. The essay started like this:

MCDONALD (6/15/20): I was 14 when Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers. I had no thoughts of kids, or how a parent protects them. But in households around the country, Black parents were having “The Talk” with their children: an intense, high-stakes training on the realities of racism designed to inoculate them against disproportionate police targeting and brutality.

My oldest child is now 7. A few nights ago, I was the one giving The Talk. We discussed George Floyd’s death. Even with my high-level, simplistic explanation, he understood and was brought to tears. He thought at first that I was speaking of the past, and I could see the fear on his face when I explained that this wasn’t “back then.” He asked a lot of tough questions about hate and racism, and ended by telling me he wants to leave the United States. He was terrified.

Like my son, I am deeply afraid—and it’s based on a lifetime of experience...

In that passage, we read about a 7-year-old who is said to be "terrified"—possibly by what he's seen on TV, but most directly by what he's been told by his mother. When their conversation ends, he says he wants to leave the United States.

The parent in this conversation is a substantial person. She holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford, plus master's degrees from both Northwestern and Harvard.

She loves her children; she's a good decent person. But these are tumultuous, revolutionary times, and a person could wonder if she exercised good judgment in holding that conversation.

No one has perfect judgment. Beyond that, everyone's judgment may be affected at times as fraught as these—or in the wake of an event as astonishing as the videotaped killing of the late George Floyd.

No one has perfect judgment. When this mother spoke to her son, she says she "shared ways he could appear less threatening to cops and other people."

Do 7-year-olds need to learn how to be less threatening to cops? Do they need to be told such things to the point where they're terrified?

There's no ultimate answer to those questions, except for the familiar answer with which we're currently scripted, in which all parents of a certain type always know what's best and what's right.

Absent some future explanation, the videotape of George Floyd's death records an act of astonishing hostility and misconduct. For ourselves, we're still waiting to hear about Derek Chauvin's previous conduct on the Minneapolis police force—about the possibility that he should have been removed from the force long ago.

So far, we've seen no such reporting. Anthropologists have warned us that we shouldn't be completely surprised if it turns out that no one within the upper-end press corps actually seems to care about this question.

That said, the essay from Slate was one of several we've read in recent weeks involving reactions to that videotape. More specifically, these essays involve reactions which may bear the signs of something resembling trauma—trauma past, present or future.

Tomorrow, we'll look at two essays in the New York Times in which highly intelligent people seem to draw peculiar conclusions about the danger they may be in. On Friday, we'll return to the various lives of children, discussing a remarkable 19-year-old UVa student who was described by Theresa Vargas in this recent column in the Washington Post.

The kids who were assailed back in 1975 are substantial adults today. We hope the same is true of the absurdly horrible kids by whom they were assailed.

Those Gotham kids weren't terrified that day. They were variously offended, angry, amazed, deeply disappointed.

Next week, we'll start to review the highest-profile sources of current extreme reactions. We'll start with the testimony of Zyahna Bryant, the impressive college student featured by Vargas, who is quoted saying that she "truly lost hope in the systems that continue to fail Black and Brown people" when she was 12 years old.

Should 7-year-olds be terrified? Should 12-year-olds truly lose hope?

There's no "scientific" answer to those questions. But there are many things which can be said about the way the mainstream press has reported some major events. We refer to the major high-profile events which define the current consensus.

Tomorrow: Dangerous friends, he says

Jaundice and its discontents!

TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2020

The various faces of Slate: It's been a while since we hailed Slate for the way it tackles the serious issues.

In just the last few days, to cite three examples, it has shown its true colors with hard-hitting fare such as this:

STOYA / JUNE 23, 2020 / 2:00 PM
I’ve Suddenly Realized How Disgusting Sex With My Husband Is

DANNY M. LAVERY / JUNE 22, 2020 / 3:58 PM
Help! My Family Wants Me to Cheat on My Disabled Husband

RICH JUZWIAK / JUNE 22, 2020 / 3:08 PM
If My Boyfriend Found Out What I Really Want in Bed, It Would Crush Him

Let the others peddle the clickbait! Slate prefers to challenge its readers with hard-hitting product like that!

That said, Slate isn't simply one thing. It also offers material like this:

“White People Don’t Respond to Our Pain; They Respond to Theirs”
What it’s really like to be a Black journalist in America.

By JELANI COBB, ERRIN HAINES, RACHELLE HAMPTON, ALEX SAMUELS, and CARVELL WALLACE
JUNE 23, 2020 / 5:45 AM

"Spring is the mischief in me?" That's what one poet once said.

After twenty-two years critiquing the press corps, most recently in consultation with major well-known anthropologists, jaundice is increasingly the jaundice within us. Eventually, we may raise the following question:

How should a reader of any description respond to large chunks of that piece?

Opinions would differ, of course. But what would the boundaries be?

We pause this week's discussion of trauma...

TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 2020

...for a moment of comic relief: This morning, reading the New York Times, we were struck by a detail in a report about Stonehenge.

Yes, that's right—about Stonehenge! We're just now passing the summer solstice and, according to the Times report, an "astonishing discovery" has been made not far from that famous site.

The discovery involves some large sunken pits which surrounded Durrington, a village not far from Stonehenge. The pits were constructed in the ancient era when the Stonehenge site was in full operation.

We'll highlight the detail in question:

SPECIA (6/23/20): “Stonehenge was for the dead, Durrington was for the living,” Dr. Gaffney said. “But now, what we are probably looking at was this great big boundary around them probably warning people of what they are approaching.”

He said that the pits had been set at a deliberate distance and that their locations would have had to be paced out from a central point. That is a significant clue about people living in the area at the time, he said, because it “means they could count”—making it among the earliest evidence for counting in what is now Britain.

Really? The discovery of those large, sunken pits has produced some of "the earliest evidence for counting in what is now Britain?"

According to the Times report, the events in question date to the Neolithic period, "more than 4,500 years ago." We wouldn't have known that the very ability to count isn't known to have existed at so recent a time.

One often hears that "primitive" members of our own species used a primitive, three-part system of counting: "One, two, many." We don't know if that's actually true, but a quick scan of the Internet seems to suggest that it may be.

Still, we wouldn't have thought that counting, however defined, could have been so recent an invention as this. Moments later, we encountered a possible modern-day problem with counting right there in today's New York Times!

We offer what follows as comic relief, but it helps drive a key point. Especially at times like these—at partisan, even revolutionary times—almost everything you read or see is likely to be somewhat slanted.

Thumbs will be placed on various scales. Even the simplest statistical matters may be massaged and selectively presented.

We humans! Our ability to work with statistics at all is, at best, rather shaky. At highly fraught times like these, such skills may evade us completely.

Consider the Times report:

The report concerns some recent shootings in Seattle—more precisely, some recent shootings inside the police-free, autonomous zone now described as the CHOP.

Altamont has already come to Seattle! The Times report starts like this:

BAKER (6/23/20): From the ice cream shop she runs in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, Molly Moon Neitzel has watched as protesters have laid claim to the area’s streets over the past two weeks to demand racial justice.

The barricades and graffiti outside her storefront have carried messages that Ms. Neitzel embraces: Race equity, she says, is the top issue facing the city.

But this weekend, two shootings rocked the so-called Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone set up as an experiment in communal living, free of the police, in the area around Ms. Neitzel’s shop. Now, a memorial sits outside her shop for a 19-year-old man who died in the gunfire over the weekend.

Two shootings had occurred in the protest zone? We were fairly sure we'd heard that the number was actually three.

Granted, that was the number we'd heard on Fox. Still, we decided to read the Times report further.

By paragraph 5, the Times was reporting that "the violence over the past few days" had produced "a total of three people shot." That was the number we'd heard on Fox, but a certain lack of clarity now obtained in the Times report.

How would this matter get resolved? Quite a bit later, we entered a possible modern-day version of ancient counting shortfall:

BAKER: The first shooting at the zone occurred early Saturday morning. John Moore, a medic working at the scene, said it began with a series of confrontations among people in the crowd. He treated the 19-year-old who was shot and then transported him to a hospital before he was pronounced dead. A 33-year-old man was also shot nearby.

Mr. Moore said he was upset that the Fire Department had not entered the zone to help with the man who died. Fire Department officials said they had been following procedure and waiting for the Police Department to secure the area first. Police officers had taken time to stage outside of the zone and, when they did enter, they encountered hostility from people who said the victim had already been removed from the scene.

That's what the Times was now describing as "the first shooting."

We're told that, by the time police had entered the protest zone, "the victim" (singular) had already been removed from the scene. That said, it almost sounded to us like two different people had already been shot!

