Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going and what do you wish?” the old moon asked the three.
“We’ve come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea.
Nets of silver and gold have we,” said Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod.

I first encountered this charming nursery rhyme in an old blue book my father’s parents bought for him shortly after the First World War.  It came back to me in a Sunday school class a couple of days ago. 

Before class, everyone wanted to talk about Sarah Palin’s winking (or “winkin'” as Sarah would say) during her debate with Joe Biden.  It struck me that Sarah was associated with both winkin’ and blinkin’: recall her boast to Charlie Gibson that she hadn’t blinked when John McCain asked her to be his VP and she wouldn’t blink in the face of terrorists. 

The Sunday school class began.  “Where is your brother?” God asks Cain.

“Am I my brother’s keeper?” the murderer replies. 

“Don’t mess with me,” God barks back.  “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”

One would think (this being the Old Testament and all) that fire and brimstone would make short work of the world’s first murderer.  But Bible stories rarely unfold the way we suppose they should.  Cain sidesteps a death sentence; instead he is banished from Paradise as “a fugitive and a wanderer upon the earth.”

Cain says the punishment is too severe. “Whoever finds me will slay me,” he laments.

And so, we read, “The LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him.”

The story ends with Cain wandering far from the presence of the LORD “in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”

On cue, the internal soundtrack playing in the back of my head shifted to the pop version of the old pop song: “Winkin and Blinkin and Nod one night, sailed off in a wooden shoe . . .”

The subconscious mind makes odd and arbitraryt associations.  Was there any relation between the winkin’ blinkin’ Ms. Palin and the land of Nod?

Nod, as John Steinbeck well understood, is the non-Eden, the anti-Paradise; a place defined by the absence of God.  In Nod, folks would just as soon kill as stranger as look at him.  Cain is in danger in Nod because he is an exile from paradise who doesn’t talk, walk or think like the natives.

As I write, three of the four most viewed Washington Post articles are about Sarah Palin . . . all are negative.  With the economy in free fall, the pundits point out, the Alaskan Governor is trying to change the subject by hanging a 60s radical and a radical preacher around the neck of Barack Obama. 

Richard Cohen wonders aloud why his colleagues in Punditland are so taken with John McCain’s Pitbull?  “In effect,” he writes, “columnists, bloggers, talk-show hosts and digital lamplighters have adopted the ethic of the political consultant: what works, works. It did not matter what Palin said. It only mattered how she said it.”

Dana Milbank chronicles the verbal misteps Palin has committed on the campaign trail, pointing with concern to the angry crowds who cheer her every word.  The media are being jeered.  Folks advocate the murder of a Democratic presidential candidate who “palls around” with domestic terrorists, hates the troops and lies about cutting taxes.

Finally, Eugene Robinson decries the politics of distraction.  “We also know that no matter how skeptical we are when we write about bogus allegations, writing about them at all gives them wider circulation. So when Palin questions Obama’s love of country because Obama knows somebody who did something unpatriotic when Obama was 8, our free-market ethos makes us rush to cover her every ridiculous word. We also find ways to convey that this is pure mudslinging and nothing but a cynical campaign tactic, but that doesn’t matter to the McCain campaign. What matters is that we’re writing and talking about this extraneous stuff — and not about the issues that polls say voters really care about.”

As Robinson surely realizes, his column is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon he describes.  As our economic Rome burns, Robinson and his friends are fiddling around with Sarah.

Is Sarah Palin really as dangerous as the chattering classes would have us believe?  Does she come to us from an Alaskan Eden, or is her true dwelling east of Eden?

The media, unsurprisingly, is divided on the question.  Few show much interest in Palin’s ideas.  She is the woman who drops a wink, refuses to blink, drops her g’s, talks about killing moose and defending Joe Sixpack and lipstick and high heels, and sounds more like a PTA president than a serious politician.  She’s “got it”, she’s entertaining and she knows how to wow a crowd.  In Rockstar America, who could ask for anything more?

I agree that Sarah’s “got it”, but I am far more interested in her ideas.  I’m not talking so much about her take on the great questions of the day.  She seems on solid ground discussing Alaskan oil policy; otherwise she’s utterly at sea.  As I watched the Katie Couric interviews my heart went out to a woman who had been thrown into deep water without a single swimming lesson.

But Sarah Palin has lots of ideas.  She has Noddian ideas.  She draws a line between us and them, prounouncing a benediction on the us people and releasing the hounds on “them”. 

