Tales Of The Sackler Drug Cartel

Title: Empire Of Pain

Rating: 5 Stars

It all starts with Isaac and Sophie Sackler, Jewish grocers living in New York before WWI. They had three sons: Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond. The parents taught them a very strong work ethic. They must never quit working hard to succeed. Later in life, Isaac experienced financial difficulties and his sons had to pitch in to help. Isaac hated that, but even as he was dying, he told them that money can come and go, but all that really matters is that you keep your good name.

Over the ensuing decades, all three brothers got fantastically rich. They took their father’s words to heart. They were major philanthropists that made a point (with legally binding explicit contracts) of plastering their names all over their bequests. There were major wings in art museums, hospitals, research centers, and universities, all with the name of Sackler. Such named bequests appear all over the world.

They were lionized for their philanthropic works. They were awarded knighthoods. The elite of the elite fawned over them.

Here’s the thing. Even as all of this was happening, no one knew how they got their money. Many probably just assumed that they came from old New York money. Others probably assumed that they made their fortune in some obscure manufacturing industry. Most probably didn’t care. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

It turns out that they made their fortune by selling addictive drugs. Not only did they do so, but the sales innovations that they developed and that were subsequently imitated by others led directly to the opioid crisis that is currently killing over 100,000 Americans a year.

It started off so innocently. The eldest brother, Arthur, was a frenetic genius. His life reads like a Horatio Alger novel. Even as a young child, he worked multiple jobs while at the same time performing brilliantly at school. He was always hustling. He worked multiple jobs, including writing copy at an advertising agency. In the slipstream of his wake were his two brothers. Hard workers themselves, if not as brilliant as Arthur, the three of them were the epitome of the hard working immigrant family making good in the US.

All three of them became psychiatrists. They worked at mental hospitals during the time when the mentally ill were just warehoused. Thinking that there must be a more successful and more humane method to treat the mentally ill, they focused on the biology of mental illness with experimental medicine. At this point, all of their work seems admirable, if not noble.

At the same time that Arthur was working at a psychiatric hospital, he was also working full time at an ad agency. In the 1960s, a drug company came to him to help with marketing a new class of drugs. This class included drugs like Valium and Librium.

This is where the tone of the lives of the Sackler brothers begins to change. Working at the ad agency, Arthur, although not the inventor of the technique, dramatically expanded advertising to medical doctors. He fought all attempts to regulate physician advertising by claiming that doctors are so smart that they couldn’t possibly fall for deceptive advertising (cue rolling of eyes here).

This is where things start getting shady. These advertisements included physician testimonials from nonexistent doctors. Arthur started publishing a free medical journal (without mentioning his own involvement) to physicians that just happened to include glowing testimonials about the wonders of his drugs. In the medical advertising field, there were really only two major players. Arthur was secretly funding his competitor and the two collaborated in their efforts. Arthur and his company set out to seduce the FDA directors assigned to approve their drugs. Coincidentally enough, when these men left government service, they’d end up with jobs at Arthur’s companies.

Arthur and his brothers created / bought a complex spiderweb of companies with intermeshing interests. In all cases, the primary purpose was to obscure their own ownership in these companies. One company that was purchased was a small drug supplier named Purdue Pharma. Arthur gave it to his brothers to run.

This is when things really start to get ugly.

One of the drugs that Purdue developed was OxyContin. A problem with morphine is that, short of an IV drip, there was no way to regulate the usage. The key to OxyContin was that the pill had an outer shell that forced the opioid to be time released.

This was potentially a big breakthrough. The only problem was that doctors were scared of the addictive properties of opioids and were reluctant to prescribe them. The typical patient for such drugs were cancer patients or maybe hospice patients.

Well, that was simply not a big enough market for the Sackler family greed. Using techniques first promulgated by Arthur in the tranquilizer market, the Sacklers launched an immense advertising campaign blitz. They latched onto the valid medical field of pain management and blew it up to make it appear that pain was the number one problem in the US. They claimed that over one hundred million Americans suffered from unnecessary pain that could be relieved using OxyContin.

Using questionable studies, they claimed that opioids were only addictive to one percent of its users. They sold OxyContin as a medicine of first resort, not last. They sent out armies of sales reps to invade doctors’ offices with brochures and free swags. Copying the techniques of every drug dealer everywhere, they gave out free samples. To counter the problem of the buildup of tolerance, they encouraged ever larger sizes. At one point, they were making 160 mg pills. A single one could be deadly.