You can count it that way if you like. In modern parlance, you can count it that way on Fox—or you can count it like this:

BAKER (continuing directly): The second shooting occurred late Sunday night. A 17-year-old boy who was shot was treated at Harborview Medical Center and released, a spokeswoman for the hospital said.

That was the second shooting! To our ear, it almost sounded like the "33-year-old man who was shot nearby" didn't quite get shot—didn't exactly count!

Was there anything flatly wrong with the Times report? Not necessarily, no.

That said, how hard is it for professional journalists to count to three> How hard is it for professional journalists to offer a simple, straightforward account of how many "shootings" there were, and of how many people "got shot?"

More to the point, is it possible that the Times counted the shootings the way it did, landing on a count of "two," because, for reasons of tribal messaging, the Times may have felt more comfortable stating a smaller number?

We have no idea if that happened, implicitly or otherwise. But if you feel sure that couldn't have happened, "Who's being naive now, Kay?"

We're offering this as comic relief in a time when almost everything you read or see is being massaged, tilted, adjusted, improved, slanted or possibly spun. How hard could it be for professional journalists to describe those Seattle shootings in a coherent way right from the jump—to write, for example, that "three people were shot in a pair of shooting incidents," if that's what actually happened.

Is that what actually happened? Was "the man who was shot nearby" shot by the same person who shot and killed the 19-year-old? In that sense, were two different people shot in one single shooting incident?

We don't know, and the Times report doesn't say. But when you see a news report like that, we invite you to consider a possibility:

Almost everything you read is being tilted, massaged.

We offer this strangely jumbled report as a bit of comic relief. We offer the passage shown below as something resembling a miracle:

KRUGMAN (6/23/20): It’s true that deaths are still falling for the nation as a whole, although they’re rising in some states. This reflects some combination of the way that deaths lag infections, better precautions for the elderly, who are the most vulnerable, and better treatment as doctors learn more about the disease.

But we’re still losing around 600 Americans per day...

In a column which we'd say contains many hints of partisan tilt, Paul Krugman was actually able to present a reasonably accurate statistic!

According to the Washington Post's data, the seven-day average for daily deaths nationwide dropped to 571.9 after yesterday's totals were recorded. That said, judged by recent norms, Krugman's statistic—"around 600"—is remarkably accurate.

That doesn't mean that deaths won't rise in the next few weeks, though we don't know if that will happen. We will say this about recent reporting of covid-19 spread:

We're not sure if we've ever seen a fully competent presentation concerning this popular topic. On "cable news," the stars don't have enough time to create such a critter, even if they're interviewing wholly capable expert guests. Nor do the stars, as a general matter, have the demonstrated ability to work with numbers at all, unless the assignment is as simple as one, two, many.

Our journalists can't adjust for inflation. They can't disaggregate public school test scores.

They couldn't explain the lead exposure data from Flint. They refuse to talk about per capita health care spending. They tend to adjust for population only when doing so furthers their preferred point.

In terms of coronavirus reporting, "cases" is the current hot statistic. The current rise in "cases" may presage a future rise in deaths, although it also may not. But we'll ask Kay to make no mistake:

The anti-Trump crowd tilts toward "cases," at least in part, because that statistic can be used to paint the gloomiest picture. Meanwhile, the man they oppose is baldly insane, and they lack the intellectual integrity to speak to medical experts about that.

There's little you see that isn't faux at such times as these. Did Al Gore say he invented the Internet? For twenty months, they took turns swearing that he did. Do you think that claim was accurate?

A press stampede was underway then; today's stampede makes two. We offer today's Seattle example as a bit of comic relief.

Stonehenge was then; Seattle is now. But counting has always been hard for our kind, and we've always been a bit crazy.

Tomorrow: We return to the topic of trauma. We'll start with this videotape.

Deaths keep dropping as cases rise!

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2020

Also, that Tulsa attire: How politicized has mainstream press reporting become? Consider the front page of the Style section in today's Washington Post.

There sat a piece by Robin Givhan, the paper's long-standing "Fashion Critic." But her piece had little to do with fashion. It was just the standard, cookie-cutter account of Trump's rally in Tulsa.

Along the way, the fashion critic blabbed such standard fare as this:

GIVHAN (6/22/20): The crowd didn’t fill the 19,000 seats of the BOK Center. The upper tiers of the arena were mostly empty. There were no people to overflow into the outdoor, overflow festival space where the president and Vice President Pence were supposed to speak. And so that stage was dismantled. But there were still plenty of people who sat through the president’s nearly two hour campaign speech—no small portion of which was taken up by an elaborate narration and pantomime explaining why he’d had so much trouble walking down a ramp after a speech to West Point graduates earlier this month and why he needed two hands to drink from a glass of water.

It was a long, rambling performance with the president lamenting that he surely must have saluted some 600 times and by God, it was so hot that day and the ramp was like an ice-skating rink and he was wearing leather sole shoes. As far as he was concerned, he really should have been cheered for making it down that ramp unscathed instead of being mocked in the media. So perhaps it made him feel better when the Tulsa crowd—his crowd—applauded after he theatrically drank a glass of water onstage with only one hand and didn’t dribble any of it on his tie.

It was Trump’s crowd. Everything is his. Everything is because of him. “We—I—have done a phenomenal job,” he said about the federal government’s response to the pandemic. “I saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”

So the "fashion critic" wrote, plus blah blah blah blah blah. Everyone says the same things now, even the "fashion critics."

Meanwhile, on the front age of the New York Times, political reporter Astead Herndon had cast himself in the role of fashion critic! Herndon started his Political Memo like this:

HERNDON (6/22/20): The difference between a rally for Joseph R. Biden Jr. and one for President Trump starts with the attire.

There is no official uniform for either event, but while those who come out for Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, show little pattern in their dress, there’s a unity to Mr. Trump’s biggest fans. A red hat is an obvious rally must. Without the cap, American flag colors will do, or a T-shirt that insults one of the president’s political archenemies—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or a mainstream media outlet, for starters.

Packing recently for his first Trump rally, Donald Fanning of Wichita, Kan., made sure to dress the part. On Saturday night in Tulsa, he wore an American-flag T-shirt along with American-flag suspenders that were hitched to American-flag swimming trunks.

Also, blah blah blah blah blah. This is front-page reporting.

Herndon went on to say the exact same things that Givhan did. By now, the blah-blah, if not the bafflegab, largely assembles itself.

During his Tulsa performance, Trump spent an astonishing fourteen minutes (14!) discussing his walk down the ramp at West Point and his attempt to drink that glass of water. Reporters aren't allowed to ask the obvious question—is something wrong with this man's mental health and/or his cognition?—so they agree to be "shocked, shocked" by each new day's new lunacy instead.

On the brighter side, a strikingly low number of people turned up for the usual bilge. Our guess? This suggests that even the harder core of Trump supporters have enough sense to be concerned by the prospect of spending several hours inside a jam-packed indoor venue as certain well-known virus flies around.

Everyone is in love with Juneteenth, and also shocked at Trump's ignorance of the event. This includes includes the ten million cable stars who had never mentioned Juneteenth in their whole freaking lives before.

Some see their new excitement as a sign of progress, and it can be seen that way. It can also be seen as a sign of the power of the faux and the pose—the force which has driven our political reporting for at least three decades by now.

Finally, might we post one more update on our American carnage? On a nationwide basis, the rolling seven-day average of daily deaths continues to drop. We're working from the Washington Post's daily numbers:

Seven-day average, daily deaths from coronavirus, nationwide
June 1-7: 803.4
June 8-14: 710.9
June 15-22: 585.9

That doesn't mean that the daily number of deaths won't go up again. After all, cases are rising, or at least that's so in the states you'll be hearing about.

The daily deaths may rise again, but as of now they continue to drop. We decided to post these numbers again after we read the gloomy report by the highly capable David Wallace-Wells for the new edition of New York magazine, a report which included this statement:

WALLACE-WELLS (6/20/20): The cost of all this failure is becoming terrifyingly clear, even as the country has begun a rapid and humiliating project of normalization. Over the last few weeks, as the deaths of almost a thousand Americans a day has retreated into a sort of cultural background noise, with the protests taking its place on the country’s front pages, the total death toll has passed a series of grim milestones: more Americans dead than in all the wars the country has fought since World War II, more than died in the 1957 flu, more dead than soldiers lost in World War I...

Almost 600 deaths per day is a lot of deaths. But, over the past few weeks, was "fewer than 700 and dropping" the same thing as "almost a thousand?" When everything is propaganda, we're going to say that it was.

Most things today are propaganda. It's embellishment in almost all things, plus bafflegab with a strong dose of blahblah as a chaser.