Here’s Sarah Palin on John McCain’s African American opponent: “This is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.  I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”

Yesterday, Palin was introduced at a Florida rally by a burly white Sheriff who saluted the crowd while emphasizing Obama’s them-sounding middle name.  Just another sign that the man from Kenya, Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, Kansas and Chicago isn’t one of us. 

If Barack Obama is numbered with the “them” people, so am I.  I have the good fortune of being a white man, but I grew up in the wrong country.  Like Sarah Palin, I was raised around snowmobiles, fishing rods, and lakes that are frozen for most of the year.  But it wasn’t Alaska; it was the Northwest Territories of Canada.  I became an American citizen a few months ago.  But I wonder if that’s enough.  Am I a real American?

Like Barack Obama, I don’t always hang out with the right kind of people.  I can often be found in the company of accused criminals.  Having concluded that our criminal justice system is broken and must be fixed, I often find myself cross-ways with the people who stand between Middle America and the criminal classes–prosecutors and police officers.  Do my friends and my adversaries mark me as one of “them”?  Does seeing America as a great but tragically broken nation make me almost as dangerous as the traitorous black candidate?

While researching my doctoral dissertation, I spent long hours pouring over ancient copies of the Western Recorder (the state newspaper of Kentucky Baptists).  In the early 1950s, the paper had a question-and-answer section written, under a pseudonym, by one of the female editors–women weren’t supposed to teach men, a position the Southern Baptist Convention has recently ratified. 

A reader wanted to know what this “mark of Cain” business was all about and the editor gave the then-standard answer.  It was explained that Cain, the world’s first fratricide, was the father of the Negro race; his mark, therefore, was black skin.  Which accounted, the editor wrote, for some of the character flaws associated with Negro folk.

How could a disciple of Jesus Christ be associated with such a hateful and benighted opinion?  How fortunate that such Noddian theology has gone the way of the Dodo.

Or has it?  With the world economy a smoking ruin, desperate politicians change the subject by tossing Noddian dots onto the floor and praying we have the good sense to connect them. 

My concern is not with Republicans, Democrats and the issues that divide them.  As I have often said, the twisted shape of our criminal justice system is a thoroughly bipartisan accomplishment.  I’m asking where we are going as a nation.  Do we see Eden shimmering the distant horizon, a vision of what might yet be; or are we wandering far from God, east of Eden in the land of Nod?

Every parent lives with the same fear.  The death of a child is something you don’t get over–there are no term limits on that kind of grief.  This Washington Post story describes a mother’s attempt to find help for a daughter addicted to heroin.  Jacqueline M. Duda and her family soon discovered that only two types of treatment are available: cut-rate therapy for people in the criminal justice system and the kind of lavish facilities you see movie stars checking into on Entertainment Tonight. 

In between, next to nothing.

“It’s a crisis,” former therapist Mike Gimbel tells the author, “because people believe they can get help, and it’s not there.” 

Jacqueline Duda offers this biting assesment.  “Since the public hasn’t bought the disease model, Gimbel says, politicians aren’t willing to invest more public dollars in treatment. ‘Politically speaking, it’s more expedient to combat the drug problem by hiring more police and building more prisons,’ he says. ‘The public thinks we can arrest our way out of this problem.'”

Voters have never warmed to the addiction-as-disease model.  Because they see addicts as weak and immoral, people are unwilling to support sensible treatment and rehabilitation programs.  Politicians learn that standing up for addicts is a political loser.  You won’t hear John McCain calling for enhanced treatment capacity even though his wife has experienced the horrors of addiction.  He won’t say it in a debate, he won’t say it on the stump, he won’t say it in an interview.  Neither will Barack Obama.  These guys are trying to get elected.

It appears that the Supreme Court has deferred taking action on the Troy Davis case until a later (and yet to be determined) date.  Again, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution provides the best coverage of the story.  Hopefully, the high court will take up the issue after November 4th.  Two issues: a collapsing economy (the Dow is plunging well below 10,000 as I write) and a hotly contested presidential election are consuming virtually all media interest at the moment.  The Davis case has a much better chance of getting the attention it deserves when the election is over and the economic picture clarifies.

Bob Herbert of the New York Times has already weighed in on the Davis story.  Leoonard Pitts, another black syndicated columnist, tackled this issue this morning.  Pitts can understand the anguish the murder of Mark MacPhail created for the victim’s family, but rejects the notion that victims’ rights should trump basic justice.

