Tools.
This, this is rich:
Agency: Chalabi group was front for Iran
BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU
May 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT
WASHINGTON – The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.
An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his agency’s internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But he said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. “Some of the information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high value targets and on force protection issues,” he said. “And some of the information wasn’t so great.”
At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a 47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during a raid on Chalabi’s home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest.
Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of the information collection program.
The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions said that Karim’s “fingerprints are all over it.”
“There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government, inadvertently,” he said.
Via Julia, though this one’s climbing the charts like mad. Why not? It isn’t every day you discover that your own government may have been so mind-boggling stupid. If this pans out, do the math: we took out Hussein’s government, doing all the dirty work and stirring up the shit until every tenth orphaned widower has taken up arms against us, while Iran waits quietly, patiently, to pick up the pieces when all’s said and mostly done.
We were their fucking flypaper.
But that’s not the funny bit; that’s not the funny bit, by half. No, the funny bit is this:
The tools are still going to figure out a way to blame it all on us.
This exercise in Dolchstasslegende brought to you by cartoonist Cerdipity, by way of Dean Esmay. Thanks to Orcinus.
Housekeeping: the Newsday article cited (rather in full) above has moved from here to here. What’s where it was now is an innoccuous AP piece about how Chalabi is “turning to politics for survival.”
The triumph of William Jennings Bryan.
The chances are that history will put the peak of democracy in his time; it has been on the downward curve among us since the campaign of 1896. He will be remembered, perhaps, as its supreme impostor, the reduction ad adsurdum of its pretension. Bryan came very near being President of the United States. In 1896, it is possible, he was actually elected. He lived long enough to make patriots thank the inscrutable gods for Harding, even for Coolidge. Dullness has got into the White House, and the smell of cabbage boiling, but there is at least nothing to compare to the intolerable buffoonery that went on in Tennessee. The President of the United States doesn’t believe that the earth is square, and that witches should be put to death, and that Jonah swallowed the whale. The Golden Text is not painted weekly on the White House wall, and there is no need to keep ambassadors waiting while Pastor Simpson, of Smithville, prays for rain in the Blue Room. We have escaped something—by a narrow margin, but still safely.
—“To Expose a Fool,” H.L. Mencken’s celebrated obituary
of William Jennings Bryan
We escaped it then, but we forgot our history, and now we’re doomed to repeat it: a farce that never was very funny, a Punch and Judy show that just won’t stop beating the shit out of us. “Atsawaytodoit!” —But unlike a lot of us plying our boats about the Islets of Bloggerhans, I’m not reading this recent Village Voice article as an instance of Pastor Simpson gumming up the works in the Blue Room:
It was an e-mail we weren’t meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that “the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level”—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we’re not supposed to know the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.
But now we know.
“Everything that you’re discussing is information you’re not supposed to have,” barked Pentecostal minister Robert G. Upton when asked about the off-the-record briefing his delegation received on March 25. Details of that meeting appear in a confidential memo signed by Upton and obtained by the Voice.
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be “the Christian Voice in the Nation’s Capital,” the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David’s temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won’t come back to earth.
Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that “the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph’s tomb or Rachel’s tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace.”
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
As the incomparable Slacktivist points out, if read carefully, this logic is at best post hoc ergo propter hoc: what’s described isn’t a highrolling geopolitical summit with apocalyptic fanatics, but instead a slick bit of fanservice for the rubes, a huckster’s shill to puff them up, make them think they’re playas, and part them from their votes and money.
The group sent “45 ministers including wives” to the White House, where they sat in a room as a series of second- and third-tier staffers came through to assure them that the president appreciates their concerns and is counting on their support. At the end of the day, they were allowed outside to wave as the president departed in a helicopter. It was their only glimpse of him. (Robert G. Upton, the AC’s leader, described this as a “heart-moving send-off of the President in his Presidential helicopter.”)
The White House shores up support in a fragment of its base, and Upton gets to return to his office and crank out fund-raising letters assuring his deluded followers that he has insider access with “key leaders” in the Bush administration.
The author himself chimes in: a rather critical paragraph was, apparently, cut. This particular instance isn’t an example of consulting eschaton immanentizers on foreign policy decisions that affect us all. The Golden Text isn’t written on any White House walls, and if any one of those 45 ministers prayed for rain, no one in the administration took it seriously.
They are, after all, one fuck of a lot scarier.
In 1999, candidate Bush gave a speech to the little-known Council on National Policy.
His speech, contemporaneously described as a typical mid-campaign ministration to conservatives, was recorded on audio tape.
(Depending on whose account you believe, Bush promised to appoint only anti-abortion-rights judges to the Supreme Court, or he stuck to his campaign “strict constructionist” phrase. Or he took a tough stance against gays and lesbians, or maybe he didn’t).
The media and center-left activist groups urged the group and Bush’s presidential campaign to release the tape of his remarks. The CNP, citing its bylaws that restrict access to speeches, declined. So did the Bush campaign, citing the CNP.
Shortly thereafter, magisterial conservatives pronounced the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership.
