Category Archives: St. Louis

Advent II and an Argument for Prayer

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I’ve recently read a fairly trenchant piece from my former home town of Denton, Texas that makes a few of the observations I make here today. In spite of the fact that its author looks a lot younger than I am in his profile photo, he makes the following apology: “The last thing we need is another old white guy talking just to be talking.”

Speaking as an old white guy, I’m amused at the thought that I should probably shut up and let experts, or pundits, or other more official speakers than myself have the only say about what’s happening in my country. It seems to me that the official speakers aren’t doing a particularly good job these days, and that many of their opinions are bought and paid for. It’s refreshing to see that Charles Krauthammer, with whom I have never agreed about anything before, has called the New York grand jury’s decision in the Eric Garner case totally incomprehensible.

Krauthammer brings up the issue of double jeopardy as he speculates about the federal civil rights investigation in New York, suggesting that any further state action in the matter would constitute double jeopardy for the officer accused. But about Missouri, it has been suggested fairly forcefully that Darren Wilson could still be tried for murder since the grand jury hearing did not constitute a trial. Missouri Attorney General, Chris Koster, has also admitted that the Ferguson grand jury was misled about the law.

Now, as outrage grows over the New York grand jury’s refusal to indict Eric Garner’s killer, the NYPD echoes Congressman Peter King’s inflammatory claim that Garner caused his own death and that his repeated cries of “I can’t breathe” meant that he could breathe. It’s interesting to me, at least, that this claim was issued in a particularly strident fashion by the Patrol Benevolent Association, the New York City police union.

Here in St. Louis City, where police are represented by two unions, it turns out that city police not only tear gassed Mokabe’s on November 25 but also tear gassed my church and a good many residential streets in Tower Grove Heights. Police chief Sam Dotson has responded to criticism in a particularly arrogant and cavalier manner, citing the usual police justifications for excessive force:

MoKaBe’s wants to think that they are center of the universe. This was not about MoKaBe’s, this was about safety and security on Grand, . . . When the order to disperse is given, it applies to everyone. People always say, “It’s not me, so I don’t have to leave.” The challenge for law enforcement is that we don’t know who the good guys are or who the bad guys are, because the bad guys intermingle with the good guys.

It’s pretty clear in Dotson’s remarks that he simply doesn’t care that his officers did physical harm to a large number of citizens. He, and Congressman King and the NYPD don’t seem capable of seeing human beings as such in the crowds on the street, or behind the personae of those they may take into custody, but merely unruly objects that require being bullied into submission.

Did [the tear gas] blow into the Bread Company? Yes. Did it blow into FedEx? Yes. Did it blow into MoKaBe’s? Yes, . . . [a]nd that’s just how it works. It’s in the wind, and where the wind goes, it blows. There was never any gas specifically directed toward MoKaBe’s, the business, the people on the patio, but people were given a lawful order to leave the area [emphasis mine].

Actually a number of tear gas canisters landed on Mokabe’s patio, and police were observed directing tear gas directly at the parish hall door of my church. Aside from my general anger that events like these are now part of the normal life of my city and my country and that they call up the memory of Bull Connor and his officers attacking protesters with water canons in Birmingham years ago, there are a good many things that trouble me about these reports and others I see today.

The first is the scorched earth approach to policing when crowds are involved, which affects (as in this case) large numbers of innocent folk as well as any who may be guilty. Chief Dodson cited arrests on South Grand but made no attempt to connect those arrests with his officers’ carpet bombing tactics, probably because he could not have made the connection if he had tried. This is policing that is entirely about the projection of police power. It is parallel to our national use of drones and air power in the middle east and of course to the infamous bombings of North Viet Nam and the use of Agent Orange a generation ago.

