They Know They're Wrong

I have had the pleasure of attending both a junior high and high school that employed off-duty cops as English teachers. The one at my high school was a ring-tailed treat, though.
I'm imagining it's because his name was 'Gale'. Sure, it's a perfectly reasonable male name, resonant of storms at sea, and therefore not sissified in the least. However, that wouldn't stop someone like him from being teased, no doubt, all through his childhood for having a girl's name, and also (no doubt) carrying the resentment from this into his adulthood.
About cops in general: I love how people carry on about how they are so humstrung by society's little "laws" that they can't do their job. And furthermore, these same people will always be first to say that there is no need for citizen oversight as far as law enforcement goes, as the hiring processes there are as sound as any, say, private security company, and certainly don't hire a bunch of meth-heads, people who flunked out of military academy, incipient white supremacists, etc.
The main point these (excuse me) bedwetters are making is-you can't question the police, because they're the police. Now, as any of us who have seen them doing cocaine in their squad cars, accepting free blow jobs from hookers, beating up people for the crime of being homeless or going apeshit on a bunch of people excercising their constitutional right to assemble and yes, voice dissent know-this is a bunch of shit. The police need oversight because their power is unchecked. It's the kind of thing that right wingers would immediately suggest if the police levied taxes. But they don't, so they don't.
They need oversight because they have a gun, and I don't. Even if I did have a gun, I still couldn't legally use it to defend myself against the (excuse me) apes that generally make up the staff of the police department in any city or town. Even if they killed you for no clear or decent reason-shot you on a routine traffic stop, strapped you down to a board then pepper-sprayed you until you asphyxiated, beat you some on the way to the station, and then beat you some more until you died-the grand jury inevitably lets them walk. They're the police, you see.
And to those who propose 'an eye for an eye' type justice: okay, can I strap the fuck who did the abovementioned to an unarmed, developmentally disabled man to a board and spray him with CS gas until he croaks? Okay, why not? Cop or not, he's a citizen, and bound to the same laws as anyone.
Alright. Let's take it back to this evil fuck who worked at my high school. He was very fond of chasing us kids, when we'd leave school property. If you wanna go to McDonald's for lunch instead of the cafeteria, what's the harm in that, exactly? The school had the policy that you must not leave at all, but a lot of us viewed this as the kind of thing that they couldn't really enforce legally...Forgetting that teenagers have no rights under the law.
And again, it was typical hysteria vs. actual thought type stuff engaged in by school boards everywhere, especially in the suburbs. On one particular occasion, my pals and I were enjoying lunch at McDonald's-violating school policy, that is-and Gale bursts through the doors, looking for us. We actually crawled out the back door.
When we arrived back at school, we stopped, as was inevitable, at the smoking section (this was back when high schools had such things). We noticed Gale approaching across the courtyard, and somehow the crowd immediately sent up a wave of obfuscation. They all said, "You'd better run, Dean," and "Here comes Gale, Dean." A lot of things like that were said, despite the fact that none of us in the party were named 'Dean'.
He walked up, said to my friend Gary, "Okay Dean, you'd better come with me."
Gary got detention, under the name 'Dean Jones'. Strangely, he never showed up for it.
A couple weeks later, I violated another well-conceived school policy by trying to exit the cafeteria with a Ho-Ho snack cake. You could have food in the caf, and nowhere else, so if you wished to step outside, you either needed to finish that food there, or be stealthy about it.
As I attempted to exit the building, Gale walked up to me and said, "Dean, you need to learn your lesson."
I said, "Yeah, I really do."
"Gimme the Ho-Ho."
"No. I paid for this thing."
"GIMME," he said, "THE HO-HO!"
"No," I said, and was then escorted to the office. He made out another detention slip for Dean Jones.
Now, should I have felt sorry for his over-zealous, vindictive, inept ass? Hell no. Natural consequences being what you should reward slow children with for repeated dangerous stupidity, I felt that it was just fine that he was assigning detention to a fictional student, who he could have easily determined was fictional, had his simple ass checked.
The next time he saw me, he said, "Your name isn't Dean Jones."
I said, "Really?", or, "You sure?", or something. My two friends and I were on our way to talk with a favorite teacher of ours, and in this case were doing nothing wrong. My friend Gary said something to Gale along the lines of 'you got nothing, leave us alone'.
Gale spun around and faced him. He tried to be intimidating, but was mostly spluttering. He said that Gary was a 'big lip'.
"'Big lip'?", I said, "What's that?" I could tell that he was looking for the happy medium between 'don't give me any lip', and 'you're a big mouth', two favorites of sadists with unchecked power, speaking to the powerless.
He spun on me. "Yeah. He's a big lip! I said it! You got a problem with that?"
So now I had a middle-aged man leaning into me, threatening me, a minor. I could've sued his ass just for that alone. Instead, I stood and laughed. He knew how stupid he looked.
As my third friend Pete was asking if it was acceptable to refer to Gale as 'dirt shoe' or 'bad hair', I took account. This particular authority figure realized that he'd been barking up the wrong tree, had made an ass out of himself, but was too committed to his sacred mission to back down. His biggest problem in the main was that he had gone too deep into a mission that had no real validity in the first place. Then, when he had failed to make any quantifiable difference, he got angry and started violating laws.
He actually was sued, and lost his job, a few years after I left that place. Serves him right. The stupid should struggle, to quote a guy none of you have heard of.
I no longer talk to any of my right-wing blogger counterparts. Or, I should say, I no longer debate them. One of them I'll talk to about anything but politics, as he seems to be a decent guy who actually listens to people who disagree with him. Most of his blog is political, so I usually just read it, and move on.
Another one of them has gone so thoroughly around the corner that I get the shivers reading his hateful mewlings. He goes back and forth on a weekly basis about whether or not he will let people comment on his blog at all, since sometimes people are mean to him. Or, 'disrespectful', or something.
But I've noticed that all one needs to do to be judged as such by him is disagree with him, a lot of the time, and that's childish. No matter how you phrase it, he's still going to have a tantrum against those of us who dispute his well-meant comments, which grow increasingly dark and yes, hateful. He then follows this up with a great deal of twaddle about how liberals (only liberals) are always engaging in immature, ad hominem attacks.
Or, what I always call the I'm-not-a-mechanic excuse: You're trying to get your car up and running again, and you find yourself beset by a squad of men who say, "Well, I'm not a mechanic or anything, but lemme tell you..." and they waste your time for the next hour or so. Look-I'm gonna stop here, but let's just say in general; I don't argue with robots or fools anymore. Especially when they try to simultaneously paint themselves as both an embattled minority and the majority of citizens, in terms of their belief.
Great. You're a minority? Well, work hard, little one. Oh. Now you're a majority? Well, those are often wrong. Almost always. Have you met most people? They're not so bright, easily manipulated by the dumbest of parlor tricks, and given to all manner of tribal taboo, happily swallowed.
As Mistah Chomsky might say, were he here, The Trick is not to Speak Truth to Power. Power already knows what it is doing, and is doing wrong. No: the trick is to remind everybody else, and try to bring them back to their senses.