Now, this might be more post hoc ergo propter hoc. But there are very real questions as to how, exactly, Bush rose to the top of the Republican lists. And even if you don’t want to believe that an interlocking directorate of Christian political organizations and prominent Republican politicians could kingmake a failed businessman and one-term governor with a market-tested family name (“CNP will forever be nothing more than a ‘comfortable place’ for like-minded folks to brainstorm, one member said,” or so goes the ABC article that’s still the best one-stop shop on the CNP. “‘What they decided at one point was that people will simply feel more at ease,’ said another member, Balint Vazsonyi, who joined the group in 1997. ‘It’s certainly not for a political reason. The views discussed here are among those you see on the television or when you open a newspaper’”), what you have to ask yourself is why so many prominent Republicans see no political difficulties in associating themselves with individuals and organizations that explicitly call for overthrowing American democracy in favor of a Christian theocracy. And you can still write this off as fanservice if you want, glandhanding the rubes while picking their pockets, like the absurdly messianic coronation of Sun Myung Moon attended by hordes of money-hungry Republican movers, shakers, and congressfolk. But then you have to go back a year or so to Jeffrey Sharlet’s “Jesus Plus Nothing,” his “undercover” account of hanging with up-and-coming Christian(ist) power brokers:
“King David,” David Coe went on, “liked to do really, really bad things.” He chuckled. “Here’s this guy who slept with another man’s wife—Bathsheba, right?—and then basically murders her husband. And this guy is one of our heroes.” David shook his head. “I mean, Jiminy Christmas, God likes this guy! What,” he said, “is that all about?”
The answer, we discovered, was that King David had been “chosen.” To illustrate this point David Coe turned to Beau. “Beau, let’s say I hear you raped three little girls. And now here you are at Ivanwald. What would I think of you, Beau?”
Beau shrank into the cushions. “Probably that I’m pretty bad?”
“No, Beau. I wouldn’t. Because I’m not here to judge you. That’s not my job. I’m here for only one thing.”
“Jesus ?” Beau said. David smiled and winked.
He walked to the National Geographic map of the world mounted on the wall. “You guys know about Genghis Khan?” he asked. “Genghis was a man with a vision. He conquered”—David stood on the couch under the map, tracing, with his hand, half the northern hemisphere—“nearly everything. He devastated nearly everything. His enemies? He beheaded them.” David swiped a finger across his throat. “Dop, dop, dop, dop.”
David explained that when Genghis entered a defeated city he would call in the local headman and have him stuffed into a crate. Over the crate would be spread a tablecloth, and on the tablecloth would be spread a wonderful meal. “And then, while the man suffocated, Genghis ate, and he didn’t even hear the man’s screams.” David still stood on the couch, a finger in the air. “Do you know what that means?” He was thinking of Christ’s parable of the wineskins. “You can’t pour new into old,” David said, returning to his chair. “We elect our leaders. Jesus elects his.”
He reached over and squeezed the arm of a brother. “Isn’t that great?” David said. “That’s the way everything in life happens. If you’re a person known to be around Jesus , you can go and do anything. And that’s who you guys are. When you leave here, you’re not only going to know the value of Jesus , you’re going to know the people who rule the world. It’s about vision. ‘Get your vision straight, then relate.’ Talk to the people who rule the world, and help them obey. Obey Him. If I obey Him myself, I help others do the same. You know why? Because I become a warning. We become a warning. We warn everybody that the future king is coming. Not just of this country or that, but of the world.” Then he pointed at the map, toward the Khan’s vast, reclaimable empire.
Maybe it’s fanservice. Maybe it’s skinning the rubes. But it’s getting awfully damned hard to tell who the rubes are, anymore. These Christianist red-state jes’-plain-folks rubes own electronic voting machine companies, after all, and spent eight years hounding a president, almost running him out of office. And if those voting machines don’t assure their candidate’s victory come November, they’ll gear up for another bruising snipe hunt—no matter at all what we the people might want. (And even if we do win, and survive, we’re all still stuck half-in, half-out of that vast empire of theirs, whose capital has just been named: Camp Redemption, ladies and gentlemen. Dop, dop, dop.)
Is the Bush administration then the triumph of William Jennings Bryan? —Not to speak too well of the Great Commoner, but he at least had some convictions to lend him courage. For all its rank rabble-rousery, his populism was ultimately rooted in the idea of trying to do some good for the people, and some little good was done. Bryan used fervent religion and crackpot economics to build a powerful coalition of people who’d had little to no power before. He was trying an end-run around the vested interests to do what he thought had to be done.
Bush is speaking to the vested interests.
That’s what’s making all the difference.
Brownsark.
From the latest op-ed by Tony Blankley, editorial page editor for that “newspaper,” the Washington Times:
We have the strength—military, economic, cultural, diplomatic, (dare I include the strength of our religious faith, also?)—to persist around the world unto victory—for generations if necessary.
But all this potential capacity for victory can only be brought into full being by a sustained act of collective will. It is heartbreaking, though no longer perplexing, that the president’s political and media opposition want the president’s defeat more than America’s victory. But that is the price we must pay for living in a free country. (Sedition laws almost surely would be found unconstitutional, currently—although things may change after the next terrorist attack in America.)
Why on earth would this be the case, Mr. Blankley? Will the next terrorist attack be a rewriting of the constitution?
(More here and here. Turn on the lights and scatter the cockroaches. —My God, you can almost hear the bated breath, you can almost smell the expectant sweat. One more terrorist attack will show you. The gloves will finally be off! We can at last do what must be done! Gloriosky, God in heaven, bring it on!)
A few basic precautions.
Professor DeLong’s father is rattled by seeing his house on the cover of Reason magazine:
The latest issue of Reason magazine arrived in the mail, and the cover causes a jolt. It is an aerial photo of my neighborhood, with my house circled and the legend underneath: “James DeLong: They Know Where You Are!”
DeLong père ends up as sanguine about the database nation as Declan McCullagh, who wrote the article on the upside of data mining that the stunt cover publicizes. But DeLong fils isn’t so sure:
I don’t have settled (or especially informed) views on this, Dad. But I wonder if your first reaction might not have been more accurate. It takes 20 seconds to find and circle a house with a telephone book, a map, and a crayon—at $10 an hour total cost for low-wage labor, that’s six cents an address. Very few people will have an incentive to organize and analyze their data on you at that cost. Those whom you want to send you magazines every month will, but how many others. I think we do have to worry about how governments—future Stasis—will use computers. And there are additional (but far lesser) potential vulnerabilities: weaknesses of the will at the personal or household level that might be exploited. [...]
