Tyre Nichols and Inhumanity

 Wondering what it is about the profession of policing that seems to produce this inhumanity.

Reminds me of a Larry Wilmore bit after the choking death of Erik Garner:

He agreed with Stewart that it could be something about the uniform that makes cops of all races treat black men differently.

As Wilmore put it, “I once dressed as a cop for Halloween, and by the end of the night I was choking brothers.”

A full believer in the power corrupts adage, one just has to wonder about the hiring practices of police departments now that the force is more able to be recorded and seen by the world.

I can remember around the time the body cameras came out, it was supposed to have a "civilizing" effect on policing.

Why are we hiring police officers that need civilizing?

Is there a mercenary culture undercurrent in police hiring? 

Social Psychologists will not speak of bad apples, but bad barrels. What is it about the power of policing behind the uniform that seems to produce this inhumanity?

Shaking my head as I remember Nietzsche:

"We must take care when pursuing monsters, not to become monsters ourselves."

The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think by Robert Pantano

 

Different Races To Run

In a recent therapy session, my therapist enlightened me to the fact that my wife and I have had different races to run.

Intuitively, I understood this. But it was her follow-up that my wife's childhood nutrition may have been so different from mine, that it radically shapes the life-races we've had to run, which really drove the point into my body.

I can remember being hungry as a kid and waking up in the house and seeing my breath it was so cold. I vaguely remember powdered milk. Disgusting.

So with this in my mind germinating, my wife sends me this:

https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2023-01-09/conservative-voice-glenn-loury-and-poet-ravi-shankar

Which is really about an overcoming ethos in which there are no "systemic" hurdles, only individual shortcomings (especially willpower). I'm generalizing but I genuinely feel this is the rhetorical endpoint. 

Also rumbling around up there was a chord progression I really liked. So I did some song freewriting:

Was denken Sie? (What do you think?)

CHORUS

It’s not as simple as you make it out to be

It’s not as clear-cut to me

It’s not as easy as one, two, three

Why don’t you believe me?

It’s almost as if you can’t see me (or feel me)

VERSE I

Who’s to say who overcomes? Who bends the world and gets the good things done? When we’ve got different races to run Please don’t mistake my question As a justification We’ve had different races to run

VERSE II

Maybe it depends, from where you begun Maybe all the babies have a damn good reason Maybe baby, we’ve got different races to run Please don’t mistake my question As a justification We’ve had different races to run

VERSE III

(one or two chord stops)

They might tell you there’s no system (pronounced sys-TUM)

Only veiled machination

They might tell you the hero overcomes

While forgetting no man is an island (pronounced eye-LUND)

They might tell you not to question
They might tell you it’s an illusion

An excuse masquerading as a delusion But trust me, we’ve had different races to run

That's Alright René

Inspired by Scott Hershovitz' Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids, I wrote a song about Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and Dualism. I hope you like it. Fun Fact: The two guitars on the outro solo are my cheeky little version of dualism - one in the right speaker, one in the left; one playing single-note lines, the other octaves. Fun huh?