The Gerrymander Circle-Jerk

I’m not going to bore you with the full history of gerrymandering, because you learned about it in 9^th grade if you’re my age, and in college if you’re significantly younger (50 is significantly younger). I will share the origins of the term – a map most of you have seen – named for Governor Elbridge Gerry, in 1812 Massachusetts. Dunno what Massachusetts is named for, but it is a spelling bee buster. Anyway, here’s the map:

This gerrymander favored the Republicans over the Federalists, and every party in power since then has been guilty of the practice. At first the Supreme Court deemed gerrymandering a political activity, and therefore out of the reach of the Court. Later gerrymandering based on race was outlawed, the practice was determined to be justiciable, and districts were required to be of relatively equal numbers of voters in federal elections (one person one vote). We had a voting rights act, and then we didn’t, and that’s where things pretty much stand today.

You would think that a representative democracy – if that’s what the US is – would by now have found a way to be, well, representative. But no, not so much. As recently as July of last year, the 4^th Circuit Court said that the North Carolina’s voter ID law targeted people of color with “almost surgical precision.” You could almost hear the state’s liberals moan ecstatically in unison. This ruling was challenged, went to Supreme Court, and was promptly denied reconsideration. Shortly thereafter, the Supremes struck down both federal legislative and state General Assembly districts as illegal gerrymanders.  Here’s what the illegal federal map looks like:

In the lawsuit that resulted in the ruling described above, it was noted that you could drive the length of District 12 with you car doors open and kill everyone in the District.

I don’t have a good map of the 28 State senate and house seats the Court said were illegally gerrymandered. Feel free to Google it; it’s basically just a map of the state. I do have one of many proposed maps -- this one created by a computer -- that purports to represent nonpartisan districting:

There’s been a lot of pissing and moaning by members of the legislature since these rulings about “When!” and “How!” and “It’s Not Fair!” They’ve been throwing their food on the floor and weeping loudly and stamping their little feet. But they’re not complete idiots, all evidence to the contrary. They have now declared that they are going to draw maps in which they take NO ACCOUNT of race. The implication is that they are only going to consider political preference in their next effort. Purely political = not justiciable, or so they’re hoping.  And that’s damned clever, because in North Carolina race and party preferences overlap with . . . wait for it . . . almost surgical precision. Ta Dah!

Here’s a map of the State by race:

And here’s a map of voter preferences in the 2012 election (when Democrats actually got off their asses to vote):

Romney   40-50%   50-60%   60-70%   70-80%

Obama   50-60%   60-70%   70-80%

Romney

  40-50%

  50-60%

  60-70%

  70-80%

Obama

  50-60%

  60-70%

  70-80%

 See what I mean? (That outlier over there on the left is Buncombe County, home of hippie haven Asheville, a very Boulder, CO kind of college town.)

And so, as we gird up for the next round of lawsuits, let me modestly suggest that In The Meantime, we do not have a lawfully elected legislature. It seems to me that actions of a racially gerrymandered political body are ipso facto racist and/or unconstitutional.

Wait, Tom! You’re not suggesting that everything the Legislature has done since those 28 gerrymandered seats were filled needs to be redone? Why, that could delay any new work for months – even years!

And the problem with that would be? According to Mark Twain (or, maybe, Gideon J. Tucker) “No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” Seriously, I wouldn’t mind at all a return to the days when we funded our schools and our Medicaid system and it was still illegal to drive over people in the streets.

Civilization and Our Discontent

I was at the doctor’s office the other day and I noticed a Pediatric Scale for Pain (the Wong-Baker Faces for Pain Scale), pasted on the wall. You’ve probably seen it; it looks like this:

I tried to locate myself on this chart and I decided on 2. Or 3. But here’s the thing – I am ALWAYS at 2. Or 3. Okay, maybe 1, if I’m doing something that doesn’t annoy me. Never that sappy 0 – 0 is for suckers. And 4 or 5 is like when your dog dies. So, 2, mostly. That’s life – it hurts a little more, once you settle on the fact that you’re never going to be a rock star/astronaut/whatever. If it gets to 3, you make a doctor’s appointment.

At least, that’s the rule for those of us who are restrained by the simple sensitivities of living in the real world. That is, those of us who realize how lucky we are and how much better things could be for a lot of other people.