Sometimes what look like quantitative changes—the falling cost of information processing—make qualitative differences. This may or may not be one of them. But it may be time to start thinking about how one would live in a world in which every conversation (even informal ones with close family members) may be broadcast around the world.
All of which is really just an excuse to cut ’n’ past the lyrics to a delightful song by Momus, written in the headier, happier days of 1997, on this very topic. Ladies and gentlemen, from the exquisite Ping Pong: “The Age of Information.”
This is a public service announcement.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now entering
The age of information
It’s perfectly safe
If we all take a few basic precautions
May I make some observations?
Axiom 1 for the world we’ve begun:
Your reputation used to depend on
What you concealed
Now it depends on what you reveal
The age of secretive mandarins who creep on heels of tact
Is dead: we are all players now in the great game of fact instead
So since you can’t keep your cards to your chest
I’d suggest you think a few moves ahead
As one does when playing a game of chess
Axiom 2 to make the world new:
Paranoia’s simply a word for seeing things as they are
Act as you wish to be seen to act
Or leave for some other star
Somebody is prying through your files, probably
Somebody’s hand is in your tin of Netscape magic cookies
But relax:
If you’re an interesting person
Morally good in your acts
You have nothing to fear from facts
Axiom 3 for transparency:
In the age of information the only way to hide facts
Is with interpretations
There is no way to stop the free exchange
Of idle speculations
In the days before communication
Privacy meant staying at home
Sitting in the dark with the curtains shut
Unsure whether to answer the phone
But these are different times, now the bottom line
Is that everyone should prepare to be known
Most of your friends will still like you fine
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
Axiom 4 for this world I adore:
Our loyalties should shift in view according to what we know
And who we are speaking to
Once I was loyal to you, and prepared to be against information
Now I am loyal to information, maybe I’m disloyal to you
My loyalty becomes more complex and cubist
With every new fact I learn
It depends who I’m speaking to
And who they speak to in turn
Axiom 5 for information workers who wish to stay alive:
Supply, never withhold, the information requested
With total disregard for interests personal and vested
Chinese whispers was an analogue game
Where the signal degraded from brain to brain
Digital whispers is the same in reverse
The word we spread gets better, not worse
X said to Y what A said to B
B wrote an email and sent it to me
I showed C and C wrote to A:
Flaming World War III
Cut, paste, forward, copy
CC, go with the flow
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know
Or, if it proves unloveable, simply to go
What part of “no” do they not understand?
NORTH: Alan—Alan, for 13 or 14 days now, all we have seen on the front pages of America’s newspapers is a group of obviously twisted young people with leashes and weird sex acts, the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays, being perpetrated by people in uniform.
—a half dozen of the other.
To which the Pentagon official replied, “You mean the six morons who lost the war?”
—“Iraqi Prisoner Abuse May Undermine War on Terror,” Tom Regan.
Now, really. I know things got a little feisty under Clinton, what with hardly veiled threats from sitting senators, but is this how one ought to refer to Wolfowitz and Feith, Rumsfeld and Cheney, Rice and Bush?
Remember: the military ultimately serves civilian masters. We ask that they serve us; they do what we require. There’s no other way a military force can work in a civil democracy.
A little respect, please.
You are what you’ve eaten.
More and better elsewhere, and once again I’m tempted to settle down with that translation of Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall. (How hard could it be to learn Spanish at this stage in the game? And then Browne?)
—At the very least, could somebody bum-rush Anon? Let ’em sleep it off in the gutter.
Me am teh best EVAR! LOL
“Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had,” said Vice President Dick Cheney. “People ought to get off his case and let him do his job.” He “said” this in a prepared statement. It wasn’t shot from the hip at a pool reporter while walking and talking at a Sorkinian clip. He had some time to think about it, is my point, and take into account the stories so far:
They first learned about this when the “courageous” soldier took the pictures to his superiors. And the pictures were all “personal.”
But then stories came out that the pictures were ordered by MI for “intimidation” purposes.
And the ICRC reported it had told the Admin. about these problems months ago.
And it was limited to a handful of “bad apples.” Except the same thing happened in Afghanistan.
And the photos were staged, not “snapshots.”
And they knew something was up in November, but they fixed it. But they were surprised by the allegations in January.
But no one knew about it. But everyone knew about it, because there was a breakdown in command.
But there was no breakdown. And the Geneva Convention has always applied.
Except when it hasn’t.
And we’ve always followed it. Except when we didn’t.
And we don’t abuse prisoners. Except when we do. It’s not “American.” Except it is expressly sanctioned by military regulations. Except it can only be sanctioned by the SoD, because Rumsfeld keeps tight rein on everything.
Except he doesn’t. Because this was authorized in Iraq, not in Washington. Except it couldn’t have been, because Rummy runs a tight ship.
Except he didn’t know. But don’t call it “plausible deniability.” Because there’s a chain of command.
Except Rumsfeld doesn’t know what it is. He only knows about the PR campaign he’s been conducting since these photos went public.
But he isn’t lying. He just doesn’t know anything.
But it’s okay. Because he’s doing a great job.
Even though everything is a shambles.
—We said; they said. I guess, well, shucks. It all remains to be seen, doesn’t it?
(Oh. One last thing: this just doesn’t wash, because it’s pretty much an astoundingly stupid way to deal with narrow roads and macho bus drivers. Thank you. That is all.)
Rage.
