No, It's Not About Racism. It's About Two People Who Were Both Tired and Angry.

All the commentators are talking about the Gates case like it's a case about racism, and maybe, tangentially, it is. I think, however, it's about two people who wanted to act like hard asses and this is where it landed them. Obama was right, Officer Crowley made a straight up stupid judgment call, but Gates helped provoke Officer Crowley.

Officer Crowley is more at fault than Gates, certainly. Crowley had to arrest Gates for disorderly conduct outside his own home, by luring him out of his own home (since a disorderly conduct arrest can't be made in the person's home) by saying only then will he give up his name and badge number. Once outside, Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct. (Nevermind that you can't get arrested for disorderly conduct in Massachusetts.)

The Smoking Gun has the police report.

Gates, a man who has a Genius grant at Harvard and makes his living talking about race relations, decided he was going to yell and antagonize the officer. Regardless of the color of the skin, if you're looking to come to an agreement with someone, it's not a good idea to antagonize them. To add the race variable to the equation now, Gates was the victim of racism, initially, by the neighbor who thought he and the taxicab driver were burglars. Crowley, after a certain amount of verbal abuse, decided he was tired of getting yelled at and made the decision to arrest Gates.

Understand, both people knew a mistake was made. Gates, immediately recognized this. Crowley recognized it after Gates showed him his Harvard identification. Each of those people made a choice. Crowley made the choice to arrest Gates after he was sick of Gates yelling at him and calling him a racist and Gates made a decision to be a hardass instead of trying to work with the officer to resolve the dispute.

Why I'm so hard on Gates is precisely because at Harvard, he teaches courses about race and he, as the teacher, should know that one of the big ideas in race relations is to work together to solve problems. When he was presented with an opportunity, he ignored the lessons of his course. That said, the context was not kind to Gates. He had just gotten off a plane flight from China, which is a grueling and demoralizing flight in its length. His front door was jammed and he had to ask for help to open it and now has a police officer in his home because one of his neighbors thought he was breaking into his own house. I'd be pissed off and initially hostile too.

But, when they both came to the point where they recognized someone else made a mistake that put them in this situation, they didn't extend a hand and I think, if we're gonna talk about the issue, there it is. They treated each other as representatives of larger ideas as opposed to people put in a situation where both of them were pre-disposed to antagonize each other. They didn't take a step back. That's the lesson I take from this ongoing episode, that both people chose at the moment where they realized they were placed by outisde forces in this situation not to step off their particular horse and take that first step towards resolving the dispute together.

The colleague of Gates working at Harvard, Professor Bobo, said that "There ain't nothing post-racial" about picking up his black friend after being wrongfully arrested but he's more right in that there's nothing post-racial about the distrust between Gates and Crowley that helped lead them to the position they're in now.

There's an odd element of humor to this: precisely because they wouldn't work together privately, they're now stuck in this strange media frenzy together publicly. Here's to hoping the 24 hour news sharks go back to health care...

Marathon: The Numbers Game (1 of 13)

I teased the possibility of a series of blogs inspired by Marathon's self-titled record early last month and finally, I have the first of thirteen installments ready for consumption. I've been wondering how to start off the feature and I drew up a couple weak outlines for things that kind of fit the bill, but didn't really ring as closely to the sound of the first song, "Painting By Numbers" as I wanted it to.

Painting By Numbers is a fast number about the money paid for the war in Iraq, with references to the choices made in our pocketbooks and timepieces. "We hold the purse/we hold the reigns/We can deny these spoiled kids their next allowance/but when they start shoving around/like bullies in a playground/we shake our pockets for more change" is the image that stuck out to me, but I couldn't find something that fit it, until three days ago, when I stumbled upon the story of the USS New York. It's a battleship made out of the metal from the attacked World Trade Center, who'se assignment is "terrorist hunting" duties. A picture of the battleship is below.

My knee jerk reaction was that I was incredibly depressed and only after I wrote out my thoughts as to why elsewhere did the parallel for the feature make sense. So. Below is my perspective on the USS New York and how it fits into Marathon's Painting By Numbers.







