Tuesday the Ferguson Commission, a body convened by Governor Jay Nixon in response to the protests engendered by the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown, released its report. The priorities identified by the Commission have been admirably summarized by the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The Commisson expects to continue meeting to move these priorities forward.

That the Commission will stay involved now that their report has been tendered is good news. Especially since the question that seems to be on every commentator’s mind is whether or not there is any chance that the report will really result in significant action. I have to say that to my mind the list of “accountable bodies” that the Commission members identified for each priority augers poorly for the possibility of real change.

For many of the nineteen points summarized by the Post-Dispatch, several accountable bodies are named. I can only wonder just how these bodies are going to respond to often very specific goals that seem to be based on underlying assumptions that I’m not sure are universally shared. Actually, I wonder just how many of these bodies, even if they agreed with the underpinnings of the report, will manage to coordinate effectively. I haven’t seen too much during the thirteen years that I have lived in this area that encourages optimism. Many of the accountable bodies listed have shown themselves in the past to be especially wedded to the status quo, others are notoriously contentious. Some, especially state agencies, are already underfunded and may resent new or reformulated tasks.

The real bugaboo, though, lies in the fact that for ten of the priorities listed in the Post-Dispatch, the state legislature is among the accountable bodies. In the case of expanding Medicaid, the lege is the sole accountable body. Now I ask you, do you see the GOP-dominated legislature doing anything about Medicaid expansion anytime soon?

If we concede that that goal is unlikely in the immediate future, how eager do you think our GOP lawmakers will be to end predatory lending by that ever-ready source of campaign cash, the pay-day loan industry? Or do you think that folks who currently won’t fund schools adequately will see their way clear to establishing universal prekindergarten for children 3-4 years old? I thought not. And what’s worse is that I would probably get the same answer for most action points if I worked my way through the whole list.

Let me ask another, related question: do you see the make-up of the Republican legislature changing anytime soon? I agree that anything is possible, but possible doesn’t really speak to probable, and probability says we’ll be  saddled with the Mean Party in control in Jefferson City for a considerable while yet. So are we talking pie in the sky when we praise the report?

Will the Commission be satisfied with a few successes? Will making just a few of the changes suggested in the report really make a difference? The virtue of the Commission’s report, after all, is that it views the situation that erupted after Michael Brown’s death in broadly systematic terms and, although it articulates laudably specific goals, it does so within an equally systematic framework.

I’m feeling pessimistic, but I’m willing to wait and see what the Commission members propose to do to hold those accountable bodies accountable. I’m also waiting to see how a polarized, and to my mind, deeply racist region supports their efforts. But no matter what happens, I have to admit, that despite my misgivings and my earlier admonition that the Commission go small, the St. Louis region is better off because the Commission has unequivocally, officially identified some of the stress points that have weakened our community as well as offering potential solutions. It only remains to see if we can find the will to support real change,even if it hurts.

There was an article in Monday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch that described the way that the small St. Louis County municipality of Pagedale was condemning inhabited, livable houses and levying fines for petty housing code violations. A subsequent editorial drew an explicit line between this practice and the over-reliance on revenue generated by traffic violations which was condemned in a recent Department of Justice report. In both cases, poorer citizens bear the brunt of the abuse of municipal power.

With my sincere apologies to those good people who have really tried to bring the lessons of Ferguson home and act upon them, a particular aspect of the misdeeds described seemed emblematic of how many in the St. Louis region have reacted to the issues that have risen in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests. This passage among others in the article struck me as jaw-dropping:

At a recent demolition hearing, Mayor Mary Louis Carter told one homeowner after another where they needed to focus their work if they wanted to keep their property: “The first emphasis should be the exterior,” she said repeatedly. One house needed new plumbing, electrical work, a new roof and foundation. Do the outside work first, Carter instructed the homeowner’s lawyer, “it’s a long time before he’s going to be able to use lights or plumbing.”

The mayor explained: “We want to bring our property values up and make our neighborhood look nice.”

Fix the outside and we don’t need to worry about what is on the inside. The folks who live in the houses can deal with the lack of plumbing as long as we don’t have to see or hear about it – and God forbid, as long as it can be kept from anyone looking to buy a house in the neighborhood.