It worked. Prescriptions skyrocketed. Purdue (and just to be clear, Purdue was privately owned by the Sacklers) made tremendous sums of money.

There were just a couple of problems. One was that, although advertised as 12 hour relief, Purdue knew OxyContin only provided 8 hours of relief. The whole point of time released pill is to avoid the hill / valley feeling that addicts feel when taking opioids. By not being honest about the actual dosage, they built addictive behavior into the prescription.

The second big problem was that users quickly realized that they could ameliorate the time release nature of the pill simply by crushing it and snorting it. Purdue was already aware of this possibility and did nothing.

A really huge problem was that, pain management being somewhat arbitrary to diagnose, pill mills immediately sprung up. Unethical doctors running alleged pain clinics would have lines literally running out of the door of people wanting OxyContin. Small pain clinics in the middle of nowhere were selling many hundreds of thousands of pills. Purdue kept detailed data on sales. They knew who the bad actors were. As long as the money flowed in, they didn’t care.

Finally, they came up with another time release pill whose effects could not be removed by crushing it. The problem was that this was many years into the epidemic. There was no way that all of those millions of addicts would just shrug their shoulders and give up. Instead, they turned to illegal narcotics. OxyContin abuse led directly to our current heroin and fentanyl epidemic. It’s been estimated that eighty percent of heroin addicts started off by abusing OxyContin.

As the OxyContin patent expired, to maximize its profits, Purdue switched their advertising strategy to advocate higher doses for longer periods of time. When the patent expired and generics came on the scene, one of the biggest producers was a company called Rhodes. Yep, you guessed it. The Sacklers own that too.

During all of this, the Sackler family continued to claim innocence. They continued to hide their ownership. When pressed, much like gun manufacturers, they claim that their drugs don’t kill people but that it’s the addicts that kill themselves. They’ve aggressively fought every lawsuit that has come their way. They do not give an inch.

In all likelihood, none of the Sacklers will go to jail. Even after paying fines, they’ll still have billions. One minor act of justice that has happened is that, disgusted at the provenance of the bequests, many of the wings, centers, and galleries are stripping the Sackler name.

The Sackler family has accomplished the exact opposite of Isaac’s words. They are worth billions but their name is trash.

It’s safe to say that when the revolution comes, the Sackler family members will be the first against the wall.

Staying True To The Canon

Title: Reacher

Rating: 4 Stars

The Reacher series of novels by Lee Child have been running for a very long time. He’s up to number twenty-six, with a dozen or two other short stories as well.

I’ve read all of the novels and the short stories. On the one hand, there’s nothing particularly innovative about the series. Jack Reacher is a retired military police officer. He’s huge, fearless, and very smart. Since he’s been retired from the military, he has just been wandering around the country. In the earlier novels, his hallmark was that he just carried his toothbrush. Whenever his clothes got dirty or torn, he’d head off to the nearest surplus store, buy new clothes, and throw away his old ones.

Whenever he enters a new town, he’d witness some wrong that needed to be rectified. Sometimes he witnessed a kidnapping, sometimes an extortion attempt, or maybe something that just seemed a little off (eg why would a hard earned West Point ring have been pawned?). He’d poke his nose into the business, violence would ensure, people would die, and justice would be reinstated. Once done, he’d be at the edge of town again, either hitchhiking or waiting for the next Greyhound to destinations unknown.

As I’ve said, this pattern is not new. Think of Caine from the old Kung Fu series, the Man with No Name in the Spaghetti westerns, or even the Lone Ranger. A town is under siege, an anonymous avenger sweeps into town, resolves the situation (brutally and without remorse) and then leaves. To the town folk, these characters are the ultimate deux ex machina.

Even if not new, Lee Child is quite adept at writing them. His situations are always interesting and he writes in the propulsive manner that the genre demands. It’s not unusual to consume a 400 to 500 page novel in a day or two. He also manages to keep Reacher interesting. He’s kind of a thinking man’s action hero. In one of the novels, his nemesis gives him the nickname Sherlock Homeless, which is actually a quite apt description of him.

Even so, the latter novels have not been great. Hard core Reacher fans had been beginning to complain that the Reacher novels were becoming less action packed. In some novels, he did seem to emphasize Reacher’s mental abilities over his physical prowess. Although that didn’t bother me, I could see where those critics were coming from.