At the moment. The current juncture. This place where we’ve found ourselves. My fingers get all tangled up in the keys and when I pound the desk in frustration it makes an ominous croak. I can speak well enough, though I have to make an effort to keep my voice down and all my jokes are brittle and if I’ve snapped at you in the past few days, it’s not your fault, and I am sorry. Sometimes my hands curl into fists when I’m not looking. It’s not that I really want to hit anybody because I’ve never hit anybody in my life but I want to hit somebody only that wouldn’t do any good, not any good at all. And it’s not the people who did the things they’ve done that I want to hit. It’s the people who say that what was done was okay, was fine, was what we’d all do anyway, was the American way, was gay feminist pornography, was what has to be done to get anywhere in this world, was nothing more than they deserved, was no big deal, was free speech. And I want to call them monsters because they are saying monstrous things but I can’t call them monsters. I can’t hit them. I can’t snap a baton against the backs of their knees and force them to kneel in fear before a snarling dog for the horrible things they’ve said, that they pretend I ought to believe. I can’t put hoods over their heads to shut them up. I can’t hit them. I can’t pretend I am better than this by pretending they are less than human because that’s how we get into these messes in the first place. But it is up to us to do something: God is away on business, and reason’s been asleep for four years or more, and every time they open their mouths monsters leap from their tongues and, and I can’t keep up, my arms won’t reach. Somebody’s locked up all the soapboxes. And just when I need my words the most to let the 300 or so people who come by here know that I feel just as outraged as they do themselves—
I am ashamed. I am appalled. I can’t countenance a country that happily lets the likes of Rush Limbaugh set the moral tone, and cheerfully pretends that James Inhofe adequately represents them. I can’t imagine a country that would so blithely condone the manifest incompetency of the people who claim to govern us. I can’t understand why we aren’t in the streets right now with torches and pitchforks, howling.
(Or maybe hide under the covers with my books and my cats and my wife until it all Goes Away in November when we vote them all out of office and we wake up from this horrible dream and everyone understands it was all a terrible misunderstanding and all the dead people stand up smiling and they apologize sweetly for playing such an awful trick on us but it’s over now and then there is a parade.)
My heart races sometimes and the corners of my eyes get wet and I feel that choke in the back of my throat and I wonder why until I remember and then my stomach drops. My hands curl into fists when I’m not looking but there are no holes in the wall. Yet.
Context.
I’m getting barraged by search requests for Limbaugh + “blow off some steam.” And I know what they’re looking for. But see: there’s two basic reasons why someone might Google up that horror.
I wish to God I knew which was in the lead.
—Bonus! For those of us still with heads atop our necks, here’s the kicker designed to blow them up once and for all. Ready? No, seriously. You have to fasten your seatbelts and hold onto your hats and kiss your socks goodbye on this one, because you won’t be picking them up until sometime next week. So when I say ready, I mean you best be motherfuckin’ ready, you hear me? Because I’m about to let World o’ Crap call George Neumayr up to the mike, and when he opens his mouth, there’s no turning back. Here he comes. Last chance. Are. You. Ready?
And why is the behavior depicted in the photos so appalling to liberals? If the behavior had been voluntary, liberals would call it free speech.
Urban remedies.
Oh, hey, Mark Lakeman is running for City Council.
Boy, I’ve been paying attention to local politics.
This is another Anodyne article. The footer at the bottom of the clipping I’ve got says April 1997, which means the damn thing was written seven years ago. It’s a piece I’m more happy with than not from back in that particular day, even if me-then glares at how me-now wants to smooth out the more embarrassing hyperbole. It’s about Mark Lakeman and the T-Horse and the Moonday T-Hows and Intersection Repair and City Repair and it’s about why I’m going to vote for Mark Lakeman, though it might not be why you’d vote for him. Or against him. And I guess beyond noting that while Hands Around Portland didn’t quite work (for at least the idea of completing an actual circle, much like Hands Across America failed to make it actually across), Dignity Village is working (for at least the idea of doing something concrete to help the homeless), and that’s the more important of the two, you ask me, well, beyond noting that, I’ll just get out of the way. —Oh, yeah: Juliana Tobón took some photos, which I’d show you if I could, but hey, you know: seven years.
Whether you blame it on disrespect for family values or rampant corporate greed, all of us here in fin de siècle America agree on one thing: life sucks. Our problems are legion and getting worse, and any conceivable solution seems hopelessly out of reach. It would have to do so much, speak to so many people, regardless of age or race or class or sexual preference or crackpot creed. It’s all too big, too abstract, too much—how can we find a solution when we can’t even agree on the problems?
Mark Lakeman believes he has a solution—and a lot of people are starting to agree with him.
The first part of the solution looks pretty damn ungainly as it negotiates the narrow paths of Couch Park at night. It’s a blue Toyota pickup truck, well-used, with a camper over the bed and an immense heap of sticks and plastic sheeting rolled up on top. It settles in the darkest corner of the park, as far as possible from the poisonous pink sodium-vapor lights. People gather round. Some of them start unloading the truck, breaking that pile of plastic and sticks into separate bundles; some of them are bringing food, trays of desserts, pots of chai and tea; some of them are standing around scratching their heads.
Those bundles, once unrolled and hefted up, attached with ties and braced with struts, become high, wide awnings, one each for the front, back, both sides. The plastic sheeting, unfurled, catches the light, looking like the paper wings of a Leonardo da Vinci glider.
“It’s a butterfly,” says one of the head-scratchers suddenly. He grins.
Rugs are spread beneath the wings, and pillows, an assortment of thrift-store styles and colors. Candles are lit and hung from the struts. Two people climb in the back of the truck and busy themselves with cups and plates. “The T-Horse is open!” they call, and desserts and cups of tea start issuing forth, all for free. People flop on the pillows, chatty, friendly, smiling. Kids and dogs play on the fringes. Someone starts to play a drum or two.
“What is this?” more than one person is asking, unsatisfied with the poetry of the butterfly answer. Well—it’s a mobile café, a free space for the people of the neighborhood to gather, a place for them to meet and hang out for the night; putting it simply, it’s a T-Horse.