Isn’t this emphasis on keeping up appearances what lies behind the bellyaching of those folks who, beginning a few days after Michael Brown’s death, began moaning about how all this negative publicity would “hurt” Ferguson and the St. Louis region in general? I can’t help but think it’s funny how I didn’t hear too much about any of these concerned citizens going out of their way to deal with issues of race and abuse of police power before the protesters who were the genesis of Black Lives Matter made a little noise. Maybe if anybody had been paying attention before, we might never have had had to deal with front page “Ferguson” on the national – and international – stage.

And isn’t it possible that it is genteel annoyance that our plumbing problems are out in the open for all to see that animates the desire to bring charges against the reporters who witnessed and told the world about the inept response to the Ferguson situation? According to Think Progress:

St. Louis County police are suddenly levying an onslaught of charges against journalists who covered the Ferguson protests last year, accusing them of minor offenses days before the statute of limitations is up. This week alone, three journalists have been charged for interfering with on-duty officers – a full year after their arrests. The recent developments follow an ongoing trend of criminalizing journalists for doing their jobs.

Two of the reporters possibly face $1000 fines and up to a year in jail for “interfering with officers.” Their crime?:

On a separate occasion, several officers – many of whom were armed with assault weapons – entered the restaurant and ordered patrons to leave. Journalists, including Lowery and Reilly, were told they could stay, but the officers later returned and told them they had to leave. Both were arrested and detained for not leaving fast enough, and were released without charges hours later.

As Martin Baron, Executive Editor of the Washington Post, which employs one of the Reporters, Wes Lowery, noted, he “should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.”

Let’s see. Abuse of police authority? Wasn’t that the problem to begin with? Only this time it doesn’t have anything to do with us getting our metaphorical linen all dirty, but about punishing and/or impeding folks who expose our dirty linen. Because if nobody knows we soiled our underclothes, doesn’t that mean we’re as bright and shining clean as a new penny?

Dozens arrested in protest; state of emergency issued in St. Louis County after Ferguson violence

By Kelsey Proud, Jason Rosenbaum & Sarah Kellogg

“….The Ferguson Police Department had control last night and it did not work out like it needed to….”

Police organization’s ‘Darren Wilson Day’ in Columbia, Mo., sparks protest, criticism

By Doug Moore

COLUMBIA, Mo. • A Facebook posting declaring Sunday ‘Darren Wilson Day’ in this college town brought protesters to the police station on Monday and strong criticism from city leaders….

Ferguson activists DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie among those arrested in St. Louis

By Wesley Lowery August 10 at 4:18 PM

ST. LOUIS – At least dozens were arrested in acts of civil disobedience in St. Louis on Monday, including several of the most prominent leaders of the Black Lives Matter Movement….

Via Twitter:

Mustafa Abdullah ‏@GlobalNomad87

The real state of emergency is the racist policing practices that are consistently deployed in black and brown neighborhoods. 4:12 PM – 10 Aug 2015

In Warrensburg at this morning’s commencement ceremony at the University of Central Missouri:

Black Lives Matter.

Many years ago, as a philosophy undergraduate, I learned that before I could address the “big questions,” I needed to take a logic class or two in order to acquire some basic rules for clear thinking. While I don’t pretend to be a master of the field, I did pick up some tools that have proven helpful over the years.

Most recently, in regard to the commentary on the the situation in Ferguson, race relations in the St. Louis area, and in the United States in general, I find myself thinking that maybe we’d be better off if we were sending our children to college to study philosophy and learn a little about logic before we train them to make a living – which seems to be the current single justification for higher education. Specifically, I seem to encounter again and again two memes that, because they are so prevalent, predominantly but not exclusively in conservative venues, might benefit from a little explicitly logical analysis:

Black on Black Crime vs. Abuse of authority.

Lots of folks get themselves all wound up over the fact that lots of angry, mostly black people hit the streets to protest the killing of unarmed, African-American Michael Brown by a jumpy white police officer in Ferguson, while very few, if any, are marching in the streets to protest the stream of African-American men, women and children killed almost daily by other African-American individuals in their own neighborhoods.  

At the heart of this riff is what is termed a category error, defined by Wikipedia as “a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, … or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.” At the risk of oversimplifying, a category error consists of comparing the proverbial oranges to apples.