1) Battleships were designed for ship to ship combat, but since have become prominent in shelling land targets close to the shore. Seeing as naval terrorism is not really used by Al-Qai'da, except against the USS Cole, but that was while it was docked, I don't see the battleship actually going on terrorist hunting missions except to fire off a cruise missile from thousands of miles away.


2) The U.S. response to the attack on New York (from which the metal comes) was to blast Tora Bora back into the Stone Age and then to invade Iraq, causing massive casualties for innocent Iraqis, thousands of American troops dead and those that are still alive suffering from PTSD or lost limbs. In short, the response was wasteful, expensive and in a direction away from the threat. The people who orchestrated the attack are still at large and the only winner were the gigantic defense firms who, with public funding (because the Rumsfeld-era Department Of Defense contracted out just about everything they could) made tons of money making weapons for Americans to use on Iraqis.

They also made money, get this, from the reconstruction of Iraq, since another part of Haliburton and KBR is in disaster management. Shit went bad, and whenever anything blew up or went wrong, they billed the government for it, cost plus. If you're thinking well, Iraq was a fluke because of mitigating factor X, they were also the groups in charge of reconstructing New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

So. With the tax dollars given to the defense department, Haliburton and KBR made money three times. First on making the weapons (bought with taxpayer money), second on billing for "defective" equipment (bought with taxpayer money) and third on rebuilding what the weapons had blown up (bought with taxpayer money).

Now with more taxpayer money, the metal is being used in a symbolic rebirth. Great.


3) 40+ years after a retiring president (who was also one of only two five-star generals) warned us about the dangers of a military industrial complex, I see this battleship, called the USS New York as the singular feather in the cap of that same complex.

Why? Because pieces of a shared traumatic experience of the country are being melted down and being used to make a ship which will never fulfill its stated purpose, but instead, go around, at taxpayer expense, protecting the seas (something which hasn't been used in warfare and probably isn't used anymore except as a nebulous place to store nuclear weapons on submarines) as a colossal waste of money, which coincidentally makes money for those same profiteers that were invited in by another President.

Instead of being used for something positive and inclusive, the metal is being used for something wasteful, hollow and ultimately putting more money in the pockets of war profiteers at the expense of the people who were affected by the attack. But there's symmetry: Our response to 9/11 was wasteful, expensive and not addressing the threat so it should make sense that the products from that attack are used for something just was wasteful, expensive and wrongheaded.

And this money comes out of our tax dollars. And this money was allowed, after a fashion, by us. We pass the buck off to the government. I know I did. I trusted George W. Bush. But it's not just trusting Bush in 2003 and 2004. It's in not calling my senator, representative or even getting involved in a meaningful anti-war effort.

It doesn't have to be a bake sale for Amnesty International or putting on a mask and going to a protest, but my shame and culpability comes from something easy: it was as simple as not asking myself the most basic question when I can't get to the bottom of a problem: Who profits?

It's in seeing something my government does, not liking it and figuring well, no one's gonna change it (and I'm powerless to change it), so sitting back and watching clips from the Daily Show to keep myself righteously angry when I'm sitting on my couch at home, tired and not wanting to put in the energy to fight something else. It's that assumption.

The call from President Eisenhower, a man who was at the top of the military food chain before becoming the President of the United States was simple: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Painting By Numbers answers that call. It's sarcastic, humorous and compels, or tries at least, to get the listener to understand that the military fights with our dollars and it's up to us to reign it in by taking nothing for granted (actual quote from that same Eisenhower speech) and using the levers of power and influence we have access to. Ugh. That assumption that I can't change what's going on is part of a self-fulfilling prophecy that odds are, is counted on by the military-industrial complex I say I can't stand.

There's a numbers game and it goes on in the pocketbooks of Congresspeople, and I'm not going to deny that. I'm going to lose that numbers game, always. I acknowledge that, but that's not the only game in town. Maybe there's another citywide organization that's doing something that I can join or add to.

Some people can be bought off, some can't, but the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened if everyone sat at their TVs and waited for the perfect opportunity to present itself. It wasn't all marches on Selma. It was getting together with seven or eight or other people and figuring out how and where to protest effectively between flashpoints.

It's up to us and Painting By Numbers reminds the listener of that drain on their account that they somehow forget about. The reigns are in our hands. We just have to pull back.