Know Your History

Sometimes at My Masonic Apron, we have to get a little serious. It's not my favorite thing to do, but every now and then it has to be done. I know this is generally regarded as a "funny" blog, and that's nice, but I feel like I cover myself in the description at the top of the blog:

"A blog where those who are lost come to be found, not necessarily found out. A blog where you can be silly, and expect the same in return. An occasionally serious place, a constantly changing place. It's your Happy Place, and mine. So, let's put on our aprons and let's get busy."

Well, something's going on in California and it warrants a little bit of occasional seriousness. If this isn't your scene today, come back tomorrow, when I'll probably be posting some wry commentary about politicians' sexy daughters or lambasting people who post videos of their hamsters parading around on YouTube wearing Barbie doll-sized underpants.

Somebody is out for blood in Riverside County, California. They're out for blue blood. And when I say "blue blood," I'm not talking about the wealthy, elite blood of the cognac-sipping, incestuous, clenched-jaw WASP variety. I'm talking about the blood of cops.

Some maniac, or some maniacs, is/are setting boobytraps in the hopes of killing a police officer-- or lots of police officers. The first attack was an attempt to turn the Gang Enforcement Unit's headquarters into a concentration camp death chamber. A hole was drilled into the ceiling and a natural gas pipe was inserted with the gas on. Fortunately, officers smelled the stink and the building was evacuated.

A little while later, when an officer opened the steel gate to enter headquarters, a contraption that had been rigged and set went off, and a bullet was fired, missing his head by only eight inches. The only reason he wasn't killed was because the gate was tricky to open, and he had his body turned a bit to one side.

Another officer was targeted. While stopping at a convenience store, someone attached a bomb to his patrol car.

Understandably, officers are on-edge. They're checking their rearview mirrors while driving home from their shifts to make sure they're not being followed. They're extra cautious when approaching civilians, or when they're being approached. The mood has been described as "tense." And tense people who are constantly justified in feeling that they are threatened, tense people with guns is not a good thing. Whomever is doing this is creating an atmosphere that could get innocent civilians killed, simply because the police don't know who is behind these assassination attempts (and that's exactly what these are-- assassination attempts) and they are seriously ramped up.

I hate throwing the "T" word around, but it essentially is terrorism. Any time someone is attempting to manipulate the psyche of another person through violence or threat or fear of violence: that's terrorism.

Ironically, what bothered me most about this particular story isn't that someone's out there trying to kill cops. Someone, somewhere, is always going to be trying to do that. And there are lots of reasons people strike out against police officers-- hatred and mistrust of authority, they're caught with their back against the wall, they refuse to go back to jail, they're on drugs or insane... whatever the reason, as long as there are cops there will be cop-killers.

What bothered me most about this story was a comment made by Attorney General Jerry Brown.

"It is incredible and I think unprecedented that police officers in the line of duty could be subjected to these kind of terrorist attempts on their lives."

Think again, sir.

I don't know about you, but, when I was taught about the Civil Rights Movement in high school, it was covered in a day, maybe a day-and-a-half. We learned about Selma, Martin Luther King, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and that was pretty much it. Nobody mentioned the Black Panthers, and they certainly didn't mention the Black Liberation Army, which was a violent off-shoot of the Black Panthers. Beginning in 1970, the BLA participated in numerous attacks, assassination attempts and successful assassinations of police officers all across the country. This is nothing unprecedented. This is nothing new.

* October 22, 1970: As thousands of police officers congregated inside a church for the funeral for slain San Francisco Police Officer Harold Hamilton, a bomb inside the church, planted by the BLA, exploded. Nobody was seriously injured.

* May 19, 1971: NYPD Patrolmen Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti tried to stop a vehicle that had been deliberately traveling the wrong way down a one-way street past their police car. When the patrol car pulled up alongside the suspect vehicle, the officers were fired upon by a machine gun. Both officers were hit multiple times and their patrol car careened into a statue. Curry and Binetti were disabled for life.

* May 21, 1971: NYPD Patrolmen Waverly Jones, black, and his partner, Joseph Piagentini, white, had just finished answering a call for help at the Colonial Park Apartments in Harlem. It was a little after 10:00pm. They were shot to death from behind as they walked together back to their patrol car. Jones, 33, was killed instantly. Piagentini was mercilessly shot 13 times in the back, with the assailants' guns, and with his partner's gun. He died in the backseat of a patrol car that tried to get him to Harlem Hospital.

