Most of  the exchanges on TPM about cops that have arisen in several posts about the Gates case show a general hostility toward the police.

As world police go American cops are about par for the course... they come a lot worse.

In many countries the policeman would have suggested that professor Gates pay him a bribe to avoid further problems and mentioning the policeman's mother, as Gates apparently did, might have ended up with the professor being "shot while trying to escape".

Except for England in the old days, ("good evening sir, could we please see the license for that gun you are holding in your hand?) cops are rough trade everywhere in the world and even in England in the old days if you resisted they could get tough, but always "excuse me sir, just hold still while I twist your arm behind your back, sir".

One of the things that happens to policemen is that after interviewing thousands of really horrible and dangerous assholes in the line of duty, they come to assume that everybody is guilty of something... and of course, in reality, everybody is guilty of "something" if only stealing another kid's teddy bear back in nursery school. So that is part of why contact with cops is normally so humiliating for honest folk... the cops seem to be looking into your soul with a look that says, "asshole, this time we are going to overlook that teddy bear, but don't let me catch you around here again."

This makes an honest person feel soiled. So making people feel guilty is a professional tool of the police and people resent feeling guilty.

Perversely, if you don't feel guilty about anything and don't seem to be affected by this treatment, they may get the idea that you are psychotic or a hardened criminal.

I'm not sure the President of the United States should have weighed in on this one until a full official inquiry had taken place, because as Chief of State and Commander in Chief, all armed forces and law enforcement in the USA are directly or indirectly under his command and this commenting on the behavior of cops on the beat, coming from the White House, may cause problems of morale among the law enforcement community and a hostile attitude from their unions.

In my opinion, Obama should have called professor Gates and offered his sympathy as a personal friend and promised him that he would ask that a full and fair inquiry take place.

Instead he has made this an "us and them" thing for a lot of people, both black and white, which is a tactical error causing an unfortunate distraction and division of support entering the health care battle, which is priority number one, or should be.

My last post had some people wondering where I was coming from. One person who wrote to me accused me of being "elitist".

The problem with your point of view is that it exposes a fundamental hypocrisy in the minds of people like you. And I do mean to use the words "people like you". You like to cloak your condescending attitude towards the working class to give the appearance of compassion. And Palin and Republicans swoop in and take advantage of it.

First I am very interested in a stable society of healthy citizens living in peace,  and that means taking care of people who are not exceptionally talented or motivated (the vast majority).

I don't consider this "elitist" -- although I don't much care -- because most of the ancestors and descendants of the exceptionally talented or motivated were and will be just average to below average.  I would call these people "the salt of the earth" and I dare any "born again" to challenge the source of that term.

I believe that the exceptionally talented or motivated are more than able to take care of themselves and that society's true role is to "uplift the masses", which means  to give the "salt of the earth" a comfortable life with the possibility of enjoying fully the simple pleasures of peace, a family, culture, health and leisure. Simple genetics plus a peaceful and healthy society will take care of producing the exceptionally talented or motivated.

I believe that this will also provide a better background for the exceptionally talented or motivated to make their contribution and to also enjoy with a peaceful heart the benefits of that contribution.

If that is elitist, I would say that anyone or any group that could put that program into effect could wear the title "elite" with some justification, certainly with more justification than the sorry assed crew that passes for "elite" today.

At the heart of the problem, as I see it, is that Americans although mostly ordinary people descended from ordinary people and likely to beget ordinary people, in fact, despise ordinary people and to the extent that they find themselves ordinary, they despise themselves.

For me this explains most of the hostile and violent behavior associated with our country.

The United States ranks behind every industrial nation except France in the percentage of overall economic activity devoted to manufacturing (...) Manufacturing has long been viewed as an essential pillar of a powerful economy. It generates millions of well-paid jobs for those with only a high school education, a huge segment of the population. New York Times

"It wasn't the US service sector that defeated Japan," notes Robert Dujarric of Temple University in Tokyo. Well-paid blue-collar jobs, he adds, have been a pillar of Japan's postwar social equality. Financial Times

(Meth is) "the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational, as opposed to recreational." It was given to starving Nazi soldiers to keep them in warrior mode on the Russian front. Now it's a preferred stimulant for people working two jobs in low-wage purgatory. "Methland vs. Mythland" Timothy Egan - NYT

Everybody has their own way of thinking: some people think in facts and figures, I think in symbols and metaphors.

I am ever searching for the correct symbol or metaphor, and when I find the one that feels just right, everything else: thinking, talking and writing, comes easily to me, just like ringing a bell.