Scott Henson, the prolific author of Grits for Breakfast, directs our attention to a Texas Monthly story by Nate Blakeslee.  Friends of Justice brought Nate to Tulia in the spring of 2000 and his initial story in the Texas Observer formed the template for much of the coverage that followed.  More recently, Nate’s reporting in the Observer also sparked the Texas Youth Commission scandal.

The job of a prosecutor is to see that justice is done.  This requires objectivity, honesty, transparency and even a touch of humility.  The general tendency is to over-prosecute low-status defendants while under- prosecuting high-status folk.  You don’t get much lower in the status game than a convicted adolescent.  With the advent of puberty, a sympathetic child morphs into a dangerous thug.  When they cry “wolf” nobody wants to listen.

From Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune comes another tale of small-town racism. 

There are two questions surrounding the tragic death of Brandon McClelland of Paris, Texas.  One, was his killing racially motivated?  If Witt has it right, the answer is an unambiguous yes. 

Which brings us to the second question: why are the local prosecutor and the Department of Safety (Texas state police) saying it ain’t so?

Paris, like Tulia and Jasper, is a Texas town that never got the memo on civil rights.  Crude Jim Crow segregation can be ended quickly by judicial fiat; but hearts and minds change at a glacial pace. 

This story rubs up against the savage, prison-based subculture of white supremacy.  Local officials are hoping that if they refuse to ask any questions they can avoid the messy answers. 

Thank you, Mr. Witt, for making that a little harder. 

Killing in a small town raises hate crime fears

By Howard Witt | Tribune correspondent
October 5, 2008
PARIS, Texas – When the mutilated and partially dismembered body of Brandon McClelland, a 24-year-old black man, turned up lying in the middle of a rural east Texas road one morning last month, the police immediately pronounced the case a hit-and-run by an unknown driver.

Within a few days, however, suspicions turned toward two white friends who had picked up McClelland in their truck a few hours before he was found dead early on Sept. 16. Despite signs that the truck had been washed, authorities discovered blood and other physical evidence on the undercarriage and arrested the two men, both with long criminal histories, for murder.

Now this small, racially divided town–already seared with a racist label by civil rights groups last year over differences in how blacks and whites were treated by the local justice system–is on edge yet again, wondering if it’s got a horrific new hate crime on its hands.

The district attorney insists race had nothing to do with McClelland’s death and police investigators are portraying the case as an apparent falling-out among friends.

 But McClelland’s relatives and Paris civil rights leaders are less certain. Citing the violence done to McClelland’s body and reports that one of the alleged assailants, Shannon Finley, had white supremacist ties, they are demanding that Paris authorities investigate the case as a possible hate crime akin to the infamous 1998 lynching of James Byrd Jr., in Jasper, Texas, 250 miles south of here.

Byrd was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by three white supremacists who were later convicted of murder. McClelland was walking in front of the pickup when Finley, 27, and a friend, Charles Ryan Crostley, 27, who was also arrested, allegedly ran him down and then dragged him 40 feet along the road until his mutilated body popped out from beneath the chassis, according to a police affidavit accompanying the warrant for Finley’s arrest.

“If you take somebody out to the country like that in the middle of the night and do that to him in that way, that’s how they do black people around here,” said Brenda Cherry, a local activist working with McClelland’s family. “To me, it smells like Jasper.” (more…)

This story from Bradley County, Arkansas sounds like Jena, Louisiana all over again. 

Several factors distinguish Bradley County, Arkansas from LaSalle Parish, Louisiana.  For one thing, the alleged assailants haven’t been charged with attempted murder–the charges are more in touch with reality.  Secondly, public officials in Arkansas are admitting up front that racist provocation played a role.

On the other hand, the black defendants (see below) are being charged as adults–a growing national trend.  Adolescent boys don’t think, feel, or reason like adults; a fact the criminal justice system hasn’t reckoned with.

Friends of Justice draws attention to stories like Tulia and Jena because they change the way people think and act.  Maybe the folks in Arkansas just don’t want journalists tramping through their community.  Nothing wrong with that.  The point is, we aren’t seeing the bizarre over-reaction we saw in Jena.

Tragically, the legal system is still being viewed as the sole source of aid.  The key problem in Bradley County is the racial animus smoldering just beneath the surface of the student body.  Is nobody going to help these kids work through their stuff?  Does anyone really believe that filing of civil rights complaints with the Department of Justice is going to make things all better, or are we simply calling the problem a nail because a hammer is the only tool left in the box?