Like: I got into my truck the other day and it wouldn’t crank to start. Not surprising, because the battery was seven years old. I went into the house and called my roadside service; 45 minutes later a guy pulls into my driveway and gives me a jump. I drive down to the auto parts place and buy a new battery. They install it and take away the old one, no additional charge. An hour or so later and I’m driving around with a new battery and my hands are clean.

Do you see how privileged that is?

Now, my more conservative friends would defend this “privilege,” arguing that I worked all my life, I earned my retirement, I shouldn’t have to feel embarrassed that I can afford to pay to avoid life’s little inconveniences. But, you know, that guy who came to give me a jump – he was just a guy in some old beater car. Not a tow truck driver, not an employee of some local auto service. Just a guy, running around in his own car, trying to make a buck. I’ll bet any money that he was a “private contractor” – i.e., no benefits, no sick leave, no overtime, nada. This guy, in this world, will work a hell of a lot harder than I ever had to, on more jobs, for less money, and when he’s my age he’ll still have to go change out his own fucking battery.

And what about those guys at the auto parts store? The store commits them to all kinds of customer service – free tests, free installation, help the morons who don’t know how to change their own oil, etc. Then it cuts back on their hours, until now there’s only two of them in the store trying to give “customer service” to 10 people at once. The 21^st century has exposed the American Dream for what it always was – corporate greed, ever-increasing demands for productivity and declining wages.

And me?  I’m a goddamned Wooly Mammoth, the last of a vanishing breed – the middle-class male. I’m a guy who worked all his life in public service occupations and now I have actual retirement, paid for by investment in properly managed government retirement accounts. Imagine, instead, that I had paid my money into a 401k. I could have retired 10 years earlier. And then sat back and watched as my entire portfolio got wiped out in the crash of 2008. Wouldn’t that have been pretty?

So, 2. 2 is not so bad.

The world I grew up in, the USA post-World War II, was a world of invincibility and can-do, a world where the American Experiment was a resounding success. We ruled the globe militarily, our country was awash in opportunity, the middle class was strong and growing. It was a great time to be alive – at least, if you were a White Male. I had no worries. Hakuna Matata. Even when I was a 19-year-old high school dropout with a child bride and a kid, I knew things would work out. And they did, mostly. Much more so than they will for that guy who came to charge my battery.

American exceptionalism started to unravel in the late 1960s and 1970s. A growing awareness of our failings – the ongoing racism and destruction of the Native American culture, the Mad Men mentality in our workplaces, the wrongheaded foreign policies that brought about Vietnam and, later, the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of Iranian nationalism, and on, and on – all conspired to seriously smear that happy image we had of life in the Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free. But even then, hey, this is the good old USA. We can fix things. It’s what we do.

David Brooks, in a recent essay (The Crisis of Western Civ: HERE) suggests that we went too far, that we discredited our own civilization to the extent that we sowed the seeds for its eventual downfall -- that we threw the baby out with the bathwater. He may be right.

But here’s the thing – that can-do spirit is hard to kill. We fix things, right? Americans still believe that the ship of state is somehow self-correcting, like those Coast Guard boats that can roll over in the waves and come out right side up. We refuse to admit that bad political choices will have long-term consequences. Why else would we elect representatives like Pastor(!) Larry Pittman of Concord, N.C. Pittman was fighting a lost cause (trying to outlaw same-sex marriage, Supreme Court ruling notwithstanding) and someone told him to “get over it.” Pittman doubled down in his war on lost causes: “. . . and if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it? Lincoln was the same sort (of) tyrant, and personally responsible for the deaths of over 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional.”

This guy is still fighting the Civil War, and he’s still on the wrong side of history. What the hell, let’s elect him to office.

Well, we’ve put our faith to the test. We have elected the most venal, corrupt, self-serving, fundamentally ignorant and flawed group of politicians in the history of this great republic. They hold our state houses and they run our federal government. Our “president” is not the anti-Christ, he’s the anti-Lincoln.

The short explanation for this among the various supporters of these miscreants is, well, we tried competence and that didn’t work – the old industrial jobs went away all the same, the immigrants are still taking all those good jobs picking lettuce. Jim Wright got this exact response to his latest blog post (The Hubris of Ignorance: HERE). In reply to his essay, someone wrote:

“. . . that is what happens when the ones that are qualified start taking us down the wrong road. The people that were leading us, they were flooding our streets with illegals, gang members, refugees, Muslims, they were endangering our very existence. They were destroying us, everything we stood for, our beliefs, our religion, our values, wanted to take our guns.” (Italics added.)

