Downfall: Then and Now

Horror movies have a strange fascination: part of the joy is walking out of the theater, into the light of day, safe. 
Of course, some, like "Jaws" stay with you because you look out at the surface of the ocean and now you see it differently; you know what monster and danger could well be, is certainly, under that calm surface.

A woman won a $10 million dollar lawsuit against the hospital and doctors which had removed a benign tumor (a meningioma) from inside her skull, claiming the surgery had destroyed her clairvoyant powers.  She had made her living as a psychic. Of course, the argument went, if she had such powers to see the future, she would have foreseen the loss of her powers and not submitted to surgery. But, then again, she would not have got that $10 million, more than she could ever have earned as a psychic in her entire lifetime. So, maybe...

Seeing the future from the present; seeing the present from the past. All possible.

Watching the 2004 movie "Downfall," the unease grows and grows because what you are seeing becomes more and more familiar, more current as things progress.

The power comes from the familiarity. 
Hitler, is so kind in the opening scenes, as he selects from a line up of seven starstruck twenty year old women a willowy lass from Munich, who he selects, perhaps, because she is from Munich which seems to resonate in some happy place in memory for him. 
She is pretty and she is terribly nervous as he brings her into his office and begins dictating a speech which she is supposed to type as he is speaking. Of course, she should be taking shorthand and then transcribing it; shorthand was developed because even the fastest typist cannot keep pace with the spoken voice. She falls behind and slumps, defeated, at her typewriter, but Hitler says, "We all make mistakes. I make so many. Let's just try again."

She is forgiven, hired, dazzled, instantly loyal to be selected from among the seven women. We see she has been given an impossible task, failed but he likes her enough to say, well, we'll work it out.

Hitler loves in the abstract: he loves the looks of the children brought before him, if they have the right looks. He loves the freshness of the women who work in his bunkers. 

Surrounding him are a rogues' gallery of unappetizing scoundrels, but also some ostensibly decent folks--Albert Speer is reticent, but stolid, standing by Hitler as Hitler lovingly touches the room size, white model of the thousand year Berlin, the best capital in the world, the best city ever to be built on earth. It is a wall against mortality and the mongrel hordes. 

Little by little, you see it, the slipping away from reality, the delusions of grandeur, as Hitler cannot see what everyone around him can see--that city will never be built and, in fact, Berlin, far from being the grandest, most spectacular city on earth, the anchor for a thousand year Reich, is collapsing around them.

The relentless optimist, Hitler orders armies which exist only on paper, on his map, against the overwhelming hordes closing in around Berlin. He clutches a red and a blue pencil he uses to draw on his maps, showing where he thinks his armies are and then should be to crush the Russians encircling him.
The power of positive thinking starts to crumble, but he cannot see it. If he says it, it will happen. 
The triumph of the Will!

He dismisses his top generals, one by one, as effete products of the academy where they only learned to hold a drink or to eat with fine silverware, and when any one of these generals fails to cleave to his plan to never take a step backward, he turns on him as a betrayer. 

The generals keep pointing to where Berlin is--so close to the Russian border, and advise him to withdraw West, where it would make more sense to regroup and where they would have a smaller border to defend. He will have none of it. 

Slowly, it dawns on them, one by one: He has become detached from reality. 

He loves the children, who he will send to their deaths

The men in the bunker talk about a way out: try to cut a deal with Eisenhower and the Americans; surely the Americans must fear the Reds as much as the Germans, and they will join in an attack to repulse the Russians.

So, even the generals are consumed by wishful thinking, but at least their wishful thinking has some basis in reality: Patton, in fact, talked about exactly that, sweeping across Germany and defeating the Russians. 

There are the true believers, the ancestral counterparts to Rush, Sean and Ann.  The wife of Goebbels brings her six beautiful children ages 5 to 12 with her into the bunker. Speer urges her to save her children, if not herself. They can be spirited away, but she says if Hitler dies and if National Socialism dies, she does not want her darling children growing up in the nasty world which would replace the golden blond Germany they had built. So she pushes a cyanide capsule into each of her children's mouths and has them bite down to crush it and release its poison, one by one.

She wants no dark hordes crossing the border to mix with her pure Aryan children. Maybe if the invaders were from Norway... but these are Slavs!

Hitler rejects measures to save the million civilians from the on rushing Red Army. If the German people are not worthy, they don't deserve to survive; besides the best are already dead. 

Why does he fight on? "He has nothing to lose," one of the officers observes. 
He is already dead, the walking dead, why should he care about taking steps to save others?

