Her Name Is Breonna Taylor

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by Fred Reed

“This will be a disoriented essay. These are disorienting times. Perhaps the reader should prepare himself with a double shot of Wild Turkey throat sanitizer, or a doob. I am still getting mail saying that Floyd’s death was due to underlying conditions. I see. By purest coincidence, he died of natural causes while hand-cuffed, face down, with cops kneeling on him. Nothing could be more natural.

Autopsies: Pick any two of three. Anyway, all of America and much of the rest of the world has lost its everlovin’ mind. You probably didn’t think of this. That’s how this column is. Full of original ideas.

OK, the sacking of America. Peaceful protesters have a point, though they may not be sure what it is. Bless them. The looters and arsonists should be shot. Back when the country was mostly white and law abiding, it would have made sense. The burning of a family’s store by urban savages should, obviously I hope, not be allowed.

But the pillagers are overwhelmingly black. Expecting them to behave as if civilized would be racist, and intolerant, and cultural imperialism, and discrimination, and just like Hitler. So they hunt and gather at will, shrieking in ebonics and streaming from stores with bags of booty. It is the same in every riot. No, most blacks are not looters. Yes, many are horrified by it. Yes, blacks are human beings and have feelings like everybody else, etc. It remains that looting and burning are a black game. What politician is going to order the shooting of hundreds of black Americans?

Why always blacks? Depressingly, the most parsimonious explanation, consistent with all of the facts, is that blacks cannot function well in a modern society. They never have, anywhere, do not, and seem unlikely to. The underlying cause appears to be low average intelligence and, perhaps, poor impulse control. They interpret apparently inevitable failure as systemic racism. The very real fact of past mistreatment changes nothing. This will not improve because it cannot. What now?

Again, many blacks oppose looting. Al Sharpton says looters are criminals and should be punished. The rap artist Lil Wayne said it is unreasonable to think all police are bad. Here we see that good sense comes in a plain brown rapper, like pornography.

OK, to brass tacks. The proximate cause of riots is always that white men have done something bad to blacks, like kill them. If in fact sometimes they have not, blacks believe that they have, encouraged by the media. Martin Luther King, Rodney King (no relation), Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, George Floyd. The police are the customary agents of ignition. Technical details, such as guilt or innocence, do not seem to matter.

If policing blacks with white cops leads to burning cities, why keep doing it? It’s like a man hitting his thumb with a hammer. Whackawhack. “Ouch! That really hurts!” Whackawhack. “Ouch! That really hurts” Whackawhack. “Ouch! That really hurts” “So why don’t you stop?” “…Whut?”

And of course there is a lot of misbehavior by police, which until recently was seldom detected. Question: For a cop, what are the most terrifying words he will hear? Cancer? Pay cut? Doughnut shortage? No. “Cell phone.”

This current ruction could be called, perhaps a bit too breathlessly, the first electronic world uprising. A cell phone video began it, went viral, and got picked up by the legacy media, which have mostly followed cellphone footage. The networks are too politically correct, too short on manpower, to compete with millions of iPhone videographers. When the Buffalo cops knocked an old man down and casually walked away as he lay unconscious and bleeding from the head, within hours the entire earth saw it. Violeta and I, in central Mexico, have watched live coverage of Washington on Australian television. We are seeing (Fred said importantly) a new paradigm.

Now, applied stupidity. It would be easy to believe that the police are actually trying to spark riots. If you think idiocy is not normal with today’s gendarmes, consider Breonna Taylor. She, a black EMT, was in bed with her boyfriend after midnight in Louisville. The police, under a no-knock warrant, using a battering ram, with no warning, crashed into her apartment. Her boyfriend, wakened by the intrusion, thought the couple were being attacked by god knew who. Reasonably, he fired a pistol at them, hitting a cop in the leg. The cops responded by shooting Breonna eight times, killing her.

With a predictability that makes Congressional corruption seem a long shot, the police said that, actually, see, they knocked and announced that they were police. The police are lying. First, you don’t get a no-knock warrant and then knock, calling out that you are police. Second, if the police announce themselves, a guy in bed with his girlfriend will get up and open the door.

However: What happens when police have done a cowboy battering-ram I’m-a-really-cool-SWAT-guy enhanced entrance, and then discover that they have killed a young woman? Easy. They suddenly remember that they knocked. Since they have killed the only other witness, they can get away with it. Perhaps an autopsy report will say that she died of underlying conditions. Yes, of natural causes, by purest coincidence while being shot eight times. Happens all the time.

The Breonna murder, like the Floyd trophy animal technique, was inverse PR genius. There must be a manual on this. Can you think of a more preternaturally foolish approach to race relations? You don’t shoot the guy you are supposed to be arresting. No. You kill his girlfriend. What brilliant police work. Awesome.

Of course, blacks kill far more whites than whites kill blacks, whether cops or anyone else. but this doesn’t fit the desired narrative. The media hide the (extremely) lopsided kill ratio. Anyone interested in black-on-white murder might read “Their Lives Matter Too”, by Paul Kersey.

Sez me, there is only one way to end the recurring riots: Have white cops police whites, and black cops police blacks. Separate departments would further reduce antagonism. Let blacks decide whether and how they want to be policed and let them do it. Since the races don’t like each other and separate when allowed, semi -autonomous urban regions might be a good idea. But this would not be the American way. When you have done something for decades that hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and isn’t going to work, why, keep doing it. Whackawhack. If I were a goofy tooth-fairy liberal, I would probably say that the policy strives for diversity and inclusion. Which nobody seems to want, but what has that got to do with it?

At this point in our study of applied, and even inspired, stupidity, we will now Have Thoughts and Draw Conclusions. These will be obvious to everybody but I will package them as insight. Hey I’m a columnist.

First, the rioters do not care about black lives. Neither does Black Lives Matter. Thousands of blacks die annually of gunshot in Chicago, Baltimore, etc. No riots. In fact, hardly a squeak. If black cops are killed by blacks, no riots. If a black cop kills a black, no riots. Nor do they care about the many equally grotesque murders of whites by blacks.

Methinks the murder of Floyd was just a trigger for many and deeper diseases rotting America. The country is profoundly unhappy and pissed off about pretty much everything. The young labor under student loans they will perhaps never be able to pay off, these loans being tailored for the benefit of the banks. Families live paycheck to paycheck, maxed out on credit cards, which are an excuse for exorbitant interest rates. Jobs have been offshored to benefit the corporations. Jobs no longer have benefits as employees have been turned into “independent contractors” for the benefit of the employers. People do not go to doctors because the prices have become barbaric, for the benefit of medical swindlers. There is anger over racism, pervasive corruption, hatred of Trump. People are angry at having unwanted immigrants forced on them for the benefit of employers. The public has figured out that the government has no interest in their well-being, and that they have no influence over government, or anything else. Except by rioting.

Finally, little will change, at least not for the better. The inner city will remain as it is, the pathologies intact. The police will be more restrained, for a while anyway. Crime will increase somewhat as cops will hesitate to arrest blacks. The country will be still more divided. Censorship will increase. Some businesses will reopen in burned out downtowns, and some won’t. Wall Street and the Pentagon, as always, will ride high, and together they will shepherd America’s descent into the Third World.”

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