Let me unpack that for you. First reason – Mexicans, Blacks, foreigners, Muslims. Second reason – abortion, Christians, gays, guns.

Guns. Cause, you know, come the revolution . . .

I’m sad (So Sad! – maybe even 4) to note that the first and final refuge of these defenders of all that is unholy is a modest document, designed more as a lighthouse than a map – the Constitution. The wise founders of this great nation knew politics, and they understood the need for checks on power. That’s what the Constitution is all about – the things over which the different branches of government and the states hold sway. Most folks can quote the Second Amendment but haven’t read any other part of the document. And for people at any extreme of the political spectrum, the Constitution is like a bible – that is, stare at it long enough and you’ll find some way to make it fit your crackpot philosophy.

American politics are not self-righting. The system only works in the context of an intelligent and truthfully informed electorate, choosing candidates that act in the interest of their country and their constituents – including the poor and disenfranchised. Including, even, the people who voted for the opposition. That is what the Constitution anticipates. Unfortunately, those conditions are long past.

The Constitution is not going to save this ship of state. If I had to predict, I’d say the likely next move of the criminals in power is to call a Constitutional Convention. They’re not far from having control over enough state legislatures to pull it off. Just imagine: The Constitutional Convention of 1787 had Washington, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton. We’ll get Trump, Bannon, McConnell, Ryan. Maybe Burr, on the North Carolina delegation. Constitutional Convention 2020, starring Scott Baio and Ted Nugent and brought to you by AT&T.

And that will be a 5.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

I used to live next door to a police officer named Greeno. He was a decent guy, good family man, took his job seriously but not too much so, prided himself on the fact that he never shot (or shot at) anyone. He was the first cop I got to know well and it set a high bar. I expected cops to be good guys, nice guys, sensible people. Many of them are just that. More than you might expect, based on what you hear and read.

I also have any number of friends that distrust cops, dislike cops, some even hate hate hate cops. I sympathize. I’ve learned to distrust “cops” in the generic sense, in much the same way many of them distrust the public. I know at least a couple of people who believe that all cops are bad, that they are the unchecked enforcement arm of a corrupt government. An argument can be made for this point of view.

So, here’s the question: what is the alternative?

Is the alternative no cops? No government? Some fairy tale anarchy where everyone looks out for themselves – rugged individualism; survival of the fittest? Well, I certainly wouldn’t be a lawyer if I thought that, because implicit in the whole lawyer gig is the notion of the Rule of Law. And for the law to rule, there must be some general acquiescence to authority of the courts as an arm of government, and the police enforce that authority. Without that, you have two choices – Mad Max on one side; Steve Bannon on the other.

What is the alternative?

Police forces have many problems. Some they bring on themselves. Some not so much. Two examples of problems the police didn’t ask for but get to deal with anyway: mental health and drug addiction. We all know perfectly well that these have become police problems because of our own abysmal failure to provide even the minimum necessary social services required to deal with these issues. Oh, yeah and then there’s this – that simple-minded conviction, based on no historical evidence whatsoever – that families should be the front line against these horrors.

Well, we’ve been there. When schizophrenic Phil was his parents’ problem, they had a solution – lock ol’ Phil up for the rest of his natural life in some bug-infested warehouse for crazies, where well-meaning care givers gouged out part of his brain to make him compliant. But, see, as compassionate human beings (who were tired of footing the bill to feed the nutcases) we got rid of the “Mental Hospitals”. The plan was to replace them with community-based care centers. Thing is, that never happened. Now families let the mentally ill wander the streets, because they can’t stop them, and these disturbed individuals cause all kinds of police problems, large and small – from murder to mugging to pissing in the bushes, sleeping under bridges and begging on on-ramps.

As for drugs, again, history provides an insight. It turns out that the base rate for

addiction in the population is quite stable. Check out the chart (from TheAtlantic.com, October, 2012). The only thing that has changed is that we’ve turned the “War on Drugs” (begun in the Nixon years to combat black radicalism and the white anti-war movement) into a for-profit industry. High among those who profit are the police, and they would be loath to give up the fight. Nevertheless, it’s a battle they should not engage and one they cannot win.