The eternal optimism in the face of all contrary evidence; the centrality of this man in his own thinking, and up to a very late point, in the mind of so many others, is so current, it's jarring. 

The ideal world Hitler constructed, gleaming, white, grandiose, all of which is threatened by outside dark hordes, and undermined by betrayal from disloyal enemies from within, it's all there in what we see on Twitter every morning. Hitler's detractors are enemies, not just of Hitler, but enemies of "the people." 

And he had accomplished so much! "I have conquered Europe! By myself. Not the generals. Me." 

From the 21st century, one sees a plan. If there is a God, who intervenes in the affairs of men, then you must see Him, in that extraordinary bomb blast from a briefcase set down under a table, at Hitler's feet, which leveled the building and killed every other person in that room, but left Hitler unharmed, with shredded trousers. 
Even Lincoln looked for an other worldly explanation for why the Civil War had been as devastating as it had: perhaps God wanted every drop of blood drawn from the slave under lash to be paid for by a drop drawn by the sword. Had the war ended early, with an easy Union victory, the people of the South would not have been ready to accept defeat. 

Had Hitler conceded defeat soon after D Day, come to an arrangement with America, England and France,  then negotiated peace with Russia, his Reich might have continued for another 40 years, and nobody outside Germany and Poland would ever have known about the concentration camps or the reality of life inside Germany. 

Cities in ruins, the leveling to rubble of all those old German buildings and institutions had to happen to start anew. 

Hitler tells Speer the war is a blessing in disguise: To have cleared Berlin for construction of his new gleaming, white walled city would have taken 20 years. The Russian artillery and bombs  were accomplishing the demolition for them in weeks.

The power of positive thinking and where it can lead. 

A New Liberal Deal

One thing you can say about Fox News and Trump and Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter--they are cartoons, but they are so obvious and in a sense, honest, about their vitriol. 
Oh, they do their own dances, trying to portray themselves as the ones under attack, after they've unleashed some diatribe about those Central American caravans being the second coming of Attila the Hun, but they are water off the duck's back.

Dr. Frederick Banting, discover of insulin, painted this 

What drives Mad Dog mad, what gets under his skin and gets him frothing at the mouth,  in fact, is the inanity on the left.

To wit:

1/ Knee jerk calls for the resignation of the Lt. Governor of Virginia because two women have come forward with "credible accusations" of sexual assault/rape against him.
2/ And everything which is not overtly or subtly "racist" is "racist." That word has been so over used it has ceased to have any meaning at all. 
When Trumpsky says we need more blond Norwegian immigrants but (brown) Central Americans are an "infestation," that needs no further characterization.
But Heaven forbid you fail to call for the resignation of any Southerner who has appeared in blackface 30 years ago--this can only be because YOU are racist for being willing to tolerate this miscreant. 
Did you know that the governor of Virginia went to VMI? Did you know Robert E. Lee is buried at VMI, NEXT TO HIS HORSE! And you are worried about blackface in Virginia? The man is buried next to his horse. 
Seems to me we have far more to worry about, psychologically speaking, about Virginians. 

Actual racism

3/ And then there is the constant refrain about needing to stand up and defend the LGBT-Q community. 
First of all, if Q is fore "queer" then what is the "G" for? I am out of it, but I thought that was "gay." And in fact, when you get right down to it, is "L" not for lesbian which is simply gay female? Do lesbians need their own distinct letter?  
But let that pass. 

Then there is the mixing of "transgender or trans-sexual" with the homosexual as if this is simply the same thing. 
Nobody should be attacked or demeaned because of his/her sexual orientation, preferences, gender identity. That much we can agree on, but being corrected because of the use of the wrong pronoun or being told to refer to someone as cis or trans? How does that play on Main Street? And do we not care if we alienate the masses over this because it's RIGHT? Pick your fights people.

A Very Koch Brothers Childhood

I beg to differ. 
One simple distinction is lesbians, gays, bisexuals need no prescriptions, no medical intervention whatsoever to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, whereas transgenders ask for hormones, and sometimes not all that frequently, surgery. But there are many other differences, which, if you read widely enough, homosexuals have begun to note and comment upon.