It’s also a seed, an activator, a catalyst; a means to an end. It’s the fourth T-Hows.
Mark Lakeman doesn’t want to be called an architect, though it runs in his veins. His father is Richard Lakeman, the first head of Portland’s Planning Bureau, who fought for Waterfront Park and Pioneer Square; his mother is Sandra Davis Lakeman, a design instructor and architectural historian whose specialty is light and its interplay with public space. Lakeman himself trained as a corporate architect, though he never got his license. “I left in protest,” he says. “I didn’t want to get my license. I don’t want the sanction of an organization that puts technology over history and culture.”
He was utterly disheartened by a sordid little incident involving a local construction firm, a major building, the EPA, and hidden barrels of sludge (the sort of thing that’s far more common than we want to admit). He knocked about for a time, traveling to Europe to help his mother with a study of the piazzas of Italian hill towns, seeing ancient architecture, buildings that were works of art, that expressed something.
Returning to the States, he took a long hard look at the immense sculptural things he’d been trained to build. He didn’t like what he saw.
“Look at this,” he says, pointing to a picture of a skyscraper. “This is trying to say aspire, be all you can be—but at the top of every skyscraper is nothing but a mechanical system. What is that saying? The only thing being expressed here is ‘growth’.”
Something fundamental has gone wrong in how we build for ourselves, and Lakeman set out to look for answers. His search eventually took him all the way back to the beginnings of building, and of human community—the Hach Wynik, quite possibly the last unassimilated indigenous people left in North America.
In 1994, Lakeman spent two and a half months living in a village of approximately 120 Hach Wynik deep in what little remains of the Lacandon rain forest, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. He ostensibly went in to conduct an anthropological study through painting; he never painted a stroke. Instead he spent all his time learning, or rather unlearning—everything about what makes family, community, human interaction, about what is and isn’t possible. He describes the process as “unmaking,” and still finds the whole experience somewhat distant, jumbled, hard to lay out—but it all crystallized around an otherwise ordinary conversation one day in the forest when his companion reached out, casually, and with one hand performed a neat and intricate little dance with a butterfly, then, just as casually, let it go.
Something had happened which isn’t supposed to happen, call it magic or luck or delusion or what you will—but the effects were very real. “I felt a profound physiological crisis, like hitting a computer with a virus. Seeing something so beautiful, and so profound… I’d have given everything I knew to have that rapport with nature.”
Coming out of the forest, he spent some time trying to reconcile what he’d learned with what he thought he knew, what he calls “two different ways of seeing.” He spent some time on a porch in San Pedro, a town on the shores of Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala, and, trying to recapture some of the community he’d felt in the forest, he began to leave his cookstove going 24 hours a day, offering up food and drink and space to whomever was passing by.
The first T-Hows was born.
“That was the remaking process,” says Lakeman. “I discovered I enjoyed facilitating gathering. And I began to see food and drink as a means of pulling people together.”
He brought this principle with him when he returned to Portland, setting up in a tent in a friend’s backyard in Northeast Portland. This second T-Hows served about 25 people a night and ran through August and September of 1995—but there was something more to be done, something bigger, something better, something to reach out to more people.
The Moonday T-Hows (to give it its full name) is slowly but surely entering the mythic landscape of Portland. Built during the winter of 1995 out of recycled doors and windows, plastic sheeting, and stormfall, it sounded for all the world like a post-apocalyptic shack. It was, instead, a lovingly crafted tea house, built around and through the trees on a yard at the corner of SE 9th and Sherrett. Divided inside into ten different spaces, decorated by ten different artists around themes like the Heart, the Soul, the Best Friend’s Stage, and Grandmother’s Porch, the third T-Hows opened on March 21, 1996, and every Monday thereafter served up a potluck. Though designed to hold 80 people, it drew at first only curious neighbors—but word of mouth began to spread. By the middle of the summer, when the band Gypsy Caravan put on an impromptu concert, two or three hundred people spilled onto the streets, dancing. Over five hundred people came to its last night, August 19, when it was dismantled.
Contrary to previous reports, no small-minded city bureaucrat reluctantly or otherwise ordered the T-Hows destroyed. There were some concerns over lack of insurance, and over the use of recycled materials in its construction (a strict regulatory no-no, by the way), but the city was supportive from the start, and issued a 6-month temporary permit, though a full year could have been theirs for the asking. It wasn’t necessary. The original idea had always been to last only from March 21 to September 21, from equinox to equinox, and when the T-Hows came down on August 19, it was, quite simply, because its time had come, a little earlier than foreseen. “It had matured,” in Lakeman’s words. It, too, was a seed, a catalyst, a means to an end.
Towards what end, though? What are these seeds trying to grow?
For a glimpse, head back to SE 9th and Sherrett.
Near the end of last summer, as the T-Hows was drawing to a close, Lakeman attached a simple string compass to the manhole in the center of the intersection and drew a big circle cutting across all four corners. He then asked the property owners if he could plant flowers in the grass berms along that circle, and three of the four agreed. Lakeman built a small tea station on one corner, to keep the spirit of the T-Hows alive, and supplied it with cups, bags, and thermoses of hot water kept filled at all hours of the day and night. A produce stand, for surplus vegetables from neighborhood gardens, and a chalk station soon followed, all built with the help of neighborhood kids, all with the blessing of the corner property owners. (The fourth eventually came around, once he saw what was happening.)
He began doing these things out of an inchoate desire to mark the neighborhood in some fashion—“I really don’t understand how it started,” he says—but Lakeman soon realized what he was trying to do was fashion a piazza from a common residential intersection.
