Blunt Force Trauma

 I am curious, after years of discussion about legitimate use of force by law enforcement, why people are being shot, pepper sprayed, beaten and mistreated by "officers of the law."

That first part, being shot, is really a mystery since lethal force is a last resort after all other means have been attempted. For those who have received more than a week's worth training, this should be one of the first lessons learned by someone who will be carrying guns around. Private citizens who wish to carry concealed weapons in most states are required to complete a sixteen hour course before they are permitted to wander the streets with a death machine tucked in their belts. One of the things they teach in such classes is threat avoidance, de-escalation, and mindset.

For just a moment, let me step outside the gun realm and shine a light on the ethics of force. If you earn a black belt in martial arts, part of the ceremony involves taking an oath that says you will use your skills only in self defense and you will avoid conflict, rather than inciting it. 

This is with your bare hands. When they start putting guns in your hands, you had best check your head as well because there is something systemically wrong with the use of lethal force on unarmed protesters. For that matter, the use of any sort of force is uncalled for unless the peaceful protest turns violent. Time and time again the aggressors in these ICE scenarios have proven to be the over-hyped poorly trained goons who seem to be ready to bust heads long before they change minds. 

Former Border Patrol commander in Minneapolis Greg Bovino regularly exhorted his troops in his SS trench coat chanting slogans such as "Whose streets? Our streets!" looking for a place to toss tear gas cannisters, including a preschool.  

Our tax dollars at work. Domestic terrorists. Born and raised paid for right here in the Good Ol' USA.

Sleep tight, America. 

Patience?

 There is an old proverb that suggests, "With the rich and mighty, always a little patience." While there is some confusion as to whether this saying originated in Spain or China, I became familiar with it while watching the seminal romantic comedy, The Philadelphia Story. Katherine Hepburn is reminding reporter Jimmy Stewart of the class divide so prevalent throughout the film. 

If only the sordid events that occurred on the private island of Jeffrey Epstein at the beginning of this century could be so blithely dismissed. 

The "secrets" behind one of the most notorious sex trafficking rings in history have been slowly leaking out since 2005 when a fourteen year old girl and her parents reported that she had been molested at Epstein's Florida mansion. In 2008, Epstein was taken into the most refined version of custody in which he was allowed to hang out in the private wing of the Palm Beach stockade. With his own security detail and was allowed to go to work six days a week. He "served" eighteen months. 

By 2011 he was registered in New York as a sex offender, and in 2016 a woman claims that when she was thirteen she was raped by Donald Trump at a party at Epstein's New York residence back in 1994. 

In 1998, Little Saint James, heretofore knows as "Epstein's Island" opened for business, where the rich and mighty were treated with more than just a little patience. All of this abuse of underage girls was public knowledge, but kept "quiet" with the assurance that it would never be used to slow the rise of those involved in the ruling class. 

The Rich And Mighty. 

After decades of keeping things "quiet," Mister Epstein was taken into custody when his private jet flew in from Paris and landed in New Jersey. This was July of 2019. Donald Trump had since been elected "president." A month later, Jeffrey Epstein is found dead in his jail cell before ever going to trial. For the past seven years the Amerian public, not the rich or mighty, have been anxiously awaiting anything that looks like justice for the victims of the "rich and mighty." Each little ugly morsel is devoured by the media and then seemingly digested without any sense of the whole picture. The money needed to keep things "quiet" has begun to run out and the evidence that could put this whole thing to rest once and for all is being doled out with an eye dropper as the crimes of those in the so-called upper class go unprosecuted. 

Enough patience. Time for the rich and mighty to be brought low. 

Yes And

 The most amazing thing about Catherine O'Hara was not that she made her comedy seem effortless. When you watched her perform, you could see the effort. And you might be amazed at how daring and difficult being that silly really was. 