For the last several novels, Child has teamed up with his younger brother, Andrew Child (note: both names are pseudonyms). Since he’s not getting any younger, maybe Lee is thinking of transitioning the franchise to Andrew. The result of doing so has restored the action to the Reacher novels. However, in so doing, Reacher has become something of a invincible terminator figure.

For a series that has run this long, that was always going to be a problem. You know that Reacher can’t die but you have to put him in what appears to be imminent dangerous peril. This is a hard trick to pull off over the long haul. Child was able to do so in the earlier novels by emphasizing some of Reacher’s weaknesses. For example, he has tendencies towards claustrophobia. In one fight, he realizes that his opponent is a better, strong fighter than him and prepares to die. Several novels comment on his lack of driving skills.

In the last couple of novels, none of those vulnerabilities are on display. Problems seem to be at best minor inconveniences to him. He dispatches many bad guys without apparently breaking into a sweat. As a result, although I’ll continue to read the novels, I don’t look forward to them with the anticipation that I used to.

There have been two Reacher films. Fans of the novels were aghast at the casting of the diminutive Tom Cruise in the titular role.  Yes, even though Cruise is not an imposing presence, he did pick up and communicate the deadpan sense of humor of the Reacher novels. Reacher is (nearly) always the smartest, strongest, and meanest man in the room. Knowing that, he talks with an absolute confidence that is quite amusing. So, I was actually OK with Cruise as Reacher. The first film was good. The second was less so.

This brings us to the Amazon Prime series. The first season is broken up into eight parts, all of which are 45 minutes to an hour long. It’s a retelling of Child’s first novel, The Killing Floor. In this novel, the stakes are higher because, in a small town in Georgia, it’s Reacher’s brother Joe that has been murdered.

Let’s start with the actor playing Reacher. Alan Ritchson certainly addresses the Cruise size concern. Ritchson is massive. He is tall and broad. I don’t know how much was done via casting or camera work, but he towers over everybody else. Regarding his acting, it’s hard for me to judge. I’m not aware of seeing him in any other role. At best, his performance can be described as wooden or stolid. Normally, those wouldn’t be great adjectives to describe an actor’s performance. However, especially in the earlier novels, Reacher is at best coldly dispassionate. He has his own moral code that occasionally does not line up well with society’s conventional code. If someone is a bad guy, then he has no problem shooting them in the back and feels no compunction to feel particularly bad about it. So, as a character, playing Reacher as stolid and dispassionate could very well be an actor’s choice. Or possibly that is Ritchson’s acting style and it just meshes with the character.

Since the series does span at least six hours, this does give them the opportunity to fully flesh out the novel. It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but it seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation. For some reason that’s not clear to me, they changed the bad guy to be a family member of the bad guy.

At times, the pacing was just a bit languid. I’m guessing that they made some kind of episode commitment to HBO. They could have probably thinned the run time down an hour or so and it would have been a tighter piece.

They’ve also fallen into the trap of making Reacher seem superhuman. He drives dangerously fast like a stunt man. He sprints at high speed (in the novels, it was explicitly stated that, due to his bulk, that he could not run fast). At one point, he seemed to pretty effortlessly know his way around electronics. It’s hard for a character to be vulnerable if they have no weaknesses.

To sum up, if you’re a long time fan of the Reacher novels, I’m guessing that you’ll be satisfied with this series. If you watch the series and you found yourself entertained, you’ll probably enjoy the Reacher novels (focus on the earlier ones first).

The Series That I Didn’t Know I Needed?

Title: Ted Lasso

Rating: 5 Stars

I know. I’m very late to jump on this band wagon. In my defense, I did not previously have Apple TV. I signed up to watch Denzel Washington’s Macbeth, and as long as I had the account, I thought that I’d check out Ted Lasso. I’d heard good things about it and was curious. I’ve just finished streaming the first season.

The plot is as simple as can be. Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) is an American college football coach that is hired to coach an English soccer team. The owner hires him expecting him to fail. She is recently divorced, got the soccer club as part of the settlement, and wants to destroy it to spite her ex-husband. That’s the plot. There is absolutely nothing original about it. A sports team owner that wants to sink their own club? Check out Major League. An American goes to England fish out of water story? Check out King Ralph. A down on their luck sports team that just needs a coach to inspire them? There are any number, including Bad News Bears, The Mighty Ducks, or A League of Their Own. Inspirational speech before a big game? Again, there are innumerable, but check out Hoosiers or Any Given Sunday. I’m sure that I could go on with all of the tropes that it employs.