The confusion – or category error – here is the belief that it is the simply the death of these young men at the  hands of often white policemen that leads to the protests and turmoil they leave in their wake. The outrage is sparked, however, not by their deaths, but by the way they die. The anger we see stems from the perception of pervasive police brutality and abuse of power that, in the most extreme cases, may lead to implicitly sanctioned murders of black Americans.

Which is not to say that we don’t all abhor black-on-black crime – or white-on-black, black-on-white or white-on-white crime. But the object of our opprobrium in these cases is crime itself, a problem for which we have more or less effective, institutionalized ways to respond. We deal with crime through our justice system. A significant part of that system involves policing and our courts, which is why abuses by those entities, along with their perceived racial biases, urgently need to be addressed separately.

Black lives matter (BLM) vs. All lives matter (ALM).

By now most of us have watched some television commentator or another respond to the Black lives Matter movement by declaring self-righteously, all aquiver with their own brilliance, “all lives matter” – as they indeed do. Possibly the most obnoxious was the recent declaration by GOP presidential wannabe, Mike Huckabee, that Martin Luther King would be appalled by BLM since, don’t cha know,  “all lives matter.” Many of us are getting seriously tired of having to deal with friends or family who think they’ve shut down the entire BLM protest movement with this insight.

The problem here is that these deep thinkers seem to believe that that they’ve turned the tables on BLM proponents and caught them in a – gasp – racist argument of the form while, at the same time, affirming their own superior humanity:

Major premise: Black lives matter

Minor premise: All lives are not black lives

Conclusion: All non-black lives don’t matter.

This is a syllogistic fallacy involving an “illicit major” premise. The implication is that BLM proponents are presenting a major premise that is incorrectly understood as universal and hence improperly excludes lives that are not black.

However, rather than srving as the major premise, “black lives matter” is actually, rather obviously, the conclusion of this argument

Major premise:  All lives matter

Minor premises: There are black lives

Conclusion: Black lives matter.

To any one with an iota of sense the only reason to use this argument to underpin a socialmovement is that somebody – most saliently the abusive police and court authorities of the first meme – have been acting as if black lives don’t matter. And that, folks, is the problem. Not the imagined exclusionary and divisive nature of BLM.

Of course, it is one thing to be wrong and another to be offensive. And the condescension and implicit racism of these two memes are just that. The “Black-on-Black” motif is often the first step in an effort to blame the victims of black crime and its frequent concomitant, poverty, complex, not very well understood issues at the best of times, on the victims who, we are told, just need to pull up their pants and act like their responsible, usually white, critics. As for  “all lives matter,” consider this offering from Steve Benen:  

A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago to imagine someone telling their neighbor, “My father just died and I’m heartbroken.” The neighbor should say, “That’s awful; I’m so sorry. How can I help?” But if the neighbor responds, “A lot of fathers have died, and since I believe that all parents matter, it’s wrong to elevate yours above others,” he’s lacking in a certain basic decency.

By now most Missourians who are even remotely tuned into state politics have heard that Lt. Governor Peter Kinder was contending that his $86,000 salary was not enough to stave off penury. His proposed solution: a per diem allowance of $103 for each day he spends in Jefferson city doing – wait for it – essentially nothing. But, hey, who can blame him? His cohorts in the legislature not only get that exact per diem allowance, but make out like bandits with gobs of lobbyist swag that likely doesn’t come his way that often.  

Unfortunately for Kinder’s endangered quality of life, it seems his peers in the legislature either didn’t take his situation seriously or were unwilling to risk the ire of constituents who are managing to eke out a living on considerably less than $86,000.  There’ll be no per diem for Lt. Governor Kinder. As a consequence, I surmise that he might be in a bad mood. He’s facing abject poverty, after all.

And bad mood might be the only way to explain his latest news-making move. The Lt. Governor has decided to weigh in on the topic of racism and the Ferguson uproar. And what he had to say either demonstrates the type of displaced anger that leaves one making ill-considered remarks that one regrets later when emotional and mental equilibrium are restored, or it’s just racist, dim-witted dribble. Judge for yourself:

The lieutenant governor of Missouri says “there is more racism in the Justice Department” than in the St. Louis area, pointing the finger at President Obama and the Justice Department who, he says, often incited “the mob” in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown back in August of 2014.

