Blood and Drugs

On a trip to Mexico to discuss mutual efforts to curb violent drug trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged to the Mexican government that illegal drug demand in this country finances increasingly violent drug cartels in Mexico. Link to L.A. Times story.

The traffic is two-way, drugs shipped north, money and guns shipped south. Rival cartels have accounted for over 7,000 deaths in Mexico over the past 15 months. A number of the deaths were police and prosecutors working to shut down the cartels. Journalists have also been killed when they reported on the  violence of the drug business.

For years, I have known that every shipment of marijuana, cocaine or heroin had cost someone their life somewhere along the route from other countries to the neighborhoods of our towns and cities. The huge amount of money to be made in the drug trade has corrupted law enforcement personnel on both sides of the border. For myself, alcohol has been the only recreational drug I want to use, and I use less of that each year as I grow older.

Arguments about the harmlessness of marijuana and attendant support for its legalization are beside the point. The legalization of alcohol in 1933 after fourteen years of Prohibition did nothing to weaken the powerful criminal organizations that had enriched themselves enormously over those “dry” years. Criminal offenses, even individually slight and seemingly harmless – buying a bag of pot, or a gram or two of cocaine – collectively undermine society, law enforcement and public respect for the rule of law.

Once cartels reach the level of power of organized, large-scale businesses spread across borders and into every corner of our country and others, combating them is daunting. There ought to be constant and complete coverage of the consequences in Mexico and in this country of the cost of supporting such malignant enterprises. This country has made great progress in reducing the use of tobacco through publicity, lawsuits and regulation. We can do the same for illegal drugs.

And we need to be in this effort for the long haul.

The Sound and Fury of Law Enforcement

Discussions on the internet often pit against one another persons with completely different personal experiences and thinking on very tough issues. Over the last day, on a local message board in which I participate, a fierce discussion has raged in one such area where a vast chasm exists between two groups.

Troubling questions about the nature of truth and experience have arisen over a drug raid in a suburb between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. From early stories, there was in this area apparently a distribution scheme by drug traffickers involving shipping packages of marijuana to random homes and intercepting the shipments before the uninvolved householders could return home.

Tracking one such shipment, officers staked out the address, one of them posing as a deliveryman and depositing the package on the front porch. The homeowner returned shortly thereafter, carried the box inside and went to change his clothes. Officers burst into the house, forcing the occupants to the floor and in the process shooting two dogs that were family pets. It turned out that the homeowner was the mayor of the suburban town, who after four days was acknowledged by authorities to have been uninvolved in the scheme, simply a random resident selected by the drug dealers. Investigations are proceeding, including a F.B.I. probe of possible civil rights violations.

Pending the results of the various investigations, not all the facts are available for consideration, but the message board erupted anyway into emotional posts by two sides, law enforcement professionals and those who are civilians. The civilians responded with empathy for the mayor and his family, lent poignancy by the death of the pets. The law officers responded vigorously on two grounds; all the facts not being in, it was premature to prejudge the officers involved, and the experience of confronting possible criminals in such a raid was so outside the experience of non-law enforcement persons that any judgement was sure to be biased.

There have been plenty of posts on other events on this board, harshly accusing the police of brutality on little evidence, to make this attitude understandable. Very few, like myself, who have never faced the possibility of armed confrontation on a daily basis can comprehend such experience without a considerable effort of empathy and understanding. As one of the police professionals involved in this debate has posted on his own blog:

There is a world you live in, a world that by all appearances is Normal and Safe. And then, there is the world that exists outside your windows, where Freaks flee across your lawns . . . Everything outside that Window is easy to ignore. But it’s there. And that…is where I come in.

Two worlds, two collective experiences that both have their truth. For those of us on the safe – temporarily – side of that Window, our empathy is immediate, and focused on the family suffering the trauma of a police raid and the killing of their pets. For the police, they understand the risks of going into a house where all they know is that an enterprise which considers violence, cruelty and murder as legitimate elements of their business plan is somehow involved with this house, and such ruthlessness may be just on the other side of the door.

One of the strengths of any forum of discussion is to give some understanding on the part of each side of the other’s reasons for their opinions. Listening is better than shouting, although sometimes it is hard to hear for the volume of emotion.

Making Sense of the Senseless

The shooting at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville a week ago has engendered a wide range of commentary on the anatomy of a killer. The best take on this tragedy I have read was published in the Miami Herald Wednesday, in a column by Leonard Pitts, Jr. Pitts has always impressed me as one of the better opinion writers around. This column adds to my regard for him.

Briefly, Pitts uses the shooting as a springboard to discuss the polarization and demonization of political discourse over the past twenty years or so, and the corrosive effect this extremism has on the society in general. Pitts observes that the word “liberal” has been so effectively made pejorative by Republicans that the original meaning of the word, and for that matter, of “conservative” as well, has been warped by partisan mangling. Pitts gives a succinctly eloquent summary of the original meanings of the two words:

To be conservative was to be suspicious of change and federal oversight, to embrace minimalist government, fiscal responsibility and a strong national defense. To be liberal was to be welcoming of change, suspicious of militarism and committed to activist government that worked to protect and uplift those who are shoved to the margins of American life.

I suspect that the forces of “conservative” politics nowadays would vigorously attack that summary, claiming that it was tainted with “liberal” bias, a charge that is routinely leveled at most news coverage and opinion. It works for me, however.

While noting from the beginning of his piece that the shooter in the Knoxville attack was primarily a “broken person,” the columnist firmly insists that the outlet and rationale that brokenness took in this case directly drew on the anti-gay, anti-liberal slant of right-wing political rhetoric. I can relate to that viewpoint.