He called it a piazza, but he could have called it a square, a commons, a green, a forum, a plaza. Throughout the world, wherever people build neighborhoods for themselves, where two paths meet, something happens. A place where people meet, converse, sit and enjoy the light, maybe shop for a trifle or two; a public space, a special place.
Except here. What do you see on a typical American residential intersection? Houses, and more houses. Houses as far as the eye can see. When space does open up, it’s never space for people to meet, but space for cars to meet: commercial strips, highways, parking lots, minimalls. The crucial difference is that we didn’t design our neighborhoods; developers did, people who weren’t concerned with livability but with the bottom line. Public spaces use up valuable lots which could be sold as houses. Why bother? The reason we no longer know our neighbors is because we no longer have a place to meet them. The reason our communities are falling apart is because we’ve left them no place to be.
When Lakeman realized what he was trying to do, he drafted a manifesto and sent it out to his neighbors—Intersection Repair, he called it. He pointed out what he saw as missing, and what he hoped to do: repair the intersection, and transform it into what it should have been all along, the crossroads for their community. Already enchanted by the T-Hows, his neighbors responded enthusiastically; meetings were held, the manifesto hammered into shape, and a block party planned to celebrate. And on September 8, they all went out and marked their otherwise anonymous intersection, serving notice to the world at large that they were claiming it as public space.
They painted the street.
Giant concentric circles, which tied into the circles of sunflowers Lakeman had already planted. Lines radiating off these circles down each of the four streets: red, white, yellow, and black.
The Bureau of Transportation responded almost at once. You can’t paint the street, they said. It’s against the rules. It’s already done, said the neighbors. We all like it. Can’t you grant some sort of exemption?
Hell no, said the Bureau. Strip it up yourselves, or be prepared to pay a $1000 fine. And you’ll be liable for any accidents caused by your illegal markings.
The neighborhood prepared to do just that, while they worked every possible angle to keep their space. In November, just before the Bureau’s deadline, Lakeman made a presentation to a couple of aides from the offices of City Councilors Charlie Hales and Gretchen Kafoury. He told them about his experiences in the rain forest, and about what he’d learned; he showed them the T-Hows, and what it had done; he told them about piazzas, and how he hoped to grow one in Sellwood. He never finished his proposal. The aides began talking animatedly about the possibilities of this Intersection Repair project. The Bureau was told to grant an exception while the merits of this interesting proposal were studied.
Everybody’s happy, right?
“It looks,” said Janet Conklin, “like the slum areas outside of Bombay. It is garish, it is unsightly, it is an eyesore.”
The City Council held a hearing March 19 to determine the final outcome of the Intersection Repair project. Conklin was the lone voice of dissent; twelve people, from within the neighborhood and without, spoke in favor.
Conklin lives nearby, and owns a condominium at SE 9th and Weber; she has had to drive through the intersection several times a month. She wants the City Council to reject the permit. According to her testimony, Conklin isn’t against the community-building aspects of the project. The potlucks are fine, the block parties, the ubiquitous tea. But it’s a question of “fundamental æsthetics,” affecting a neighborhood “on the brink of renovation.” She suggests a community garden as an alternative to painting the street.
I haven’t personally seen a Bombay slum, so I can’t speak to that comparison, but I didn’t find the intersection to be unsightly, or an eyesore. But I’m not a property owner, with visions of renovation dancing in my head. I do note that there is no space anywhere available for a community garden.
The tea station, gazebo, benches, historical marker, all have a certain rough-hewn quality, but that’s of necessity. This is an “emergency piazza,” as the proposal puts it. The street is painted and these installations built out of found materials because there’s no other place to put it, no money set aside for it, no other way to do it—and yet this is something so vital, something so amazing to the neighborhood, that they went ahead and seized this intersection despite the rules and laws against it. Call it eminent domain by guerilla tactics.
Petitions were circulated in the immediate neighborhood, garnering 88 signatures in favor. Surveys were taken: 87% thought the neighborhood was safer now; 87% thought that communication between neighbors had improved; 81% thought traffic was safer and 90% thought it had slowed—traffic calming without speed bumps; 81% thought the neighborhood had become more livable.
The City Council voted unanimously to allow the project.
Portlanders are constantly told how lucky we are, what forward-thinking urban planners we have, what a progressive City Council, what a livable city. Here at least is an example of that: some hooligans deface public property, the Bureau of Transportation objects, a property owner frets about property values, the City Council grants the hooligans a permit.
But it’s easy to lose sight of our good fortune. Look at the damned US Bancorp Tower, or the sprawl along 82nd, or Burnside, or Sandy, or the horror stories about the Portland Building, or those horrible condominiums that just went up by the Lloyd Center, or the Lloyd Center itself. We just opened up the Urban Growth Boundary to more development of the soulless big box mini-mall suburban hell variety—and every month sees a new parking garage. It’s discouraging to realize that Portland is considered so livable merely because everywhere else is worse; it’s hard to know what to do when all the relevant decisions are made by groups so distant from our everyday lives.
Which brings us back to where we started, with the T-Horse.
When the Moonday T-Hows was dismantled, its ten rooms where dispersed throughout the city, to start ten new T-Howses. The Kitchen ended up in the back of a well-used blue Toyota pickup truck.
The T-Horse made its first appearance, sans wings, on Friday, December 13, 1996, in Pioneer Square, dispensing as always free tea and desserts to whomever stopped by. Ever since January 6 it has been working its way widdershins about the city, traveling from park to park, a new one every Monday night. It had grown wings, a heart-shaped canopy, and rugs and pillows and candles, and crowds—as many as a hundred a night as it neared the top of its Northeast arc. This is in the rain and chill of January, February, and March; imagine what it will look like in April, May, June.
The idea is to make at least two circles of the city, the second a little wider and more dispersed than the first, between January 6 and June 21, the summer solstice—and with the solstice comes City Repair.