Seeing her walk a very fine line between tribute and parody, her Katherine Hepburn impression was flawless in that it made the viewer consider "what would it be like if Kate Hepburn did..." It was as if she was real life intelligence channeling a spirit to take our imagination along for the ride. 

I used to stay up into the wee hours of the morning to catch Ms. O'Hara and her Canadian Crew on SCTV after Saturday Night Live had finished up. I watched Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas in the Great White North, and John Candy bursting through any and all scenes he shared with anyone else. I reveled at the wry smarm of Eugene Levy and Joe Flaherty, and the goofy charm of Andrea Martin. Eventually I was able to marvel at the kinetic silliness of Martin Short. And then there was Catherine. 

It was easy to get the idea that she had been hustled in as "the pretty one," the one who would take all the parts for the "pretty" ingenues who would be put off or frightened by the chaos that surrounded her. Not so. Catherine O'Hara could bring the goofy and her characters were always carefully drawn and often very brittle. But hysterically funny. 

Some will remember her for her role in Home Alone, a wacky tale of parents who should have been put in jail for leaving their child behind when they run off to Europe. But she was also the mom in Beetlejuice. And she was also the autoharp half of the folks duo of Mitch and Mickey in A Mighty Wind. In the midst of all the arch and sometimes sarcastic moments in this film, the pair's final number, A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow, brings an emotional catharsis to a film filled with memorable performances but none as tender as Mitch and Mickey. 

Catherine's gone now. She will be doing improv nightly somewhere in the ether I'm sure. But she won't be forgotten. She stomped on the Terra for seventy-one years and made me laugh for most of it. 

She will be missed. 

Tin Soldiers

 What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground - How can you run when you know? Ohio, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

No one knows exactly who fired the shots that killed four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Sixty-seven shots rounds were fired in thirteen seconds, killing students Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and William Schroeder, were killed and nine more were injured. Eight of the twenty-eight National Guard soldiers involved in the murders were eventually brought before a judge. They were all acquitted. 

Lawrence Shafer, a sergeant in the Ohio National Guard at the time, admitted to firing his weapon, stating he felt his life was in danger and firing in the direction of demonstrators.

"In the direction." Hold on to that. 

Event though the soldiers were acquitted, the judge said in his decision, "It is vital that state and National Guard officials not regard this decision as authorizing or approving the use of force against demonstrators, whatever the occasion of the issue involved. Such use of force is, and was, deplorable."

"Deplorable." Hold on to that as well. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. Four dead in Ohio. 

Fifty-six years later, ICE soldiers and Trump is coming. How many more will have to die?

All these years later, it's time for a change. 

I leave you with the words from another Neil Young song: There’s one more kid that’ll never go to school - Never get to fall in love, never get to be cool. - Rockin' in the Free World.

What Could Go Wrong?

 Don't you worry about incipient trillionaire Elongated Mush. He might still make it to that thirteen-digit plateau, even if his plans for jury rigging the government of the United States government have fallen by the wayside. 

To get to that place where no one else can touch his wealth, the genius behind MechaHitler is hoping that it will be humanoid robots that will move his company's stock out of the red and into the black. He's asking that we put away our foolish notions about electric cars saving the planet as Tesla will stop manufacturing their models S and X in order to free up factory space to construct droids. No specific mention was made about the future of what was touted as the future, the industry punchline known as Cybertruck. Soon, we are told, those electric vehicles will be just an afterthought as Mister Mush moves on to creating an army of automatons to serve us. 

Avoiding for just a moment that a great many of Mush's projects seem to blow up and/or burst into flames, can we focus on the science fiction trope that swirls around any endeavor such as this? I would imagine that someone inside Tesla has a copy of Isaac Asimov's I, Robot stashed in a drawer in their desk, next to some twelve-sided dice and a few Rush CDs. Or maybe one of the flesh and blood employees has spent the ninety minutes it takes to watch Westworld. The movie, not the HBO series that would take far too much of their precious time. 

