CSotD: Lightening up as the Light Fades
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Candorville leads off what could be a very depressing day if I let it.
I'm nearly ready to take a break from Facebook, because the place is far more full of feuds than conversations, and I get tired of pissing into the wind.
For example, we're got another social media lynch mob forming over that unjustifiable, boneheaded, illegal interaction between a rogue cop and a good nurse.
The city and the police department have both strongly acknowledged that he was wrong.
No, they didn't fire him on the spot because you can't — though the private security firm he moonlights for can and did — but he's on "administrative leave" and I highly doubt he's coming back. (And if you don't like the procedure, you should be a little careful about your support of labor unions.)
If, like me, you support Black Lives Matter and want to see bad cops taken off the street, you should be saluting this as a positive step, because this guy is toast.
But I might as well point out one more time that Melania didn't wear the freakin' stillettos to Texas and that Al Gore really did head up the funding to develop the Internet and that John Kerry served with honor in Vietnam.
Because we've already lit the torches and we've got all these really neat pitchforks and it would be a shame to waste them.
Hiring someone to piss into the wind for me sounds good.
I'd even buy the guy a raincoat.
Prickly City offers a little comfort, though of a back-handed nature.
I took a roadtrip with my eldest granddaughter yesterday, and the subject of peaceful demonstrations and rogue cops came up.
She told me she had bailed on a demonstration after it became clear that the organizers planned to purposely antagonize the police, and that they had about 200,000 followers at one point, but only a handful continued once it was clear that provoking a violent response was part of their deal.
It's important to put that experience into the mix, because, as I've said before, it's the guy in the bloody Uncle Sam suit who gets in the paper, not the crowd of normally dressed people, and it's the picture of the demonstrator clashing with the cop that gets in, not the picture of a crowd listening to a speech.
And I told her of a march in Chicago a few weeks before the 1968 Democratic Convention, in which we chatted with the cops and one had a sprig of lilac in his motorcycle helmet, until we arrived at the Civic Center where a police riot was in progress, with Daley's goons beating the crap out of everyone.
And the good cops we'd been talking to begged us to keep back, and I saw in their eyes how horrified and helpless they felt.
Now here we are, back with Edmund Burke again:
Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
Though we ought not to forget Samuel Johnson, either:
If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.
Many sides, yes, but not many people on many sides.
Many more silently chewing their cud.
Time to spit it out and speak up.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Back-to-school happened two weeks ago in Colorado though not until next week other places, but I think Labor Day is a fair divider. It's certainly, as Wiley suggests, where we drag our heels to slow the circles down.
It was good that Granddaughter and I took our road trip yesterday, because the roads were reasonably clear Friday morning on the way to coastal Maine, but, as we returned in the afternoon, I-95 Northbound was packed with Boston-area folks trying for one last three-day weekend.
We purposely took some very scenic backroads from Portsmouth home, which the city folk don't know about and let's keep it that way.
Which is the opposite of the situation in Baby Blues, because, for city folks, all those places are around during the school year, but once school starts, that ol' calendar fills up and hitting a museum or the zoo on a weekend goes out the window because of soccer games and suchlike.
The days really do get shorter, don't they?
Many a truth spoken in jest, History Division:
There's been a thing lately on the non-toxic parts of social media about jobs that no longer exist, like elevator and switchboard operators, but today's Loose Parts – probably unintentionally — brings to mind another.
Though I think the job died well before the selfie took its place, there used to be "camera girls" who worked in nightclubs, and here, a camera girl at Ciro's in Hollywood gets a shot of Guy Madison (my hero!) and Gail Russell. They must have had a darkroom on site; at less chichi places, you paid her now and got the pic mailed to you later.
I never went anywhere so grand, but I remember guys on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City taking your picture and offering to send it to you for $5, and my father explaining to me that he didn't think they even had film in their cameras.
Cynical guy, my dad.
But no fool, either.
Good old Portsmouth boy.
More "old" than "boy" these days.
Aren't we all?
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