By Mickey McClain

We held off on publishing this blog.  The following Dueling Blogs were written ten days ago, but something told us to wait, and see what the week held … Pokemon-wise.  It’s not that we anticipated softening our tone, or rendering some kind of apologia or erratum—which, ironically, we did decide was necessary with our larger project, “The Little Book of Lynching, Part Two”, finished at around the same time.  No, the reason we held off publishing these blogs is that we wanted to see if our fears were affirmed.  And those fears were not so much about Pokemon Go, as such.  Rather, they were about the larger and more frightening trend of opposing parties “cross-talking.”  (That being the case, it is both ironic and eerie that that Pokemon craze really took off during the weeks of the Republican and Democratic Conventions.)  And, no less importantly, our fears were about the larger problem of people who don’t read books anymore not understanding the nuances of debate.

So, Pokemon Goers, here goes:  I have read dozens of articles this week, and my suspicions were confirmed: the majority of your detractors are not objecting to the game itself.  Hey, we get it.  A treasure hunt!  Time honored.  Not as elegant as geocaching, and more simplistic than Ingress, but fun. So far, so good.  Where can I sign up?   But the Pokemon Go defenders have largely failed to listen to the specific and reasonable complaints of the detractors, and as a result, you gamers with your heads stuck up your butts (I know, hard to do while your eyes are glued to the screen) have written these lengthy epistles about what wonderful fantasy and escapism Pokemon Go is, and how you have invented this groovy new-fangled thing called “exercise” and discovered this heretofore hidden treasure called “conversation”, neither one of which were happening while you were down deep in your dungeons playing Arkham Knight, Minecraft, Super Mario Brothers, or Grand Theft Auto.
Hurrah.  You are emerging from your dark basements, breathing the fresh air, and interacting with others of your species.  Walking and talking.  We applaud this, fellow Homo sapiens.  Just don’t forget your sunscreen.

That’s not what we “contrarians” and “curmudgeons” have a problem with.  What we have a problem with is a game that leads children to walk into intersections, and adults who are acting like children to walk off of cliffs.  And no, there are no hyperlinks here.  We are not going to insult you and suggest that you haven’t already read these stories.   So just to clarify, we aren’t discussing what is good about Pokemon Go here.  We are talking about real dangers and disruption, documented world-wide, in alarming numbers, and not one defender has properly addressed that.   IGNACIO ELENCHI.

Nothing in a week has changed this: Nintendo designed a game that is basically unsafe. 
Pokemon Go, as designed and played, is dangerous.  And no, I am not against augmented reality, nor do I think the Oculus Rift is of the Devil.  In fact, I can’t wait for virtual reality.  I can finally tour the Louvre.  See the Pyramids.  Trek to Victoria Falls.  But Pokemon Go is inherently dangerous, and the only way that statement is not true, is if just ONE of the following statements IS true:

a.)    Walking with your head down and your eyes glued to the screen is perfectly safe  OR

b.)    Most everybody who plays Pokemon plays it the way the lawyered-up Nintendo tutorial shows:

WITH THEIR ARM HELD OUT STRAIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM, AT A NINETY DEGREE ANGLE FROM THE BODY, HOLDING THEIR PHONE UPRIGHT, WHILE THEIR EYES ARE CAST AT THE HORIZON, TAKING IN BOTH THE SCREEN, AND EVERYTHING GOING ON AROUND THEM.   (This, by the way, is why parents and grandparents playing with their children are to be applauded:  they have seen the inherent risks, the potential dangers, and are preventing that full stop.  You all have effectively trumped my major argument against the game, you have my hearty congratulations, and you can stop reading now.)

There is no international data base collecting Pokemon-related pedestrian injuries, vehicular accidents, acts of trespassing, EMT and police response calls, or generally rude behavior, but the visual evidence and the reportage is in from all over the world.   Legions of people are behaving in ways that are sometimes rude, sometimes dangerous, often both.  And it doesn’t matter how many there are; once it has been confirmed that in cities and towns all over the world, police, businesses, private properties, sacred places, and oh, just places that are due more basic respect than groups tromping about playing Pokemon Go …they have all had their day-to-day functioning turned upside down by this game.  The very fact that people in such critical public service fields as policing and emergency medical services have had to plead for common sense, post new signs, write new rules, and most importantly, answer more emergency calls, ought to say something to Pokemon Go players.  

Something not good.   If it is negatively impacting every city and town where it is happening in tangible and measurable ways, I don’t need more statistics than that.  It is being played in a way that is fundamentally disruptive, and that is wrong.  And here is where the cross talk happens: your arguments about the benefits of the game are trumped by the problems it is causing.  Until this changes, it doesn’t matter if some good is coming out of the game.  A DICTO SIMPLICITER AD DICTUM SECUNDUM QUID.  As long as a lot of headaches and heartaches are perpetrated on unwilling bystanders—particularly our public servants—then that trumps any fun you might be having.  You don’t get to play games at society’s expense, and if you can’t accept that, then let me suggest now that you run, don’t walk, back to your basement dungeon.  

The arguments and epithets lodged against those of us who have a problem with the game are legion, and they are all flawed.  The defenders rigorously and meticulously avoid these concerns voiced by the detractors, almost as carefully as one might avoid mines in a minefield when playing Pokemon Go in Bosnia.  They say that we are blaming “all the problems of the world” on Pokemon.  No we aren’t.  Just the problems actually being caused by those who play the game stupidly.  That’s created plenty of problems, without blaming global warming or world hunger on those pesky virtual varmints.  They say that we don’t understand the importance of this, that Pokemon Go is just the beginning of virtual reality impinging on the real world.  Of course we get that, and that is precisely why we are so concerned about your behavior. 