Another troubling circumstance is the contemporary policy in many U. S. cities of policing through crackdowns on minor offenses such as jaywalking, as a way putatively to discourage serious crime. It is the escalation of situations involving minor offenses that often results in the abuse or outright murder of citizens. Sometimes there is no original offense at all, and an “offense” (usually resisting arrest) is manufactured in the confrontation. It is this aspect of contemporary policing that particularly penalizes ethnic minorities, the disabled, and the mentally ill simply for being where they are and/or who they are. Contemporary news reports are replete with accounts of mentally ill or challenged individuals who have been brutalized and savaged by police when they didn’t understand why they were being detained in the first place.

I find it deeply disturbing that police now consider that they have the right to detain me when I am going about the normal business of my life. I find it even more disturbing that police claim to be able to give me orders on the public thoroughfare and if I do not respond instantly to their satisfaction have the right to assault or to kill me. But this is the consequence or our present system of laws and concomitant police procedures. This is what the rule of law has come to mean in the post 9/11 United States, and I note additionally that the U. S. Border Patrol and TSA are being given permission to continue racial profiling as part of their screening processes. I am reading that police feel alienated from the public in the wake of reaction against the murder of Eric Garner, but I see nothing but arrogance and contempt for the public in their behavior as in their claims of innocence and/or grievance.

Then there is the question of corruption. Since I have lived in St. Louis (about twelve years) police here have been caught running a ticket scalping swindle and a car theft ring in collusion with a local towing service. I need not mention the racketeering laws that have made it legal for police all over the country to seize money and property from individuals without warrants or other due process. That police are using asset seizure as a funding source is appalling. Whether they spend seized funds for equipment or on perks makes no difference. The entire practice is corrupt from the beginning, and it is of a piece with the practice in some communities of using revenue from traffic stops as a funding source. This practice is epidemic in St. Louis county, as described in this recent Post-Dispatch editorial.

In addition, though I am in general a supporter of unions, the power of police unions to frustrate reform and protect the deep corruption of policing disturbs me, just as it disturbs me that my reaction to seeing a police vehicle nowadays is a wariness bordering on downright fear. I don’t deny the fearfulness of crime. (Though I do deny the validity of the drug war, and I think any sane person has to deplore the rise of our present system of for-profit prisons.) Still, there is much authentically serious crime. Two recent murders of Bosnian Americans in St. Louis seem to qualify as hate crimes and were apparently committed by African Americans. I do not deny that police live regularly close to violence and squalor; but in a culture of policing such as that we have around us now (police and civilians alike) that fact softens no hearts but is rather corrupting in itself. Moreover, our statistical approach to crime and crime rates in this country now provides police incentive to abuse citizens in order to meet arrest quotas, and unions are implicated here, as well.

Finally, the arguments that state the conclusions of grand jury deliberations in Missouri and now in New York seem particularly lawyerly to me. They are not the arguments of ordinary citizens. They share a deep claim that in the realm of public policy supposed good ends justify bad means, and (transparently in the case of New York) they involve appeal to exculpating technicalities that do not accord with commonsense reading of the facts. That present day law courts allow this remains a wrong without remedy. Though protest is growing around the country and beyond, it is meeting with the usual violent containment response we have come to expect.

The rallying cry of protest is the charge of racism, and while I agree that deeply embedded institutional racism is an important consideration as I attempt to understand what is presently going on around me, especially in my city, I don’t think racism is the chief cause of it. Policing has become an industry in my country. It operates with the logic of industry, demanding and using resources and materials opportunistically without regard for morality or the stewardship of life in our cities or on our planet. Ethnic minorities, the disabled, the mentally challenged or ill—these are targets of convenience. Those of us who live in the safe enclaves reserved to the privileged classes do not see them by and large, and thus they can serve as a constant source of human fuel for our corrupt municipal courts and the prison industrial complex.

I do not claim that industrial growth is the conscious end and goal of present day policing; though I do claim that industrial growth has become its real end, masked as a guilty secret behind the myth of public service. And thus police manhandling of protestors and journalists is coming more and more to seem a violent response to the possibility of public exposure of the real end of policing and (perhaps more to the point) organized resistance to the possibility of citizen regulation. At long last we shall be establishing a police review board in the city of St. Louis. But the new board is a sham and a mere adjunct of police power as presently constituted. It seems yet another design to give police political cover, like Governor Nixon’s Ferguson commission and our newly constituted presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing, headed by a police chief whose appointment is problematic to say the least.