“The whole blow up of this protest movement was based on the lie that never happened of ‘hands up don’t shoot,'” Peter Kinder, the Lt. governor told NewsMaxTV’s Steve Malzberg Show Monday. “But it’s bad enough the protestors were behaving that way but we have a right to expect more from the attorney general, the head of the Justice Department of the United States, and the president of the United States. And instead what we got too often from them was incitement of the mob, and, uh, encouraging disorder in Ferguson and distributing the peaceable going-about of our lives in the greater St. Louis region.”

Kinder added President Obama and Eric Holder “took one side” following the death of Michael Brown. Asked why, he said the Justice Department was “staffed with radical, hard-left radical, leftists lawyers.”

He called the Justice Department under Holder, “not like any Justice Department in American history” and “Eric Holder is unlike any previous attorney general.”

“Many of them have spent most of their careers defending Black Panthers and other violent radicals,” he added. “

So the entire “blow up” was the result of a “lie”? Evidently, Kinder didn’t read or lacks the capacity to process the Department of Justice (DoJ) report on Ferguson policing and justice systems. Nor does he seem to understand what a mere spark can do to a field that’s ready to burn. But, just as the mayor of Ferguson claimed that the thorough DoJ investigative report doesn’t constitute “proof” of racial misbehavior, Kinder thinks that we can disregard the well-substantiated facts recounted in the report because “Eric Holder is “unlike any previous attorney general” – which is to say, he’s black and, hence, ipso facto, in cahoots with radicals whose legal careers have been limited to “defending Black Panthers and other violent radicals.”

Is this resentment feeding on resentment? A sad, resentful man appealing in turn to the white resentment that fuels so much of the right wing? Do you think maybe Kinder wants a little appreciation from the types who think that the state of race relations leans a little too much toward those damned “takers.” Do you think he might be trying to erase the memory of the ridicule he excited the last time he stuck his head up into the light and demanded poverty relief?

I wonder, though, do you think that if people had to supply supporting evidence for such absurd claims before anyone would report on it, they’d think twice about what they had to say? What is the correct label for someone who puts ugly, unsubstantiated libels into the public record? And fails to take it back, apologise, explain that he was in a funk, had a headache, whatever, when he’s called on it (not too stringently, admittedly) by the media?

I recollect the efforts of St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer Tony Messenger to avoid, in his own words, contributing to “this state’s political problems, rather than elevating the discourse” after the dust-up about hateful political rhetoric that occurred in the wake of Tom Schweich’s recent suicide. Specifically, he apologised for calling a State Senator Kurt Schaeffer a fool when, he said, it would have sufficed to point out that one of Schaeffer’s legislative efforts was foolish. His mea culpa, no matter how admirable, bothered me – I hope to have more to say about it in the future – because if discourse is to be elevated, all the participants have to agree about the height of the plane on which they are going to get together and discuss. Otherwise, those who insist on going alone to the most elevated level will have nothing do do except shout into the wind.

Peter Kinder has revealed himself as one of those people who experience uncontrollable vertigo when confronted with the ladder that leads to that higher space. They confuse ideological labels with facts, the expedient with the good, their own good with that of everyone. Such people can do lots of harm – and are doing so daily in the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress and statehouses across the country. Such behavior is demonstrably foolish. And we call those who act foolishly fools, among other things. The correct label for Peter Kinder is fool, among other things. No apology will be offered.    

Remember after Sandy Hook when Roy Blunt was adamant that he would not support legislation that might restrict Second Amendment rights? By which he meant the right of citizens to amass stockpiles of just about any type of weapon. Which was, incidentally, the right of the same folks to enrich organizations that sponsor the NRA, which, in turn, offers tangible aid to politicians like Roy Blunt. Instead he sought to blame government for failing to keep those pesky mentally ill folks under control:

Blunt said in an interview that federal funds have been handed to some communities in states that move people from mental institutions, where federal dollars were used to help them, “and put them back into the community without much monitoring whether people are ready to be in the community or not.”