It shouldn’t work. I should be bored. I should be rolling my eyes at the pablum.

After all, besides the inspirational coach and the apparently evil owner, you have the following characters: the owner’s sycophantic sidekick, the obnoxious, cocky superstar in his prime, the once great but now past his prime world weary team captain, the sweetly innocent player just coming up, and the meek mild mannered equipment coach who’s actually an unrecognized soccer genius. How predictable is all of that?

Even so, shockingly enough, I have really enjoyed it and can’t wait to start watching the next season.

Why? It’s not exactly a trick question. It’s the writing and the acting.

Sudeikis does outstanding work as Lasso. He has to walk a very thin tightrope between a kind of knowing irony and a Mr Flanders level of sweet sincerity. He nails it perfectly. You laugh at him, with him, and are moved by his overt non-ironic respect and care that he gives to all that he meets. He’s an impossibly saccharine character that Sudeikis makes us believe in. The others, especially Hannah Waddington as the owner that is soon shown the error of her ways by Lasso, Brett Goldstein as the aging team captain, and Brendan Hunt, as Lasso’s taciturn long time assistant coach, all bring their characters to life.

Even though the path is well trod by so many previous films or novels or series, the writers keep it interesting, amusing, and often moving. Sports films generally have many opportunities for bathos and pathos. Here the writers never miss an opportunity for either. The dialog gives the actors many opportunities to shine.

It is an excellent example of the genre. Given that we’re in the third calendar year of a global pandemic in which people are willfully choosing not to get free vaccinations and are oh so quick to assert their own individual rights without regard to any larger social good, perhaps the perpetually positive, earnest, and cheerful Ted Lasso is exactly the kind of tonic that I needed.

A First Draft Of History As Fiction

Title: Suite Francaise

Rating: 5 Stars

This novel is about living through the French Occupation during World War II. It was destined to be written in five parts. The first part describes several characters as they desperately flee Paris as the German army bears down upon the city. The second part is about a year later. The German army has occupied a French town. It features several characters, both French and German, as they try to make their way in this occupied world. The third part (which exists only as a plot outline), concerns the actions of the French Resistance and the German response to it. The fourth and fifth novels, named Battle and Peace, only exist as titles.

Why weren’t the five parts completed? Well, the author, Irene Nemirovsky, was of Ukrainian Jewish background. Although having been denied French citizenship, she was still living in France at the time of the Nazi invasion. Eventually, she was arrested as a Jew and was murdered at Auschwitz during the Holocaust at the age of 39.

Amazingly enough, she wrote the novel during all of this. Writing in microscopic handwriting, it was all written in one notebook. She and her daughter Denise managed to keep it concealed as they fled from one hiding place to another. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, Denise kept the notebook but never read it. She assumed that it consisted solely of painful memories that she did not want relived. More than fifty years later, as she was getting ready to donate her mother’s materials to a French archive, Denise began to decipher the microscopic handwriting.

Realizing that instead of a painful memoir that she had a World War II contemporaneous fictional novel, she set out to find a publisher. It was published in 2004, and by 2008, it has sold over two million copies.

This is just about the most intense novel creation backstory since John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces.

Knowing that backstory does overlay a deeper meaning onto the story. If I didn’t know the backstory, then I’m not sure that I would have given it my highest rating. However, understanding that what I’m reading is a first draft of a novel written by a writer living under the most dangerous of circumstances makes her achievement all the more breathtaking.

The first part centers around a large number of characters, each with their own attitude and response to the impending invasion of the Nazis. There are the Pericands, an upper class elite family used to having everything done for them by servants and looking down on everyone else. It’s up to the mother to try to shepherd her many children and decrepit stepfather to safety to a provincial town. Is it any wonder that at some point she forgot her stepfather? Gabriel Corte, a French intellectual, cannot believe what is happening. Also an elite, he cannot believe that society has sunk so far down in the chaos of the collapse that he’s not given the special favor that he’s always deserved. The Michauds, minor employees at a bank, are cast adrift as higher ups in the banks prioritize their own safety and comfort over those of their employees. Charles Langelet, an epicure, is full of beauty and appreciation of the finer things, but is not above trickery and thievery to get what he wants.

