A New Definition of "Police Riot"

Kudos to Colorado ACLU for uncovering the story behind a very strange event on Monday (Aug. 24) at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Though Monday was not supposed to be a big day for protesters, it ended up being the day with the most arrests, when police suddenly and inexplicably attacked a sunset march going from the Civic Center toward downtown. More than 100 were arrested, and of the 60 who decided to challenge their arrests, none have been convicted, due to lack of evidence or uncertain police testimony.

Turns out the police staged their own riot, when Denver undercover cops masquerading as anarchists pretended to resist arrest so that they could safely be removed from the area before the police did a sweep. A Jefferson County deputy, not understanding what was going on, pepper-sprayed the undercover cops along with the commander who was pretending to arrest them. From there, events deteriorated to the level of farce.

This isn't that surprising. When tear gas was widely used at the February 2003 protests in Colorado Springs, amateur videographers took pictures of police on side streets surrounding Academy Blvd., donning full riot gear before any civil disobedience had been done. When you can't find enough protest to justify your actions, make your own.

The core move of any bureaucracy is to self-perpetuate. If the budget can't be justified by its activity, a bureaucracy almost never calls for cutting its own budget. Instead, activity is generated. Everyone was chiding the Denver cops for the overwhelming presence on downtown streets during DNC. So they had to manufacture events to rationalize their budget.

When paranoids see all life and struggle as a stage-managed drama directed by shadowy puppet-masters, they are wrong 80 percent of the time. But every now and then, the curtain lifts on a second layer of game-behind-the-game, where we see that the paranoids have a point. What appears to be a political struggle is a scripted bread and circuses show presented for our edification and enjoyment. As the rallying cry goes, "This is what democracy looks like!"

Red-Hot Racism for Columbus Day

I haven't liked Columbus Day for a long time, and the whole "500 Years of Oppression" is just a secondary reason for me -- even given Denver's annual Columbus parade, complete with American Indian Movement civil disobedience. Those who think there was something positive in Columbus coming to the North American continent, have to overlook his very genocidal tendencies in helping Ferdinand and Isabella chase the Jews and Moors out of Spain (Housley, The Later Crusades, pg. 311). In his later years, Columbus was becoming a messianic racist nutcase, spouting about how God had chosen him to eradicate the Jews of Europe. This is someone to celebrate?
Well, I guess so, given the way people are responding to recent hoopla about an African-American teenage girl being pepper-sprayed and punched in Fort Pierce, Fla. Admittedly, the facts in this case can be as controversial as those in the Jena Seven events, and the cops in Fort Pierce arguably used restraint. But when I saw the user comments regarding the YouTube video in question, I was dumbfounded (they might have been removed by the time you read this). Users, some giving full names, bandied about the word "nigger" as though it's commonplace and OK to use as a white person, which several YouTube observers obviously are. Now, the Fort Pierce brutality case is a borderline event, because the 15-year-old wasn't doing the slightest thing to comply with a cop's request. But to use a discussion as an excuse to dredge out racist terms that should have died a century ago, shows how far we have to go to eradicate racism in this country. 515 years of white folk eradicating everyone else in North America, ain't ya proud?