City Repair is going to be a giant human circle which will link hands at high noon on June 21, along the route the T-Horse followed through the city. It’s also going to be a massive tea party and potluck to be held that evening, when the circle collapses and converges on Pioneer Square.
This is your chance to participate. The T-Horse is drawing people in, spreading the word, letting us all know something is happening. Like the initial outlaw street painting at 9th and Sherrett, City Repair will serve notice: we are seizing this space as ours. What happens next is up to us.
“Some bureaucrats are nervous,” says Lakeman, “concerned about the precedent being set.” No wonder. Lakeman would like to see no less than a city full of repaired intersections, residential neighborhoods clustered about their emergency piazzas, herds of T-Horses roaming the city—public spaces created by any means necessary. He’s seen how simple it is to start community, where before there was none: all it needs is a little food, some drink, a space, and the people will come. He’s seen the profound effect it’s had on his neighborhood. He wants the whole city to feel it.
“It’s funny,” he says. “People talk all the time about saving the rainforest, but this—this is coming out of the rainforest, to save us.”
One stupid move, two stupid move—
Boycott Disney, sure. I mean, since they’ve decided to kill their legendary 2D cel animation department, all you’ll be missing is stuff like Gnomeo and Juliet. Small sacrifice, right?
Because really, this sort of crap is shameless and unforgiveable:
WASHINGTON, May 4 — The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.
The film, “Fahrenheit 911,” links Mr. Bush and prominent Saudis — including the family of Osama bin Laden — and criticizes Mr. Bush’s actions before and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating. [...]
Mr. Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor.
“Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn’t mean I listened to him,” Mr. Emanuel said. “He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that’s why he didn’t want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn’t want a Disney company involved.”
Disney executives deny that accusation, though they said their displeasure over the deal was made clear to Miramax and Mr. Emanuel.
A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.
“It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” this executive said.
But you might also consider writing to Jeb and asking him if he’d really use the power of the state to exact such petty revenge on a person or corporation exercising their First Amendment rights to report facts that might make him personally feel a little uncomfortable. (Extra points if you can keep a straight face while doing so.)
—Nathan Newman has a partial list of the Disney tentacles to be avoided, unless and until. Otherwise, ladies and gentlemen of the secular West, PABAAH! will have won.
I wish I believed in Hell.
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?
This is what pro-life looks like.
Barry has marshalled the facts and figures to prove what anyone truly committed to reducing the number of abortions performed ought to do: support the full legalization of abortion and liberalize its access. —And taking advantage of the mystic secrets of bloggery, he presents his arguments in two forms: a Catholic version (tailored to the current [atrociously unfair and staggeringly ill-informed] debate on John Kerry’s status as an adherent in good standing to his faith), and a catholic version, for your more general-purpose debating needs. —Yes, Kerry is a bucket of warm spit. Yes, it would be nice if in all this “polarization of the body politic” there were anyone out there who was actually over here with, you know, us, the liberalish other to the left of what anyone with an ounce of perspective would consider the tepidly cautious corporatist center. Yes, it would be fucking wonderful if we all had ponies. But our prisoner’s dilemma has come down to yet another evil of two lessers, and in the final analysis, a douchebag is better than a Coca-Cola douche. Hardly a snappy rallying cry, I know. Lemme give it some thought.
Federal Comstock Commission.
“So, can we say ‘suck’?”
That’s what Fresh Air co-executive producer Danny Miller asked attorney Steve Schaffer. Miller was calling because emerging star Nellie McKay uses the word in a song excerpted in the program’s review of her album Get Away From Me.
No, said Schaffer. No “suck.” Though McKay was insulting somebody and not talking about sex, the word’s sexual connections make it a no-no in the new landscape of media regulation. Miller cut out the offending word and spliced it in backwards, leaving alert Fresh Air listeners to wonder why McKay would think something “skcus.”
Schaffer, like many communications lawyers, was wary of the FCC’s rapidly shifting use of indecency and profanity rules, signaled by its March 18 decision on an NBC broadcast of the 2003 Golden Globes.
—“What the #%@& is off-limits now?” Current.org.
If Myra Breckinridge arrived in bookstores in 1968 at a time of cultural and political upheaval in America, Myron came about in 1974 at a time when this upheaval had been muted by a conservative-led malaise. Richard Nixon was president—although soon he would resign in disgrace—and the US Supreme Court had refused to protect the absolute right to publish “obscene” material. Rather, the Court ruled that “community standards” should determine what is obscene. So a book that is perfectly acceptable in one town might be banned in another town.
To combat the Supreme Court’s “mad way with the First Amendment,” Vidal decided to remove the “dirty” words from his book and replace them with “cleaner” ones—the names of the Supreme Court justices who participated in the ruling. Thus “to fuck” becomes “to burger,” after Chief Justice Warren Burger. A “pussy” becomes a “whizzer white,” after Associate Justice Byron White (nicknamed “Whizzer” in college because he was a speedy football star). And a “dick” becomes a “rehnquist,” after William H. Rehnquist, an associate justice in 1974 who became the Courts chief justice in 1986 when Burger retired from the court.
Myron remained in this form for a decade in paperback editions. But in 1985, when Vidal published the two books together as Myra Breckinridge and Myron in a new hardcover edition, he decided that “Myron should conform to Myra.” Thus he removed the “burgers,” “rehnquists” and “whizzer whites” and restored their more graphic anatomical meanings.
—“Myra Breckinridge & Myron: An Introduction,” Harry Kloman.
Plus ça change, I suppose; at least it keeps the printers busy. —We already know what “santorum” is.
So what’s a powell?
Thin blue race.