Might be sexist, but you are not a victim

4/ And then there is the #METOO "movement," which, as far as I'm concerned has "liberals" abrogating all notions of fairness, due process in the name of "believe the woman," as if no woman has ever accused a man of sexual transgression and not been completely correct, as if memory is infallible and no woman has ever suffered from any sort of psychopathology. 
I get the fact there are sexual predators. Bill Cosby was likely one. Al Franken, not so much. An idiot, tasteless, awkward, gauche in the extreme, but not in the Cosby, drug 'em and have intercourse with their unconscious bodies category.
It makes Mad Dog crazy that his fellow liberals have driven him into the arms of Betsy DeVos, a really disgusting prospect, but she has justly attacked the star chambers cum "student committees" on college campuses which have expelled boys who were never allowed to confront their accusers or even, in some cases, to learn the particulars of the offense which prompted their punishment. 
Good Lord, do we really need to discuss this in detail? There are plenty of details available on line about campus "trials" which would make Kafka and Arthur Koestler blanch. 
If you think someone has been a sexual predator or a rapist: BRING HIM TO TRIAL. Defenders of #METOO have argued the legal system is stacked against the accuser, victimizes the victim. 
But the American legal system does this deliberately, for a reason. The idea is that to unjustly convict someone of a crime is worse than allowing a guilty man to walk free. 
Is there not the possibility that by simply granting a woman her "justice" by virtue of her accusation, we have made it too easy for women who may not have been violated in quite the way they now remember it to exact punishment on the men they accuse? I'm not saying this is the case even in the majority of cases, but is this not even a possibility?
And if the legal system is broken, then let us fix it. But to simply say, oh, let's forget the legal system and all its fairness and safeguards, let's just get vengeance, then where are we? 

Marketing vs Science

5/ Endless nurturing, sympathy and expressions of grief for "survivors" and "victims." Oh, I'm so sorry for your loss. Oh, that must have been so awful, come let me give you a hug. Liberals do this. 
 Trumpsky gets a little dewy when he is speaking about a white woman raped by a brown man, but for the most part, he does not get deeply into sympathy. There was enough of that at the State of the Union with teary eyed white female victims having their moment in the gallery, but for the most part, hurt females are gathered up by liberal women. 
 Really, Mad Dog could just howl at the moon for all this faux empathy. The left is drowning in victimhood and empathy and oh-how-damaged-you-must be. Please.
Let's find some liberals who push past all that, who are not survivors or victims, who do not want to wallow in safe spaces, who can shrug off moronic sexist, racist remarks and go for the jugular. 

Where is a virtuous Democrat? 
Give me a combat veteran, so he doesn't have to prove how tough he is. Make him a man, but we could take a woman if she's an Ann Richards type woman who can say stuff like, "Poor George, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth." Or, when told she has to remove the nativity scene from the state capitol grounds, says, "That's too bad. This has been on the only time we've ever seen 3 wise men gathered together in Austin."

It Can Happen Here

And make him a real liberal, who goes after anyone who trespasses in ways that matter--like when our own Democrats vote for a bill which guts Dodd Frank protections against too big to fail banks after receiving significant contributions from the banking industry. Make him able to sling a zinger as in, "You know, with all the divisions we have in this country I thought, maybe I'm naive, but I thought we could all agree: There IS NO SUCH THING AS A VERY FINE NAZI." 

Let him push for clean energy because it's likely to help our economy. Let him observe how even after a fire, rebuilding tends to build new wealth and more. Let him say there will be more jobs for all levels of worker building windmills and solar panels than were ever employed in coal mining.  Let him say: Look, I don't know enough science to be sure about climate change, but the evidence looks good enough to make me want to go for the Green New Deal. If we are wrong, the jobs it creates will still be a benefit. It just won't benefit the Koch brothers.

Keep in mind the real problem

Let him say science is a work in progress but we can, after a certain amount of experience, say we believe as a working hypothesis that the heart pumps blood to the brain and that vaccinations cause a lot more good than harm.  And that if you want to be a member of the herd, you have to be vaccinated, no philosophical exceptions allowed.
And let him give a three minute explanation of how he thinks abortion is different from infanticide. And let him risk confusing his audience, the national media and risk the wrath of Planned Parenthood and NOW by saying that the distinction between abortion and infanticide is all about line drawing and he might be willing to draw the line earlier than 21 weeks, as science and discussion guide us, with exceptions for exceptional and rare cases. 

And let him not worry about hurting feelings more than he cares about doing the right thing. 

Where is that Democrat?