In Jena, Dr. Phil and the Reverend TD Jakes intervened briefly, implying strongly that the Jena 6 families should sit down with the family of the assault victim, sift through their differences, and engage in a group hug.

Sounds a bit naive, even dopey; but does the court system have a better idea?  Throwing the Jena 6 in prison for a quarter century (which is what Reed Walters was initially fixing to do) is a ludicrous response to a tragedy spawned in racial hatred.  At some point, folks need to find common ground.  Reconciliation is the only long-term answer; retribution drives the emotion deeper.

The little-reported religious revival that swept through Jena in the wake of a media feeding frenzy shows that local residents understood that some kind of new beginning was called for.  Schooled in the tradition of revivalism, Jena residents responded the best way they know how.  A revival may be a poor substitute for a conversation about the legacy of Jim Crow racism, but, realistically, it was probably the best option available. 

Who knows, Jena may be baby stepping its way toward real dialogue.

The troubles in Bradley County won’t be revolved so long as the criminal justice system is perceived to be the only remedy.  Judges, prosecutors and FBI agents are good at putting bad guys behind bars, but they are worse than useless when it comes to helping confused adolescents find their way home.

Six students charged as adults

BY MIKE LINN

Posted on Thursday, October 2, 2008

Prosecutors charged six black students with felony battery as adults Wednesday, accusing them of beating a white student over racial slurs written on a bathroom wall at Hermitage High School.

The Aug. 20 fight led to the suspension of 11 students at the Bradley County school and a three-day hospital stay for the white student, who suffered cuts, lacerations, bumps and internal bleeding.

Dwight D. Neal, 16; Darcarus Edington, 17; Martel Childs, 17; Tyson Kendrix, 16; Marcus Broughton, 17; and Demarcus Smith, 16, are all charged as adults with battery in the second degree, according to documents filed Wednesday in Bradley County Circuit Court.

Andrew Best, deputy prosecuting attorney in the 10 th Judicial District, said he didn’t know of any attorney representing the defendants. Efforts to find phone numbers for the defendants’ parents failed Wednesday.

All defendants remain students at the high school, Best said.

Best said the beating victim, identified in a school resource officer’s report as John Dillion Rippey, is not the student who wrote “KKK” and “nigger” on the bathroom wall.

Best said rumors had circulated that Rippey wrote the slurs, and Rippey had been in a fight last year with one of the defendants.

According to the report by school resource officer Denise Walton, another student wrote “KKK” – a reference to the Ku Klux Klan – on the boys bathroom wall and that Neal was a “nigger.”

Neal went to the cafeteria to round up friends, who approached Rippey and two other white students working in a classroom without a teacher during lunch, the report said.

The report said that during the confrontation, Edington struck Rippey from behind, Rippey lost his balance and hit the side of his head on a television cart. The six defendants then beat Rippey while two other black students watched, according to the report and Hermitage School District Superintendent Richard Rankin.

Rankin said one black student in the fight was suspended for 10 days and the other five were suspended for five days. The two black students who watched were suspended for three days, Rankin said.

During the confrontation, two female students guarded the doors to the classroom. They were suspended for three days, Rankin said.

The white student who admitted writing the racial slurs on the walls was also punished by the school district, Best said. He is a minor and has not been charged with a crime but was suspended for five days, Rankin said.

Best said that since race was an element in the beating, he reviewed the charges very carefully.

“If six white boys had jumped on an African-American youth at the school and sent him to the hospital, we would charge the white students just the same,” Best said. “I would be derelict in my duties not to prosecute were the situation reversed. There’s always a concern with something racially charged like this, but in this situation, when someone ends up in the hospital, someone needs to be charged.”

The president of the Bradley County chapter of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People said he plans to have a meeting with school officials to discuss the writings on the bathroom walls.

“I want to know how long it was left written on the walls before anyone did anything about it,” Rodney Domineck said. “In the boys’ defense, I can understand that with anything racial like this you can get very emotional and sometimes do things out of character.”

Since the fight, Rankin said, the school held an assembly to try to bring racial harmony to the campus, which has about 180 high school students.

Counseling was also made available, Rankin said. He said no racially charged fights have occurred since then.

Best noted similarities in the Hermitage case and that of a case in Jena, La., that drew national attention. In Jena tensions between black and white students ran high for weeks before the beating of a white student.

Critics said the charges, later reduced, were racially motivated and overblown. Thousands marched in the Louisiana town in protest.