I don’t have much hope, and I don’t know where to look for hope these days. I think my country is as uneasy an occupied place today as it was in the time of my childhood and youth. Perhaps this is an argument for prayer. I’ve skipped church this morning in order to finish this polemic, but I will go to my parish home, which has now served as a bunker in my city’s war with its own police, at 5:00 today, and perhaps find some comfort in the antique language of common petition.

Advent: a time of great change?

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One of my students two weeks ago remarked that we are living in a time of great change. I didn’t disagree because I never do that with students, but I am thinking today that a time of great change may already be past, a trajectory such as that Richard Rorty describes in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” one “defined by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the building of the land-grant colleges, female suffrage, the New Deal, Brown v. Board of Education, the building of the community colleges, Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement.” Rorty was more optimistic in 1992 than I am now. He didn’t live to see the neofascism of the anti-Obama movement, though he could have predicted it. “The future of American politics may be just a series of increasingly blatant and increasingly successful variations on the Willie Horton spots.”

Following Dr. King. It may be that the arc of history bent towards justice for a stretch of time in the last century, but if so it has now snapped back with a vengeance as far as I can see. That a seeming preponderance of good people, many of them liberal and some of them African American, can not merely countenance but embrace the official dehumanization of Michael Brown as recorded in the proceedings of the recently closed St. Louis County grand jury hearing, that these same good people can accept the outcome of that hearing as a triumph of the rule of law, that my country at large, including my young President, can not only accept but defend our contemporary surveillance state with its increasingly oppressive policing whose excesses fall primarily upon ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged and disabled, and the mentally ill—none of these circumstances gives me hope for my country’s future.

One of the big stories in St. Louis last weekend concerned the appearance of five St. Louis Rams players making the ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ gesture on the field at Sunday’s game with the Oakland Raiders. The St. Louis police union reacted quickly with a demand for an apology, though news reports alleging that the team had officially apologized were later denied by Rams executive, Kevin Demoff. But more interesting to me is the language of police union representative, Jeff Roorda:

[N]ow that the evidence is in and Officer Wilson’s account has been verified by physical and ballistic evidence as well as eye-witness testimony, which led the grand jury to conclude that no probable cause existed that Wilson engaged in any wrongdoing, it is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over-and-over again. . . . Our officers have been working 12 hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance, . . .

Not only does Roorda claim that Darren Wilson and by extension all Police were vindicated by the McCulloch grand jury, but he also promotes the grand jury’s findings to the level of absolute proof, delivered over and over again, while displaying a contempt for the community he alleges his brother officers defend that seems deep and abiding.

Along South Grand police still engage in racial profiling. St. Louis police tear gassed a crowd of innocent people inside Mokabes at the corner of Grand and Arsenal on the night the McCulloch announcement, sending a hundred or so injured to St. John’s Church down the block. My priest told me the next evening that she had called the chief of police on his private number—both Mokabes and my church had been designated sanctuaries—to ask what she should do with the wounded. That same evening I talked with two young men who had been among the injured. One of them was likely responsible for some of the video you can review here. I don’t know his name. It may be that police did not provoke the violence in Ferguson that night as they did last August. But Ferguson police apparently raided St. Mark’s Church, and someone allowed a large section of Ferguson to burn to the ground. Read my friend Kevin McGrane’s account of that evening at his blog, The View From Windy Hill.

Michael Brown has now entered the realm of urban legend as an incarnation of The Incredible Hulk, joining Trayvon Martin and a host of others of the publicly dehumanized. The dehumanization of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, of Cleveland, has already begun.