And as for all the people who are claiming that Pokemon Go is exactly the kind of escapism that this world needs right now, I say, you are absolutely right.  As long as you are also spending some of your precious time trying to help the world.  And the people in it.  Maybe one of the reasons that the world is in this sorry state is because so many of us are so self-absorbed, and spend so much time in escapism, ever think about that?   It ends up being a circular argument.  CIRCULUS IN PROBANDO.

Only one in four people in the United States ever gets off their fat ass to go volunteer for a cause.  For example, one thin little article claimed that Pokemon Go was actually helping animals in shelters because as a Go stop, one shelter put up a sign saying you could walk a shelter dog.  Here’s a tip:  a lot more dogs would be helped if you would put down your phone and actually go volunteer at a shelter.  
You make fun of us for making fun of you, and then you ask “What would you prefer,  that we play Candy Crush, like you do?  Flame on Facebook, like you do?  Binge watch Netflix, like you do?”  No, what I believe your critics had in mind was read an actual book, with no faces in it.  Go to an actual gym, with no monsters in it.  And make your mark on the world without a screen standing in between you and the experience.

And as for that guy (James Roy) who made the bullet list, and then told you all in no uncertain terms to get OFF his law and to GET a life—here’s what.  Dozens of you congregate on his front lawn all the time, which is both illegal and rude—and even scary.  And your best plan is to mock him?  Kids, in twenty years, when you have a big-ass honkin’ oppressive mortgage, and you spend all of your spare time trying to fight back the insidious crab grass in your damn lawn that is constantly threatening to slither under your front door and choke your children as they sleep, and after you have spent a king’s ransom at Home Depot on petunias and mums and manure and insecticides and herbicides—after you have become a proud homeowner, you tell me how you feel about a bunch of extras from the Walking Dead marching zombielike onto your lawn, kicking over you garden gnomes and trampling a hundred weekends’ worth of work.  That old fart (just 38 yrs. old, BTW) with the smoldering list, he had a right to be upset.  Grow the hell up. 

And speaking of growing up, if the following paragraph doesn’t apply to you, then don’t take offense. How can you even disagree with the following point?  Understanding this distinction represents the nuancing skills of the adult mind.

There is behavior evidenced in the way some people play Pokemon that can be described as nothing less than Social Retardation.   A failure to have developed the skills necessary for navigating society that is nothing short of extreme.  Little armies of rude people taking over places that they clearly should not invade, speaks to the Social Retardation of all those who spend their lives in front of a screen.  Do the research, and you will find that police stations and sheriffs’ departments all over the world are having to ask people to stop playing at these locations.  And this includes instances of players barging into buildings where officers are working, and pounding on the doors of police stations at all hours, demanding entrance, so that they might catch that elusive Pokemon.  For God’s sake, it’s a police station.   And that is not as shocking as the fact that emergency rooms are having to tell Pokemon Go players not to flood in and start playing among and amidst the mangled and the dying.  The fact that numbers of people would even do this is, yes, nothing less than Socially Retarded. And let’s not get started on the allegedly adult couple who scaled the wall of a zoo at 1:30 in the morning to catch a Pokemon.  Even more bizarrely still, players are defending themselves using The First Amendment.   

Listen up, Pokemon players…..in cemeteries…9/11 memorials…the site of the Hiroshima bombing…Holocaust museums…if you need to scream 1st Amendment to justify your playing, then you really don’t get it.  Citizens of any higher civilization have always defined themselves not by what they have a right to do, but ultimately, what is right to do.  ARGUMENTUM AD POPULUM.  Translation: Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you should do it.  I got two words for you:  Fred Phelps.   Did you know that the courts ruled (even upon multiple appeals, to higher and higher courts) that it is quite legal for Fred Phelps and his creepy congregation to stand in Arlington National Cemetery and hold signs that say “God Hates Fags”, while chanting hateful things right next to parents burying their son who died fighting for this country?   For your freedom to play Pokemon?  (Try playing it in some Middle Eastern countries, if you don’t believe me.  They just issued a Fatwah.)  Do you really want to be in the same league as Fred Phelps?  And no, what you do not get to use as a defense is that Playing Pokemon isn’t the same as carrying a sign saying “God Hates Fags”.  Arlington National Cemetery is sacred to this country and its citizens; insults and disrespect can’t be measured, and if you don’t know how upsetting it is, to having somebody cackling and mincing around, catching a fake avatar on top of your loved one’s grave, well I guess you don’t know what it is like to have a father buried in Arlington.

 I do.  I  know. 

And while we are on the subject of hate, could you people please learn the distinction between someone who has “an issue” and this thing called “A HATER”.  ARGUMENTUM AD HOMINEM.   People who are critical of your YouTube featuring your cat in a funny burka with explosives tied to it (Muslim pussy) are “HATERS”.  People who take issue with the two dozen Selfies you have of yourself on Facebook featuring you wearing nothing but a bikini made out your parents old CDs are “HATERS”.   People who don’t think Ball Tapping is the coolest new game ever are “HATERS”.   People who think that you writing your college entrance essay on “why Jackass is your favorite movie” is a very poor choice … are “HATERS.”   

