Last week’s presidential debate was fairly riveting. It was reality TV at its best. Trump is truly a master of the genre.
But life goes on and I keep asking, “Do I want to spend my life playing an uncredited role in someone’s live 24/7 reality TV marathon? Do I need this drama?”
Do any of us need the kind of drama Trump promises to bring? Couldn’t those who do just get that kind of drama privately, without dragging the rest of us into it?
It used to be we had bars for that. I remember one bar back in the day, near Pike Place Market, that had a nonstop brawl. All night until well after closing, bottles and ashtrays and chairs sailed across the room aimed at some citizen or other, while visiting sailors from far off lands wept and ran back to their ships in fear. That was where you got your reality show.
For more excitement you could always go overseas and get hacked to pieces by machete-wielding insurgents. The collapse of colonial empires made that easy to arrange.
Where did all the good places to get beat up go? I blame McDonald’s, Disney and strip malls. I blame Starbucks, Costco, Wal-Mart, Facebook and Netflix. Collectively they’ve wrecked all the great social institutions.
Without nice friendly neighborhood bars to pound our neighbors in and get pounded in return, it’s just human nature that some folks will want to fill that void. What better way than to elect a protégé of Putin?
Speaking of Putin protégés, it was just reported that the new Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who is something of a one-man reality show himself, has said he will happily arrange for the massacre of an estimated 3 million of his people who are addicted to drugs. He said he would gladly do for the Philippines what Hitler did for Germany, only that he would kill drug addicts instead of Jews.
Duterte seems to think he’s better than Hitler because his victims would be criminals and not an ethnic group. That overlooks a couple of points. There have already been extra-legal lynchings in his country in which people only suspected of being drug addicts have been killed.
Then, too, what is illegal? We pass laws against using drugs, so drug addicts are criminals. Germany made being Jewish criminal. Trump has suggested making it illegal to be an unregistered Muslim.
It was just a few months ago that we had people running for the presidency seriously discussing whether making abortions illegal meant you ought to jail women who have them.
Duterte at least reminds us we can do without making it illegal to be a drug addict. We don’t need that or all the consequences, not the ones Duterte would unleash, but also not the consequences I see every day in this country. The whole drug war is a waste, it ruins lives, undermines families, and it’s built on fraud.
Speaking of endless drama we don’t need, we don’t need a police state of any kind, and that includes a surveillance state.
The Seattle Police Department (SPD) bought what software? To do what? To monitor and track users of social media and follow their movements and activities? All the easier to round us up the next time we protest bad laws?
[Note in passing: “Geofeedia”, the name of the software, is pronounced “gooey feed ya.”]
What is illegal? Whatever elected lawmakers who represent us say is illegal. Our City Council passed a law three years ago that said the police department had to get City Council approval to purchase surveillance equipment.
The good news: They may not be using the software anymore. (Well, they say they aren’t.) The bad news: The SPD would break the law right away after it was passed, behind our backs.
So the message from the SPD is, the people can’t have secrets, but they can. Their job is protecting us from crime, but they break laws and do so in hiding.
Next time the SPD doesn’t like a law, maybe they could say so, how’s that? Do your own protesting, SPD.
Just please leave your guns at the precinct when you do; we don’t care for the added drama.