CSotD: Observations
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First Dog reminds us that Big Brother isn’t the only one watching, and he’s not making up that bit about self-driving cars, because a Waymo taxi snitched on some drunken teenagers who were shooting plastic pellets out its windows.
Which is one of those things where maybe it’s good that kids can’t get away with anything anymore, but then again, at least the driver was sober this time. And there’s a certain level of getting away with things that is good for kids, which is why some Amish communities have Rumspringa, in which they let their kids cut free for a year and either come back and settle down or not.
Though cutting free for Amish kids is generally pretty tame stuff that wouldn’t make for thrilling video. The Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show featured a normal guy on camera all the time, unaware that he was the star of a very popular TV show, but the actual existence of various Housewives and party-kid programs suggests that voyeurism wears thin if there isn’t a fair amount of salacious misbehavior.
First Dog lists the people he thinks are a good market for sicko-creep glasses, and I suppose we’ll find out how well they sell. Or maybe we won’t, since part of the point is to be discreet in your peeping. It makes the news when someone gets caught planting cameras in dressing-rooms and bathrooms, but it doesn’t make news when they don’t.
However, there’s this: The LA police department is one of several law-enforcement organizations that has dropped its Flock contract, in part because of public pushback and in part because it kept producing false arrests based on shaky grounds.
There is a call for police officers, and, especially at the moment, for ICE officers to wear body cameras, because for all the video being shot, you can’t count on citizen videographers being around as they were during the arrest and murder of George Floyd.
Tom Homan explained to journalists that he wants his ICE officers to have body cameras, but blamed the Democrats for opposing the Big Beautiful Bill that he says financed the equipment. And he has also blamed those shot and killed by ICE agents for failure to cooperate with officers.
This has not gone over well with cartoonists, resulting in this
Juxtaposition of the Day
Homan has further explained that harsh criticism of ICE, such as comparing them to Nazis and calling for the dissolution of the department, makes people even more apt to not cooperate with them, which in turn makes it more likely that there will be bloodshed, and he expressed his fear that one of these days it will be an officer who is shot rather than an uncooperative citizen. And click that link before you assume he didn’t.
Bagley has a point in that attaching the term “czar” to various jobs has largely been a somewhat joking recognition that they are in charge of a program, but that when someone justifies people being killed for disobeying orders, it takes on a more sinister tone. Homan has called for officers who break the law to be prosecuted, but we have not yet seen it happen, and there continues to be an epidemic of people “weaponizing their vehicles.”
Homan has a point about the perils of antagonizing police, and my own experience is that the best policy is to play it cool. Videos that explain how to infuriate an officer while asserting your rights seem to invite more trouble than they defer. However, I don’t think you should have to keep your wallet on the dashboard of your car, as young Black men do, so that the officer can see that it is what you are reaching for.
Necessary suggests the end result of an organization that explains away the shooting of uncooperative suspects, and Anderson points out that, when we’re systematically rounding up brown-skinned people because they look like they might not have been born in this country, that’s a very broad and subjective interpretation of who is a “suspect.”
Homan’s rhetoric reminds us of Mayor Daley’s famous verbal blunder after the Democratic Convention of 1968, when he explained that “the policeman is not here to create disorder. The policeman is here to preserve disorder.”
As someone who wore his hair long a half-century ago, my stomach still tightens when I see the checkerboard design on the hat of a Chicago cop, and I know there are people in this country whose stomachs don’t need that specific a uniform to tighten.
As Dick Gregory said back in 1968, when he was running for president as an independent candidate, it doesn’t have to be that way.
I still believe that, but I grew up such that the local Trooper was my second-grade teacher’s son-in-law and his wife was the dental hygienist in our school. I know the police can be part of the community, but I’ve also seen what it’s like when they aren’t.
Following the latest shootings, ICE was told to quit making random stops of cars, because it leads to trouble. And then Dear Leader demanded that the stops continue.
He’s not there to create disorder; he’s there to preserve disorder.
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Speaking of Dear Leader, he does provide comic relief, if you can enjoy his hijinx without thinking of the power he has over more serious things, and his fatuous attempt to crash the Spanish team’s victory photo at the World Cup was a delightful bit of letting the hot air out of an overinflated ego.
Juxtaposition of the Buffoon
On a serious level, it reminded me of an incident during a G-7 meeting in which Joe Biden began to chat with a paratrooper who had made a ceremonial jump and didn’t realize the other heads of state were gathering for a group photo. That was criticized as evidence of dementia, but the people who were so het up over that aren’t the ones laughing over Trump wandering around and trying to get into the victory photo for a game he hadn’t played.
It puts a whole new spin on “The Whole World Is Watching.”
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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