It used to take days or weeks to execute an innocent black man. Now it can be done in a few minutes.

Back in 1944, a young black male named George Stinney, Jr. was accused, tried, convicted and executed in a matter of days for a crime he almost certainly did not commit. By white people. White people who hated black people:

“It took less than a day for a jury to convict George Stinney Jr. and send him to the electric chair,” NPR’S Hansi Lo Wang reports. “He was convicted of the deaths of 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 7-year-old Mary Emma Thames in deeply segregated Alcolu, S.C.”

Matt Burgess, an attorney for the Stinney family, tells Hansi, “There were no African-American people in that courthouse. It was a jury of 12 white men. Everyone in that courthouse was white.”

George Stinney Jr. was executed less than three months after the two girls were murdered. His trial lasted just one day. After the jury needed less than 10 minutes to declare him guilty, no appeals were filed on his behalf.

“His executioners noted the electric chair straps didn’t fit him, and an electrode was too big for his leg,” The State newspaper reports. The paper adds, “It took Mullen nearly four times as long to issue her ruling as it took in 1944 to go from arrest to execution.”

70 years later, in 2014, lots of black males were murdered by racist white government employees in Cleveland, Ferguson, Staten Island, and many other places across the country. The only difference? Time.

The 2014 cops didn’t even pretend to bother with courts or silly things like due process: no, they arrested, accused, tried, judged, and killed, all in a matter of minutes. Or seconds, in the Cleveland case.

Those who say we have “made progress” in terms of equality are correct. However, that progress is NOT in a good direction. It’s going backwards. Until we as a society admit that our institutions have been made into Ayn Randian, apartheid-esque, Teabagger havens for a load of Ted Nugent wannabees, things will only get worse.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

America’s Cops Need to Get a F***ing Clue.

Now it’s the Cleveland PD’s chance to display some truly epic ignorance and stupidity:

Cleveland Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins took the field Sunday in a shirt reading “Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III” in a gesture to bring light to officer-involved shootings in Ohio that have happened in the last three months. Now Cleveland Police Patrolman Union President Jeff Follmer is demanding an apology from the Browns for Hawkins’ actions on Sunday.
He said,”It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.”

Not that it is confined to Cleveland: the same kind of cluelessness has been on display in St. Louis, and other cities across the country, large and small. Cops don’t get it. They truly do not understand.

This is because of a long process of “othering” that has gone on for decades. Politicians and pundits have sown the seeds of mistrust between civilians and law enforcement, to the extent that we not only mistrust each other, but we are preparing to be attacked at any moment. (One example: more people wanting to carry concealed weapons, and more cops opposing CCW.) It’s now at the point where far too many people in Law Enforcement feel that anyone who isn’t a cop is a potentially deadly enemy, and they act on that mindset.

On Edit: Here is another example.

The solution is to change the way we see each other. In spite of the media, in spite of regressive jackasses on all sides, people of good will can and must re-establish communication and re-develop mutual respect. There are a lot of good cops out there, and we can start with them. Weed out the “Kill them all” a**holes and get down to business with the real professionals who actually want to protect and to serve.

But this ain’t gonna happen until the police holster their weapons, close their mouths, and open their ears. From the newest rookie patrolman, through the chiefs and up to the District Attorneys, Law Enforcement needs to understand that we have good reason to fear and mistrust them. And that cannot continue to be the case.

Get a clue, cops. Please.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

Ferguson Officials haven’t learned Thing One since the Michael Brown murder.

From the racist , biased prosecutor and like-minded cops using armored vehicles and battlefield weapons intended to kill terrorists on civilians, to the heavy-handed tactics of the Nixon administration, police and politicos are just as malignantly clueless as they were the day an unarmed black kid was shot in the street by an out-of-control cop and his body was left to rot on the pavement for hours in the summer heat. And the stupidity was clearly visible in these remarks from the boss cop:

At a late news conference, as National Guardsmen watched from a distance, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said that as of midnight, police had arrested about 30 people related to the protests and tallied hundreds of gunshots.

The magnitude of the protests caught the police off guard, he said.

“As dynamic as August was, can you imagine a night like this?” he asked. “We didn’t have anything of this magnitude, so it was very difficult, I think, to telegraph exactly what we should have expected. I didn’t foresee anything like this.” He added that police did everything they could to prevent the chaos.

Such stupid, bigoted, willfully pig-ignorant f***wits. They think they can go on with the apartheid-lite approach that Ferguson (and many other such towns) have taken for decades. Even though it hasn’t worked in this case, even though people are not at all happy, even though buildings are burning and innocent people are suffering, local officials are convinced that they can just beat down people of color and everything will go back to “normal”.

Rich, powerful white people have been trying this idiotic approach for centuries. And it always looks like it will work, for a while at least. But history shows us that oppressors will fail, no matter how many times they try.

Stupid f***s.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky

It’s all good if you are a white, Christian male. Otherwise, you deserve whatever is done to you.

That seems to be how America operates: women, people of color, and non-Christians are pretty much here on sufferance, and any injury done to “those people” is no big deal. But nononono, don’t mess with the right-wing honkey dudes, nononono. They are deserving of doubt’s benefit, due process, tolerance, and understanding, yupyupyup. A short list of examples follows :

Number A: Michael Brown, yet another black man executed without due process by a racist white cop. But let’s not rush to judgment, the white cop deserves a fair trial and all the benefits of our legal system. Pity the black man didn’t get any of those things, but hey, it’s his own fault for picking African-American parents, right?

Letter 2: Let’s just read this headline: “Hedy Epstein, 90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor, Arrested During Michael Brown Protest”. Yes, you read that correctly. This Jewish female had the nerve to suggest that the Christian male cops were out of line for murdering black citizens, so they grabbed her and threw her a** in jail. No references to the Nazis are allowed, nononono, that might be offensive to the St. Louis police, right?

Thirdly: Don’t  report on the evil being done by white Christian males, or you will be arrested. If you are lucky, that is: they might threaten to kill you, instead, for betraying your fellow male oppressors. Nothing worse than a traitor, amirite?

Fourth: the best way to explain away the heinous actions of White Christian Males is to employ the services of a bunch of smiling white people. Because these sweet young white ladies are just doing their jobs, and it would be ungentlemanly to ask them any uncomfortable questions. And be nice to the clean-cut young white Christian men, too, because, well, you know, white people.

Finally: even if a man is a convicted, registered sex offender, white Christian males can use their discretion to allow him into school buildings and onto a varsity football team, because, hey, the girl shouldn’t have put herself in that position, right? The poor widdle wapist deserves a chance to get his life back. And it is wrong to shame him, because he only did what any other man has a right to do, right? Those women have it coming, acting that way, right?

One might say that this writer and other white men should be  deeply ashamed of many members of our  gender, ethnicity, and faith. One would be right. All that privilege went to their heads and turned into a gargantuan sense of entitlement: to the extent that we see the majority of the world’s population being oppressed and abused by a minority (us).

But hey, next time, pick the right parents and chromosome set before you get born like we did, okey-dokey?  Otherwise, don’t complain about being oppressed, killed, raped and abused, because it’s your own damned fault for not being white, Christian and male. Winners keep, losers weep. Quitcherbitchin, loser scum.

Mr. Blunt and Cranky