I love to put some quotes and pictures, like the ones above, together and hear how they resonate like a chord played on a well tuned instrument. For me, much of what we are facing today is resumed, almost like a poem in these snippets

The key visual metaphor is that of the meth addict's transformation from hillbilly beauty into death's head. The key phrase is the one from Robert Dujarric in Tokyo: well paid blue-collar jobs, are the pillar of social equality, followed by the NYT stating that those with only a high school education make up a huge percentage of the US population. That is the present situation in a nutshell.

I was struck by a line in president Barack Obama's much reported NAACP speech, where he, a supposed "lefty", addressed this advice to young African-Americans:

"They might think they've got a pretty jump shot or a pretty good flow," Mr. Obama said, "but our kids can't all aspire to be LeBron or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court justice. I want them aspiring to be president of the United States of America."

My first reaction to that paragraph was that aspiring to be a rapper or a professional basketball player was just as realistic as aspiring to be a scientist or engineer and certainly more realistic than aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice or president of the USA, as between the White House and the Supreme Court there are only ten jobs, whereas to begin with there are 1,696 basketball players in the NBA... (Sorry, but I can't find the number of openings for hip-hop artists).

I immediately thought on reading Obama's words, "what's wrong with aspiring to having a union card and working in a factory at union rates and getting married on that pay, buying a house and raising a family, seeing some of your kids go to college and then retiring on a decent pension and going fishing with your grandchildren?"

What is supposed to happen to people who don't have the natural aptitude or interests to be scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers? Or specialists in derivatives or other such useful types?

In today' America are they fated to end up like the woman in the photographs, fated to taking methamphetamine in order to be able to stand the strain of working 60 plus hour weeks at minimum wage without any unions or medical coverage?

Is there only to be a future in America for knowledge workers?

If so, we as a people are in deep, deep, shit.

Because that is not really in our DNA.

For thousands of years our species has mostly worked with its hands and as a simple matter of natural selection, not everyone who is an able bodied, willing and honest person is interested in reading and studying.

As Italian author Alberto Moravia once said, the number of illiterates is constant, but nowadays the illiterates know how to read.

And this is just as true for white people as for black people in today's America.

In many senses we really are living in a post-racial society.

Today the real question is class and poverty, not race.

Most of the white working poor of today's America would happily trade the pale complexion of their nether parts to be an African-American UAW worker in the 1950s and 60s Detroit.

Today, instead of a society where race inevitably determines status, we live is society of sharp class divisions, where class, except for those with inherited wealth, is based on educational attainment and that educational attainment itself is in great part based on the parent's social class and the income that comes with it.

Within living memory the sons and daughters of the line workers of unionized American manufacturers, who showed aptitude for study, could go to excellent state land grant universities and their brothers and sisters who didn't like school could look forward to the same decent life as their parents had enjoyed... That didn't last very long did it?

In today's America it is very difficult for an American from a poor family of any race, no matter how intelligent he or she might be, to get a first class education or, with parents (or single parent) working at two jobs, the supportive and stable family life to be able to concentrate on their studies and thus escape from poverty.

The heart of the matter is that America's once proud working class, both white and black, is being transformed, has been transformed, into a classic "lumpenproletariat" or "ragged proletariat". Here is how the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines that term:

(German: "rabble proletariat"), according to Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto, the lowest stratum of the industrial working class, including also such undesirables as tramps and criminals. The members of the Lumpenproletariat--this "social scum," said Marx--are not only disinclined to participate in revolutionary activities with their "rightful brethren," the proletariat, but also tend to act as the "bribed tools of reactionary intrigue."

What could be a better description of the working poor followers of Sarah Palin's, or of any populist of the right that may arise in the near future's, than as "bribed tools of reactionary intrigue"?

Are any right wing populists, who go in mostly for creationism, abortion and guns, going to advocate strong labor unions, a higher minimum wage, universal health care and keeping the jobs in the USA? I doubt it very much, don't you?

Will anybody else advocate those things?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday he had been "surprised" by a recent U.S. demand that Israel halt a construction project in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. (...)" In my conversation with Obama in Washington, I told him that I could not accept any limitations on our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Haaretz

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the US demand was "odd." Jerusalem Post

I wonder how this is going to play out?

How will AIPAC organize to soften up Obama?

What weak point will they discover to break him down?

What I don't see them doing is bending their stiff necks.

The personal power of the individual men and women that make up AIPAC, in dozens of areas that have nothing to do with Israel, will be deflated if they don't prove to Obama, and everybody else, that they are stronger than he is.

This is his "Gunfight at the OK Corral" moment.

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