And if we are concerned about all the people surrounding us who are staring down at their phones as they cross Fifth Avenue—or just any old four lane highway, like the fifteen-year-old girl who got hit by a car in Pennsylvania—then surely we must be “HATERS”.   But here’s what.   You could make the argument that we are more concerned about you Pokemon players than you are about yourselves.  You could say that makes us rather parental in our attitude.  But not hateful.  There is something primally parental, in the very best way, about vast numbers of people who dread the idea of naïve children (who naturally think they are bulletproof) roaming into busy streets, dark alleys, dangerous waters, minefields, nuclear plants, or Fukushima death zones.  So please, if you wish to navigate life as successfully as you think you are navigating Pokemon Go, you should probably learn now that it is inaccurate, classless, warmongering, and just plain intellectually lazy to call everybody who has a critique of the way you do something “A HATER”.  By a goddam thesaurus, for chrissake.  And not that stupid college edition.  I am talking about the true Roget’s, with the alphabetized word index in the back, and the front table of contents arranged by the way the cosmos is organized.  Yeah.  Yeah.

In the meantime, I have invented a game of my own, whereby I will walk the  neighborhood with my eyeballs pointed straight ahead, and I will search for 151 Pokemon Go players who are easily caught with my lasso made of dental floss, because they are not paying attention to what they are doing or where they are going.  Gotta Catch ‘em All!  Then, I will take them all down to the gym in my basement, tie them up, and make them read the newspaper, eat their vegetables, play Scrabble, and compete with each other in Model U.N., until they finally “catch” a fucking clue.  And those who misbehave will be sentenced to playing Ms. Pacman for twelve solid hours, wearing adult diapers.

And just a quick word to those of you who keep going on about how now, because of Pokekmon Go, you are now out in the world, socializing.  I will grant you, maybe that’s a jot better than you spending your life in a dark room.  But please don’t confuse socializing over ________ (fill in blank of some stupid coveted monster; I am not going to Google it) with what it means to forge a true friendship.  Get back to me in a year, and tell me where you are on the relationship meter with these goofballs.  A friend is someone who is always there for you—or so some say.  Most of these people won’t be.  A friend is someone who listens to you, even after you have droned on about the same thing—the same break-up, the same job, the same fantasy, the same team, the same roommate, the same professor, the same aches and pains, the same hobby, the same boss, the same relationship, the same the same the same, but a true friend goes right on listening—or so some say.   Doubtful your new Pokemon pals will do that.   A friend is someone who drives you to the airport even if they don’t want to, picks you up drunk from a bar even if it’s two in the morning, and shows up with a pair of jumper cables or a lug wrench, even if it’s storming or there’s a blizzard outside—or so some say.   Think your Pokepartners will do that?  Highly unlikely.  And lastly, of course, there is my definition of friendship:  A friend is someone who will help you move.  Someone who loses an entire gorgeous weekend he could have spent at the beach, or kayaking, or sleeping in—or playing Pokemon Go—because he/she has agreed to help pack your stupid crap into boxes you scrounged from the back of the Piggly Wiggly and the ABC store, and all because you think that moving into your new stupid apartment across town is an integral part of your whole new life plan coming to fruition.  A friend lets you keep believing that.  And a friend helps you move there.   But your fleeting friendships from Pokemon Go?  Pokemon No. 

I have to say, at the end of the day, (or more specifically, at the end of twenty days) there has been a lot of name-calling, on both sides.  And little listening.  But I have really tried to listen.  So in return, I would ask you to listen to this.   In the unchanged blog below, I really made one major misstep.  Rather than rewrite it,  I will leave it stand and apologize for it.  I made a glib remark about all those who would end up dead or wounded at the hands of Pocket Monsters.  “Two words”, I said snarkily…“Darwin Awards.”  And while a little part of me still smiles at the meaning behind that, I forgot the bigger picture.  And in that moment, I was an assface.  Too often, I am an assface.   But the difference between me and some of these gamer assfaces is that I can admit I am an assface.

But back to the big picture.  Let me frame that for you now:  so far we have been relatively lucky.  That famous sideswiping of the cop car in Baltimore left nobody badly hurt.  And the fifteen-year-old girl who was injured ended up smiling for the World Wide Web cameras, and apparently will be just fine. But that can’t last.  It won’t last.  Statistics are the karma of mathematics.  My writing partner shamed me (not purposely) when he brought this reality home: for many years, he worked for the railroad … and lore has it, if you run a locomotive for long enough, you will take a life.  It’s not the engineer’s fault. It’s not the conductor’s fault.   It’s the fault of the fool wearing headphones.  The fool who got drunk. Or the person whose only foolish mistake was being a kid, and not realizing that his childish folly could get him killed.  My partner has never killed a human being while in a locomotive, but he has beaten himself up for every poor dog he ran down, guileless lover of dogs that he is.  And he has watched lives permanently damaged, if not completely destroyed, because they did take a human life.   Breaking a train with a hundred cars of grain or fuel is a cumbersome, dangerous, and often deadly proposition, even when that train is crawling along.  The people running the trains are kind of depending on the good sense of the average person not to amble down railroad tracks.  My partner has talked to men who have to spend the rest of their lives knowing that they killed another human being, because that human being had too many cocktails.  Or took a stupid dare.  Or because he had a bad day, a series of bad days, and decided that this was a good day to die.  And of course, there is the man who is haunted by knowing that his oncoming locomotive was the last thing those two little kids, trapped in the back of the car stuck on the tracks, saw—right before he ran them down.  And all because some douchebag parent though they could beat the signal.   