* August 29, 1971: San Francisco Police Sergeant John V. Young is shotgunned to death while sitting in his police station by members of the BLA.

* January 27, 1972: NYPD Patrolmen Gregory Foster, black, and his partner, Rocco Laurie, white, were walking their beat along Avenue B when they were murdered in the exact same way as Jones and Piagentini had been-- shot repeatedly in the back. They were turned over and an eyewitness heard one assailant yelling, "Shoot them in the balls!" Laurie, 22, was shot in the groin. Gregory Foster, 23, had both of his eyes shot out.

Had enough yet? Closer to my home, more nutjubs were hard at work. A group that called themselves "The Revolutionaries" got into the act, too. On August 29, 1970, Fairmount Park Police Department Sergeant Frank Von Colln was sitting at his desk talking on the phone when gunmen walked into his small stationhouse and shot him five times, killing him. Von Colln's revolver was inside his desk drawer. Two other Philly officers were shot and wounded that same day.

It goes on and on and on.

If you think it is just a sepia-hued memory of faded headlines, you're wrong. In Seattle, a police officer was gunned down and brutally killed while just sitting in his car. In Alaska, another officer was writing a report in his patrol car when a vehicle pulled up alongside him and the Anchorage officer was shot five times. Unprecedented? Please.

And I find it distressing, irritating, and shameful that people involved in the law and in law enforcement in 2010 have no concept of the history of violent attacks on police officers carried out by bigots, maniacs, and other so-called "revolutionaries" who think the only way to send a message or institute a change is by shooting someone in the back or blowing them up. In America, we don't have very long histories, and as such we have no excuse for not knowing our history.

Here's a little tip, Mr. Attorney General: nothing is unprecedented. It's all been done before.

DOGS: Bad Dogs, Bad Dogs-- Whatcha Gonna Do, Whatcha Gonna Do...

It's no secret that I love "COPS." I love COPS even more than I love Gilbert & Sullivan-- and I may be the only person in the whole goddamn world who can say that sentence in all seriousness. Give me a choice between a night at the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and a marathon of "COPS," I would be hard-pressed to choose those expertly-trained voices over a couple hours of baton-bashing, dumbass-tasing fun.

I mean-- a free night of Gilbert & Sullivan might sway me-- but opera tickets are expensive, and COPS is free and out on bail.

My wife is a "COPS" (and G&S) convert, I'm happy to say-- and I didn't even have to resort to the last-ditch tactic of cuffing and stuffing her... on the sofa in front of the TV on a Saturday night. She went willingly. Maybe she gets all misty-eyed and remembers the times when we were first long-distance dating and I would be watching "COPS" at my place in suburban Philadelphia, and she would be watching "COPS" at her place in Pittsburgh and we would discuss the various foot pursuits and felony car stops with intense sexual longing.

Like most couples do.

One of the things that my wife likes to poke some justified fun at are the police pontifications that inevitably occur at the beginning of each segment.

They're unscripted, but they might as well be, because they're all the fucking same:

I always knew I wanted to be a cop.

I got into law enforcement 'cuz I wanted to help people.

My dad's a cop, his dad was a cop, my uncles and cousins are all cops-- my wife's a dispatcher, my grandmother was a cop-- kicked the shit out of Al Capone once-- and my dog's a K-9 cop. My gerbil's a sergeant on the tactical entry unit of the SWAT team the next county over.

You meet a lot of interesting people in this job.

Every day you come into work, you never know what's going to happen.

It's that last one that gets me every time. Pal, nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen when they come into work. Yes, you might be getting mooned by a busload of drunken frat assholes from the local community college one minute and be arresting some banged-up hooker with tit-rings and anal leakage the next-- but, like, last week, I went to "Staples" and both of the black-and-white photocopiers were broken. Not only that, but the line at the post office was nine people long, and I had to take my bulk mailing in the next day, because, well, I just couldn't wait that long.

I mean-- I sure didn't know that was going to happen.

On Wednesday night, my wife and I got a puppy. Her name is Molly. She's very cute. God takes great pains to make puppies extra special cute so you don't beat their heads in with their empty food bowl when they hot-shit all over your brand new hand-woven oriental hallway runner.

I admit that I don't know what being a cop is like, but I suspect that, judging from the opening monologues diligently recited by police officers the country over that it's a lot like being the owner of a puppy.

"Every day, you never know what's going to happen."

Fuckin' aye, Ossifer. After a day or two of being a Puppy Daddy, I feel that shit. Hard. At 1:45 in the morning, I have also been known to step in it, bleary-eyed, on our bedroom floor.