TRAUMA AND REVOLUTION: What do we need at times like these?

MONDAY, JUNE 22, 2020

Novelization or fact?: Only the good die young, Billy Joel once claimed.

That claim was false, as is this additional claim:

Only the smartest ones are ever completely stupid.

We formulated that aphorism after perusing the latest from Slate. In particular, we formulated that notion after perusing the piece which ran beneath these headlines:

“The Karens Are Giving Us a Hard Time Now”
A waiter at a reopened restaurant explains how dining works in a pandemic.

As we've recently noted, "Karens" is a new term of group denigration. It follows the earlier phrase "dumb blondes," replacing the condescension of the earlier term with a more modern type of moral condemnation.

Everyone's whacking the Karens! It's a term which lets the most human among us enjoy a fully human impulse—the impulse to engage in the invention of the other.

Only the (allegedly) smart ones are ever totally stupid? We promulgated our aphorism after reading this account of the authorship of the Slate piece:

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Magi, who works as a waiter at an American Chinese restaurant in Boca Raton, Florida. The conversation has been transcribed, condensed, and edited for clarity by [NAME WITHHELD].

NAME WITHHELD—he'd be socially defined as a guy—is now three years out of Yale (class of 2017). As noted, only the (supposedly) brightest and best are ever really this dumb.

WITHHELD is almost surely a good decent person, but he's also a child of a certain age. It didn't seem to enter his head—or the heads of his editors, if any exist—that such terms of demographic denigration spread quickly through a society, and that they're hard to tamp down, restrict, walk back or control.

(For the record, the enjoyable denigration of women played major roles in the way George W. Bush, then Donald J. Trump, ended up in the White House. We refer to the denigration of women on the part of the upper-end mainstream press corps.)

With regard to the current term of group denigration, your limbic brain will tell you to say that it's only meant as a criticism of a certain type of woman. Go ahead—keep saying that! People like us always do!

At any rate, the sheer stupidity of our war-inclined species may be its most obvious trait. In fairness, this stupidity represents the best we can be expected to do, according to the group of major anthropologists with whom we routinely consult.

These experts say it's a function of the way our imperfect brains are wired. Our brains are wired to identify others, they say. Things tend to proceed from there.

For ourselves, the best thing we've done since the lockdown arrived was to rewatch the 1982 film, Sophie's Choice. This led us back to Emily Dickinson's Ample Make This Bed, but also to the plea for mercy, empathy, pity with which William Styron ended his 1979 novel:

This week, we plan to talk about trauma and traumatization. Essays which seem to describe this state of affairs have been appearing widely of late, raising significant questions.

By way of background, people are often treated quite badly. A few days ago, to cite one example, we clicked a link and were taken to an essay in the Hartford Courant.

The essay appeared in 2015. In the essay, a young person—she was then 22—said this about her own life. Headline included:

DCF Needs To Stop Blaming The Children

By the time I was 16, I had already experienced a lifetime of trauma. My family mistreated me. The state took me away from them and dumped me into a shelter. The foster family I was placed with rejected me. My social worker decided to place me at a residential treatment center in New Britain. She promised me that being there would help to heal my anxiety and depression, and that I would eventually return to living with a family.

But when I entered the doors of the facility, I knew this wasn't a place where I would heal. The girls' unit had a small, dimly lit common area and a long hallway of residents' rooms. It looked and felt more like a prison than a restorative environment. The only times we left the unit were for school or an occasional scheduled trip to the mall. For the most part, we were stuck in the dark common area, leaving us feeling claustrophobic and in desperate need of fresh air.

The focus of the place was compliance, not treatment. The staff was overwhelmingly undertrained and authoritarian. Too frequently, they let their own emotional reactions guide their response to the girls in their charge. When a girl talked back or slammed her bedroom door, staff might throw her to the ground, restrain her and drag her to the solitary confinement cell. There was little oversight and fewer consequences.

[...]

Though the facility was supposed to heal my brokenness, I left it far more shattered than I went in...

Styron ended Sophie's Choice with a memorial to all "the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth." He didn't restrict himself to Holocaust victims and "survivors"—to people like the Sophie of his title. He listed many others besides.

The person who published that account of her youth was in the news last week. Today, she's 27 years old—and the site at which we found that link referred to her a "a monster."

So these things tend to go.

On balance, we'd be inclined to say that the young woman who wrote that essay made a shaky decision in recent weeks. That said, when we keep childhood trauma in mind, and when we muse on the inevitable fruits of our nation's brutal racial history, we're inclined to reserve our criticism for the Washington Post, which commissioned and published a truly astonishing "news report" last week.

Almost surely, the Post was seeking to cover its ascot, protecting itself against attack in these revolutionary times. To accomplish that task, the newspaper was apparently willing to throw a private person under a very large bus.

The young woman to whom we've referred was 22 when she wrote that essay for the Courant. We can't vouch for the accuracy of anything she wrote that day, but the Courant apparently judged that her essay raised important questions about one of Connecticut's major social institutions.

Five years later, that young woman hit the news again, this time in the Post. We'd be inclined to say that her aim may not have been fully true this time around.

That said, you can't make the types of decisions our benighted ancestors made without creating shock waves—shock waves which will reverberate down through the annals of time. In part, we think of what Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address.

All this week, we'll be looking at recent essays which suggest types of traumatization, or something resembling that. Your limbic brain may ask you to be offended by this framework. According to experts, limbic brains are inclined to do things like that.

This will be part of a longer discussion concerning what Jelani Cobb said about the current state of American policing. It will be part of a longer discussion concerning the ways the mainstream press corps has tended to report this ongoing conduct.

According to the Washington Post's invaluable Fatal Force site, police officers have shot and killed roughly a thousand people in each of the past five years (2015-2019). How should we understand that fact? We'll be pondering that question over the next several weeks.

This week, we'll start with some personal essays. They've appeared fairly widely in the past few weeks and they do, and then again sometimes don't, make absolute perfect sense.

What lies behind these personal essays? Among other things, mountains of American history lie behind these essays. Keeping that horrible fact in mind, the question we're asking is this:

At revolutionary times such as these, should we live on novels alone, or do we need accurate facts?

Tomorrow: The 7-year-old "was terrified," his mother said

More fun with the Karens: As we type, Slate is offering, within an advertisement, a link to a hard-hitting report at another site. Here's how the report is headlined:

Hairstyles That Women Should Ditch: Retire The "Karen"

Warning! This is the way we nitwits behave when we've gone to the finest schools!

Jaundice and its discontents!

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2020

Plus, the revolution arrives at the Post: Should Juneteenth be a national holiday?

We don't have a fixed view on that. That said, everyone suddenly favors that designation. By "everyone," we mean a wide range of public figures who may not actually care.

Yesterday, we performed a minor bit of research. Our effort was driven by curiosity, though it also was fueled by jaundice.

Yesterday, we decided to see if people who are so ardent now had ever said even one word in the past. By "people," we mean certain corporate multimillionaires. That's where the jaundice comes in.

Yesterday, we decided not to post the fruits of our research, intriguing though they were. We'll probably post our results on Monday. But yesterday, we decided to take a step back from our jaundice.

The sources of our jaundice are possibly more than several. They're reasonably well documented—for one such example, see below—and they've been piling up for well over twenty-two years.

Still and all, at some point, jaundice becomes too much. We decided to sit on our findings.

This morning, we stumbled upon a remarkable bit of reporting by the Washington Post. By "remarkable," we mean that it's an example of pure anthropology—anthropology all the way down.

It's an example of the way we humans have behaved all through the annals of time.

We can't necessarily tell you whose behavior was right and whose behavior was wrong in the episode under review. (As a general matter, we believe in staying away from judgment and punishment culture.)

In the end, we can't tell you whose behavior was wrong at all, let alone most wrong. We can tell you that the pattern emerging from this strange news report has obtained all through human history.

It emerged during the French revolution. It emerged during the Chinese "cultural revolution."

It even emerged at the dawn of the west. We think of the remarkable story which ends with Socrates' death.

Just as a basic frame of reference, Socrates seems to have wrong, or at least incoherent, in almost everything he ever said. It isn't hard to understand why some people found him annoying.

Still, the story to which we refer is deeply foundational. As told by Plato in The Apology, the story starts like this:

The oracle at Delphi declares that Socrates is the wisest person in Greece. Because Socrates is sure that this can't be true, he sets out to prove the oracle wrong.

So far, we might say, so good! At this point, we're encountering a type of origin myth about a foundational principle—the refusal to (blindly) accept the statements and judgments of authority figures.

