Evo Revo

Several days ago the cops shot a guy around the corner from where Daughter Em lives in Portland. They immediately blocked off the whole street and wouldn’t let her go home. She had to spend the night at a friend’s and next day wasn’t even allowed on the block until later in the day. Who the hell do they think they are, making people sleep on couches and not letting them go home? The arrogance of just blockading an entire neighborhood as if everyone there were guilty astounds me. It’s not like there was a big shootout and people were in danger. They were probably planting a gun on the guy they shot and didn’t want the neighbors to see. They didn’t need to bother, the guy the pigs shot at his wedding in New York didn’t have a gun planted on him and the cops were still acquitted. Actually turns out that the cop who killed this guy in Portland had also killed a woman in the same neighborhood a few years back and was acquitted for that. We used to call these guys pigs in the 70’s, for good reason.



Not much has changed (Seattle 1999):




Reagan came along and all of a sudden it got fashionable to be a Yuppie establishment type and such people don’t criticize the cops. And then after 9/11… I don’t even want to talk about that. Just because there were some uniformed heroes there doesn’t make ALL uniforms into heroes and does NOT automatically command my respect. So I’m a traitor, right?

A couple of years ago our less-than-esteemed Vice Emperor Dick (Evil Eye) Cheney came through Billings on an Imperial Progress to his favorite fishing spot on the Bighorn River. This happens every year or so and they always take his motorcade down from the airport on Zimmerman Trail just up the block from us. (They need to avoid the legions of terrorists waiting on the main airport road who have it in for Dick. It’s a good thing they don’t know about me.) So, on this particular day, our long-suffering UPS man was heading to our house to pick up a load of mugs to send all over the world to our lovely customers when a (woman) cop flagged him down, shouted something he couldn’t hear, and walked away. He looked around, saw that Cheney’s armored limousine was still 3 or 4 blocks away, so decided she must have meant for him to move his truck (so the terrorists couldn’t hide behind it). Instead she must have meant for him to stay put (obviously there was a lot of room for bombs in a big UPS van), because as soon as he put his truck in gear she flew into a rage, began screaming at him and wrote him a huge ticket, the basic violation being that he had “ignored her direct orders.” Now a moving violation is a serious deal in UPS land; a driver with more than one will be fired. Poor UPS Steve had to take a whole day off work to appear in court, pay a fine, explain the whole thing to his boss (who luckily was not a flag lapel-pin wearer). When he told me about it three days later he was still shaking, and he is a very gentle guy, not quick to anger. And who asked you to fish here anyway Mr. VeePee? You and your Dark Minions go away and leave our poor UPS driver alone! Fish in Wyoming where you belong!!!

(Ahem, excuse me, lost it for a minute there. . .)

In the New World we are going to make, there will be police, yes. But they will all have to take 4 years of social work and counseling classes and there will be only one guy with a gun for every 100 negotiators instead of the reverse. They will have to spend a certain number of hours a month in counseling practice sessions instead of the same hours on the shooting range. And it will not be a de facto capital crime for a mentally ill guy to threaten a cop. And any cop who loses his temper because someone disrespects him or her would be summarily fired. Any cop who needed to get his rocks off chasing someone who ignored (or didn’t hear) his command to stop would be fired. Any cop that pulled out his gun because a 12-year old in the ghetto was running from him (something I saw in front of my house in East Palo Alto once) would be FIRED!!

Viva la revolución.