Meanwhile, the cosmic cycle wheels in the heavens and brings the beginning of another Advent season. I think I first understood Advent at about age fourteen when I sang in a Messiah rehearsal at First Baptist Church in my home town. I particularly remember a tenor whose name I have forgotten, a young man who served as a soloist at St. Paul Methodist Church, where I had grown up. His singing that day of the plaintive song of Isaiah forty, for a fourteen year old boy in love with singing, forever imprinted the words, “Comfort ye my people,” in my imaginary so that I cannot recall them without Handel’s music. I no longer remember the sound of the voice I heard that day—perhaps it has been supplanted by that of Richard Lewis. But the gestalt, the old half-round church that was later torn down, and the gray weather of an early 1950s December Sunday afternoon, lodges in my mind together with that musical gesture and other antique rhythms.

These seem particularly antique to me this year. I remember quoting the great Advent antiphon once long ago and moralizing it: ‘Desire of Nations is a handsome epithet; having intoned it, we are left desire.’ As this year winds down towards the solstice I find that I am much in need of such comfort as that of which Isaiah sang so movingly, but my own song sounds more and more to me like “That lucid souvenir of the past, / The divertimento; / That airy dream of the future, / The unclouded concerto . . .” of which Wallace Stevens speaks in a poem called “Mozart, 1935.”

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.

A priest I loved once said in a sermon that we postmoderns are a people who have lost our story. I am feeling particularly marooned this Advent, having lost my story (or a substantial part of it) and perhaps its music as well.

We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.

—Come, Lord Jesus!

along south grand the morning after

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Back before I got sick last summer I had begun to explore my city with a camera. There’s a lot I want to write about St. Louis, and I’m thinking I’ll illustrate many of these posts with my own photographs as I write them and put them up.

I’m also getting more serious about photography. I’ve started a photo stream at Flickr and am trying now to build it up as I explore Adobe Lightroom. I think I’ll try to post photos every week from now on, in addition to the ones I’ll use in posts about the city and other things and places. I had thought to get my photostream built up a good deal more before posting the first photos here, but I have a reason for beginning now that will be immediately apparent.

This morning I braved chilly weather for a walk down South Grand, about a half mile from my house. It’s a strip filled with restaurants, boutiques, service businesses, a bank, and it serves as the comercial center of three more or less contiguous neighborhoods around historic Tower Grove Park: Tower Grove East (my neighborhood), Tower Grove Heights, and Shaw (where Vonderrit Myers was shot). Though protests about the Ferguson decision were mostly peaceful along South Grand there was some looting and a good many businesses had windows broken out. My church, St. John’s Episcopal Church just half a block west of Grand on Arsenal, had windows broken along the alley.

I’m going to write more about that evening and my church’s role in it later. Right now I’m still thinking about my morning’s walk. Here’s a photo taken at the southeast corner of Grand and Arsenal looking down past the storefronts on the east side of Grand. The same gestalt could be seen repeated in each block of Grand for the next six blocks.

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Something remarkable occurred in the hours after the plywood barriers went up. In late morning, early afternoon, people began to paint signs and murals on their storefronts. I don’t know how much of this was spontaneous and how much was orchestrated by neighborhood merchants, and I’m not sure I care. As the painting went on more and more artists joined in, painting whatever they were inspired to say in the spaces offered by the boarded-up storefronts. By late evening, when we walked to South Grand to have dinner, the street was alive with what in the sixties we might have called a happening, and what we now sometimes call a smart mob, made up of folks painting whatever vision they had on the walls left behind by calamity.

A good many of the South Grand Murals aspire to be prophetic, like this one on the front of Salon St. Louis where my beloved gets her hair cut.

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Or this one, in the window of the Wyoming St. Post Office.

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Others are more prosaic, like this one on a side wall of The St. Louis Bread Company.

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When I drove down Grand at mid morning yesterday, I noticed a good many boarded up windows spray painted with the slogan, “Why? We need our jobs.” Here’s one mural that stuck to that message, on the Medicine Shop window at Grand and Juniata.

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A brand new restaurant, Rooster, was particularly hard hit. Its large expanses of glass were too good a target, I suppose. Here’s what Rooster’s front looks like now.