Private Health Insurance: Pros and Cons

If ever you have any doubts about the relative virtues of the American commercial health care system, aka private health insurance and National Health systems, rather than focusing on the horror stories about socialized medicine in Europe and Canada, where, our American Republican politicians tell us (as if they know) there are death panels deciding who can get chemotherapy or waiting times of years before you can get your hip replaced, consider this: Has the American system become so corrupted that however bad the European national health systems may be, how much worse can they be than what we've got?

Oh, we all know some healthcare insurance plans are "Cadillac" plans, negotiated, for example, by unions over years and providing wonderful coverage for doctors' visits, hospitalization and even drugs. 

Sheelah Kolhatkar

But, after you ask yourself, "Do I have such a wonderful plan?" ask yourself what this passage, from the Sheelah Kolhatkar's New Yorker  article "The Whistle Blowers" might mean. Here she is describing the home Kiran Patel is building himself with the money he made from the health insurance conglomerate he fashioned, combining WellCare with Freedom and Optimum Healthcare. 

"The residence will be a cross between the Taj Mahal and Versailles--a sixty-eight-thousand square foot palace with a fountain, a twelve-car garage, a Hindu temple, domed pavilions, and latticework made of red sandstone imported from Rajasthan. There will be separate building for Patel's three grown children and their families, spread across seventeen acres that abut White Trout Lake, which is celebrated for its sunset views. The estate's centerpiece is a grand ballroom."

Kiran Patel

This from money made from health insurance here in the USA, mostly from billing Medicare.

You will say, well, I need to know more about Mr. Patel and how he was able to become so rich, as an entrepreneur. Perhaps he is simply more brilliant and more hard working and more of a risk taker than his fellow cardiologists. Maybe he made this money, fair and square. Maybe he deserves this. After all, we are a capitalist society. You cannot be envious of the winners.

Really? Do you really believe that?

Or do you believe, with Balzac, "Behind every great fortune lies a crime" ?

Carolyn Kormann and Boyan Slat: The Widening Gyre

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

--W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" 

My oldest son, from age ten wanted to be a photographer for the National Geographic, a fantasy for which I was partly responsible because I subscribed and he read everything which came into the house. 
Years later he read The New Yorker, cover to cover, when I was reading only the cartoons, but he got me into the habit, and that has richly rewarded me.

This week (Feb 4) it was a dazzling piece by Carolyn Kormann, a staff writer, about the problem of those Texas size plastic garbage heaps floating around the Pacific and one man who decided to do something about it, a Dutch guy named Boyan Slat.

Carolyn Kormann

Actually, it's not just one heap but at least four, and they are more like gyres (swirling things) and those are only the ones you can see. Much of the garbage may be sinking to the ocean floor, washing up on beaches.

I'd often wondered why someone didn't just get a big tanker, or a fleet of tankers out there and vacuum the stuff up.

There is the image of those starving polar bears on ice floes, victims of the global warming which Trump dismisses as a Chinese plot,  and now there are the images of those terminally cute sea turtles swallowing plastic straws and wrapping.

I've tried to get the staff in my office to switch to metal spoons rather than throw away plastic, but they have refused, the ladies claiming it would fall to them to clean the silverware and they may be right. Having read Kormann's piece, I now understand whatever de minimus efforts I might make, carrying groceries home in reusable cloth bags, eschewing plastic spoons and straws, it would be only a drop in the bucket, literally. 

Boyan Slat

Kormann manages to profile Slat, who is trying to do something, and is something of a hustler, necessarily, giving Ted talks, gathering up large quantities of money from foundations and on line donors--but he's hustling for a great cause, cleaning up the oceans, while she also renders an unsparing portrait of the man and all through she weaves in the science and technology and personalities which are being mobilized. She tells you what other workers in this field say about him, the criticisms of the concept--some think once the plastic is ocean borne, it's too late--other think the engineering is simply too complex. Then again, the guy is Dutch and the Dutch have a history of engineering the ocean. 

Decades ago--seems like a lifetime--Jacques Cousteau complained the oceans had become befouled by trash and garbage and although I noticed that, it seemed nobody else did--they were too busy delighting in the underwater things he recorded swimming by.

Slat's idea is to simply pull an enormous net behind a boat or boats and sweep up the garbage, but there are problems--the plastic just floats away from the net, elusively pushed away by the wave generated by the approaching finger. And the stuff may have sunk far deeper than the net and the stuff may be not just plastic crates and big things but tiny bubbles and shards. 

It's a project which Slat admits is daunting but he insists, as he must, it is not unsolvable. Like those oil rigs in the North Sea, where there's a will, there's a way.

