Reading our Bookcase - Day 3

The Politics of Law, A Progressive Critique Edited by David Kairys

This book is a collection of essays or articles. Justin says it was a textbook he used in law school. It is fun to see his handwriting and notes from when he was a younger man. He liked the book so much he used it when he was teaching a class on Civil Rights at the law school. It is pretty dense, but I decided to read the article by David Rudovsky titled “The Criminal Justince System and the Role of the Police.” This was written in 1990, explained the situation clearly and things have turned out much as the author predicted. He talks about the War on Drugs and how the incarceration of Black people grew at such a fast rate. He briefly outlines the Warren court and some of the changes in criminal procedures that were implemented to give some modicum of due process to the accused (like Miranda). But also discusses how the Court failed to required disclosure of of police informants. Then the Burger-Rehnquist court started to erode this precedents in the name of “public safety and law enforcement.”

I noted the disucssion of qualified immunity and a how it was established as the law by the Supreme Court in LA v. Lyons. It was a situation where the detained person was stopped for a motor vehicle violation, did not resist, but the police used a chokehold on him and rendered him unconscious. Luckily he survived, because he had documented at least 15 people who had died at the hands of police who used this stranglehold. The Court showed “little concern for the deadly consequences of this unconstitutional police practice.”

Sound familiar? 30 years later, here we go again.

The article closes with a prescient sentence:

“Ultimately, the costs of the current approach [the conservative crime control model] will not only be increased economic inequality and unchecked violence, but a weakening of the constitutional guarantees of liberty and equality.”

Check, check, check & check.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/defund-police-reform-accountability-social-services-20200615.html

Reading our Bookcase - Day 2

Day 2 - Tante Picot by Mlle G. du Planty

I guess you could say I inherited this book when my father died. I think he was interested in collecting old books, although I am not sure why. I feel pretty confident it wasn’t because he was interested in their content. Maybe it was because they look cool. Or he thought they would appreciate in value. Or that there is something kind of magical about holding something that a young person held & read over 100 years ago.

Anyway, I would say you can skip this book. It is from another era in a bad way. From the little I can find out about it, the author is trying to make an example of the main character - of how not to act. She is Tante Picot, an elderly aunt who comes to Paris to live with her nephew and his children. She is described as an old lady with a good heart and likeable, but her aggressive and authoritarian spirit make her intolerable, even to herself. In one of the vignettes, she starts rearranging the furniture, which causes a lot of noise for her downstairs neighbor. When the neighbor sends his Black domestic worker to try to get negotiate some “peace” Tante Picot berates her. Finally, when Tante Picot learns that the neighbor is suffering from a systemic inflammatory disease (Bouillaud’s disease) she changes her tune completely and offers some home remedies. I wonder if this character “Tante Picot” is known in the french culture, like an Uncle Scrooge or something - but I can’t find much about her.

Here is the old book with a watercolor painting of a pear. . .

Do you keep books that don’t mean anything to you just because they are old?

Reading our Bookcase - Day 1

Day 1 - Fanon for Beginners by Deborah Wyrick

This is an interesting book explaining the life and work of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and political philosopher from Martinique who wrote about many things, including colonization and decolonization. It is an easy read with a lot of cartoons throughout.

The part of this book that stuck with me was Fanon’s support for the Algerian National Liberation Front. Algeria gained their independence from France in 1962. My grandmother was French and born in Algeria around 1910. I don’t know the whole story or how long they were there, but the family must have moved back to France shortly after that.

I come from a family of colonizers. That’s something to think about and learn about.

Missing the Pixies

I am not going to be able to see one of my favorite bands - The Pixies - play in town! Although big stadium concerts don’t have a lot of appeal these days, seeing them live would be so evocative and nostalgic. Such is life. I will be traveling and making new memories.

But I did learn that there will be a documentary podcast about the Pixies - check it out if you like them too!

What should be in the first post?

This will be a place to think out loud about making, recycling and sharing.