The title of today’s ‘The Daily’ show from the NYT was just:
The Mayor of Minneapolis.

Half an hour of interview with him, and nothing else.

As spokesdrones go, he was very good. He called George’s death a murder. He noted that it was his call to fire all four officers involved. He let his emotions show as well as his brain. He talked like a Democrat, especially when the President came up–all well and good.

To my ear, the problematic part of the interview came when the host started asking him about the ‘looters’.

Last week, both this Mayor and the Minnesota governor came out with statements suggesting that all the looting, more or less, was being perpetrated by shadowy evil Outsiders, not residents of his city.

This of course was patent bullshit, and in the last few days the Governor walked his statement back a mile or two. So the host asked the Mayor–You gonna walk that back for us too?

Yes.

And then the host asked a really smart question. What difference does it make in the end, whether the people pissed off enough to vandalize and steal were Minnesotans, or just Americans?

The Mayor said, well, I just couldn’t believe it, that the citizens of my own city would be destroying their own grocery stores, and barbershops … it was inconceivable. Still is–don’t want to believe it, even if the evidence shows its true.

There are two huge problems with this bit of spokesdronery.

First of all, the neighborhoods where the raging people live are the only place they have, to take their rage out on, and that has been true for decades, going back to the Rodney King riots in L.A., and probably long before that.

The people involved are inevitably too poor to be mobile. Heading down to riots in Chicago or Milwaukee isn’t an option for them. They don’t have cars, and even if they do, they don’t have that kind of gas money. Odds are that in the current situation they don’t even have jobs.

Second, and more importantly, there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that "barbershops" are not the primary targets of vandalism, here or across the country. Barbershops are a racially coded metaphor, and they don’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

Banks, on the other hand, seem to have been disproportinately targeted, not for robberies so much as for glass-smashing and other acts of vandalism.

Is it really so hard to believe that some small percentage of the protesting residents would lash out against banks, or precinct buildings?

Why would that be hard to believe, Mister Mayor?

Maybe because as you said in a less than straightforward fashion, you don’t want to believe it.

On past the looty thing, the Mayor put a large part of the blame for the initial murder on the police union in his town.

I can bloody well believe that the union is pro-cop to a deadly fault.

I have no faith in the idea that a Mayor and a Council lack the ability to rein them in, and they’ve had years and years to do it. Philando Castillo’s killing alone was four years ago. Have you just been waving your hands that whole time, shrugging your shoulders?

I want to be clear.

There’s no larger purpose ever served by actual looting, especially of small local businesses. It’s immoral, and even worse, it’s counter-revolutionary. It lets the mostly white, mostly rich media wring their hands endlessly about looting, and lets them largely ignore the simple facts about why there’s unrest in the first place–that murder of poor brown bodies has been a way of life in this country for hundreds of years, and the power structure doesn’t even see it as a crime. A shame, maybe, but not a crime, especially when committed by our valiant boys in blue. Just another day under de facto apartheid.

There is a potential point to burning a cop car or flinging a brick at a bank. I don’t support these actions or even condone them. But I get why a population routinely subjected to its oppressors murdering them and routinely getting off scot-free for it might go there. It’s not, as the mayor thinks, inconceivable–potentially, it’s perfectly rational.

Some smart guy whose name I didn’t catch the other day made this addtional point.

In a protest against police brutality and murder by cop, the cops themselves are automatically counter-protestors.

Sure, they can say it’s their job to "keep the peace", when it suits them to keep it and not kill innocents.

But when they are the focus of the protests, they’re also in the position of counter-protestors whether they want to see it that way or not.

Michael Moore said another smart thing, in the comment-linked podcast, see last post.

You want to stop looting?

Stop widespread economic injustice and the income gap.

Nobody making even fifty thousand comfortable dollars a year is going to risk losing everything by grabbing champagne out of a liquor store opportunistically. Nobody with a good life is going to carjack you.

There are exceptions, for mental illness. Even Winona Ryder could have a bad shoplifting habit. But by and large, looting and all other random street crime is done by people who are desperately poor, in a country that tells them that unless they’re rich, they’re nothing–they don’t even exist, much less have anything to be proud of, or dignified about.

The system is broken and it stays broken because the people with power want it that way, consciously or not.

It all comes back to greed being the religion of this ugly culture.

The reason I wrote about this today isn’t really because of the glaringly obvious injustice.

I was more thinking about the Spokesdrone thing, and about how I am neither among the oppressed, nor the elite, and probably never will be.

I’m the other kind.

Whatever that is.