Now, step back.  Look around at the people playing Pokemon Go.   Watch as they stare at their screens. Watch how they walk.   Look where they walk.   Look at all the innocent people behind their steering wheels, innocently driving their cars.  And now, think of that poor railroad guy, seeing the faces of those two little boys, every night before he goes to sleep … and the look of horror in their eyes. 

Now tell me there are no problems with this game.   Explain it so I understand. 

​This is not a rhetorical question.   I am waiting.

By Mickey McClain

                        AN OPEN LETTER TO BLOGGER DUNCAN LINDSAY, OF METRO.CO.UK:

RE:  POKEMON GO, REAL MONSTERS, and keep your gamers the hell away from all things Holocaust.

I woke up Sunday morning and checked the breaking news, only to read some blogger off in Newcastle on Tyne, U.K., calling me a “judgmental moron”.  What?  Excuse me?   He did this because I am one of the many people who has become immediately and passionately critical of Pokemon Go.

In this little epistle, I will take apart the blog points of Mr. Duncan Lindsay—a man whose real job, as he proclaims on his Facebook hagiography, is to render critical analyses of soap operas.  I think that explains a lot.  

Here is the article, for those who—oh screw it; I don’t know who would want to read it.  Unless, of course, as a grim harbinger of the future.  http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/17/why-those-looking-down-on-pokemon-go-players-are-the-ones-who-need-to-get-a-life-6011601/    (Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Two minutes and twenty seconds of your life that you will never get back.) 

Lindsay, you call people who are troubled by Pokemon Go (which has now caused car crashes, cliff accidents, robberies at gunpoint, and shootings) “judgmental morons.”   Quick rhetorical tip for you, Lindsay.  Unless you have a damned good argument to follow that up—which you don’t—calling someone a judgmental moron for having an opinion kind of makes you a judgmental moron. No wait.  It doesn’t “kind of” do that.  It does precisely that.  You, Lindsay, are a judgmental moron.  
The bald fact is this:  Pokemon Go players, in massive numbers, are barging, oblivious, into places where people worship their God, mourn their dead, and live their private lives.   This is, folks--and you will hear this again, in this blog--STUPID, RUDE, and DANGEROUS.   And that’s not just my opinion.   That is being proven out by incidents … and by … how to phrase this delicately, for your particular ears, Little Lindsay--that is REALITY.    And to your possible parry that I am cherry picking incidents—the fact that you CANNOT play the game WITHOUT ignoring the real world around you, but must INSTEAD keep your eyes glued to a screen, absolutely guarantees that we will see much more of this.   What would have happened, I found myself wondering, if that infernal global GPS system had placed a highly desirable Pokemon at the Bosphorus Bridge?  Would PokeZombs just go trundling onto the bridge, not noticing that pesky military coup, or that helicopter firing down on innocent civilians?  

Reality, kids? 

Lindsay, your arguments are all straw men—a typical symptom of writers ensnared in eternal adolescence because they don’t bother to read actual books.  Writers who don’t reason, but tweet.   Who think emojis trump the OED.    But back to the game:  You defend Pokemon Go with a brief but broad swath talking about how gaming helps “problem solving skills, decrease anxiety and develop motor skills.”  You can say the same thing about Lincoln Logs.    Of course all those benefits are possible, if gaming is enjoyed in moderation, like good wine and soft porn.   Lindsay, nobody has a problem with that kind of gaming.  It’s when it turns to addiction, and gamers have to wear adult diapers so they won’t have to leave the game, and eventually they pass out from dehydration.  And sometimes die.   Gaming is an addiction for many people today, and that is what we judgmental morons are worried about.  Addiction is worrisome.  That doesn’t make the worriers morons.   Nobody ever died from playing a board game. 

You compare Pokemon socializing to people holding “cans of beer” at parties.   Here’s a wee difference. The people holding cans of beer are usually making eye contact.  Looking at each other, and talking.   As YouTube after YouTube reveals, Pokemon Go players spend virtually (hah, joke) all of their time staring at the screen, ignoring important features of the landscape like other humans, approaching buses, and large memorials to the dead.   This is not cool.  Nobody has a Pabst while they are at mass, I’ve never seen anybody playing whist beneath Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and you don’t see a lot of Selfies being snapped at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.  It is almost as though there is something more important going on in that location than “The Self”.

Yes, Little Lindsay, to return to your shallow arguments, people may criticize that Pokemon is not real, but as is so typical of those who do not read much or interact with the living on a regular basis, you have missed the nuance of their point.   Nobody has a problem with fantasy.  Ever since the world stood up to applaud and adore a little girl following a white rabbit down a dark hole, in a book written by a grown up man for a very fetching little girl—long before that, and ever since—the world has adored a good fantasy, escapism.   But what we do not attempt to escape—when relishing that fantasy in the privacy of our homes, or the safety of a darkened theater—are core survival tactics like rules of the road, traffic signals, large warning signs, and basic human courtesy. 

Lindsay, you compare Pokemon to “Game of Thrones”, but people don’t climb over walls plastered with clear warnings and fall down cliffs to get to their TV remote.  And for all the future tragedies that are impending, I have just two words for the victims:  Darwin Awards. 

Little Lindsay, since apparently you think that the way to show you really feel something strongly is by using capital letters—as opposed to, oh, using a more scintillating vocabulary, let me make clear to you the real problem with Pokemon Go.  IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE  (again, small joke, for those engaged in the debate about the literal meaning of words, and mourning  the demise of the dignity of the word “literal”), AGAIN,  IT IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAY THE GAME WITHOUT SPENDING VIRTUALLY ALL OF YOUR TIME STARING AT A SCREEN.  THIS IS STUPID, RUDE, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, DANGEROUS.  Little Lindsay, I am so open minded about this whole thing (my writing partner is teaching me Cid Meyer’s “Civilization” as we speak), that I would be just fine with Pokemon Go and its playground of augmented reality, if it were set up more like a traditional scavenger hunt, where players actually did commune with each other, put their heads together to figure out clues, and mind the WALK/DON’T walk signs.  