In theory, we still honor that principle, though we routinely honor it in the breach. That said, in this famous origin myth, things went sideways from there.

In order to prove the oracle wrong, Socrates journeyed through Greece, speaking to men [sic] with reputations for wisdom. Since he was sure that he himself knew nothing, he felt sure that one of thrse men [sic] would prove to be wiser than he.

That's when things went sideways. In Professor Lee's translation, Socrates, as quoted by Plato, explains what happened next:

SOCRATES, AS QUOTED BY PLATO: After a long consideration, I at last thought of a method of trying the question. I reflected that if I could only find a man wiser than myself, then I might go to the god with a refutation in my hand. I should say to him, "Here is a man who is wiser than I am; but you said that I was the wisest."

Accordingly, I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him—his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and the result was as follows:

When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: "Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him."

Then I went to another, who had still higher philosophical pretensions, and my conclusion was exactly the same. I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.

Having annoyed everyone in Greece, he ended up on trial for his life. This happened at a time of political turmoil, upheaval, unrest.

That was a type of cultural revolution too. At certain times, we the people decide the time has come to silence those who disagree with the group wisdom which has emerged. Also with those who have made mistakes, or who are perceived to have done so.

A similar story, from this very time, was published in Thursday's Washington Post. This peculiar report was very long. It appeared on the front page of Style.

One piece of good news appears in the lengthy report; the target has apparently lost her job. We thought of great revolutions past, but also of Salem Village.

We can't tell you who was ultimately right or wrong in the matter under review. As a general matter, we would advise you to stay away from judgment and punishment culture, though of course that advice could be wrong.

That said, we were struck by the fact that the lead reporter was Marc Fisher. We thought of an earlier remarkable piece, an opinion column from the distant, destructive past.

Let us start by telling you this. We have no doubt that the veteran journalist of whom we speak is a good, decent person.

For ourselves, we would never have commissioned, or published, a report like the one which appeared in yesterday's Post. But these are matters of judgment, and it's better to limit judgment to particular acts, without moving on to condemnations of particular people.

For ourselves, we would never have commissioned or published a report like the one which appeared yesterday. For all we know, Fisher felt the same way, but his editors made him do it.

Whatever! At any rate, we thought back to the opinion column Fisher wrote in late November 1999. A mob was running in the streets at the time. The episode in question ended in many deaths.

At that time, the mob was chasing Candidate Gore through the streets. In the eyes of the mob, he hadn't condemned Bill Clinton harshly enough. For that, he was being pursued.

As part of the larger pursuit, the mob was also was chasing Naomi Wolf.

At the time, Wolf had written three books, two of which had been chosen as New York Times Books of the Year. No matter!

Revolutionary fervor had gripped the membership of a certain guild. And as will happen at such times, there was nothing too crazy for these people to say or to do in support of their fervor.

At the time, the journalist in question was writing a weekly column for the Washington Post's Sunday magazine. In the column under review, he slimed Wolf hard, not failing to mention her troubling hair, and he wrote utterly crazy things about Candidate Gore's unacceptable wardrobe.

In fairness, this particular wardrobe-shaming has been underway for a month at this time. As a matter of basic anthropology, crazy statements grow crazier still as such group actions proceed.

But as a result of this guild-wide frenzy, many people ended up dead in Iraq. And as a result of the concomitant sliming of Hillary Clinton—a sliming which never really ended—Donald J. Trump ended up the White House!

The column in question was barely sane. This is the way it ended:

WASHINGTON POST SUNDAY MAGAZINE COLUMN (11/28/99): [W]hen Al Gore sneaks around and spends $15,000 a month to hire an oddball like Naomi Wolf, a controversialist who campaigns against the tyranny of the beauty culture and then plasters soft-lit glossies of herself and her perfectly teased hair all over the Internet and on her book jackets, we have two choices: We can say Gore's a good man who's been duped by over-eager aides, or we can say this is a man who does not know himself, a man who is unknowable, unreadable and therefore not fit to be president.

A person who makes her living by writing pop philosophy about sex tells a man who would be president of the United States that he must be a different kind of man, that he must be more assertive, that he must wear a brown suit of a sort that is alien to virtually every American. And he says, “Okay.”

To call him unreadable is to be charitable.

Today, these human specimens say that Trump's not fit. They say that because they don't have the intellectual integrity to question his mental health in direct, grown-up terms, using their big boy words.

Back then, they were saying that Gore wasn't fit! As part of the deal, and at no extra charge, they were sliming Wolf as an "oddball."

They were troubled by Gore's brown suit—it was "alien to virtually every American"—but also by Wolf's "teased hair." In our view, the Washington Post has lost its mind this week, but that was also true back then, when that lunatic column was published as part of a much larger action.

Today, our tribe is quite sure of itself. But our sachems said nothing about any of this in real time, and they still won't discuss these past episodes. There's no sign that they ever will.

In yesterday's peculiar report, one piece of very good news obtained—the current target has apparently lost her job. That said, we see many others in yesterday's report who could perhaps be marched through the streets now that the initial target has been taken down.

We're astonished to think that the Washington Post would publish such a report. But as we've told you for the past several years, it's all anthropology now.

This is who and what we are. According to major anthropologists, we're a highly tribal species, with a strong inclination to war.

Our brains are wired that way, they say. We do it every time, they say, leaving you to decide if it's wrong.

ELEMENTS OF THE WHOLE TRUTH: Experts say the darnedest things!

FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2020

A decent attempt by the Times: The premature death of a decent person is no joking matter.

As a general matter, the same is true of the (frequently clownish way our "journalism" works. The same is true of the heavily tribal nature of our heavily war-inclined species.

Still and all, every once in a while, a person will perhaps be permitted to chuckle. We'll admit that we chuckle, or at least roll our eyes, every time we read this account of the late Rayshard Brooks' recent death:

What happened during the incident

...According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, which is investigating the shooting, the officers gave Brooks a sobriety test, which he allegedly failed. The GBI says that when the officers then went to arrest Brooks, he “resisted and a struggle ensued,” prompting one of the officers to deploy their Taser. Brooks was able to obtain the Taser before trying to run away, according to the GBI, and then “officers pursued Brooks on foot, and during the chase, Brooks turned and pointed the Taser at the officer. The officer fired his weapon, striking Brooks.”

Brooks was able to obtain the Taser! It almost sounds like he sent away to Amazon, or had somehow managed to prove that the Taser in question really belonged to him.

Meanwhile, does "a struggle ensued" sound a bit like President Nixon's famous "mistakes were made?" The death of Brooks is no laughing matter, but the way our species is inclined to function may sometimes seem like a joke.

It was New York magazine which let us know that Brooks "was able to obtain the Taser." That said, similar fudging of language—accompanied by fudging of facts—has been fairly routine as our "journalists" attempt or pretend to describe what happened that night.

Also, as public officials may perhaps seem to align themselves with the tribe. As such officials may possibly seek to further their own interests.

The occasional journalist bravely resists this impulse. For one example, consider what Rachel Maddow did when she interviewed Paul Howard last night.

Howard said, just a few weeks ago, that a Taser is considered a deadly weapon under George law. He made the statement as he "charged six Atlanta police officers with using excessive force in pulling two college students out of a car during a protest."

Last night, Maddow played the videotape of Howard's recent statement! She then gave him a chance to discuss the claims that this recent statement may undercut his murder charge against former officer Garrett Rolfe.

She also asked Howard if his unusually quick action in charging Rolfe and Officer Devin Brosnan was affected by his upcoming run-off election, part of a re-election campaign in which he's been running behind.

She even asked Howard to address the charges of sexual harassment he is currently facing, along with the charges of financial impropriety. It was an unusually tough interview, unlike the softball session she conducted, long ago, when Colin Powell agreed to appear on her air.

Oh wait! Maddow didn't mention any of those matters during last night's interview! We saw the tape of Howard's recent statement, and heard a brief mention of the other matters, as we watched Tucker Carlson fume about the end of the American experiment on Fox News last night.

On our own liberal cable, Maddow joined Lawrence O'Donnell in kowtowing to Howard and applauding his recent decisions.
When Maddow described the claims Howard has made against Officer Brosnan—the officer who didn't shoot Brooks—she didn't bother telling viewers that Brosnan's attorneys have challenged the accuracy of several of Howard's claims.

Fawningly, the claims were repeated. Viewers weren't even allowed to know that the claims have been denied.

For students of anthropology, this latest deeply unfortunate case offers a brilliant case study in the tribal sifting of logic, information and fact. Depending on which news organizations you frequent, you're being exposed to highly selective accounts of what happened, accounts which are marinated in selective applications of logic.