So, part of the solution is to provide human services and decriminalize a lot of what passes as “crime” but is really “sickness”.

Then there’s the stuff cops and their government overlords DO bring on themselves.

Such as? Well, racism, and militarization, and their goddamned code of silence, the latter being the elephant in the room.

I’m not going to dwell on racism today. I’ve written about it elsewhere (here), and it is a fact of life in America beyond what cops bring to the table. I will say that there are certainly racist police, there are entire departments that openly engage in racial profiling, the Klan and white nationalists have infiltrated agencies to some extent – more than they should, less than they claim – in brief, racism is the great stain on our national honor. You’d think that increased diversity in hiring would solve the problem, but, no, not really. We’ll come back to that.

The United States today is at a low ebb, vis-à-vis the crime rate. Crime is at the lowest point (per capita) we’ve seen since the 1950s. Unfortunately, this fact does not fit with the narrative that the liar-in-chief and his lackeys need to sell to consolidate their positions. Thus, crime is rampant, lies are “alternative facts”, the police are the victims. Ergo, the sensible restrictions placed on the sale of military equipment to civilian forces have now been lifted, and all the boys (and girls) in blue get a tommy gun, or a tank, or a bazooka, or whatever. This is bad juju. When you combine a militarized police force holding a grudge with a gutted Posse Comitatus act, there’s no one left to protect the civilians. In case you didn’t notice.

Believe it or not, racism and militarization are not the biggest problems. There’s a contamination in the ranks, it is nearly universal among the police forces, and it infects much of what they do. Yep. The code.

It’s a simple rule. Thou shall not rat out a fellow officer. No matter what nasty, brutish, vicious and/or underhanded shit she did, keep your fucking mouth shut. It doesn’t matter if it’s murder, you cover it up. You don’t Want to Know what will happen if you don’t follow the code.

I get it. Policing is sometimes (often?) a rotten job, wherein officers are confronted with situations that present no good choices. They are sometimes asked to make life-and-death judgment calls with little information or context. Given that, and given that a bad call can end a career (or worse), the solution is simple – police officers, by general agreement, simply do not make bad calls. They exist in an error-free zone, each hastening to protect the other from any allegation of poor judgment, misconduct, or malfeasance. And race plays no role – everyone follows the code.

The psychology of this code is almost insurmountable. For any officer to publicly go against another – regardless of how minor the disagreement – is a near-heroic act. The outspoken officer will be shunned, threatened, attacked, subjected to similar allegations, and – perhaps worst of all – given no support or backup, on the streets or off. Ratting out a fellow officer is at best a career-killer, at worse a death sentence. And why would you do that? You go along, you get along.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: There are, as I suggested above, many good, more-or-less honest, well-meaning police officers who genuinely care for the public they serve. But there are a few Rambos, because, hey, cop-gun-badge-power-priapism, and a few racists, and the odd whack job or two. Here’s the scenario – the good-guy cops are trying to handle the problem, trying to do the right thing, help the little-old-lady-crazy out, when Rambo wanders in, misjudges the situation, flies off the handle, and bingo! Dead lady, guilty Rambo, good guys sworn to silence. Maybe Rambo gets a pass. Maybe not, and the good guys lose their jobs, plus perhaps a little jail time for perjury, all because of The Code.

Alternative to this? There’s quite a bit to be done. Beef up internal affairs. Set standards for honesty and transparency at the highest levels of the force. Don’t assume the officer is always being honest. Give civilian review boards some actual authority (they are strikingly toothless groups, mostly). Extend protections and promotions and genuine support to officers who are willing to tell the truth about the deadwood and troublemakers in the organization. Make police misconduct files available to public inspection (they are generally considered “personnel records” and as such, not accessible). Require ethics training and re-training. Fire a few assholes, for starters.

Cops are not a “necessary evil.” They are in integral part of government, for good or ill. They are the enforcement arm. They serve and protect, in the case of a government that has the interests of the public at heart. They attack and harm and destroy on behalf of despotic and self-serving administrations. Despite all the awful things we hear about things the cops do, many of us been lucky up until now. Tomorrow they may come for me, or you. When they do, you better hope the rule of law is still on your side.