We could spend time here discussing the merits of the HBO version versus the 1973 original, but the sentiment expressed in Michael Crichton's amusement park gone nuts follow-up, Jurassic Park stand as a reminder to all of us when we start putting too much trust in our droids. “Yeah, but John, If the pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists." That was Ian Malcolm, an expert in chaos theory, speaking to John Hammond whose clever idea to turn dinosaurs loose on a remote island turned out rather poorly for many of the invited guests and spawned a seemingly endless number of sequels. Very rich people seem to have a penchant in these movies for messing with the defined order of things in order to expand their wealth by bringing about the aforementioned chaos. 

Judging from the track record of Mister Mush, I would expect things to head in the direction of cannibalistic pirates. Or maybe he's hoping that by making a legion of humanoid robots he can finally build something he never had: a friend. 

Here You Are Again

 Most, if not all of the things I am telling you are not news. I am no reporter. I am a filter. 

I believe that everyone who reads more than six words of Entropical Paradise gathers this in. The most obvious reckoning of this is the way it takes three days for "current events" to show up here for your reckoning. This digestive cycle allows me not only the chance to stay ahead of the daily demands of writing a daily demanding blog, but also gives us all a chance to reflect for ourselves on what is laid out here for readers to consume. Once it creeps inside your brainpan it's entirely up to you, dear reader, to choose what those freshly fired synapses do. 

You might nod in quiet agreement. 

You may wonder where I get the impressions that I serve up. 

You may skip to the end just to see if I ever stop talking about my marginally misspent youth. 

I do not expect to change any minds here. The evidence I present is primarily of the "have you heard" variety. I understand that this is the choir to whom I am preaching, and I don't expect any actual blowback when I say that the pedophile-in-chief ought never to have been elected in the first place and the effort it will take to remove him from office is wholly out of scale with the seemingly effortless way he slid down that escalator into our political lives more than ten years ago. This event alone should have shown the convicted felon up for what he is: A grown man afraid of stairs. Why walk when you can ride? 

Perhaps you drop by this corner of Al Gore's Internet to see if my opinions on things have shifted in some dramatic fashion. This might be disappointing for you. If instead you stop in to see if you want to hold the ax while I grind, then we've got a pretty good thing going. 

And maybe, just maybe, you're tired of reading about how much I detest the dark places this world is sliding. Which is understandable. I just write this stuff. 

I don't have to read it. 

Crossing Over

 I don't know if it was someone's pet or just a stray. Just like a year ago, when I rode past the lifeless body of a cat who had apparently made an ill-fated attempt to cross the street, I stopped. 

As I did a year ago, I moved to the sidewalk and got off my bike. Then I waited for the traffic to pass before I went out and made the worst possible rescue of a black and white cat that was not as lucky as I have been all these years on that hundred yards of High Street. It is the busiest stretch of my commute, and I try not to experience it too often during the rush of the day. The nocturnal amble this feline took didn't seem to keep him safe, and it is quite possible that whatever or whomever struck him was blissfully unaware of the collision. Radio on, thinking about the coming day, on their way to or from work.

Or simply out for a drive that ended tragically for a cat. 

I picked up the carcass and laid it on the sidewalk, only a few feet from where the end came. I thought of some words and was suddenly thrust into a world that doesn't always stop when someone dies. 

I thought of Alex Pretti, and how a nation stopped for him when he was struck down. I wondered, not for the first time, how many others had been abused, beaten, tortured and killed when there wasn't a sea of cell phones tracking the tragedies in real time. I thought of Renee Good whose last words to the officer who seconds later ended up shooting her three times in the head: “That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you."

I'm not guessing my little Oreo Kitty friend was harboring any ill will toward the driver of the car or van or truck that stopped him in his tracks. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He used up one of his nine lives trying to get across the street. I didn't want whoever loved this cat to find an ugly mess where their pet had been. Just like I wish that those who knew and loved Alex and Renee want to believe someone or something will help them get to the place where they belong. 

Wherever that is.