Forty-five years ago, almost, I was a second-year student in college stunned and riveted by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. When the first stories broke, and I realized that the murder had taken place in Dallas (I had no idea that JFK was even there that day,) immediately an event reported from Dallas a week or two before came to mind. Then U.N. Ambassador for the Kennedy administration Adlai E. Stevenson while on a visit to Dallas had been surrounded by right-wing demonstrators whose virulent hatred of the U.N. prompted one of the sign-carrying protesters to bludgeon Stevenson with her sign. Stevenson was unhurt. Lee Harvey Oswald was certainly not right wing; he also, like Jim Adkisson, was a broken person, seeking vindication first from Communist countries, then cast off and bitter, finding a target in Jack Kennedy as shining as Oswald himself was invisible.

Inchoate rage and bitterness in a person draws strength from rage and extremism in their surroundings. The target may or not have political or religious backgrounds identifiable as sources of the mental derangement of the attacker, but the climate itself feeds his or her brokenness.

Political convictions may be strongly felt, and vigorously expressed, but they are opinions, not holy writ to be pursued without civility or willingness to respect those of contrary convictions. The climate of discourse and public order suffer when venom and hyperbole drown out calm discussion. Jim Adkisson was a product of his own demons, but he found direction in the shouts and snarls of political rage.

Flags of our Fathers

We watched this movie on DVD the other night. I expected a good movie, both from the reviews and from my reaction to the movies of Clint Eastwood, especially the movies since Unforgiven. I was not disappointed. You cannot say of such a movie, given the subject matter, that you enjoy the experience, but you can say that you appreciate the artistry and are very moved by the story presented.

Body Farm Fiction

From an unlikely source, the church bulletin for St. Paul’s Episcopal church, Chattanooga, comes an alert for a book event at Rock Point Books on Friday, February 2, 2007, at 7:00 p.m. Dr. Bill Bass, a forensic anthropologist for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, along with co-writer Jon Jefferson, will be signing copies of their second fictional collaboration, Flesh and Bone. The book continues the series featuring fictional forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Brockton (resemblance to Dr. Bass not coincidental.)

Hannibal Lecter Redux…again

I am a great admirer of Thomas Harris, the reporter turned novelist who draws on his knowledge of forensic investigations and serial killers for some of the most arresting books I have ever read. Movies have made his most memorable character, Hannibal Lecter, an instantly recognizable figure in the public consciousness. All of the books featuring Lecter are worth reading, with Red Dragon, the first to feature Lecter, best in my estimation, as in the judgement of many other readers.

Having chronicled his anti-hero from early career through capture, imprisonment, escape, abduction and seduction, Harris, I thought, would not run his string of Lecter books further. But he has. Hannibal Rising, in stores just in time for Christmas (Heh), examines the childhood and very early stirrings of Lecter’s homicidal (and cannibalistic) drives.

Seeking Redemption

In the Chattanooga Times Free Press this morning, in the Metro section, there is a story on the efforts of the UTC football players cleared of rape charges to re-establish their eligibilty under NCAA rules:

Five of the six former UTC football players cleared of rape charges last month have asked the university to restore their NCAA eligibility so they can play at other colleges, officials said.

The charges of rape against the six former UTC athletes were dismissed Jan. 18 after a judge found insufficient evidence to bind the case over to a grand jury. The players are waiting to hear the results of a university conduct hearing that will determine whether they are readmitted as students or permanently expelled.

This is on the face of it, a question of fairness following acquittal under rape charges. In the course of the trial, however, most of the players acknowledged, I believe, that they engaged in group sex with the young woman who brought the charges. Is such behavior of itself likely to be a bar to scholarships elsewhere, or at UTC?

Ponderous. It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Link

(Go to Metro on sidebar menu)

A Tale of Two Bridges

A pair of bridges, displaying two bits of history, one dark, the other hopeful.

The John Ross Bridge

In Chattanooga the old bascule drawbridge spanning the Tennessee River is being restored; most of the old, decaying concrete is being replaced. A two-year job, estimated in the contract, now in the seventh month. Much concrete has been stripped away, along with a hundred feet of the approach decking from the north bank of the river. The main piers of the bridge, out in the river, have not really been touched yet. I am not sure how those will be done, replaced entirely (the mind boggles) or somehow re-coated with fresh concrete. I am always fascinated to watch these big projects. And glad I have no responsibility for them.

There is another bridge, a couple of hundred yards upstream from the bascule bridge, a bridge much older than the drawbridge, which at one time connected Walnut Street with the north bank of the river. Repeated inspections of the bridge by state engineers in the 1970s led to the closing of the bridge due to structural decay. A long debate ensued about rehabilitation of the bridge, finally leading to the restoral of the bridge as a pedestrian bridge, part of the planned revival of the riverfront, in 1993. A happy conclusion to the issue, but there was a darker history to the bridge. In 1906, the last lynching of a black man in Chattanooga took place from the third arch of the Walnut Street Bridge. The case of Ed Johnson became a footnote to legal history, involving the Supreme Court of the U.S., and in 2001 a local attorney Leroy Phillips, collaborated with a newsman to write a history of the case, Contempt of Court.

A couple of stories appeared about this case in local papers this week, as the centenary of the lynching approaches. Apparently there is finally going to be a historical marker of some sort placed on the restored bridge to memorialize Ed Johnson. Here is an article about the newest chapter in the Ed Johnson story.

Two kinds of progress in Chattanooga, two bridges.