Okay. So, I haven't really posted in a while. Good reason. I received the line edit for my novel a couple weeks ago and I've spent the last two weeks sorting through the changes, corrections, suggestions that came with it. Hard work. Hopefully, the inspiration (and the very, very thorough, professional and critical comments and suggestions from my editor) will make the read more better. :-]
Got an anonymous comment: "I like this photo. Your writing? I do not understand them."
I guess that's why I post photos. Not everybody is going to "understand" my writing. So, they can look at the pictures; you know, the thousand word thing.
AlterNet has a piece about a book from the former chief of the Seattle Police Department, Norm Stamper. You may remember Norm as the top cop in Seattle during the WTO (World Trade Organization) imbroglio of '99 when some protesters and police got a wee bit out of hand.
Anyway, Norm's book, Breaking Rank, apparently purports to open the closet on the dirty little (and big) nasty business that police work is, has always been and probably always will be. The AlterNet piece reads, in part:
The author reflects on his own experiences as an officer to illustrate the ways in which America's police force is rotting from the inside out, corrupted by an interior culture of institutionalized racism, misogyny and homophobia. But while effectively ripping the police world apart, Stamper manages to remain honest about his own role in the "boys' club." He confesses to some unsavory, stereotypical-cop behaviors in his early days, from emotionally abusing his wife to knocking perps unconscious. And he's upfront about career regrets (e.g., the WTO debacle, for which he resigned).
Being the kid of a cop--indeed, a cop who eventually became the chief of the Denver Police Department--I can only observe that Stamper's revelations are interesting and pretty close to home. In the AlterNet piece Stamper provides:
Young men who've been given authority -- a badge, a gun -- and allowed to stop and cite and arrest and question and fight and shoot their fellow citizens, run a grave risk of having that power go directly to their heads, or other parts of their anatomy.
That pretty much summarizes how and why it's easier for cops to become abusive in their personal relationships. 'Who are you to question my authority, wife?'
...And they're also adept at delivering blows that don't show. They know what to do and they're armed, so a lot of police domestic violence over the years has gone unreported. Their victims and survivors are terrified -- they're afraid to come forward, for good reason.
Suffice it to say, my father fit the above profile like a glove. But, then, there's also the other side of the story--which I've seen firsthand--and which I described in a post last year, part of which reads:
And, if you look still deeper you may see the macabre images which that old cop holds, secret and secure, in the most inaccessible recesses of his or her mind. And, the images are of a life spent dealing with all the vileness and degradation human beings are capable of; of victims who have been cut and sliced and who, lying deadly still in their own blood, can only silently swear that another human being was responsible; of children abused, black and blue, from the hard knocks of parents – PARENTS! – who could not deal with themselves much less their children, much less an unkind, complex world; of drunks and derelicts lying lice-infested in gutters with matted hair and urine-soaked clothes … vomit stained shirts and no shoes; of hookers and pimps plying their trade; of pre-pubescent boys and girls whose bodies were sold for the price of a meal; of automobiles wrecked beyond manufacturer recognition encasing four or five or six dead young bodies who only wanted to have a good time at 110 fucking miles an hour; of dopers and pushers and good outstanding pillars of the community high as kites after snorting or shooting or popping or drinking their particular ticket to nirvana; of the homeless and sick wandering the streets babbling to themselves and cursing the unseen demons that haunt their souls; of ten-thousand filthy, disgustingly sad, sad images which, in one way or another, the old cops not only dealt with but were expected to deal with over and over and over again and again by a society that, in spite of its humanity, delegates to one class of people – the cop – the job of handling its failures.
I haven't read Stamper's book and I may do so.
I remember my father telling me that when he first became a Denver cop (1946) he and his partner would patrol the red light district of Denver and, moving slowly down the street in their cruiser, shoot the passed out derelicts on the sidewalks and in the gutters with a bb gun. He said they'd laugh like hell when the pitiful drunks would jump up and grab whatever body parts had been pinged and look around to search for the source of the pain.
What fun...
Sweet Melissa came down with a kidney infection a couple weeks ago. We actually thought we had lost her (she will, after all, be twelve this September). But, she bounced back. Sweet as ever...
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