The second part contains characters from the town of Bussy. The locals are horrified that the Germans have chosen to garrison in their town. Even worse, some of the residents with nice homes have to share them with German officers. The main French character is Lucille Angellier. Fairly recently married, albeit unhappily, her husband has been captured and is a POW at some faraway German camp. She lives (again unhappily) with her mother in law. A German officer named Bruno lives with them. Madame Angellier holds the German in cold contempt. Lucille also wants to hate Bruno, but he is a sensitive man and a talented musician. Over the course of a year, the two of them grow ever so closer.

In the second part, you see how the relationships between occupier and occupied change over time. Even those that profess to despise the Germans secretly ask Lucille to procure favors for them from Bruno. Some townspeople see an opportunity to make money off of the Germans. With no young French men in town, inevitable relationships develop between young French women and young German men.

The second part ends with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The Germans garrisoned at Bussy pack up and are being moved to the Eastern Front. As this gets underway in the last pages of the novel, there is a dark sense of foreboding. Even though Nemirovsky cannot know it (she dies in 1942), the Eastern Front will spell doom for all of these troops.

I can’t get over that what I’m reading is a first draft written under horrendous conditions. It truly is an amazing piece of literature.

Give Someone Else A Chance – Again

Here we go again. In July of 2020, when Joe Biden was picking his running mate, there were people running around screaming in apoplectic rage because he limited his choices only to women of color. People were irate that he was exercising such an egregious example of affirmative action. I wrote here about why I, a cis white male, wasn’t particularly perturbed by his actions.

Now that there’s a Supreme Court vacancy, President Biden has announced that he will fulfill his campaign promise of nominating a Black woman to the court. Once again, there are voices of outrage. How dare he overlook all of the wonderful white male candidates and only focus on qualified Black woman!

Just like I did before, let’s look at the facts.

According to that indisputable source, Wikipedia, from 1789 to the present, there have been 115 Supreme Court Justices. According to my count, there have been two Black justices, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. There has been a grand total of one Hispanic justice, Sonia Sotomayor. There have been five female justices, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor (two check boxes!), Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett. That leaves the remaining 108 as white males.

Let’s run the percentages. 1.7% of all Justices have been Black. 0.8% of all Justices have been Hispanic.  4.3% of all Justices have been women. 93.9% of all Justices have been white males.

It’s not exactly a huge mystery why. Black people weren’t even considered citizens until the Fourteenth Amendment passed in 1868. Even after that point, it would be close to another hundred years, after school desegregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that Black people even had the ghost of an opportunity to advance to something as august as the Supreme Court. It wasn’t until 1920 that women were even granted the right to vote and they were denied anything approaching equality for decades after that.

Even if we grant all of that, start history with Sandra Day O’Connor, and pretend that the sexism and racism of those first two hundred years or so somehow don’t count for some reason, where does that leave us?

O’Connor was nominated in 1981. Since then, thirteen more Justices have been appointed. Of those, one has been Black, one has been Hispanic, and four have been women (again, Sotomayor checks two boxes). That leaves eight that have been white males.

That’s a bit better. What are the percentages? 7.7% have been Black or Hispanic. 30.8% have been women. 61.5% have been white males.

What percentage of our country is composed of white men? A quick search yields about 31%.

So, if President Biden decides to nominate a Black woman, white men aren’t exactly going to be underrepresented in our highest court.

Regarding the argument, by doing so, that Biden is overlooking an entire swarm of highly qualified white men that could better serve in that open court seat? Well, does anyone seriously think that Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh is the greatest legal mind of our age? I have absolutely no fears that Biden will have trouble finding a Black woman serving on a court somewhere that can at least match Kavanaugh’s level of legal acumen.

So, let me close with the same thought that I stated in my previous post. From the year 1789 to the year 1980, the only possible demographic to be a Supreme Court Justice was the white male.

What do you call a job where race and/or sex is a prerequisite? Affirmative Action. For the first 191 years of our country’s history, the Supreme Court was an affirmative action program for white males.

Knowing all of this, I have no problem with a President, in the year 2022, saying that maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance.

Lady Macbeth In Missouri

Title: Ozark

Rating: 5 Stars

I don’t often write about television series, probably because I don’t watch that many of them. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, but the time commitment always seems oppressive. I guess that I just have a preference for a two hour film in comparison to a ten hour season. When you factor that in many cases the season is left somewhat open ended to prepare for future seasons, it just seems like a serious commitment. Even so, every now and then one catches my eye.

