Jamiies Lartey said a smart thing.

A cop doesn’t have to be a white supremacist (or I would say, even a ‘bad apple’) in order to function as the enforcement apparatus of a white supremacist culture.

(See also: "He was just doing his job".)

When Amy Cooper, of unleashed dog in Central Park fame, called the cops on the "African-American man" who asked her to control her mutt, Lartey says, she was using the institution of the police as her "personal racism valet".

He goes on to say that what she did makes sense, if you look at the real job we hire cops to do, what their actual function is in the society. (Hint: "to protect and to serve" ain’t in it.) We outsource the keeping of the racial order to these employees every day, as taxpayers, whether we are white supremacists or not.

The system is rotten at its base, in its tacit assumptions.

And by the way, I would say that this applies with equal or maybe greater force to class as well as race.

I listened to (but didn’t see) a lot of the 20 minutes prior to the death of Rayshard Brooks. I thought it was striking that this cop didn’t seem to be an asshole at all. He was pretty laid back, and polite, referring to the victim as "Mister Brooks". And the victim responded in kind, even using the "You’re just doing your job" line verbatim.

But somehow this working-class father, who Again just happened to be black, is dead anyway.

I don’t care much about arguing about whether Rayshard was a good guy or a bad guy. Yes, he was a marginally drunk driver, yes, he made a series of very poor decisions including the one to resist arrest, yes, he probably made those decisions in part because he had an outstanding warrant (I don’t know what for, and I don’t care). Maybe Minneapolis George really was passing a hot twenty–but he didn’t deserve to die.

And Rayshard Brooks didn’t do anything that amounted to deserving two fatal bullets–in the back for Christ’s sake.

The cop who performed that act of cowardice and exceesive force is a victim of his own bad choices too. He chose to make his living as a tool of a fucked-up system–and so on, you can do the math. Here too, the good guy or bad guy question doesn’t get us very far or matter very much in the end.

Pivot. Back to the personal.

All those things Luke Smith said about Academia apply here too.

Now professors don’t carry guns yet, so far as I’m aware. And …

There’s nothing inherently rotten or complicit in going to work every day and teaching people how to write, or do trigonometry, or speak Spanish.

But being a prof is less and less about those morally neutral things. "Teaching" is less and less about teaching. In my context, the college was selling a product to its students. Take these classes, we were telling them, pass these tests, and it all amounts to a big fat ticket to go work for a defense contractor and be making six figures by the time you’re thirty.

That IS a slow bullet to the back, because even if it all works out just as promised, all a prof is doing is perpetuating the normalization of evil, using his intellectual authority to bless a culture and a worldview that is literally in the process of killing the planet and the species.

I struggled with this at times, and I made an extra effort to say: Look here, at this Snowden fellow. Consider the logic of freedom, as it applies to software … on and on.

I did subvert the real agenda of my employer, and I’m contingently proud of that fact.

But working within the system to change things is a fool’s errand most of the time. It’s too easy to justify yourself and the things you do.

In the back of my mind I have this image of a social services job in the rez border town, a job to use to get past the last two years I need for that sweet retirement. I may end up in that hazy job, for that purpose.

But I won’t be kidding myself when I do, the way I was these last few years in the decaying culture of college. Also, I won’t be making enough no matter what I do, to get to the promised land in the style I want to get there.

So that leaves me in the strange position of considering becoming a businessman at last, an entrepreneur in the business of selling individual facts assembled into useful packages with a view that points out beyond the broken existing world.

A content creator with a strangely wobbling moral compass that nevertheless will eventually and always point true north.

This is what the microphone is for.