If you watch the PBS NewsHour, you've seen some highly speculative assertions pass without challenge or comment. If you watch Carlson or Laura Ingraham, you may be exposed to videotape and information you'll see nowhere else, though such exposure may be accompanied by hopelessly ridiculous frameworks.

(Although that isn't always the case, we find ourselves forced to suggest.)

This morning, the New York Times offers a perfectly decent attempt to assess the decisions made by the two officers who encountered Brooks that fateful night. The hard-copy headline says this:

Experts Debate Police Decisions In Atlanta Stop

In a lengthy, 44-paragraph front-page report, Fausset and Dewan quotes various things various "experts" have said about the two officers' conduct. To their credit, the reporters are willing to offer a range of viewpoints about various bits of the officers' conduct. They even mention this, though not until paragraph 36:

"Georgia officers are taught that Tasers are a deadly threat because they can disable officers long enough for their guns to be seized..."

Warning! That statement is part of a larger presentation about the legal status of Tasers under Georgia law. For those who are seeking to assess the charges against former officer Rolfe, a second consideration is mentioned, and then perhaps a third.

Indeed, the reporters are willing to quote an expert who opines, at one point, in favor of Rolfe. The question at issue is this:

When Rolfe shot Brooks, should he have known that the Taser Brooks had been able to obtain had already been fired twice? On that basis, should Rolfe have known that the Taser was no longer operative?

In his public statement charging Rolfe, Howard expressly stated that view. Today's report includes an alternate expert opinion:

FAUSSET AND DEWAN (6/19/20): Use of force should be proportional to the threat, the experts said.

But whether the officer should have known how many times the Taser had been fired—or could have reacted quickly enough to that knowledge—was a separate question.

“That’s a high expectation in the middle of a fight, that an officer is going to know every single fact that we get to see after the fact with an analysis of the video,” said Roberto Villaseñor, a former police chief in Tucson, Ariz., and a member of former President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

“There’s a lot of things that occur in a dramatic, volatile situation that you might not be aware of,” he continued. “You have adrenaline pumping, you’ve got fear working, you’ve got the fight-or-flight syndrome going on—you’ve got a lot of things that are affecting your perceptions.”

Should Rolfe have known that the Taser which Brooks had obtained couldn't be fired again? At least as presented in this report, that's what Villaseñor seemed to suggest, though he makes no such direct assertion.

Even here, a basic question went unasked, even as this discussion proceeded. Was there any way for Rolfe to know that the Taser had been fired twice?

In the first such incident, Brooks apparently discharged the Taser against Officer Brosnan, briefly disabling him. Did Rolfe even know that Brooks had done that? At no point in the Times report was this question asked or answered, or even opined upon.

Is it possible that Rolfe didn't know that the Taser had already been fired? Is it even possible that he might have thought, in the heat of the moment, that the Taser away from which he ducked might have been Brosnan's gun?

For ourselves, we have no idea about such matters. And when we watch our favorite shows, we see massively-paid corporate superstars rushing right past such questions

Despite its omissions, the Times report makes a decent attempt to puzzle out what happened. Indeed, the Times report spends a lot of time on a questions we've been exploring:

On the fateful evening in question, should the officers have let Brooks "walk home" or to his (alleged) sister's (allegedly nearby) house? That's what Butler told NewsHour viewers. Should Brooks have been allowed to do that?

The fact that they didn't let Brooks walk away was cited by Butler as an apparent sign of their racial bias. In this morning's report, the experts discuss this topic at some length—but one basic question still doesn't get asked:

FAUSSET AND DEWAN: Some observers have said the shooting death of Mr. Brooks could have been avoided if the two officers, who are white, had declined to arrest him. According to the footage from Officer Brosnan’s body camera, Mr. Brooks maintained that he had not had more than two drinks that night.

But he also made a suggestion: “I can just go home.”

It seemed like a simple request. “Why didn’t they just let him go home?” Mr. Brooks’s father, Larry Barbine, asked in an interview with The Toledo Blade.

Dr. Ture, a former law enforcement officer, said he likely would have written a citation but not taken Mr. Brooks to jail, particularly given the presence of the coronavirus in many detention facilities.

“I’d have said, ‘Mr. Brooks, I’ll offer you a ride wherever you want to go, however, I’m going to take your vehicle keys,’” Dr. Ture said. “If I was so concerned I might even tow the vehicle. But I might not even take Mr. Brooks to jail.”

But other experts said that for decades, the police have been told that society wants law enforcement to take a zero-tolerance approach to drunken driving, the No. 1 cause of death on U.S. roadways.

“Like with so many other social problems, we put officers at the forefront of dealing with D.U.I.,” said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who teaches law at the University of South Carolina. “So it should be no surprise that officers arrest someone for D.U.I. That’s what we’ve been telling them to do for a long time.”

Vince Champion, the southeast regional director for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, the Atlanta police union, said there were limits to an officer’s discretion.

Mr. Champion said he once let an inebriated driver walk home a short distance and the man was struck and killed. His supervisor, who had approved the move, was demoted, he said. Such episodes can lead to lawsuits.

“We’ve had to go away from trying to be nice,” he said.

These experts today! Some of the experts will say one thing, while others will say something else!

For ourselves, we'd like to see as few arrests as possible in all types of situation. To their credit, the Times reporters presented several points of view in the particular passage we've posted.

Various experts said various things. But even in this relatively lengthy discussion, one basic question remained unasked:

Under department protocols, were the officers required to make a DUI arrest? Given the policies of their department, were they empowered to let Brooks "walk home?"

Last Monday night, the highly placed William Bratton seemed to say that the officers were required to make an arrest. But we don't know if that statement was accurate, and since that time, we've seen no one pursue that question.

As of this morning, that includes Fausset and Dewan. These reporters today!

Where factual questions get ignored, novelization takes over. Pundits like Butler appear on shows like The NewsHour. They start telling the highly selective stories they very much like and prefer.

People like Judy Woodruff stare into air as unfounded speculations emerge from their high-profile broadcasts. In this way, "Joe Sixpack" starts ingesting the selective narratives which have always fired the war-inclined hearts of those in our various tribes.

Or so top anthropologists tell us. Those experts always seem highly despondent when they appear in our rooms.

In the last two weeks, we've seen a pair of presentations which come close to defining the current field of play. One statement was made by Jelani Cobb. The other statement was made by Andrea Ritchie, right there on the NewsHour.

In a rather unusual statement, Jelani Cobb offered this on MSNBC's The Beat:

COBB (6/10/20): One other point that I have been making a lot, I have been making all the time, is that one of the reasons that this problem has been allowed to persist is that people have the perception that this is a black and brown problem.

But if you were to discard all of the incidents involving black and brown people, what you would find is, there are a heck of a lot of white people, unarmed white people, who are killed by police each year.

We have a fundamental problem with policing in this country, whose most extreme violent forms are witnessed in how we see black and brown people treated by law enforcement.

In a highly unusual statement, Cobb seemed to say that we have a general problem with police killings—a "fundamental" problem which isn't restricted to the (presumably unwarranted) killing of those who are "black and brown."

Given current tribal narrative, that was a highly unusual statement. Six nights later, following Butler on the NewsHour, Ritchie offered this in a discussion which centered on the shooting death of Breonna Taylor, a wholly innocent person:

YANG (6/16/20): Louisville has banned—in reaction to this, banned no-knock warrants. They called it Breonna's Law. How effective do you think that will be?

RITCHIE: I think it's good that we're stepping back to look at how those police officers came to be at her door and looking to interrupt one of the mechanisms that has resulted in her death and also in the death of—I can name five other black women killed by no-knock warrants, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, Alberta Spruill, Aiyana Stanley-Jones.

So, there's many—this is not the first time. And so I think that stopping no-knock warrants is important...

From that presentation, and from Ritchie's full interview with John Yang, a viewer might form a picture of "the whole truth" which is very much unlike the picture suggested by Cobb. In this instance it was Yang, not Woodruff, who sat mutely by as preferred stories were told.

It's true that, before the shooting of Breonna Taylor, quite a few other people had died during no-knock raids. Next week, we'll discuss the egregious case from Houston in 2019—a case you've never seen mentioned.

We'll also start to review the numbers which lie behind the statement by Cobb. We'll look at the numbers nationwide, and at those from Minnesota.

We'll think about the possible survey we sometimes wonder about. After reading Wesley Lowery's Atlantic essay, we imagined several survey questions which could be asked, mainly involving this one:

How many "white" people do police officers shoot and kill?

How many respondents would lean toward "none?" In part, that's a question about our comically awful journalism. It's also a question about the way our human minds tend to work.