Ozark is ostensibly the story of Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman). A mild mannered financial advisor, he and his partner have been laundering a drug cartel’s money for some years. The cartel discovers that his partner has been embezzling from them. They execute him. As they’re preparing to execute Marty, he desperately pleads for his life by showing them a tour brochure of the Ozarks that he just happens to have in his pocket and claims that it’s an area perfect for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars. They let him live but keep him on a very tight leash. He moves his family and he tries to fulfill the rash promises that he made to the cartel. He encounters many obstacles and is always living on the edge of disaster.

Just from hearing about the plot so far, there are obvious parallels to Breaking Bad. In both cases you have a mild mannered milquetoast man that apparently is secretly harboring criminal mastermind ambitions. Instead of being a chemistry genius, Byrde is a master of financial chicanery. Like Walter White, when under pressure Marty has a remarkable ability to think his way out of any scrape. One difference is that when we meet Marty, he’s already broken bad. He’s already made the decision to work with the cartel. He is already corrupt.

I’ve seen some reviews that paint Marty somehow as a basically nice guy that just got himself into a scrape. I don’t agree. Byrde is amoral. He’s a calculating machine. He sees the world as a set of problems that need to be solving. Although the scrapes he gets into are dangerous, I get the feeling that he secretly enjoys them. He’s Houdini always looking for his next great escape.

As the seasons unfold, I think that it’s the women that have emerged as the most interesting characters. His wife Wendy (Laura Linney), his erstwhile protege Ruth (Julia Garner), and the local opium farmer Darlene (Lisa Emery) now drive the series.

Darlene is a salt of the earth farmer that just happens to have a homicidal temper. Several men, thinking that they’re talking to some weak housewife, make the mistake of insulting her. She responds by casually grabbing a nearby shotgun, shooting them dead with nary a thought, and then having them buried in one of her fields. She’s tough and smart but dangerously unstable.

Ruth would probably proudly call herself trailer trash. She literally does live in a trailer. She has an accent that you can cut glass with. Although not educated, she has a native intelligence that shines through. Bitterly familiar with the way of the world, she’ll do whatever necessary to succeed. Even so, as the series unfolds, nearly everyone she loves dies. In the second half of the last season, she’s destined to become an unstoppable revenge missile.

When we first meet Wendy, we’re not even sure if she’s aware of Marty’s laundering habits. It turns out that she’s been complicit from the first. Even so, in the beginning she seems to be an unfulfilled, unhappy spouse to an emotionally unavailable husband. On the verge of leaving him, their forced flight drives them back together, however unhappily. Over time, their relationship ebbs and flows accordingly. As the series goes on, we see Wendy’s true nature. She shows herself to be a cold blooded, cold hearted, pitiless woman. Her bipolar brother becomes a problem for her. She acquiesces in his murder. In an intense emotional argument with Darlene, Darlene collapses with a heart attack. As she lies there suffering, Wendy sits down and watches her writhe with what can only be described as an absolutely joyous look on her face. Wendy is now the engine that is pushing Marty into ever more ambitious plans and it is her remorseless drive that will overcome all obstacles to accomplish them.

In the scale of great, sweeping, crime dramas, Ozark is no Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, or The Wire. Even so, I think it’s a worthy entry that, unexpectedly for television series, has only gotten better in the later seasons.

Systemic Racism Isn’t Just Bull Conner

Title: Locking Up Our Own

Rating: 5 Stars

Over the last several years, I’ve read many books trying to come to terms with our country’s legacy of systemic racism. It’s so easy to identify bad actors, whether it be Senate Majority Leader Richard Russell fighting against racial progress until his bitter end, or George Wallace standing in the way of a young girl just trying to go to school, or a founding father like Thomas Jefferson who advocated equality for all while holding slaves and keeping one as a concubine, or even Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s using the term “superpredators” to describe black youth. If systemic racism was as easy as that, it becomes a matter of identifying the bad actors and rooting them off. Not an easy job but seemingly doable.

The challenge with systemic racism is that it’s just so much more complex than that. You read a book like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. You come away with the understanding that the modern day policing, judicial, and prison systems have all become tools to oppress people of color. Our justice system seems to be the platonic ideal of systemic racism. 

When you think of that, you think of Richard Nixon and his Attorney General conspiring to enact draconian drug laws for the purpose of imprisoning Nixon’s two sworn enemy cohorts, black people and hippies. That’s all true. This has been captured on tape.

It just doesn’t tell the whole story. In the mid 1970s, especially in cities like Washington DC and Atlanta, the black community had made significant gains. In DC, the mayor was black. The chief of police was black. Many judges were black. There were many black police officers.  Considering where they started from just dating back to the 1940s or 1950s, this was tremendous progress. They finally had seats at the table of power.