Special Agent Steve Frazier of the FBI in Little Rock said he knew of no federal complaints related to the racial slurs at Hermitage and hadn’t heard of the case until a reporter contacted him Wednesday.

Frazier, who said the FBI encourages those who feel their civil rights have been violated to contact the agency, notes that cases involving speech walk a fine line.

“People have the right to First Amendment speech,” Frazier said. “Where that crosses the line into state or federal law is a difficult legal question. In situations such as that, the FBI would receive the information from the person who reports it, consult with the U. S. attorney’s office and the Department of Justice in order to determine if that speech violates federal law.”

Reason editor Radley Balko directs a pointed question to Democratic candidate Joe Biden in a New York Times “what would you ask the candidates” piece.  To wit:

Senator Biden, you’ve been one of the Senate’s most ardent drug warriors. You helped create the office of “drug czar”; backed our failed eradication efforts in South America; encouraged the government to seize the assets of people merely suspected of drug crimes; pushed for the expanded use of racketeering and conspiracy laws against drug offenders; advocated the use of the military to fight the drug war; and sponsored a bill that holds venue owners and promoters criminally liable for drug use by people attending concerts and events.

Today, illicit drugs are as cheap and abundant as they were decades ago. Would you agree that the anti-drug policies you’ve championed have failed? If not, how have they succeeded?

– RADLEY BALKO, a senior editor at Reason magazine

This statement of appreciation from Troy Davis, passed along by Amnesty International, just arrived in my in box:

To all,I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith.

It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.

As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy.

I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.

I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.

So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated.

There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.

I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing, “I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”

Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!

— Troy Davis

Steven Bochco, famous for legal/cop dramas like “NYPD Blue” and “Hill Street Blues”, is making his cable debut. “Raising the Bar” shifts the focus from serial killers and child molesters to the more mundane offenses you would encounter if you strolled down to the County Courthouse.  The defendants are scruffy, compromised and frequently innocent.  The DA is crass and cynical, prosecuting cases he thinks he can win even when he has no way of determining if the defendant is really guilty.  The judge at the center of the action is an efficiency nut who enjoys exercising the boundless power her office affords.  Juries are prone to convict unless innocence can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. 

In other words, Raising the Bar is about the real-world criminal justice system.

The show isn’t doing very well.  The reviews have been mixed, the competition is intense, and the ratings have been dropping.   The show lacks a rivveting Dennis Franz type lead and the production values are a bit too formulaic for my taste.  But I suspect the real problem is that the American viewer doesn’t know what to do with moral ambiguity and the portrayal of a broken legal system?

I have become a loyal viewer.  The legal system presented in most legal dramas is pure fantasy (you will notice that the bad guys are almost always white and wealthy).  The “Law and Order” pantheon, though skillfully rendered, takes a pro-prosecution perspective; defense attorneys are generally sneering, well heeled and amoral.  “Law and Order” is generally a who-done-it murder mystery in a courtroom setting.  As such it avoids 90% of the cases that pass through a real courtroom.

Bochco’s “Raising the Bar” could be a sleeper.  Dramas driven by complex characters can take a while to hit their stride.  But if you want a compelling window into a broken system, “Raising the Bar” delivers.

In this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bochco talks about his new show. (more…)

I met Sandy Gonzalez a few months ago at a conference in DC.  His story beggars belief, but it’s true all the same.  Since I was fresh from the Alvin Clay Trial it didn’t seem too incredible that federal DEA and ICE agents would give their blessing to a series of gruesome torture sessions ending in murder.  When Sandy Gonzalez blew the whistle on fellow DEA officials he was driven out of the agency.  Thus far, no one in the mainstream media has been willing to touch this story.  The implications are too severe.  We all like to believe the best about our government and there are few rewards for those who tell too much truth.

Fortunately, people like Radley Balko of Reason Magazine who are willing to listen to folks like Sandy Gonzalez.  Balko remains the only reporter who has given the story of Ann Colomb and her family the attention it deserves.  You can find his interview with with Gonzalez here beginning with this enticing lead-in:

Three years ago, Sandalio “Sandy” Gonzalez’s 32-year career with the Drug Enforcement Agency came to an abrupt end after he blew the whistle in a horrifying case now known as the “House of Death,” in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stand accused of looking the other way while one of their drug informants participated in torturing and murdering at least a dozen people in an abandoned house near the Texas-Mexico border.

In August, Senior Editor Radley Balko spoke with Gonzalez about the case, the cover-up, and what it all means for federal law enforcement and the War on Drugs.