Blood in Brussels in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

And I think of making lists
like “Things I Like”… and “Things I Like”…
(My perennial forgetfulnesses
reave me like a shrike!)

– scrap of paper I scribbled on while typing that last marijuana entry

The problem with “Hope”-ish flights, written straight, is that I have to take a silly thing seriously clear out of proportion, against an increasingly bothersome awareness that enjoyment or etc. … doesn’t work, or something. (Can you warm yourself with a good day or a delicious meal that happened years ago? The silly fun things are hedges against the night that you plant today… when you will move to a new house with an unplanted yard the next morning, and will be moving again every morning after that. Sometimes you’ll even move that evening. You see what I mean about mockery.)

Soon punished.

In the morning I found that people had been exploding bombs full of nails in Brussels.

I don’t know how to segue from that savagery to my head-pains about people on this side of the water and do it tastefully.
Donald Trump responded to Brussels with more mubbledubblings about the importance of America torturing. Ted Cruz spoke with better sentence structure and managed to be more terrifying:

"We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized."

1. What would this “empowering,” and “securing” these neighborhoods, actually specifically look like? Police already patrol - but regular police service is clearly not what he means. It sounds much more like straight-out occupation of defined hostile territory - with “empowering” meaning the police wouldn’t have to respect the usual rights.

2. … Doing this to these neighborhoods BEFORE these neighborhoods become radicalized?!? (I take it he doesn’t mean a cause-and-effect relationship…) Since no one can see the future, that means regardless of whether they radicalize.

These guys have absolutely no use for the Muslims who are not our enemies but to be our enemies - for political reasons, and also apparently sincerely.

And it takes so few people, with these methods, to do the horrible things that these guys can heedlessly (deliberately) generalize to large populations! So few people, to be able to do something horrible. You do not stop there ever being any little knots of people who can get a few necessary things. So - barring universal sublimity, how does it ever leave this pattern? And the horrible things will never be so minor in the real scale of things that they can’t and won’t be painted as an existential threat to whole great nations. To justify the most curious (curiously rewarding) … practical … measures.
It’s like history is being stuck in place because the great nations are being driven mad by itchy powder that they can’t stop. Tiny little spicules of itchy powder in the form of gore splashed on airport walls.

No, writing an addendum to the last entry to say how remarkable it is that Panama Red can be found in a Portland pot shop (with definition, history and geography, discussion) does not feel like the thing to do. It fills me with nausea, or something like.

And I have also turned my mind to astonishing incarceration rates for indigenous Australians, and to the problem of how to winnow it down to a particular or useful reason or culprit. (It’s Arbi’s Amnesty International group’s task; she mentioned it; I’m peeping in the window.)

The conviction statistics make suggestions, but not quite clear ones. (There is a supposed prevalence of violence, accounting for a disproportionate lump in the convictions, “acts intended to cause injury”… but then why so few homicide convictions compared to non-indigenous convicts? Are these really careful injurious acts? Never mind this, I’m just muttering to myself…)
When I turn my head to look for another possible side of the picture, I find enough anecdotal accounts of hideously racist Australian police to choke an Alabamian. (Ah, well, I had hopes.) But the official statistics don’t have footprints in them to indicate that this has been a factor, or to indicate how much of one it might be. Or they don’t at first blush appear to. Maybe they do.

How do you tease this apart? Define the problem. Make conditional cases for the problem. Test if you can. Redefine the problem…

It is mind-balm, in a way. It’s hunting. Better.

The end of the day. Tired. Cruz’s and Trump’s focus in regard to Muslims ripples in my head like a cheap plastic banner. The problem in Europe is said by many of these talking heads to be lack of assimilation in Muslim neighborhoods… and, I think Cruz was just saying, this lack of assimilation is to be prevented by law enforcement agencies… ?!?
(Cruz said afterward it was like heavy police presence in cocaine-ridden inner cities, taking down active drug gangs on the street.)

I find nothing in this but wooziness. Brussels is a smear of horror. Only Australian prison puzzles seemed a ray of light. I’m going to bed.

Last updated March 23, 2016