What Is This Bullsh*t, Anyway?

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

16 June 20

Things have come so unstrung that I look out from the aquarium that is my life now and I don’t recognize what I’m looking at anymore.

hat little I understood about this country is now completely obsolete. Things have come so unstrung that I look out from the aquarium that is my life now and I don’t recognize what I’m looking at anymore. The news is exotic and unfamiliar. My fellow citizens appear to be at the end of a very short rope. And, in general, the country seems unprepared for anything that might happen, and a lot of things are happening at once. There is now only one overriding question:

What is this bullshit, anyway?

Item: things got wildly out of hand in Albuquerque on Monday night. From the Albuquerque Journal:

The shooting occurred during a clash following a peaceful protest to remove the controversial sculpture, a monument that features conquistador Juan de Oñate. The FBI is assisting in the investigation, according to an APD spokesman. U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, meanwhile, called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the shooting. The night began with peaceful protest and prayer but tensions began to escalate when protesters took a pickaxe to the statue and members of the heavily armed New Mexico Civil Guard, a civilian group, tried to protect the monument.

“Although we are still learning more about the situation, I am horrified and disgusted beyond words by the reports of violence at a protest Monday night in Albuquerque,” Lujan Grisham said late Monday in a statement. “The heavily armed individuals who flaunted themselves at the protest, calling themselves a ‘civil guard,’ were there for one reason: To menace protesters, to present an unsanctioned show of unregulated force. To menace the people of New Mexico with weaponry — with an implicit threat of violence — is on its face unacceptable; that violence did indeed occur is unspeakable.”

This is the second episode that I know of in which armed camo clowns gathered to protect a statue. (There was an earlier one in Brandenburg, Kentucky.) Now, someone has been shot. It’s only a matter of time before one of these episodes turns into a serious firefight in which unarmed demonstrators get caught between the police and the militia—and neither group, I feel safe in observing, is predisposed to support the demonstrators if things get wild all at once.

Gilbert Gallegos, a spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department, confirmed that one man had been shot and had been transported to University of New Mexico Hospital in critical but stable condition. He didn’t identify him. Police Chief Michael Geier said in a statement that APD is “receiving reports about vigilante groups possibly instigating this violence...If this is true, (we) will be holding them accountable to the fullest extent of the law, including federal hate group designation and prosecution,” he added.

What is this bullshit, anyway?

Item: After a month of really bad reviews, the New York Police Department seems desperate to change the story. From CBS News:

The New York Police Department found no criminality after officers became sick Monday night from shakes they got at a Shake Shack in downtown Manhattan, Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison tweeted early Tuesday. Sources told CBS New York it appears the incident was accidental, possibly the result of cleaning solution that wasn't properly removed from the shake machine. Harrison tweeted that, "After a thorough investigation by the NYPD's Manhattan South investigators, it has been determined that there was no criminality by Shake Shack's employees.” Police – and the police union -- initially suspected an employee may have contaminated the shakes with bleach.

What’s the big deal here? We’re not even a month distant from the moment when the president* suggested imbibing cleaning solvent to fight the pandemic.

Seriously, though, I guarantee you that this already is a dangerous urban legend within the NYPD—and its union—and that somebody, somewhere is going to pay a terrible price for it. This is really time for serious national leadership, which I seem to recall as having been something valuable. Instead, we’ve got a president* who seems to relish stoking this unrest, a supine Republican Party that’s just trying to get to November without disintegrating entirely, and general prayer rising in the country that we just get through another day without a mass casualty event, or yet another African-American citizen’s dying in dubious circumstances.