On Thursday, I popped in on our little pup three times, to see how she was doing. We keep our veteran dog gated in the kitchen, because he has a nasty tendency to scratch/eat through doors when left alone, and so we thought we'd try gating our rookie dog with him until such time as we could procure a crate to crate-train the little Molly Monster. When I arrived home for Check-up #1, I entered the house and it was very, very quiet.

You never know what's gonna happen...

As I made my way to the kitchen, I saw one big, gray head in the kitchen doorway, above the top of the gate. Ah, hello, Finley, you good, old dog. But there was no sweet, small, blonde head to be seen. Finley was alone in the kitchen, the gate was still up.

"Oh, my God," I thought to myself, "she's dead."

And so, as a cop would, I cleared room after room. Kitchen: clear! Dining room: clear! Living room: clear! I started up the stairs one by one, smelling something unfortunate. As I stepped on the fifth or six stair, I saw that little blonde head poking out. And then I saw her little chocolate muffin treats all over our rug. Oh, and a pee-pee lake in the office. She had pushed against the gate with her head until it made enough of a space for her to crawl under.

The second time I came home, she showed Daddy her new trick: vaulting clear over the gate like an Olympic hurdle star.

When you own a puppy, you come home and take stock. The snow shovel is on the ground. There's a wet spot on the couch. The rug's mussed up. The bathroom door is ajar. The old dog looks very disturbed. A sweater is on the floor. It smells like a nursing home. It's time to play everybody's favorite game: "Find That Shitheap."

Predictability, like the ho-hum, hum-drum of the cubicle/office/non-profit administration world, is gone-- at least, until she's housebroken.

Until then, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do....

Tongue-Tied in Oakland

I don't know what to say about the cop-killings in Oakland, but I feel compelled to say something.

It's expected of me, law enforcement advocate and supporter that I am. You knew it was coming. You knew it was time for another sad blogpost, one that would not make you giggle or titter, or comment. A sad one. As it says on the banner a'top "My Masonic Apron," this is a sometimes sad place.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, here we are. It's time to put a strip of black over the badge. It's time for the white gloves. It's time to acknowledge a sacrifice greater than ourselves.

They're saying a lot of things in Oakland this morning, and much of what they're saying has to do with the killer. They say that he was "frustrated with the parole system." They say that he was "trying to better himself." They say that he "wasn't being treated right." They say that he "wanted to get rehabilitated and to find a job."

Well. That's what they say anyway. People say a lot of things that don't make any sense when they're upset, and Lovelle Mixon's family has every right to be upset over the blood that this man spilt in Oakland on March the 21st, 2009.

I just don't understand how arming yourself with an assault rifle is a logical component of a plan to "better yourself." Maybe one of Lovelle Mixon's family members can explain that to the people of Oakland or, better yet, to the family members of the deceased officers.

You know-- this isn't what I want to say. This is coming out all wrong. I'm sorry. Let me try again.

---------------------------

It is a rarity when I am at a loss for words. This is one of those times. I felt sure that I could sit down at the computer this morning and just start clicking away, and that, as usual, something cogent and passionate would pour out, but I'm not getting anything. Maybe I'm just spent. Maybe all the death and despair of Philadelphia has bled me dry, and has disabled me to the point where I cannot respond to what has happened 3,000 miles away. 3 dead cops, one brain dead-- a police department in shambles and a city in fear and despair because some fucking bastard was "frustrated with the parole system?"

How, exactly, do you respond to that?

What do you say?

Someone wrote a comment on the Oakland Tribune's website that said, "They all got what they deserved. Everybody knows cops are brutish thugs."

And how, exactly, do you respond to that?

What do you say?

Here's what I have to say personally, and it's nothing that I can say in any commentary or any editorial or any newspaper: if this tragedy doesn't move you in some way-- if it doesn't make you see that the criminal element of this society has effortless access to a plethora of guns that they are unafraid to use, if this doesn't give you a pang of guilt for every "cop-with-a-donut" joke you've unthinkingly made, if this bloodbath doesn't give you a moment's pause: then I guess I just don't know what to say to you.

I guess I'm just tired. Tired of the violence and the meaningless words that follow afterwards, from them, from me, from the governors and the mayors and the presidents. From everybody. I'm just so fucking tired of it.

So, go on. Play your bagpipes. Write your hateful, spiteful comments to the newspapers, and your supportive ones, too. Send your flowers. Lower your flags. Cross your breast.

Just get on with it.