P.R.F. Prosebox 8/15/2019 in Book Six: Trying to Hold On 2019

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening; you’re joining us here at P.R.F. Prosebox this entry being put forth on Thursday, August Fifteenth, Two Thousand Nineteen.

I. did not. want to leave. my bed this morning. Had another dream about High Schools that weren’t my High School and events that I would have wanted to experience but never did. Woke up cold with the puppy resting her head on my chest and I noticed she’d moved the blanket (I can understand that… two sheets and a large blanket were uncomfortable for her to lay her head on my chest so she moved the large blanket, lol). And if I was a master of my own destiny… I would have laid in bed most of the morning. Drifting between asleep and awake. Cuddling with the puppy and laying in bed. Alas, it was not to be as I am not the master of my own destiny. Got dressed, came in to work.

At work it took a solid 40 minutes for my damned computer to boot up!! The fundamental issue with a remote server, I presume. “You must restart your computer to install updates” always causes issues the next morning. DURING the computer boot up, I received a phone call from an officer about an e-mail he had sent me that I could not access. Y’know… I suppose you could say that my job is always full of interesting stories:

Massively drunk guy shows up to a house party that he wasn’t invited to. The homeowners kick him out (legal). The drunk guy gets belligerent. What should have happened: If you have a belligerent drunk on your lawn that refuses to leave, call the police and have the man arrested and/or escorted off of your property. What actually happened: The homeowner decided “nobody is going to disrespect me on my own property” and beat the absolute FUCK out of this guy. THREE skull fractures and a potentially permanently fucked up ear canal. And this is how “Throwing someone off of your property” can become “Serious Criminal Charges for Assault”.

After that phone call, I finally got my computer up and running. Guess what? Domestic Violence Defendant who has violated the No Contact Order 3 times in 3 weeks… violated it again. Because whenever he’s drunk, he wants to go see his girlfriend, apparently. And he’s drunk HARD and OFTEN. Blood Alcohol Levels averaging 0.3 and above. That means over 30% of his freaking blood is alcohol. Okay, even imagining I could consistently keep my BAC in that range… I certainly could not drag my ass across town to (things he’s done): climb onto a roof, scream loudly for thirty minutes, lock pick a door, or break in to a car. Trust me, my friend… when the State says, “We can deal with all of this after you get a substance abuse evaluation” it is because you NEED TO GET A SUBSTANCE ABUSE EVALUATION! Damn!

Then… the difficulty starts. I need to start seriously considering what my “bottom line” is on some of these cases for next week. For example:
A 35 year old woman is a mother to a 1 year old daughter. During the first week of June, the daughter was found unsupervised playing in the highway! Officers arrive, charge Mom with a crime. Two weeks later, the daughter is found (again) unsupervised just wandering around the town. When officers pick her up and go visit the home, the front door is wide open and Mother says, “Oh, I just thought my other daughter took her shopping.” FINALLY the Officers thought, “OK, we need to charge this lady again and not give this daughter back to her!” So… two charges against the mother for failure to supervise this child… what should my bottom line be? Do I “make sure she does time” and risk that she’ll refuse to plea at all? Do I offer her probation to determine if her issues stem from active drug use or mental health issues? Where, if at all, do the lines intersect between Public Safety, Acceptable Plea Deal, Public Opinion, and Justice? So, I crafted a plea offer and sent it to Defense Counsel. One of… gosh… Twenty Five down.