And Lindsay, you threaten that Pokemon Goers who are criticized may look through my social media and peruse the kind of commentary I wield at the world.  Please do.  I/We are moviesforyourmind.net.  And we write about the real world, which is falling apart because wanna--be journalists like yourself who produce little polished turds called “blogs” are drowning in a pond of Narcissism, while the real world screams for your real help and attention. 

Little Lindsay, in a world where people are discovering real wonders, taking on the real monsters, creating great art, and spending their time helping others, your little Pokemon Go-Obsessive lives will never be taken seriously.  As I am one of the rabid critics of Pokemon Go, I am apparently one of the people whom you feel needs to get a life.  Hmm.  Let’s see.  I have published eight books, publish a longform blog, I own a miniature museum (involving yes, a lot of fantasy and escapism), I have taught at three universities, I am in the American Forensics Association Hall of Fame, I have worked extensively with animal rescues and assorted political campaigns, and, most importantly for our purposes, I have traveled the world while actually looking at the things in it.  Specifically, most of the states in these United States.   Also, most of the countries in the E. U., having developed a particular fondness for the cities of London, Bath, Paris, Hon Fleur (even though I got food poisoning there, admittedly the one bad thing that can’t happen to you while playing Pokemon GO), Rome, Pisa, Venice, and Naples, Malaga, and Morocco.   I have also traversed Teheran, Chiraz, Persepolis, the jungles of Panama, the mountains of Peru, the wilds of Mexico and Ecuador—and you know what, Li’l Linds, I never saw one Pokemon.  And I had a marvelous time.  You know what I DID see, Little Lindsay?   I saw Chartres Cathedral, our nation’s capital, The David, my first Van Gogh, Machu Picchu, the crown jewels of England, the Eiffel Tower, the Panama Canal—and oh yes, the monument to the war dead at Dachau.  I didn’t even take a camera, much less a Pokemon tracking device.

Because I understand that there are already some very moving photographs of Dachau available to me. Along with some very interesting stories about the place and the people who lived there.  Correction. Were murdered there.   Don’t ask me to articulate it, but that just felt, oh, more important than stalking for Pokemons around the crematoria.

You talk about the up swell of naysayers to be as predictable as the sun rising in the east.  Lindsay, what’s the last time you or your ilk even WATCHED a sunrise? That, my friend, is the whole fucking point. 

How dare you tell me to get a life, you little Pokemon Fairy Fart.  YOU get a life, but before you can do so, you will have to get some manners.   Perhaps you and your father should go looking for Pokemon in the woodshed.

Blog is still in edit.  Watch this space.

By Meg Langford                                                             
 
(Dear Reader; As we were writing these closing thoughts and feelings, about the book, it would seem that somewhere in Texas, the assassination of a number of Dallas Police Officers was being carefully planned.  We can only reiterate the sentiments articulated in “Ashley’s Dove’s”, a tribute to a fallen officer written to honor the sacrifice of Officer Ashley Guindon.  It resides on our website, moviesforyourmind.net.  The sheer magnitude of people that this sniper’s act of carnage will impact, and the heartbreak that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives, is simply beyond words.   Beyond imagining.  All that said, the events that took place in Dallas on July 7th, 2016, seem to live in some strange synchronicity with the epilogue to this book.  We mourn with a stunned nation.  Our hearts are broken.)
 
 
It has been a long journey, starting from the century-old lynching deaths of Henry Smith and Jesse Washington and Mary Turner, all carried out in front of a thrill seeking, bloodthirsty mob.  A long journey to the evil and ugly forum comments and social media rants of today, where it feels eerily as though many with a mob mentality would happily watch a modern lynching, if such atrocities were still around—failing that, they will spew their bile onto the world wide web.  It has been a morbid and dreary series of sad stories, as we have gone from one tragic killing to another, starting in “The Little Book of Lynching, Part One” to “The Little Book of Lynching, Part Two.” 

And for what it is worth, I think you can make a valid argument that this second book could be more aptly named, “An Examination of Police Brutality in America” or “Excessive Force:  Deadly Epidemic or Necessary Evil?”—or some other annoyingly academic sounding moniker.

But we are sticking with “The Little Book of Lynching, Part Two”.  Why?  Because there is a common thread here:  that vengeance, masking itself as justice, has been running rampant in this country since we became a country—long before, in fact--and all too often, law enforcement and some perversion of the judicial system is either involved, or hovering on the fringes of tragedy, but choosing to look the other way.  Just as a bunch of thugs associated with local law enforcement orchestrated the killing of three civil rights workers back in the turbulent 1960’s, so now we have police officers who choose to ignore the most important parts of their training, and escalate situations until someone is needlessly shot, or, just as chillingly, Tased to death.   And just as there was precious little effort put towards bringing justice to Emmett Till’s killers, or the mob that lynched Mary Turner, so current law enforcement officers who should know better choose to be unconscionably casual when it comes to investigating the homicide of an innocent human being.  The 2014 death of young Lennon Lacy, of Bladenboro, North Carolina, who was found hanging from a swing in an all-white trailer park in a way that the medical examiner said he could not possibly have engineered himself, was a joke to local cops: they took the coroner’s camera when he tried to document the crime scene, and threatened him with the direst of consequences if he even took one picture for the evidence files.