So guess who he blames when a mentally troubled individual shot two policemen in New York?  His constituents, Missourians who exercised their 1st amendment rights to free speech in Ferguson this summer. Evidently the 2nd amendment trumps just about every concern, including public safety. First amendment? Not so much – at least when it involves issues that get old white guys, the only constituency that matters to Blunt, all itchy and bothered. God forbid that police should be accountable.

And, of course, there’s the mental health dodge that was trotted out in the wake of Sandy Hook, but not so much in the case of the NYPD shooter. When a NRA-loving, gun enthusiast shoots a school full of little children, we blame the shooting on his mental problems, not his collection of lethal weapons. But when a troubled and violent man, angered by one more miscarriage of justice, goes off the deep end and the innocent suffer, Blunt wants to blame the folks who expose the bigger, original problem and demand that it be addressed. Nice distraction.

If we’re looking under the carpet for underlying causes, things that might prompt a disturbed man to go off the rails and shoot two innocent policemen, we might turn our regard to the type of toxic police community relations that the protesters are trying to get us to take seriously – and fix the real problem rather than trying to suppress free speech. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if we carried through with those mental health spending initiatives that Blunt was pushing in the wake of Sandy Hook, but which are languishing now that the public is becoming jaded by regular episodes of gun violence.

Of course, like Blunt, lots of people don’t get it. They confuse the symptoms with the disease. A recent letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that:

The St. Louis metro area is starting to learn the consequences of the recent violence in our midst. Corporations no longer consider moving here. Organizations are reluctant to hold conventions and meetings here. Tourism is down. Enrollment in local colleges is down. More fallout is almost certain to follow.

None of this bodes well for advertising revenues. Perhaps local news media such as the Post-Dispatch and Channel 5 should have considered this before taking an editorial stance that seems to favor the protests. …

In other words if we could cover up the problems nobody – or at least, the implication is, nobody who matters – will ever know or care. If folks would just shut up, we wouldn’t have any problems at all.  Wipe the pus away and you don’t really have gangrene. Didn’t we all learn in Philosophy 101 that if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it doesn’t really make a sound.

Update:  Steve Benen has this to say about what seems to be a GOP stampede to politicize the NYPD shootings (as usual, it seems that Blunt was just following the program laid out by his betters):

There’s no shortage of related examples. Joe Stack flew an airplane into a building, motivated by anti-government sentiment. Dr. George Tiller’s assassin was motivated by his opposition to abortion rights. The Oklahoma City bombers killed 168 people. How much responsibility do mainstream conservative pundits and politicians carry for these crimes? None.

There was also Cliven Bundy’s dangerous conflict with the Bureau of Labor Management – which generated all kinds of support from Republican policymakers and conservative pundits – and which “eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff … declaring, ‘If they’re going to come bring violence to us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.'”

Under the reasoning espoused by Giuliani, King, Pataki, and others over the weekend, the responsibility for all kinds of violence should apparently be extended to every corner of our political world.

Which is largely why this blame game isn’t worth playing. Tragically, lunatics sometimes commit horrific crimes. When it comes to maintaining a healthy discourse in a free society, let’s not connect their violence to political opinions we may or may not like.

None of which, Roy Blunt, means that we can’t try to get a handle on the tools of violence employed by these folks – making it harder for those with a record of mental illness and violent crime to access guns won’t eradicate criminal violence, but it can help. Same goes for limiting access to weapons designed to serve military needs.

“…. Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard….”

“….If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us….”

– Justice Robert Jackson, WEST VIRGINIA STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION ET AL. v. BARNETTE ET AL., 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

Last night:

Oregon Ducks hoopers hold hands up during national anthem before game against Ole Miss

December 07, 2014 at 5:28 PM, updated December 07, 2014 at 6:10 PM

Two Oregon Ducks men’s basketball players held their hands up during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner before a game against Ole Miss….

[….]

The actions are thought to be demonstrations linked to recent federal grand juries decisions to not indict police officers who had slain two African-American men, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York….

[….]

The self-righteous indignation in some of the comments under the news story are priceless.

Previously:

Barack Obama and “The Star Spangled Banner” (October 24, 2007)

Those who ignore history are, well….stupid (October 25, 2007)

And you shall know them by their deafening silence (July 1, 2009)

Back home again in Indiana: a modest solution to our universal school funding crisis (January 1, 2012)