Oh… and this happened yesterday but I had already published so I didn’t return to write about it. You all know Steve King by now. The polyp on Iowa Nice. The neon sign of Iowa’s Fourth District’s Racism and Insanity. Why? Because the majority of Iowa’s Forth District is (a) complacent to racism; (b) brutally pro-life. I’ve lived and worked in many places in the Fourth District and you see more “Right to Life” signs than “Rest Stop” or “Restaurant” signs. So… provided the man that said, “What’s wrong with White Nationalism?!” and “White People have made all the best contributions to the world!”… provided that he stays Pro-Life, Iowa keeps voting for him. WELL, we’ll see if we can’t get that changed in 2020… but I’m not sure if his most recent comments will hurt him or help him. Because he was discussing, recently, why he absolutely, loudly, passionately rejects ANY bill that allows for abortion exceptions “due to rape or incest.” To which he said:
“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?” Mr King said on Wednesday.
I hope I’m not alone in saying with both shock and outrage: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! I could write for hours trying to unpack that batshit crazy statement but I’ll try to be quick about it.
(1) Yes, you dumb fuck. Throughout the recorded history of the human population there have been many (thousand? million? billion?) that have been born due to sex that was NOT rape or incest. “Rape or incest” was not the only way sex happened until recently, you colossal moron.
(2) EVEN IF the large majority of the human population from 10,000 B.C.E. to 1950 C.E. was born due to “rape or incest” that does not make it okay in the modern era. We don’t write our laws based on “what was socially acceptable in the 12th Century” we write our laws based on the information, knowledge, and culture of the Modern Era. I can’t for the life of me see a Senator waxing poetically about the laws of 1042 as honest justification for a bill in 2019!
(3) NOW… let’s strip it down further. PRETEND 100% of the human population up until 1950 was born through “rape or incest”. PRETEND that the “course of human history” argument is logical and compelling. I know, lots of giant leaps of bullshit fantasy, but just go with it. You still have almost 70 years of medical knowledge and Victim Impact Research to sort through. You still know that when given a choice some women choose to give birth to their rapists child and some women choose not to give birth to their rapists child. We have research, study, and anecdotes that state that some women who have their rapists child regret it and this can sometimes result in abuse or neglect of the child. So, allowing the woman to choose what happens to her after being violated and having her very choice to have sex or not stripped from her… you’re going to argue against this woman being able to chart the course of her life after being raped?! Seriously?!? The hill you want to die on is: This woman was raped and our government is going to force this woman to go through with pregnancy… we won’t help her pay any hospital bills and if she needs time off from work to be pregnant, who gives a shit, we’re not going to help her… and if she tries to give the child up for adoption, we’ll allow the rapist to sue for custody… and if she doesn’t give the child up for adoption, we’ll still allow the rapist to sue for custody and parental visitation… but if she didn’t want to deal with any of that she shouldn’t have gotten raped in the first place!! THAT is the political stance you want to take here?! I don’t mean this against all pro-life people… but to the politician saying THAT is what he wants?? You. fucking. MONSTER! I don’t often mean things that are violent and cruel but quite sincerely… go fucking die in a fire you absolute scrotum!

Court should have been quick today. All hearings continued, thank you very much, enjoy your day. EXCEPT Domestic Violence Defendant who has violated the No Contact Order (now) 4 times in 3 weeks needs to be addressed. The Magistrate asks what the State requests. THE STATE REQUESTS A SUBSTANCE ABUSE EVALUATION AND/OR A SIGNIFICANTLY HIGH CASH BOND AS THIS IS A PATTERN WE NOW KNOW HE WILL CONTINUE! Magistrate decided on a $300 bond. I… guess… that’ll have to do? I don’t know. If I was allowed to make 1 phone call, I could have that bond paid in 25 seconds… maybe for this guy it will actually be enough to make him wait. Because the victim called us and is RIGHTLY tired of having to deal with this guy. AS SHE SHOULD BE. It really is, and always has been, like damn for me about No Contact Orders. No Contact Orders are pieces of paper with no meaning UNLESS THE JUSTICE SYSTEM TAKES THEM SERIOUSLY. And if a magistrate is going to say, “That sucks. Try again.” then that is a recipe that will get someone killed. Frustrating.

After that, though, I did get a little personal “positive” moment… or what passes for one. The City Attorney and I were discussing the Iowa Statute for Public Intoxication. In it, the law states both “a person shall not be intoxicated in a public place” AND it says “a person shall not simulate intoxication in a public place.” And I mentioned how that was an argument I had (and lost) when I worked in Tiny Town. Because our officer did not get a PBT of the individual so there was a motion to dismiss the case; but I was arguing that the behavior itself, if sufficiently convincing of intoxication, is enough to satisfy the statutory language. The City Attorney laughed and said, “That was my case. I was the one that beat you on that.” I looked at him confused and unable to place the face. I remember that day. I remember the judge, I remember the court room, but for the LIFE of me… I cannot remember what the defense attorney looked like! The City Attorney continued, “The attorney had died that Saturday and I came in to argue his motion on Monday.” Yeah. I remember that part. I remember that part vividly. DO NOT remember what the Defense Attorney at the hearing looked like! I was laughing too because… just goes to show you exactly how addle-brained that place was making me there towards the end!