So, to quote Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”  Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.   Except for the cellphone and its ability to record events.  Old Jean Baptist may have invented the dahlia and been ahead of his time in his campaign to abolish capital punishment, but he didn’t see smart phones in the future.

So, for all of these reasons, this book remains stubbornly titled, “The Little Book of Lynching”, with the most compelling reason of all remaining as sadly true as it was a few hundred pages ago:  There are only a couple of dozen names of the dead here.  There should be thousands.

Until the day I die, I will remember coming across one long list of lynching victims, one of which was only known as “JOHN THE SLAVE.”   Here was a human being who lived, laughed, loved, but more than anything else, he suffered.  He may have been dragged from his home across an ocean to a strange and frightening place.  He probably had a wife and children.   He no doubt had hopes and dreams and prayers, which pushed hopelessly against a wall of greed and cruelty that he just could not overcome.  And that is all that will ever be known of his life.  He was John.  And he had been purchased by another human being.

So yes.  This is “The Little Book of Lynching.”
 
 
AN OPEN LETTER TO POLICE OFFICERS EVERYWHERE
 
Stop it.  Just stop it.

Stop saying that YOU “FEARED FOR YOUR LIFE”, when you were clearly in no danger.  And no, I am not vilifying officers for using that defense when they really did have reason to fear for their lives.  That is precisely why examples of officers who employed deadly force when clearly threatened have not been included in this book.

I am talking about cops who use “I feared for my life” as an excuse to engage in the worst kind of brutality:

--Officer Michael Slager claimed he feared for his life when he shot Walter Scott, and will surely testify that there was a small portion of the interaction that we did not see: the fight which took place after the first dash cam footage, and before the covertly documented murder in which Slager shot eight times at a fleeing Walter Scott.  Only one problem with that: virtually everything in Michael Slager’s statement is a lie, so why should we believe his excuse?  He did the unthinkable when he planted a Taser at Scott’s body, and neither he nor his fellow officers attempted CPR, as they claimed they did.  Of course, Officer Slager could not possibly have known when he spewed his pack of lies called an “Officer Statement” that the truth was being covertly taped by a terrified bystander—imagine what might have happened if Slager had looked over and realized that a stranger was recording the entire incident?  Lastly, regarding Slager’s aiming at a fleeing man and firing eight times, nothing that had happened justifies shooting into a crowded neighborhood, especially when three of your bullets have missed their intended target and flown off into suburbia.

​--“I feared for my life?"  I don’t believe that Tamir Rice’s killers feared for their lives, because if you really did fear for your life, driving up to within two feet of a maniac wielding a gun is the last thing a couple of cops would do.  They would instead barricade themselves behind safe cover and start negotiating.  Or shooting.   But never, never if they truly feared for their lives from a maniac wielding a rifle would they speed right up to his line of fire.

--The man who gunned down Bernard Bailey can’t have feared for his life.  Bernard Bailey was a well-known fixture in the teeny tiny town of Eutawville, population 300, where Bernard, fifty years old and patriarch to a large and loving family, served the state as a prison guard for twenty years and attended the local church every Sunday.  He just stopped by the courthouse to pay his daughter’s broken taillight ticket.  Five minutes later, he would be dead.   Because a weasely little man named Chief Richard Combs (who had just been fired from his last policing job, by the way), would later claim that he “feared for his life.”

Oh, and here’s another thing that the citizenry would like to see changed immediately:
Stop being so casual about investigating the deaths of young black men.  As in the case of Keith Warren.  Where officers waited five hours before notifying his parents after they found him hanging from a tree.  And to make matters worse, they sent his body for embalming before the family could say goodbye, choose a funeral home, and most importantly, before an autopsy could be conducted.   Officers, stop being so casual about the death of young black men like Feraris Golden, where you literally drove over the crime scene, then changed the official description of the noose from “a blue work shirt” to “a green sheet.”  Officers, stop being so casual about the death of young black men, like in the case of Kendrick Johnson, where you stupidly and inexcusably waited for a week to take possession of the crucial security footage, and months … months …before you interviewed the witnesses.  And when CIA consultants noted strange evidence of footage missing from all relevant cameras, your response was to claim that the investigation was closed, and then you literally slammed the door.

And Officers, stop this immediately:  stop ignoring the procedures in which you have been so carefully trained, at my expense, at the taxpayer’s expense, just because you have some kind of Rambo fixation.  And stop shooting so quickly, so cavalierly, that under questioning, when seeing the actual video actions of your evidence, you are forced to say “We may have told him to drop the gun while we were firing.”  As was the case with the officers who gunned down Michael Crawford III, for casually carrying a weapon in public, in an open carry state—the definition of which meaning that you can casually carry weapons in public.   But, maybe not if you are black.