Next week: The victims who get spoken about, along with the victims who don't

Minnesota dreamin': Minnesota's numbers can be found within the Washington Post's invaluable Fatal Force site. Lowery was involved in this site's creation.

We'll guess that those Minnesota numbers would seem surprising to some. We may sift those numbers next week.

Also, what effects flow from the stories we tell? From the facts we agree to share? From the facts we agree to omit?

Brian Williams should use his words!

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2020

The shape of traditional values: Midway through last evening's program, Brian Williams teased the upcoming segment:

WILLIAMS (6/18/20): Coming up, a closer look at the charges against the two officers involved in the killing of Rayshard Brooks. Stunning new details about what happened just after the fatal shooting.

That was the test of the tease.
After a commercial break, Williams played a bit of videotapoe from the presentation by Paul Howard, the Fulton County Distrct Attorney. After that, he introduced his new segment as follows:

WILLIAMS: It was a powerful and methodical presentation in a local Atlanta courtroom today containing some shocking new details we didn't yet know about the killing by police of a black man in Atlanta last week...

That's the way he introduced the segment.

Did Howard actually make "a powerful and methodical presentation?" Obviously, that's a matter of judgment / opinion.

For ourselves, we thought a lot of the presentation was quite hard to follow. Absent due process in an actual trial, it will be hard to evaluate the charges which were made—or do we no longer bother with that?

For ourselves, we weren't blown away by Howard's presentation. Beyond that, we'll offer some points about Howard's current circumstances below.

That said, we evaluate journalists here; as a general matter, we don't attempt to evaluate District Attorneys. Watching Williams, we thought he ought to go back to "using his words."

We have one traditional word very strongly in mind. In our view, some editor should have amended Williams' copy in the way shown below:

WILLIAMS/AMENDED TEASE: Coming up, a closer look at the charges against the two officers involved in the killing of Rayshard Brooks. Stunning new allegations about what happened just after the fatal shooting.

WILLIAMS/AMENDED INTRODUCTION: It was a powerful and methodical presentation in a local Atlanta courtroom today containing some shocking new allegations we hadn't yet heard about the killing by police of a black man in Atlanta last week...

Does Brian know that what he heard yesterday was a set of allegations? Does he realize that he still doesn't "know" if the allegations are true, or if they'll stand up in court?

At one time, this was one of the most obvious bits of blocking and tackling in the whole American journalistic system. Everyone knew that an allegation had to be shown to be true. An allegation wasn't true just because a D.A. made it.

Today, people like Williams are primarily paid to pleasure viewers with tribal messaging services. Our tired old Enlightenment values and frameworks are being worn away.

We thought Chris Cuomo was so bad on CNN last night that we're postponing our discussion our of sheer despair. But make no mistake—almost surely, this is the most heavily tribalized topic in journalism today.

Last night, people on Fox heard one set of reactions to the presentation by Howard. On CNN and MSNBC, the sifting was very different, and rarely the twain shall meet.

As for Williams, it no longer occurs to him that you shouldn't simply assume that District Attorneys are making accurate, well-reasoned statements. Depending on your rooting interest, you can simply assume that you know that an allegation is true and well-founded as a matter of low..

In theory, a citizen shouldn't simply assume that a D.A. is making accurate statements and in rendering valid judgments. That may be especially true if the D.A, in question is involved in an extremely difficult re-election fight, as Howard currently is.

Should you believe everything Howard says? As a matter of traditional theory, no, of course you shouldn't! Everyone is fallible, and Howard is running behind for re-election in a district which is currently full of emotion about the shooting death of Brooks.

As for the harassment charges against Howard, not to mention the charges of financial impropriety, you can just click here. The report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution links you on to reports about both areas of concern. We heard these matters mentioned last night on Fox, but not on the channels we love.

We don't know if this D.A. has ever done anything wrong in his entire life. That said, viewers will be hearing about these matters over on Fox, less so on our own tribal channels.

Last night, the attorneys for Officer Brosnan—the officer who didn't fire his gun—disputed various things Howard said, including his apparently inaccurate claim that Brosnan has become a state's witness.

If Cuomo had stopped interrupting Brosnan's lawyers while asking absurdly irrelevant questions, viewers could have gotten a clearer picture of their client's account of what happened last Friday night.

As for Williams, he should go back to using his words! Howard has made some allegations. At one time, everybody knew the meaning of that highly important word!

ELEMENTS OF THE WHOLE TRUTH: When Lowery wrote about Minnesota...

THURSDAY, JUNE 18, 2020

...we imagined a possible survey: Except for the instant way it surfaced in the discourse, it's a fairly tangential point.
The questions at issue were these:

Should the two officers in Atlanta have allowed the late Rayshard Brooks to walk home on the tragic night in question? Under department protocols, would they even have been allowed to exercise such discretion?

Should they have let him walk home? In the end, it's a fairly tangential question, but it quickly provided a standard messaging-point. As we noted yesterday, Paul Butler offered this assessment on Tuesday night to a PBS NewsHour audience:

BUTLER (6/18/20): When the officer who ends up killing Mr. Brooks shows up, Mr. Brooks says, if you're concerned about my driving, my sister lives two blocks away. I can just walk to her house and leave the car there.

That also is effective policing. The cops don't have to arrest everyone. Public safety is about keeping people safe. But too often, especially with African-American suspects, the resort is always to arrest. And, sometimes, it leads to these tragic consequences.

[...]

It's about commonsense judgment. The officer could have said, "If I see you in this car, I'm going to lock you up."

According to Butler, the officers should have let Brooks walk the two blocks to his sister's home. His car could have stayed on the Wendy's parking lot. They could have warned him about coming back to drive his car away while he was still drunk.

Yesterday, we forgot to tell you—we feel completely sure that Butler is a good, decent person. Does anyone really doubt that?

That said, Butler is a leading cable news legal expert and a Georgetown Law School professor. By Tuesday night, the assessment he offered on the NewsHour was being voiced wherever our liberal tribe's storylines are sold.

Butler plainly suggested, at several points, that the officers' refusal to let Brooks walk home, or perhaps to walk to his sister's house, was based on racial bias. That too was standard official group narrative. This adds interest to what was said on CNN last night.

To the extent that Chris Cuomo's persistent interruptions allowed an interview to occur, Cuomo interviewed two attorneys for Devin Brosnan, the officer who didn't shoot Rayshard Brooks that night.

On the fateful evening in question, should the officers have let Brooks walk to his sister's house? At one point, fighting through interruptions and a battery of absurdly irrelevant questions, one of Brosnan's attorneys offered this:

CUOMO (6/17/20): Amanda, let's look at this idea that the performance that night [by Brosnan] was "exemplary" in the context of several different aspects of this, starting from light to heavy.

PALMER: Sure.

CUOMO: Light is, you see the guy. He's drunk. He says he wants to walk home. You could have let him walk home.

[...]

PALMER: ...You know, with regards to the argument, Well, why didn't you call him an Uber? Why didn't you—

CUOMO: Or drive him home.

PALMER: —or drive him home.

Number one, Mr. Brooks provided an Ohio driver's license, and he was driving a rental car.

We also see in the video he is disoriented about where he is. He says that he is in Forest Park, Georgia, when in fact he is in the city of Atlanta. He thinks that his hotel is like just down the street over a bridge. There is no bridge nearby.

So letting him walk home, in Devin's opinion, was not an option, particularly for Mr. Brooks' safety.

In our view, Cuomo's performance last night was two steps past abysmal. We'll offer more on that depressing topic this afternoon or tomorrow.

For now, should the officers have let Brooks walk home, or to his sister's house? Assuming that Palmer's statements are accurate, we'll guess that the answer is rather clearly no.

For starters, walking home to Ohio would have been quite a stroll. Meanwhile, did he actually have a sister who lived two blocks away?

As storylines have quickly hardened, we've still seen no one ask or answer that obvious question. So too with this:

Under department protocols, were the officers required to make a DUI arrest, as William Bratton seemed to tell Brian Williams on Monday night?

There too, we haven't seen that question directly asked or answered. Our basic point is this:

Within the failing worlds of (1) "cable news" and (2) the upper-end academy, Butler is considered to be a leading expert on matters of this type.

That said, he got way out ahead of himself on Tuesday evening's NewsHour. On its face, the basic script he recited that night made little apparent sense. But it almost completely falls apart based on what Palmer said.

(We're assuming her statements are accurate. If they are, you almost surely won't see them repeated or discussed, except on Fox.)

Beyond that, Butler strongly suggested, at two separate points, that what happened that night was all about race. He strongly suggested that the officers would have let Brooks go without an arrest if Brooks had been white.