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The flag is the city flag with a peace sign substituted for the central fleur-de-lis. Because we met friends from church inside last night when we had dinner there, and because we then stopped by the church on our way home, my initial reaction to the invitation to table was to think of church, but I’m sure Rooster was only advertising.

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Here’s a photo that shows more of the damage at Rooster. It’s a former bank building and has been jammed with crowds since its opening in October. The owner is local entrepreneur, Dave Bailey. You’ll find a number of good reviews if you Google.

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As we were walking last evening after dinner we met lots of folks to talk with. There was a festive, almost holiday atmosphere along the street. One man we spoke with, not a young man, had a couple of cans of Krylon paint in his hands which he kept shaking as he spoke. We complimented the murals and asked which ones he had a hand in. He laughed enthusiastically, “I’ve not started yet, but I’m about to!”

I’ll post more mural photos at Flickr as I’m able. It will be interesting to see whether these murals grow as time goes by. Of course they aren’t permanent, but grafitti tends to grow while it lasts. Our server at Rooster commented about the murals that they made him proud and happy—he lives in the area. “Isn’t it interesting how sometimes the worst in people brings out the best,” he said.

Michael Brown verdict

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The St. Louis County grand jury has now found no probable cause to indict Darren Wilson with a crime as a result of his killing of Michael Brown. County Prosecutor McCulloch has laid out the evidence in such a way as to exonerate Wilson and has suggested that anyone who disagrees must have made up her mind in advance of the facts, likely influenced by irresponsible media. Of sourse, what Prosecutor McCulloch presented was an argument based on a carefully selected account of the facts, despite McCulloch’s constant protest that the Grand Jury was presented with all pertinent evidence.

I have never believed that officer Wilson would be indicted for killing Michael Brown. I pointed this out first here. The law gives police the benefit of the doubt in cases such as this one. But it should be said that this is not justice. It is rather a legal shield for the power elite. Prosecutor McCulloch urged the expression of dissent ‘so that such a thing might never happen again,’ but I found his pleading unpersuasive. There are numerous possible interpretations other than the now official one of the “facts” that Prosecutor McCulloch presented. Unfortunately, we shall now never hear them aired in open court. This was what the St. Louis County Grand Jury process was about.

Aside from the fact that McCulloch had a huge conflict of interest in this case and should have recused himself in the beginning, his polemic defending the impartiality of the grand jury process and claiming that anyone who dissents is insulting or attacking the integrity of the good folk who served on the grand jury, who gave up their lives, etc., is a pretty naked appeal beyond the merits of the case. It seeks to set those good citizens who support the grand jury and do not support Michael Brown, a young black man with an attitude, and those who do support Brown, against one another. But these adversaries should have met in open court, and they will not.

For a grand jury proceeding does not allow cross examination of witnesses. When asked why he did not seek a jury trial in this case McCulloch responded that had he done so a pre-trial hearing would still have occurred and the case would still have gone to a grand jury to determine probable cause. The difference is, of course, that a prosecutorial trajectory would have been set in a normal pre-trial proceeding, and that would have strongly influenced the outcome. The best chance McCulloch had of influencing the outcome of this particular case (and of avoiding any potential negative consequences with the electorate) was to present it to the grand jury with no recommendation.

I think the Michael Brown murder trial, travesty though it was, was not about Michael Brown or even about Darren Wilson. I think it was about creating a local outcome that could not easily be appealed to fhe federal court system and create the possibility of overturning Graham v Connor. Of course there will be gunshots, never mind who shoots; and of course there will be looting and vandalism. Civil strife invites opportunistic exploitation, and the terrible irony of such things is that often the innocent are harmed. When a society sets out an intentional policy of harming the innocent, where will such a policy come to rest?

So in the final analysis the verdict was, and is, a whitewash, or worse: the fix was in. The grand jury was used, and the predictable outcome confirms the establishment narrative with all necessary violence and chicanery.