Now to bring the focus back around to the news events impacting the Nation. Many of you may be following the trial of a man accused of assaulting a 13-year-old boy in Montana after the boy wouldn’t remove his hat during the National Anthem at a rodeo. The man has already admitted to his actions (essentially) according to an affidavit filed with the court but plead Not Guilty to the charge. His attorney is claiming that the Defendant has a traumatic brain injury, lacks impulse control, and believes that Trump’s words should be taken as “direct orders.” For those of you who don’t know… what is alleged is that this Adult Man saw a 13 Year Old Boy wearing a hat during the National Anthem. It is alleged that he told the boy to take off his hate. It is alleged that the boy said, “Fuck you.” Then it is alleged and admitted that the Defendant then grabbed the boy by his throat, lifted him into the air, before slamming the boy into the ground. The child had blood coming from his ears, a concussion and a fractured skull and was airlifted to the nearest hospital. What does this man have to say on the record about his actions? “‘I guess I messed up because he got hurt. But I’m a patriot! I was given an order from (the) commander in chief to make sure people are patriotic!” IF this man is convicted of the charge, the maximum sentence in Montana for the offense is 5 years. The Defendant is already on probation for assaulting 3 people with a firearm “during a traffic incident.” This man is clearly a danger to himself or others. He has been put on House Arrest pending trial. WHAT?! Assaults 3 people with a firearm in 2011, breaks a child in 2019 and gets to “stay home?!” PUT. THIS MAN. IN JAIL. Judges, sometimes, you know?!

I hold hope that our Country will be pulling itself from the brink of Trump’s bullshit soon. I do. But it is not hope based on the unified strength of a people or the moral uprightness of good men and women. No, it is the dismay of seeing what is to come. I’ll share the list as CNN compiled it: (The following is an excerpt fro Trump’s Global Turmoil Threatens His Re-Election Chances by Stephen Collinson.

President Donald Trump is showing what happens when the United States abandons its decades-long role as a guarantor of stability and instead chooses to act as an agent of global disruption.

A series of economic and political shocks are fomenting disorder across the planet and straining an international political system that Trump deliberately set out to undermine.
Stock markets are tumbling as warning signs flash of a global recession exacerbated by fears deepened by the US-China trade war.

Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan are locked in a dangerous new standoff.
The post-Cold War arms control regime is breaking down.
South Korea and Japan – the foundation of US influence in Asia – are reviving age-old animosity.
Concern about a Tiananmen Square-style crackdown by Beijing in Hong Kong is growing as Trump looks the other way.
Iran and the US just narrowly avoided spiraling into a disastrous war partly precipitated by the President’s maximum pressure campaign.
And the European Union – for years a crucial co-sponsor with the US of world stability – is seeing one of its three most influential members, Britain, heading for the exits, with enthusiastic encouragement from the White House.

Trump did not cause all these crises. But his actions or unwillingness to temper them did deepen the discord in many cases. And his refusal to play the kind of stabilizing leadership role expected of a US president is fomenting power vacuums and may convince key protagonists in each drama that they may not face the kinds of consequences they might normally expect from Washington.

The President’s worldview is rooted in his enduring belief that the world has been ripping America off for generations and that strength and unilateral US action are the only way to restore respect. He believes engagement abroad inevitably leads to costly commitments and bloody disasters like the Iraq War.

But Trump’s foreign policy achievements – apart from piling up glowing flattery by leaders intent on exploiting his craving for praise – are questionable at best. He can claim to have finished an operation started in the Obama administration to stamp out ISIS. And there is a recognition in Washington that China’s economic policies needed to be challenged. But the US and the rest of the world are learning the price of an improvisational approach shaped largely to satisfy Trump’s domestic political requirements that often seems strategized only in the time it takes to commit it to Twitter.

Wednesday’s grim economic news made the risks of such an approach clearer than ever, raising the possibility that Trump’s mission to turn the world upside down could blow up in his face.

That is our hope and how painful it is. We are hoping for disaster in hopes that those who support the Disaster President may finally wake up. But then… I’m not sure that hope is enough. For too many of these people, Trump merely needs to say “This is because Democrats got elected in 2018” and that will be enough for them. I think of it like a strange aberration of the Titanic. The captain is personally sinking the ship and telling the passengers to stay aboard. As many flee to the life boats, there are still hundreds in their cabins mocking the fleeing. “Look at those panicked liberals who don’t trust the captain. What imbeciles!” Meanwhile, even these people can see the water starting to rise in their cabins and the captain again says, “Please stay aboard, we aren’t sinking, we’re just having a minor leak in the water lines caused by those who fled so don’t leave and be like them.” And these people continue to stay in their cabins. As they begin to float and realize the doors won’t open… I wonder if they’ll still believe their captain who says, “Nothing is wrong.”

And perhaps, because so many of us in the United States are asking, “WHY is it still debatable whether Trump is a racist?!”

Why America still can’t face up to Trump’s racism

by Jess Row

(CNN) The Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville in 2017 was the largest eruption of white supremacist violence in the United States in a generation, if only the most visible of thousands of incidents that followed the 2016 election. August 11 and 12, 2019, mark the second anniversary of the violence, which claimed the life of the anti-racist protestor Heather Heyer and injured dozens of others. Two police officers died in a helicopter crash.