Everything is always possible, of course. But on what basis was the underinformed Professor Butler willing to float that claim?

In these matters, the expert was peddling narrative and not a whole lot else. Appallingly, this is the way our discourse has worked for many decades now.

These sub-rational acts of group behavior have been performed by the upper-end press corps on a wide array of topics. The conduct extends all the way from "the Social Security trust find is just a pile of worthless IOUs" and "Al Gore said he invented the Internet" all the way to this week's acts of group declamation.

This is the way these peculiar elites actually tend to function. No, this isn't "rational" conduct—but it definitely is our floundering culture and our deeply flawed species in action.

We had somewhat similar thoughts and reactions when we read Wesley Lowery's new essay for The Atlantic, "Why Minneapolis Was the Breaking Point."

In his lengthy essay, Lowery discusses police killings in Minnesota. The essay starts like this:

LOWERY (6/10/20): Miski Noor watched just the first minute of the video of George Floyd’s killing before closing the tab and walking the two blocks to join the protests already forming at the scene. The days since have been filled with a maddening sense of déjà vu.

Noor had joined the Movement for Black Lives in 2014, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The 34-year-old activist’s first protest was that December, a demonstration that shut down the Mall of America during the peak of the holiday shopping season.

Noor soon became intimately familiar with the gruesome cycle: The police killed someone. Activists protested. Small reforms were won. The police killed someone else.

In Minnesota, St. Paul police killed Philip Quinn, a Native American man in the midst of a mental-health crisis, in September 2015. One week later, a Kanabec County Sheriff’s deputy killed Robert Christen, a white former fullback for the Wisconsin Badgers who was enduring a mental-health crisis of his own. Two months after that, in November 2015, Minneapolis police killed Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man. Hundreds poured into the streets.

In paragraph 4, Lowery named three people who have been killed by police officers in Minnesota. In a departure from current norms, he included one person who was white.

Overall, we thought Lowery had various thumbs on various scales in the course of his lengthy essay. Out of curiosity, we googled reports of Philip Quinn's death. We were already generally familiar with the events which led to the death of Jamar Clark.

We'll link you through to such accounts at some future point. That said, we're trying to proceed extremely slowly on this.

Dating at least to Plato's Apology, history teaches that we the people are reluctant to process encounters with the various facts which may be taken to help define "the whole truth" concerning some given subject. We may tend to prefer pre-existing beliefs.

We're trying to be respectful of that basic fact about our human nature. For today, we'll only mention a possible survey—a possible survey we sometimes wonder about:

After reading Lowery's essay, we wondered how many black men and women have been killed by police officers in Minnesota in recent years. Acting on that curiosity, we went to the Washington Post's Fatal Force site, which documents fatal shootings by police.

(Don't let the site's title page confuse you, as we recently did. The invaluable site is still active, though you'll have to fumble about to access its data, which the Post almost seems to be hiding at this point.)

How many black men and women have been shot and killed by Minnesota police officers? The number for the past six years struck us as perhaps surprisingly low. We also wondered about something else, and about that possible survey:

In recent years, we've often wondered what would happen if you conducted a survey about police killings. Respondents would be told how many black people had been killed by police in some given place during some given period.

They'd then be asked to estimate how many white people had been killed. The question could be asked in various ways. In some versions of the survey, respondents would be given "None" as one possible answer.

How many people would guess that no white people ever get killed by police? How many would have a reasonably good idea about the way the numbers work nationwide?

Just last week, Jelani Cobb somewhat surprisingly said that lots of white people get killed by police. Given the way such matters have been reported in recent years, we'd be curious to see how many people are aware of that general fact.

We'd be curious to see that point explored. We would say, as Cobb seemed to say, that such information is a fairly basic part of what might be called "the whole truth" about this important topic.

Cobb said many people get killed, that it isn't just black and brown. Tomorrow, we'll provide at least one number from Minnesota, and we'll discuss a double killing you've never heard about.

In our view, Butler's presentation on the NewsHour made no sense at all. How much that we hear on our favorite shows fit that unfortunate mold?

Tomorrow: Two previous no-knock deaths

Kliff could produce important work!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 2020

But would the Times permit it?: Sarah Kliff joined the New York Times a bit more than one year ago. Unlike others at the Times, she lacks the twin excuses of incompetence and ignorance.

Today, at the very top of page A1, she suggests the way a person like herself might perform some large-scale, major health care reporting.

In the bulk of today's report, Kliff reports price gouging by certain concerns who are performing coronavirus testing. Along the way, as she starts her report, she places this apparent gouging within a much larger context:

KLIFF (6/17/20): How can a simple coronavirus test cost $100 in one lab and 2,200 percent more in another? It comes back to a fundamental fact about the American health care system: The government does not regulate health care prices.

This tends to have two major outcomes that health policy experts have seen before, and are seeing again with coronavirus testing.

The first is high prices over all. Most medical care in the United States costs double or triple what it would in a peer country. An appendectomy, for example, costs $3,050 in Britain and $6,710 in New Zealand, two countries that regulate health prices. In the United States, the average price is $13,020.

The United States government doesn't regulate health care prices, Kliff reports. One result "is high prices over all"—massive overcharging for medical care, as compared to the cost of health care in other developed nations.

"Most medical care in the United States costs double or triple what it would in a peer country," Kliff reports. The gouging Kliff describes in this way is paid for by Americans across the board—by red and blue voters together!

This is the basic story newspapers like the New York Times have long refused to report or discuss. Kliff understands the basics here—the basic facts concerning the looting of every American by the various entities which comprise our "heath care system."

Kliff understands the basics of this relentless looting. But will she ever report this topic? Would the New York Times permit her to? Will she simply knuckle under, as all good "journalists" do?

Also this: Your cable news favorites never discuss this. Can you explain why they don't?

ELEMENTS OF THE WHOLE TRUTH: What the NewsHour offered last night!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17, 2020

Storyline all the way down: As a matter of policy, could Officers Brosnan and Rolfe have exercised discretion that night?

Instead of attempting to arrest the late Rayshard Brooks, could they have issued a summons and driven him home, while impounding his car? Under the "protocols" of the Atlanta Police Department, would they have been allowed to do that?

We've been asking that question because it quickly became part of the discussion of this latest police shooting. More specifically, many people—in comment threads and on TV—began asserting that the offices could, and should, have done so.

Also, that the officers would have exercised such discretion had Brooks belonged to a different "race."

For the record, that's the way we'd like to see many more matters handled. We'd prefer to see fewer arrests, or at least fewer instant arrests—although we do understand that Mothers Against Drink Driving spent decades persuading pundits to stop treating DUIs as a "minor offense."

In theory, a DUI is a serious offense. That widely accepted judgment has quickly given way in the face of this latest incident, which has carried its own mandated claims.

That said, rational discourse tends to fly in the face of such terrible incidents. (To the extent that such discourse ever existed at all.) Just consider what happened last night on the PBS NewsHour, the brightest show in all the land.

Judy Woodruff discussed this matter with a pair of guests. Her first question went to Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law School and an MSNBC legal analyst.

Woodruff seemed to want to know if an arrest had been required. The first exchange went like this:

WOODRUFF (6/16/20): Hello to both of you. Thank you so much for being here...

And my question to you is, could this have been headed off from the very beginning? Did the police, coming across a man sitting in his car who had fallen asleep, did they end up—did they have to arrest him?

Paul Butler, I'm going to come to you first.

BUTLER: So, Judy, we see the first 25 minutes of the encounter is civil. At first, the officer who responds says, why don't you just take your car from the driveway to the parking lot and sleep it off? That's effective policing.

But later, when the officer who ends up killing Mr. Brooks shows up, Mr. Brooks says, if you're concerned about my driving, my sister lives two blocks away. I can just walk to her house and leave the car there.

That also is effective policing. The cops don't have to arrest everyone. Public safety is about keeping people safe. But too often, especially with African-American suspects, the resort is always to arrest. And, sometimes, it leads to these tragic consequences.

For the record, the picture Butler painted may have been somewhat unclear. It would have been good policing, he said, had Brooks been allowed to "just walk to [his sister's] house and leave the car there."

Presumably, that meant that Brooks should have been allowed to walk to the sister's house, with the car being left on the Wendy's parking lot. Extemporaneous speech is often jumbled, but this point was somewhat unclear.

It's clear, however, that Butler thought that's what the two officers should, and could, have done. He also quickly suggested that they would have done that had Brooks been "white"—that their decision to make an arrest was based on Brooks' perceived "race."

Meanwhile, a basic factual question:

Did Brooks really have a sister who lived two blocks away? Although the statement is often repeated, we've seen no one ask or answer that question. Almost surely, we never will.