Kormann ends her portrait with a gossamer portrait of surfing with Slat in the San Francisco Bay. The image is cinematic, two beautiful people, one Slat, who is a comically inept, who, one imagines, is only out there so he can be alone with the winsome Kormann, but both on surfboards and he tries and tries but he is, like Gatsby, trying to overcome the irresistible force of his own personality and of nature, "fighting the endless white water to get back out," a boat beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly.

Trumped Up

There is no possibility I am the first to note the irony of the meaning of "trumped up."

"fabricate, devise," 1690s, from trump "deceive, cheat" (1510s), from Middle English trumpen (late 14c.), from Old French tromper "deceive," of uncertain origin, perhaps from a verb meaning "to blow a trumpet." Related: Trumped; trumping.

But what is surprising is how seldom anyone comments on this, plays with it.

The idea that the man's very name means to "deceive" and "cheat" seems so obvious, the idea of "hiding in plain sight."

His acolytes simply will not believe this. In a sense this is exactly what Trump tells us when he says he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue in broad daylight and not lose a vote from his base.

The idea that his fans do not care, do not care if they are lied to, because they are not the ones who are being lied to--it's everyone else who is being lied to; we know better. We take him seriously, not literally. 

Listening to a podcast about Marie Antoinette done by Melvyn Bragg on "In Our Time," it is illuminating how little we know about public, not to mention, historical figures. Makes you think again about Bret Kavanaugh and Ron Northam. 

We can sell you anything: Smoking as an aphrodisiac 

Marie Antoinette, according to the panel was vilified with what would now be called an "ad campaign" which was almost wholely pure lies, although it was true she spent astonishingly, obscenely on clothes, but that is what royalty did in her time, (and still.)

So we may not know much about the real man, Donald Trump, but we can judge from his own appearances, statements, tweets and rallies, that he is a liar and a man who uses lies to spin a fantasy which is dear to his audience, very much as Hitler and Goebbels and Henry Ford and Senator Joseph McCarthy did.

There will always be prevaricators like Mr. Trump, but how many will be named, "Liar" or "Dissembler" or "Phony?"

Curious that. 

Trump, the Ravishing of White Women As a Trope

Whenever things slow down for Donald Trump, whenever he suffers a wound, he tweets MAGA or if he is particularly dyspeptic, he starts belching about the latest imagined or real rape or murder of a white woman by a dark skin, Spanish speaking nogoodnick, MS 13 illegal immigrant who has slipped across the border to seek out a white woman to rape.

Save Our Beautiful White Women

As others have observed, had the victim been a woman of color, there would be no story.

In this, Trump is one of a long line of racist demagogues stretching back to the American Revolution.

Reading, "The Men Who Lost America" a surprisingly engrossing account of the British generals and politicians (who were often one in the same), the king among them, I came across the story of Jane McCrea.

Jane McCrea was the bethrothed of a loyalist American soldier, on her way with General John Burgoyne, as he wended his way down from Canada with a British army, accompanied by allied American Indian warriors and somewhere between 500 and 2000 camp followers, women and children, among whom was Burgoyne's mistress. 

Burgoyne

(To digress: Burgoyne was much in love with his wife, 20 years his junior, but, apparently, while on assignment in the colonies, it was not remarkable for officers to take on a mistress, often the wife of another soldier, either loyal or Royal, who was occupied elsewhere. (Burr in "Hamilton" is carrying on with the wife of a British officer stationed in Georgia.) Apparently, what happened in camp, stayed in camp, in America.)

To return to the story of the unfortunate Ms. McCrea: during the trek south, two Indians argued over who was going to be the bodyguard of Ms. McCrea and apparently the disagreement got out of hand and one Brave ended the argument by bringing his tomahawk down through the skull and brains of Ms. McCrea.  If I can't get paid to guard her, then neither will you. So there.

The incident became a cause celebre. It was reported back in England, bloviated about in Parliament and it make every newspaper in America,

The event fed into the contention of the colonists that the king and his men were bringing savages to bear, savages and German mercenaries, which meant the king regarded the colonists as foreign, not British subjects and far from protecting the British colonists, was subjugating and murdering them. "I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love." It even made it into the Declaration of Independence as one of the many depredations Jefferson attributes the king, 
"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Gen, Horatio Gates

So there was the Trumpian racial thing, as General Horatio Gates of the Continental Army said, "That the famous lieutenant-general Burgoyne, in whom the fine gentleman is united with the scholar and soldier, should hire the savages of America to scalp Europeans and the descendants of Europeans."