From that time emerged the nationwide scourge of heroin. This hit black communities particularly hard. Where before there was poverty, now there were open drug markets, violent street crimes, and a dramatic increase in murders.

Feeling like they were losing control of their city, it was the black DC mayor and police commissioner that embraced what now seem to be draconian drug laws. There were mandatory minimums for drug and gun crimes. Police were given virtual open reign to harass any suspected drug offenders. Even the most minor of drug possession charges resulted in an arrest. Once that arrest was on a young man’s record, good luck getting a job or housing or an education. For such young men, what choice did that leave them but a life of crime?

It was not as if these leaders were operating in a vacuum. Although to people outside of it, the black community might seem homogeneous, in truth it holds a complex class structure. Everything from skin tone, to level of education (Howard University being the epitome), income, address, among other attributes, combine together to create a black experience mosaic. The more privileged, substantial members of the black community applauded these aggressive actions. Black parents just wanted to raise their children in a peaceful neighborhood. Such respectable members of the community saw the drug dealers as race traitors. Many black leaders believed that the black on black violence in their community was their largest civil rights problem.

Hindsight is always 20/20. The results now seem obvious. Young black men stopped on a mere pretext with no probable cause were searched and, when drugs / weapons were found, were arrested and thrown into the justice system. At one point, one in four black men were arrested, jailed, or on probation. It made it seem as if the black community was somehow innately predisposed to crime. No one seemed to understand that the white and black communities used drugs at about the same rate but since black people were way more like to be searched with no probable cause, this made it inevitable that more black people would be caught in the justice system web. These pretext arrests destroyed the presumption of innocence that a community should have.

As the number of arrests increased, so too did the demand to imprison them. With a system as overwhelmed as it was, even those that could have benefited from drug treatment or some other intervention ended up imprisoned because there was no space in these alternatives. There never seems to be room in a treatment center but authorities always seem to be able to find one more jail cell.

This explosion in crime led to a form of policing known as Warrior Policing. Instead of serving and protecting, the police occupy streets like they’re in a war zone. This technique was taught in police academies. Even though there were now many more black police officers, these officers, using this hyper aggressive training, employed the same brutal tactics as white officers. It turned out that racial equality in the police force did not lead to equality in treatment of the community.

Reading this highlighted how complex of an issue systemic racism is. It precludes easy answers. To accomplish true equality would required a pretty fundamental reshaping of our country. It would require a sea direction change in our justice system. It would require a massive investment in underfunded alternatives to prison. It would require the police to abandon their warrior philosophy and start to protect and yes, serve, their community.

Not impossible to imagine, but at this time it seems an impossible dream.

Sometimes A City Just Needs To Riot

I’ve been reading Gotham, by Burrows and Wallace. It’s a history of New York City, starting from when the city was founded in 1625 and stopping at 1898. It’s a mammoth work. It’s written in a style that it’ll be difficult for me to write about. It is in no way a narrative history. Spanning over 1400 pages, broken up into four sections, each covering a block of time, each chapter in a section discusses one component of New York City at that time. There are chapters about politics, architecture, the gentility, and so on. It’s interesting but having no narrative thread makes it a tough plow to read. It’ll take me well over a month to finish.

Even so, I might occasionally write about things that I find interesting while reading it. One of the first things that I found amusing is how many times New York City has descended into riots. Some of the riots are quite serious indeed. For instance, there’s the slave riot in 1712 when a small group of enslaved people revolted, attacked settlers, and burned a building. More tragically, there was the Draft Day Riots in 1863. Outraged that the wealthy could buy their way out of the draft, white working class men rioted when the draft was implemented in New York City. Quickly descending into a race riot, black men, women, and children were hunted down by a mob. Over a hundred people were killed and a black children’s orphanage was burned down.

Some of the other riots, even though they were serious affairs in which people died, seem to somehow be less serious. Here’s a partial list of riots in New York City that, looking back at that them from our perspective now, seem quite odd.

Doctors Mob Riot (1788): A group of children were playing outside of a hospital. They looked in and saw a medical student dissecting an arm. Either as a joke or to terrorize a boy, the student lifted up the arm, shook it at the boy, and told him that it was his mother’s. Well, it turned out that the boy’s mother had just died. The boy told his father, who exhumed the mother’s grave and found an empty coffin. The father formed up a mob and they descended upon the hospital. The rioters moved down Broadway and they gathered in front of the courthouse. Doctors went into hiding. Rocks were thrown. The riot lasted for a couple of days until the militia was called in. Some twenty people died. All medical specimens were destroyed.