The most obvious questions don't always occur to our upper-end journalists. But when Woodruff turned to her other guest, a very strange thing occurred.

Woodruff's second guest was David Thomas, a retired police officer and a professor of criminal science at Florida Gulf Coast University. Amazingly, Thomas was disinclined to agree with Butler!

Woodruf's second guest thought her first guest was wrong! This created a dynamic you will virtually never see on pro-liberal corporate cable:

WOODRUFF (continuing directly): David Thomas, let me ask you about that moment when police made the decision not to just let it go, that, instead, they decide—they did give him a test of whether he had been driving under the influence, and then made the decision to arrest him.

Did they have a choice to say, "You can go?"

THOMAS: The problem with making that choice or having that choice, or using discretion, what actually happens in that process is, if I let him go, there's nothing to keep him from returning to that vehicle and driving it.

And he's impaired. So, because of that, the police do nothing, and if he kills somebody, then the police are going to be held liable for that. So, it's a double-edged sword.

In most instances, I have seen this happen, where people—officers have done this, and the person comes back, takes the car, and they drive off that. And so then that leads into a chase. And it's a mess.

So, the reality is, I think that, as much as I would like to say, "Don't make the arrest," I don't think you have much of a choice, because the officers are responsible.

Thomas disagreed with Butler! Under current arrangements, you will never see such a thing on pseudo-progressive "cable news," where bookings are almost always done to ensure total agreement with prevailing scripts.

Woodruff had a difference of opinion on her hands! When she gave Butler a chance to respond, she received a peculiar response:

WOODRUFF (continuing directly): Paul Butler, what about that, that the officers were faced with a decision about what to do about what they found there?

BUTLER: The reality is, police officers always exercise discretion.

Most cops will tell you they certainly don't arrest everybody who they have probable cause to arrest. So, it's about commonsense judgment. The officer could have said, "If I see you in this car, I'm going to lock you up."

But, again, Mr. Brooks said, all I have to do is walk two blocks away. We know from the evidence that police officers exercise their discretion not to arrest all the time, and white people are—disproportionately get the benefit of those decisions not to arrest. African-American people and Hispanic people disproportionately get locked up.

Butler's non-response response strikes us as little short of astonishing, except as a classic example of the way modern discourse works.

Thomas had raised a blindingly obvious point. If the officers had decided to let Brooks walk away, he could have returned to the Wendy's lot, driven away while still impaired and proceeded to kill someone.

According to Butler, the officers should have warned Brooks that he'd get arrested if they saw him back in his car. Butler then returned to an approved messaging point, in which he implied that the officers' decision to make an arrest had been based on Brooks' race.

Except for those who love storyline, Butler's response strikes us as astounding. They should have given Brooks a warning. They should have assumed that this would keep him from driving his car away!

That prescription makes zero sense. That said, Butler's comments often strike us that way on corporate cable, where no one is expected to make any sense, just so long as what they say adheres to approved storylines.

Here at this site, we know nothing about criminal law or about policing. But starting Monday, even we understood an obvious point—presumably, Brooks' car would have to be impounded if no arrest was made.

This thought didn't seem to occur to the Georgetown law professor! Meanwhile, though Woodruff never seemed to notice—upper end moderators rarely do—neither Butler nor Thomas seemed to have answered her question.

Woodruff had asked if the officers could have made the choice to release Brooks without arrest. Both guests seemed to assume that they could have made that decision under department protocols, but no one was ever directly asked.

Under department protocols, could the officer have released Brooks? Or did department protocols require a DUI arrest?

On Monday night, William Bratton seemed to say that Atlanta protocols required an arrest. We have no idea if that is true—and most likely, we never will.

As we've been noting for twenty-two years at this site, this is the way the discourse works at the upper ends of our establishment press corps. To our mind, Butler's presentation made astoundingly little sense—except in the all-important way he kept Returning to Narrative.

In the NewsHour's next segment, John Yang interviewed Andrea Ritchie, "a researcher at Barnard College and an attorney representing people involved in police violence." No other guest was interviewed. Viewers would hear what Ritchie said, and they'd hear nothing else.

Barring possible pushback from Yang, no one would offer additional aspects of what might be called "the whole truth." Viewers would hear Ritchie's perspective and they'd hear nothing else.

In this segment, the topic was the shooting death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville back in March. Taylor, a wholly innocent person, lost her life during a multiply-bungled, middle of the night "no-knock" police raid.

For reasons we'll detail by the end of the week, this was one of the worst interviews ever performed on TV. With respect to storyline, suffice to say that the first exchange went like this:

YANG (6/16/20): Earlier in the show, just before this segment, we heard a discussion about Rayshard Brooks' case in Atlanta. This happened on Friday. Already, that officer has been fired. There's talk of criminal charges against him.

Breonna Taylor was killed three months ago. The officers are still on the force. They're on this administrative reassignment. And as far as we know publicly, the investigation has had very little movement, very little public movement. What do you make of that difference?

RITCHIE: I definitely think that it has to do with how we see and understand state violence and who it impacts and how it's impacted.

I think it also has to do with the jurisdiction. It's long past time for those officers to be fired. And it's long past time for her family to receive the reparations and healing that they're owed and deserved.

I think part of it is about how we understand state violence. I think our understanding of state violence is shaped by the experiences of black men like Rayshard, who are perceived to be the sort of quintessential targets from the time of lynching to the time of the present, and that the experiences of women, of gender-based violence, are kind of shaped by our understanding of white women experiencing domestic violence in the home.

And, as a result, black women who experience both state and violence in the home are left out of both narratives, and we literally don't see them, even when the violence is happening to them in front of us...

Why hadn't the officers in Louisville been charged? Imaginably, Yang's question was geared to trigger a certain prevailing narrative. As it turned out, Ritchie was ready to serve.

Before the interview was done, Ritchie had possibly given viewers a certain impression. She had possibly given the impression that no one is killed in no-knock raids except an array of black women. Below, you see Yang's second question and Ritchie's response:

YANG: Louisville has banned—in reaction to this, banned no-knock warrants. They called it Breonna's Law. How effective do you think that will be?

RITCHIE: I think it's good that we're stepping back to look at how those police officers came to be at her door and looking to interrupt one of the mechanisms that has resulted in her death and also in the death of—I can name five other black women killed by no-knock warrants, Tarika Wilson, Kathryn Johnston, Alberta Spruill, Aiyana Stanley-Jones.

So, there's many—this is not the first time. And so I think that stopping no-knock warrants is important, and that we need to recognize that increasing the time that folks have to respond to 15 or 30 seconds or a minute, imagine someone backing on your door in the middle of the night. That's not enough time to understand what's going on either.

So, we need to maybe step further back and ask ourselves, why are people showing up at—police officers, armed police officers, showing up on people's doors to serve no-knock or short-knock warrants?

And I think then we need to look at the war on drugs, which is where those warrants came from and what brought those officers to Breonna's door that night. And we need to rethink our approach to that in a way that we are taking an approach to saving lives not, taking them, in this way, as Breonna Taylor's was taken.

We also think it'a a good idea that no-knock raids are being questioned. That said, we were struck by Ritchie's list of previous victims, and of the pleasing misimpression this interview might have conveyed.

Why haven't the Louisville officers been fired? Because they were sent to perform a no-knock raid based on a legal warrant, and because Taylor's boyfriend (understandably) fired at them when they entered the apartment, it isn't entirely clear that these officers did something wrong.

These small aspects of the whole truth were never voiced last night, though Ritchie mentioned historical lynchings a few strides out of the gate.

When she was rather fuzzily asked whether she thinks "Breonna's Law" will be effective, she didn't attempt to answer the question. Quickly, though, she listed other victims of no-knock raids, all of whom were black women.

This is messaging all the way down. This is messaging in the absence of the simple, elementary facts which help constitute "the whole truth." It's also abysmal work by the lofty NewsHour, a TV show which has long been branded as the brightest such show in the land.

We'll have more on no-knock raids in Friday's report. By then, we'll have returned to what Jelani Cobb somewhat surprisingly said:

"One other point that I have been making a lot, I have been making all the time, is that... people have the perception that this is a black and brown problem."

That's what Cobb said last Wednesday night. Could last night's NewsHour help us see where people might get that perception?

For better or worse, this is the way our discourse has worked at its highest level for a very long time. This brings us to something we decided to check while reading a somewhat novelized essay in The Atlantic.

The essay was written by Wesley Lowery, though he himself called it a "story." Recently, Lowery said the "core value" of our news orgs needs to be "the truth."

Tomorrow: Lowery in Minnesota