Portland bloggers Ethan Lindsey and Christopher Frankonis (the One True b!X) are both typing up blow-by-blow coverage of the public inquest into the shooting of James Jahar Perez by Portland police officer Jason Sery. It’s the first such inquest since police officer Gary Barbour applied one of those once-popular “sleeper holds” to Lloyd Stevenson in 1985.
Against the backdrop of Stevenson’s senseless death, two officers spat in the face of a city trying to grapple with these questions. On the very day Stevenson was buried, officers Richard Montee and Paul Wickersham sold as many as 30 T-shirts in the East Precinct parking lot, depicting a smoking gun and emblazoned with the slogan “Don’t Choke ‘Em, Smoke ‘Em,” indicating that they—and the officers who bought the shirts—believed Pantley and Barbour hadn’t erred in killing Stevenson but had erred only in their method.
It’s been just under a year since Kendra James (a worthless waste of a crack-ho whose type comes and goes, apparently) was shot as she attempted to drive away from a routine traffic stop. Tensions were understandably a little enflamed; they’ve roared up again, and again, understandably. The Oregonian has done its part, reminding us with two front-page stories that Officer Sery was “a gentle and patient family man. A spiritual person, dedicated to Christian teachings on morality and compassion. A tireless and inventive cop who is natural at working with the public,” while Perez surprised three scientists selected by the paper to go over the medical examiner’s report, by having “a high level of cocaine in his blood but no sign that his body was metabolizing it. [..]
“I have never seen a case that has that much cocaine and no cocaine metabolites present,” said Washington State Toxicologist Barry Logan.
“A lot of dealers keep their stash in their mouth, and if the cops show up they swallow it,” Logan said. “If he had just swallowed some, and died within a few minutes” those test results might happen, he said.
That level of cocaine in the blood is “extremely high,” [Miami-Dade County toxicologist George] Hime said. “We would normally not associate that amount of cocaine with someone who would be . . . conscious.”
Hime said that “someone under that much influence could be very aggressive, maybe very confused, hyperstimulated.” People generally start feeling effects of cocaine soon after taking the drug, especially if it is smoked or injected.
Of course, they also had to report the fact that only 24 seconds elapsed between Sery’s initial call on the traffic stop, and his call indicating shots had been fired.
Portland police have something of a checkered past when it comes to brutality and the covering up thereof. One of the more recent incidents involved police officers kicking Eunice Crowder, a blind 71-year-old woman, to the ground, pepper-spraying her, and tasering her four times. When her 94-year-old mother tried to rinse the pepper spray from Crowder’s eyesocket, police shoved her against the fence and accused her of planning to use the water as a weapon. The city’s paying Crowder $145,000 because there is a risk that the city might be found liable. No apology is forthcoming. No admission of wrongdoing. As far as the police are concerned, that is how things ought to have gone. —Ditto Kendra James. (Her family has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the city, and rejected a $250,000 settlement offer.)
Ditto, one presumes, so far, James Jahar Perez.
Perez was black, of course. So was Kendra James. So was Lloyd Stevenson. Eunice Crowder’s race isn’t mentioned anywhere, so I’m assuming she’s white. —Of course, she also lived.
Is it trite and simplistic to chalk it all up to racism? Yes, if you think by doing so you’ve diagnosed the problem; on to the slogans! Policing is a dangerous business, and the most innocuous situation can explode without warning into fodder for a Fox special. But to respond by assuming that any deviation from an unknown script, any reaction other than utter and abject submission, is a threat that must be put down with sudden and overwhelming force (with kicks, pepper spray, tasers and gunshots)—it’s destructive, and not just to the bodies of the people subdued. It isolates the police, pulling them out of the community they’re supposed to work with and protect and transforming them into a tribe of their own, one we all fear. When cops sell T-shirts making fun of a Good Samaritan they killed by mistake, when unarmed victims of police shootings are written off as useless crack-heads and acceptable collateral damage, when the only official response to the beating of a 71-year-old blind woman is to insist that’s how things must be, the only sane conclusion to draw is that we’re merrily destroying our village in order to save it.
Of course, to dismiss racism from the picture by presuming police malfeasance affects us all equally would be equally trite and simplistic. To say nothing of naïve. And wrong.
When we (Amp, Elkins, Jenn, Chas, Matt, myself) first moved to Portland back in 1995, we rented a house pretty much on the corner of 25th and Killingsworth—up in “the ’Hood,” some folks called it. (Still call it, despite the gentrification.) Our neighbor to the south was a dealer. Perfectly nice guy as neighbors go. His uncle (I think) had an informal gentlemen’s club he ran out of the garage behind the house, which meant the walls were covered with jazz albums and a couple-three old buddies would sit in recliners in the sun and shoot the shit. His clientele got a little insistently spooky, especially when they’d mistake our house for his. But the biggest nuisance was the cops: cruising slowly down the street at night, shining their spotlights into houses, pounding on his door late at night, knocking on ours (and everyone else’s) to ask us questions about him. Every now and then they’d take out their frustrations by ticketing every parked car they could dredge up a violation for—three tickets in one year we got, and since then? One, I think.
One night coming home from something or other we found squad cars parked at one end of the street and saw cops out on our neighbor’s lawn. One of the cops waved us to a stop, marching toward us, his big flashlight held up over his shoulder, shining into the car. He got one quick look at us—just one—and instantly, his whole demeanor changed. He relaxed. Stopped marching. Smiled. Shrugged a little. Waved us on.
Our neighbors, of course, were black.
We were white.
(Much like the cop. Much like a fair chunk of our neighbor’s clientele. And if one of us had reached for our seatbelt? Wallet? Cell phone? Not that we had cell phones. But. If we had, would we have been shot? Tasered? Pepper-sprayed? —I don’t think so. The cop had sussed out all the pertinent evidence and made his gut call: we were on his side. He was safe.
(So were we.)