Gates further embellished, just as Trump has, Trump who always speaks of "beautiful children" or "beautiful women" murdered or raped. He would not be as offended, presumably, if the woman raped were ugly or the child dark,

Painting by Vanderlyn

"A young lady lovely to sight, of virtuous character and amiable disposition...scalped, mangled in the most shocking manner...dressed to meet her promised husband."

A Trump before his time, Gates was.

It didn't matter this was a loyalist woman on her way to meet a loyalist man who was fighting against Gates and the Revolution. In fact, it may have played better that way: Look what happens when you make your loyalty to the British who consider us just chattel.

It's reassuring to see Trump is nothing so new. Just an new refrain of a very old song. 

Chris Hayes: A Colony within a Nation

One of those Christmas books you finally get around to reading turns out to be very worthwhile: Chris Hayes, "A Colony in a Nation." 

Before he gets to the riots and revolt in Ferguson, Missouri, Chris Hayes tells a few tales about the American revolution, beginning with the Boston Tea Party which, he says, occurred because the King and Parliament lowered the tax on Tea arriving at the port of Boston making legal tea as inexpensive as black market tea imported by bootleggers from the Netherlands.

Destroying the village to save it

(One has to imagine if we made heroin, cocaine et al available at cost at local dispensaries in downtown Baltimore whether the local drug lords would set fire to these dispensaries.)

So the Boston Tea Party was not about Americans indignant because they could not afford their beloved tea, but it was a black marketeers' action to protect their markets, more Tony Soprano than freedom riders.

The king's agents, who enforced taxes, were much reviled in the colonies and often attacked for doing their jobs. Some were pretty benign, but others, particularly soldiers who were forced into the homes of locals, were seen as agents of oppression.

Land of the Free

Fast forward to Ferguson in the 21st century and tales of how police executed the policies of local (white) government officials to collect taxes and you see the analogy. Rather than raise property taxes on the white property owners who had a voice in Parliament, the government officials decided to extort money from the poor Black community in a travesty of police work where sitting in a car while black, walking while black and certainly driving while black were all crimes, and black citizens issued summons, fines and fines upon fines. As Hayes notes, the federal Department of Justice was a little taken aback when they investigated, to see how very open the white town officials were about how they intended to ramp up revenues by assessing fines and penalties in a spiraling vortex of never ending penalties where black "offenders" were not even allowed to pay their fines and thus accrued more and more penalties. Arriving at the court room door, a long line awaited and the court closed before half of the citizens had a chance to pay their fines and more penalties were added.

Response to "tyranny" 

Blacks were routinely stopped, humiliated by gun toting police who would demand identification from a black man, and when he asked why, charged him with failing to carry a driver's license, making a false statement (calling himself "Mike" rather than "Michael" which was on his birth certificate) and so brazenly and cynically building a mountain on top of not just a mole hill but a cavity.

No real freedom without Economic Justice

Simply reading of the indignations visited upon the black population of Ferguson the wonder is why they hadn't burned down City Hall years before. 

I was once on a jury in very white Montgomery County Maryland, where a Latino man, Cesar, was on trial for selling a 1 oz pack of marijuana and he was arrested by nine Montgomery County police, who charged a cross a parking, lot, a field, a playground and arrested, mistakenly, the man's brother who was working under the hood of his car, only arresting Cesar, when he emerged from the apartment building carrying what might have been the change for his customer. I sat in the jury box thinking, "The real threat to the community that morning was all those police, waving Glocks as children in the playground and their mothers, scrambled to get out of their way."

The blacks of Ferguson daily had their 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure violated not to mention their 1st, 13th amendment rights, and likely a long list of other Constitutional rights violated daily. 

Which is to say, they were treated as a hostile enemy and the police thought of themselves as an occupying army. It was the "Fort Apache, the Bronx" scenario, the police being the victims hold up in a fort, surrounded by hostile and barbaric natives.

Of course, some of this is imagery and hyperbole to make the point, but the basic point--that the police were seen as angry, dangerous oppressors working for a corrupt, criminal white government--is strongly supported. 

Maintaining Order

The details Hayes lays out make his case.
Criticisms about his use of the analogy of a "colony" miss the point. The basic truth is persuasive: the police are illegitimate in this setting, not representative of the people, not there to serve and protect the population against actual criminals who rob and murder. The police are part of the robbery scheme, and in some cases, the police murder. 

Whenever I see that confrontation between "black lives matter" and "blue lives matter" I'll see it differently now.