MDDM Folly, Rabbit in the Moon & American race relations in the news

[Doug Millison]

17. Caught on Tape
Officer Suspended after Videotaped Beating
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/07/08/police.video/index.html
Teen, Father File Suit over Videotaped Beating
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/07/10/police.beating/index.html?related
Man Who Taped Police Incident Leaves Hospital
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/07/12/police.beating.crooks/index.html
CNN Transcript: Police and FBI Investigating Inglewood Police Beating Case
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0207/10/ltm.14.html
US Department of Justice: Civil Rights Division
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/crt-home.html
Inglewood Police Department
http://www.cityofinglewood.org/depts/police/Ipdindex.htm

Inglewood police officer Jeremy Morse, a three year veteran, was caught on
video tape assaulting Donovan Chavis, a handcuffed sixteen-year old African
American male, by plummeting him face down on the back of a police car and
punching him in the face. According to Donovan Chavis and his father, Kobe
Chavis, on Saturday, July 6th, they stopped at a local gas station in
Inglewood, California. While pumping gas, Kobe Chavis was approached by two
police officers who soon discovered that his license plate had expired and
his license had been suspended. At this point, Kobe says he was thrown to
the ground with a knee in his back and then pushed into his car where he was
told to wait. After paying for gas and exiting the convenient store with a
bag of potato chips in his hand, police officers said the young Donovan
Chavis lunged at one of the officers, a claim both Donovan and his father
adamantly denies. At this time, according to Joe Hopkins, Donovan's
attorney, Donovan was handcuffed, beaten, and dragged on the ground by an
18-inch chain he was wearing around his neck before being thrown on top of
the police car and hit in the face.

Mitchell Crooks, who observed the incident from a hotel across the street,
began videotaping the scene, but was only able to capture the last few
moments of the incident. Many Inglewood residents are viewing this incident
as a racially motivated crime against African Americans and are therefore
outraged at the response, or lack of, from the Inglewood Police Department,
who suspended Officer Morse with pay. For more information regarding this
story, users may access the first two links listed above. The third link
leads to a recent news story concerning Mitchell Crooks (the man who
videotaped the incident), while the fourth link leads to a live transcript
of CNN's American Morning with Paula Zahn. Finally, the last two links lead
to home pages of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice
and the Inglewood Police Department, respectively. [MG]

from:
The Scout Report -- July 12, 2002
 http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/


Pynchon:
"Whatever else may be wrong in a political way -- like the inadequacy of
Great Depression techniques applied to a scene that has long outgrown them;
like an old-fashioned grafter's glee among the city fathers over the vast
amounts of poverty-war bread that Uncle is now making available to them --
lying much closer to the heart of L.A.'s racial sickness is the coexistence
of two very different cultures: one white and one black.
While the white culture is concerned with various forms of systematized
folly -- the economy of the area in fact depending on it -- the black
culture is stuck pretty much with basic realities like disease, like
failure, violence and death, which the whites have mostly chosen -- and can
afford -- to ignore. The two cultures do not understand each other, though
white values are displayed without let-up on black people's TV screens, and
though the panoramic sense of black impoverishment is hard to miss from
atop the Harbor Freeway, which so many whites must drive at least twice
every working day. Somehow it occurs to very few of them to leave at the
Imperial Highway exit for a change, go east instead of west only a few
blocks, and take a look at Watts. A quick look. The simplest kind of
beginning. But Watts is country which lies, psychologically, uncounted
miles further than most whites seem at present willing to travel. [...]
Watts lies impacted in the heart of this white fantasy. It is, by contrast,
a pocket of bitter reality. The only illusion Watts ever allowed itself was
to believe for a long time in the white version of what a Negro was
supposed to be. But with the Muslim and civil-rights movements that went
too.
http://www.libyrinth.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html


"systematized folly"...  Echo?


"In their Decadency these Virginians practice an elaborate Folly of Courtly
Love, unmodified since the Dark Ages, so relentlessly that at leo anyone
who has observ'd slave-keepers in Africa, it will seem all quite ancient."
(M&D, p. 274)



MalignD:
>I shouldn't get into this, but it is worth pointing out that Sheila Walker is
>an Afrocentrist, with all that implies; i.e., at least at this stage of
>things, a field of study many of the claims of which are grossly ahistorical
>and patently preposterous.


Neither "grossly ahistorical" nor "patently preposterous" would disqualify
such views from Pynchon's historical fiction, it seems to me -- he appears
to be looking for a deeper truth, a bigger more comprehensive kind of
"history", judging from M&D at least ....



" [...] In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a
rabbit-ears antenna on top. Inside, where its picture tube should have
been, gaping out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic ivy among
its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The name of the piece was "The
Late, Late, Late Show."


Rabbit-ears?

"The Rabbit in the Moon!"
--M&D, p. 573