Oh, and while this may not seem as earthshaking as the other items on my list, stop killing dogs.  Stop murdering people’s pets.  Like poor Geist, of Utah.  Dozens of police were combing the neighborhood searching for a missing toddler that ended up being right where he belonged, in his own home, sleeping.  But in the process of searching the area, cops entered several city blocks' worth of backyards, calling for the child. When two-year old puppy Geist approach a cop who stepped into Geist’s backyard, the cop just shot him. And in Oklahoma:  When a cop was giving his brother in law a ride-a-long, they got lost and stopped at a family home to ask directions.  When the family dog, Bruiser, came out wagging its tail and barking, they shot it dead.  And in Baltimore:  When Nala, a domesticated sharp Pei with a nametag, was grabbed by Officer Jeffrey Bolger, his best plan was to slit her throat.  It didn’t help that witnesses nearby heard the officer say “I’m going to gut this fucking thing.”  And here’s something else, with the dog killing--this “wrong address” business is getting old.  Your excuse often sounds something like this: you showed up at the wrong address, and then felt threatened by this innocent family’s pet, so you shot it.  FIRSTLY, when a person makes a complaint on a neighbor, such as domestic violence, you should start out with the assumption that you might have the wrong address, since the person calling in the complaint could very well have gotten the address wrong.  So when you show up at a place that you think might be the location, nobody at the house, including the dog, deserves to be treated badly from the get-go.  It is one thing to take care for your own safety as an officer, it is quite another to assume when you knock on the door that whoever is on the other side of the door is guilty of something.  Including the family dog.  Secondly, carry a little seven dollar bottle of mace.  That way, if the family dog does act in an aggressively protective way, the beloved family pet experiences a few moments of pain, instead of eternal death.   Thirdly, if you can’t handle most of these dogs without putting a bullet through their brain, you are pussies.  Some police in Ohio felt so terrified of the family dog that they first Tased poor Jack, then shot him three times.  The family came home, slipped in the dog’s blood on their front porch, and found his lifeless corpse along with a note to call the police.  What you should know about Jack is that he was a five pound Chihuahua.  And yes, I called them pussies.  What other word could possibly apply in examples like these?  There are dozens of such stories on the internet.  It is heartbreaking.

And oh, Officers?   since you are so hung up on obedience to the law, how about respecting people’s First Amendment rights to say what they want, even if it offends you.  So when an all-around great guy like Cleveland Browns Receiver Andrew Hawkins wears a shirt pleading for “JUSTICE FOR TAMIR RICE, JUSTICE FOR JOHN CRAWFORD”, how about if the local Union beefhead not retort with some twaddle about how the entire Browns team owes the local cops an apology, just because Hawkins wants justice?  How can anybody have read the full chapter on Tamir Rice in this book and not see what a gross miscarriage a justice was perpetrated from the moment Loehmann was hired, till the last hurrah, when the prosecutor chose to parade a mentally unstable witness in front of the grand jury.

And here’s another thing about the First Amendment: the people of this country have a right to peaceful protest.  Yes, matters do get out of control, and when they do, arrests should be made.  But they only tend to get out of control when the powers-that-be ignore peaceful protests and reasonable requests, as authorities did in Baltimore for an entire week, after Freddie Grey died of his injuries at the hands of cops who again, ignored procedures.  Dear police:  you don’t get to celebrate the American Revolution, and all the protests and upheaval our Founding Fathers engaged in, and then refer to every gathering of dark skinned people as “uppity thugs”.  Or worse.   And when it comes to how you deal with peaceful protests, how about NOT acting like cop Ray Albers who, for no reason, began pointing his high powered rifle at protestors who, it can clearly be seen in the video, are just milling around.  That didn’t stop this cop from raising his assault rifle and pointing it at people who were doing nothing wrong, just days after Darren Wilson had shot Michael Brown.  Albers, when respectfully asked to identify himself, gave his name and badge numbers as “Officer Go Fuck Yourself.”  And they wonder why we have trouble respecting them? 
 
And here’s something else about which we feel very, very strongly:
 
STOP TAZING CHILDREN.  It can kill them, and you know it.  In fact, stop Tazing anybody unnecessarily--for example, when they are already handcuffed and subdued.   And stop Tazing them many, many times over the prescribed limit.  Because if you do, as “Officer” Scott Nugent Tased Baron “Scooter” Pikes nine times in fourteen minutes (that’s 9 X 50,000 volts, interrupting the heart’s electrical activity), you might kill someone, as Nugent killed Pike.  Pike was acquitted though, of course, even though there is irrefutable evidence that he violated a number of rules and procedures.  

Or, if you are an officer who is “Tase-Crazy”, you might cause brain damage to an innocent young boy, as did Independence, Missouri Officer Timothy Runnel when he made a conscious choice to torture seventeen year old Bryce Masters, not once, but four times, the Tazer pressed cloth against Bryce’s chest, effectively destroying the boy’s mental health, along with his entire future. “Officer” Runnels, you Tased the boy for 23 seconds, then lifted him up several feet and dropped his face and skull hard, on the concrete sidewalk.  You left him medically dead for eight minutes, and caused permanent brain damage.  This is not the action of a policeman.  This is the behavior of a sadistic psychopath.  And no, like millions of other Americans, I don’t  believe that you are sorry.  Why?  Because a person capable of that kind of torture is not capable of remorse.  That is, in essence, the definition of a psychopath. Oh, and to the Independence, Missouri Police Department.  You had a chance to condemn this torture, caught on video for the world to see, but instead, your first words about the incident were flat out lies.  So I guess that makes the officials in charge and the spokesholes at the Inde-Mo police departments a bunch of dirt bags as well.
 
Oh, and Officers, STOP RAPING.  STOP SODOMIZING.  Stop sexually assaulting trusting citizens, and prisoners who are under your watch.  And yes, although we touched on those who use the power of the badge to prey on innocent victims for their sexual gratification in an earlier chapter, it is worth noting a few more, if for no other reason, because these crimes are almost impossible to believe. 
 