That weekend in August 2017 was also the moment when the so-called alt-right reached a temporary peak of popularity; in the wake of public outrage, lawsuits and even a few FBI investigations, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups fell into disarray, and the most vocal backer of the movement, Breitbart News, went into a swift decline. These groups have yet to stage a similar event—although the terror itself has continued, carried out primarily by radicalized individuals, like the gunmen in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting or the El Paso massacre last weekend.

The partial disintegration and discrediting of the alt-right was one positive outcome of Charlottesville; there have been others. The violence of August 2017 helped galvanize a broad anti-racist political coalition that has achieved some notable successes in the past two years, from the 2018 opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the first monument to lynching victims, in Alabama, to the election of politicians and district attorneys – like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner – who are committed to ending mass incarceration, to the first-ever Congressional hearings on reparations for slavery this past June.

The real news, unfortunately, is what hasn’t happened: nothing has stopped the march of Donald Trump’s white supremacist policies and rhetoric, which have become so folded into the reality of everyday waking life in the United States that Americans – even the most politically savvy or left-leaning – are constantly in danger of accepting them as our purported new normal. Trump’s latest attacks on four Congresswomen, and his repetition of age-old racist tropes about crime and decay in Baltimore, have only cemented a familiar pattern: commentators on the left and in the center describe his behavior, accurately, as racist, while Republicans, save a few outliers, act as if his statements never happened. Any observer of US politics can tell you why: Trump is speaking to his base – roughly a third of the American electorate – who respond favorably to racist incitement and the outrage it generates on the other side of the political spectrum.

As a white writer who writes extensively about race, I’ve been observing this situation closely since well before the 2016 election, and I’ve been dismayed by the unwillingness of so many of my white peers – people who are personally horrified by Trump and his success – to come to grips with what is happening in our country. Among white centrist Democrats and liberals there’s been a great deal of talk about the importance of civility and free expression, and an explosion of anxiety about how the Democratic Party has lost touch with a monolithic entity called “the white working class.” There’s been much less discussion in the national press about the underlying political transformation that made Trump’s election possible: the rapid growth in racial resentment and white nationalism as primary issues – even single issues – among conservative and right-leaning white Americans.

How did this happen? In time this may become one of those questions historians ponder for decades, like the exact origins of the Third Reich, or the improbable success of British imperialism in India. My own theory has to do with space and the American landscape: how the growth of suburbs, the ever-creeping sprawl outside American cities, has managed to keep white and nonwhite Americans physically and psychically apart, so that many white Americans my age (born in the 1970s) have grown up in what I call white dreamtime – never having to think seriously about racism or witness its effects. For conservative white Americans, this meant that President Obama’s election, and the widespread public dialogue about race that followed it, felt like an existential threat – preparing them to rally around Trump with the intensity that propelled him to an unlikely victory.

But this state of dreamy suspension – what James Baldwin once called the “sunlit playpen” of white American existence – also explains why so many of my white liberal compatriots are not able to grasp that racism has become a national emergency, undoing the social fabric and the democratic institutions of the United States. They may be seriously alarmed about Trump’s assault on civil rights, outraged about his immigration policies, and willing to call him racist, but they’re still hanging on to the belief that one day – in 2020, or at worst, 2024 – all this will be over, and the US will have come back to its senses. This is especially true among the kind of white people I spend most of my time with – professionals, academics, businesspeople – whose lives haven’t gotten measurably worse in the last two years, and in some cases, because of the booming stock market, have improved. If you travel in those circles, it’s still possible to believe life is good.

Many of Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, are committed to a radical transformation of American society and politics from which there is no going back. They either do not believe, or do not care, that the president was elected in part through the aid of Russian intelligence. They don’t mind that he regularly makes remarks about staying in office after his two terms are over. In short, these voters are willing to sacrifice (or at best, make light of) the foundations of American society (democracy, free expression, the rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, voting rights for all citizens) in order to keep a white supremacist in power. Ailish Hopper, a professor of peace studies at Goucher College, recently told me that the United States is devolving into a state of “national ethnic conflict,” which puts it on the same footing as 1990s Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland in the 1970s. In other words, we are in the early stages of either an authoritarian consolidation of power or a civil war, or both.

Many voters in Trump’s party – what the GOP has become – embrace these possibilities. Most Democrats and liberals I know don’t want to admit they exist. They’re not willing to accept the truth that is staring us all in the face: explicit white nationalist sentiments, like telling an African American to “go back where you came from,” actually encourages Trump supporters’ embrace of their man. Polls taken after those racist comments showed that approval for Trump among Republicans went up by as much as 5%.

Charlottesville should have been a moral turning point for the right to reject racist politics, but it wasn’t. The right has united around a white supremacist president, and the rest of us – the anti-racist majority – need to do everything in our power to fight back.