Flour Riots (1837): Due to US monetary policy, the economy went into a tailspin and several banks failed. In particular, the price of food dramatically increased. There were press reports that the flour supply was getting very low and that the wealthy were hoarding it. This led to a mass demonstration. In front of a crowd of four thousand, the last speaker called on the crowd to march on the major flour supplier. Police tried to stop them but were overwhelmed and disarmed. The mayor stood in front of the crowd to get them to stand down. Instead he was stoned. The crowd broke into the warehouse and stole / destroyed 500 to 600 barrels of flour and a thousand bushels of wheat. They eventually dispersed. One result of this was that, the next day, the number of police were increased.

Astor Place Riot (1849): This is one of my favorites. I even previously wrote about it here. This was all about Shakespeare. The gentry preferred the classic, refined Shakespearean acting of the English William Charles Macready. The working class preferred the brawny, masculine acting of the American Edwin Forrest. Macready gave a performance of Macbeth at Astor Place. The problem was that this theater was dangerously close to a working class neighborhood. Insulted, a crowd showed up and, during his performance, showered him with rotten eggs, fruit, and if reports are to be believed, half of a sheep’s carcass (who brings half of a sheep’s carcass to a performance?!). He was catcalled, including one of my favorite phrases of all time, “Down with the codfish aristocracy!”. When he tried again later, ten thousand people surrounded the theater in protest. The militia was called out. In close quarters, the crowd jostled the militia. The militia fired. Some twenty-five people were killed and over one hundred were injured. All because of Shakespeare.

New York Police Riot (1857): I find the name of it, if nothing else, amusing. The mayor of New York had authority over the municipal police. This force was notoriously corrupt. It was so corrupt that the state legislature ordered it dissolved and to start up a new metropolitan police force that would not be under the control of the mayor. The mayor refused to give up his police. The metropolitan force showed up at City Hall to arrest the mayor. The municipal police stormed out of the City Hall to protect the mayor. The metropolitan and the municipal police forces engaged in a fight. The metropolitan police were routed and retreated. Over fifty men were injured. Ultimately, the Supreme Court agreed with the state and the municipal police force was disbanded.

Dead Rabbits Riot (1857): This was another riot with a silly name. It resulted because of the politics behind the New York Police Riot. For a time, both the municipal and metropolitan police forces attempted to be the law in New York City. They would actively impede each other to make the other look bad. Criminal gangs saw this as an opportunity for looting and vandalism. A gang named, and yes, this was their name, the Dead Rabbits, used this as an opportunity to invade the territory of the Bowery Boys gang. Some 800 to 1,000 gang members engaged in a brawl. The police were called but were routed by the gangs. Ultimately, the state militia were called in to break up the fight. During the two days of fighting, eight people were killed and around one hundred were injured.

Straw Hat Riot (1922): Believe it or not, this riot was caused by a fashion faux pas. Straw hats were considered acceptable attire for men only during the summer months. They were supposed to stop wearing them on September 1st, but there was a generally accepted two week grace period. Well, on September 13th, two days before the end of the period, a group of kids decided to get a head start. They went around to factory workers heading home, yanked their straw hats off, and then stomped on the hats. Anyone who resisted was beaten. An estimated mob of 1,000 was stealing hats. Several men were hospitalized from their beatings. Eventually the police were able to break it up. Apparently, this was not the last of it. In 1925, a man in New York City was murdered for wearing his straw hat after the summer.

Patrolman’s Benevolent Association Riot (1992): This was another amusingly named riot. NYC mayor David Dinkins proposed creating a civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. The Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York organized a rally in protest. Some 4,000 New York police officers showed up. They blockaded the Brooklyn Bridge, jumped over some police barricades, and rushed City Hall. These law enforcement officers damaged cars, were openly drinking, physically attacked journalists, and chanted racial epithets directed towards their Black mayor. The on duty police supposed to maintain order just stood by and let it happen. Later, the PBA president conceded that things got out of hand but blamed David Dinkins for the riot.

This is only a subset. I didn’t even mention the Hard Hat Riot, another riot with a quality name, or the most famous NYC riot of them all, the Stonewall riots, that were a watershed event for LGBT rights.

Fun times in the big city!