A partial list of the damned:
 
Foster “Pete” Bowen, Huntington West Virginia Police Captain, sentenced to between three and six centuries in prison for the known rape of seven boys, although according to evidence that came out in his trial, to quote the judge, “You may have committed more acts of child rape and abuse than any person in the history of West Virginia, sir,” Judge Farrell said. "In fact, you may have committed more crimes against persons than anybody in the history of West Virginia."
 
Christopher Bowersox, a Bakersfield police officer sentenced for possessing child pornography, according to federal prosecutors. The FBI case against him alleged he had child pornography images on his home computer and took part in online chats in which he discussed raping, mutilating and killing, and eating young boys and infants.  He got just 48 months.
 
Columbia County Oregon Sheriff’s Deputy John Lawrence Hinckle.  Initially indicted on more than thirty counts, he was eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree rape, two counts of first-degree sodomy, one count of first-degree sex abuse and one count of incest.  75 months.  The victim was his daughter.  He molested her from the time she was ten, to the time she was seventeen. Perhaps he was losing interest as she got older.
 
Once head of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in South Florida, Special Agent Anthony Mangione led a double life, fighting child pornographers even as he was building his own special collection of brutal child porn, some of the victims as young as three.  He was busted when he stupidly emailed some to a school bus driver (chilling thought, that), and feds linked the emails back to Mangione.  Who only got six years for his evil.
 
 “Officer” Gary Dale Baker, who raped a seventy five year old woman who had trouble communicating to her family what had happened because of a stroke which had severely debilitated her speech.  And he didn’t just do it once.  He did it four times, the first time while she was actually having the stroke—and the fourth time under the watchful eye of a hidden camera her family had installed.  His charged included not only rape but also sexual battery, forced oral copulation, and robbery.
 
Wichita Kansas Police Officer Greg T. Nicks was given four life sentences for sexually abusing a fifteen month old, and sending the pictures to his girlfriend, who, horrifically enough, did not turn him in.  She is in jail on similar charges.
 
Chief Deputy of the Pike County Sheriff’s Office Clyde Franklin Sanders Jr., pleaded no contest to raping a three year old.  Twice.  She was his daughter.
 
Boyce Officer Stephen Young purposely engineered positions that would put him in close proximity with children, where he spent years and years sexually abusing them. Officials investigating the case believe that he raped about twenty toddlers, five of them being mere infants.
 
Benton County, Washington Deputy Sheriff Kenneth John Freeman enjoyed the dubious distinction of  being the most wanted man on the U.S. Marshall’s list. He was finally found in China, and brought home to face trial for raping his daughter from the age of ten to the age of fifteen. Deputy Sheriff Freeman (ironic name) got fifty years, and also has a second dubious distinction:  the film he uploaded to the internet, of him raping his own daughter, is the most downloaded and viewed piece of child pornography every tracked.
 
This is just a partial list of the long, long scroll of the damned.

And let me make this crystal clear:  I do not list this long litany of crimes and horrors so that we can somehow learn to hate and distrust the police even more.  I said that I believe the vast majority of officers to be good, brave, and honest, and I believe that those officers are smart, ethical, and noble enough to finally admit that there are cops worthy of condemnation.
 
                                                            ********* 
 
And most importantly, officers, if the above manifesto does not apply to you, then don’t get angry at an increasingly outraged populus; don’t claim you have the Blue Flu and fail to show up, to do your duty.  That isn’t showing fellow officers loyalty.  That is aligning yourselves with cops who have turned criminal.  And to stand by them would betray everything you claim to believe.  Everything you have sworn to uphold. 

It’s very simple, officers:  if none of these grim and ghastly charges apply to you, then don’t take it personally.  What you should take personally is how seriously officers who violate procedures, engage in police brutality, and commit heinous crimes threaten to put you in a bad light, and make your job infinitely more dangerous.  Direct your rage and righteous indignation where it belongs—at them, not at the concerned citizen.

And finally, officers, for God’s sake, in the name of all that is sacred, stand up loud and proud, and repudiate these actions on the part of rogue officers.  Distance yourself; call out and criticize and condemn these men:  officers who use excessive force are breaking the law just as much as the criminals you arrest, and officers who body slam, who punch and pummel the handcuffed suspect, officers who torture through Tazing, and who rape, are sadists who are not worthy of wearing the uniform.

Think about it.

We expect conservatives and right-to-lifers to clearly repudiate people who bomb abortion clinics.

We expect people who believe in free speech to draw the line at the likes of Fred Phelps, especially if his ilk shows up at a soldier’s funeral.

We expect the Muslim community to stand up and loudly repudiate people who commit violence in the name of Islam.

So here’s the thing, officers--you don’t get a pass. 

The thin Blue line needs to be erased now, and the tall Blue wall needs to come down today, with all the same drama and outrageous indignation that brought down the Berlin Wall.

Because to all of the hundreds of thousands of good, brave, honest cops out there—if you don’t name these vile violations of proper procedure and egregious engagements in police brutality for what they are …acts of war, committed by a mercenary band of Storm Troopers--then mark my words:

It sure as hell feels like you have declared war on us, the citizens of these United States..

And boys in blue—you just know that is not going to end happily.

Declaring war on the citizens of these United States?   That has never gone well for anybody. 
 
 
(During the time that we were putting together this final epilogue to the book, two more black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, were killed at the hands of white police officers.  Whether or not those two men needed to be shot will no doubt be at the center of heated debate and intense investigation for months, perhaps years.  We had to end the book at some point, and commit these stories to history, since clearly there is no natural end point to the project.   It seems as though the killings will never end.)