If
a person wants to read about
racist policemen killing Black men or using excessive force against
them, there's no shortage of stories this week. New York City has
come again into the spotlight,
which isn't surprising, given their long history of questionable
policing. But
for this post, I want to continue to focus on Ferguson, Missouri, and
Saint Louis County, where Ferguson is located.
An
early indication of the fairness of the “justice” which Michael
Brown's family can expect is the refusal
by
Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to appoint a special prosecutor to
replace Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County district attorney who
will likely be prosecuting the case against the officer who shot Mr.
Brown to death while he was unarmed. I
see no justice coming
for
Michael Brown or his family from St. Louis County or the Missouri
state government.
But
a
Business
Week
story that caught my eye a
few days ago provoked
a few
strands
of thought. The
story concerns
the description of the causes of the extreme fragmentation
of St. Louis County. Over time, the county has fragmented into 91
municipalities that “range from small to tiny, along with clots of
population in unincorporated areas.” Why this fragmentation?
First, because the law allowed residents to fragment themselves.
Secondly, because of the hellishly selfish motives of the residents,
who “set themselves up as municipalities to capture control of tax
revenue from local businesses, to avoid paying taxes to support
poorer neighbors, or to exclude blacks.” One of the municipalities
has only thirteen members – all of whom are white. And according
to the Business Week article, the extreme fragmentation of St. Louis
County is a key factor holding back economic development in that
county.
This
description of St. Louis County reminded me of the description of
Hell in The
Great Divorce,
a short novel
written by C.S. Lewis in the early 1940's. In
the story, Hell was likened to a shabby gray town (or grey, if you
prefer the British spelling) that seemed to go on forever, where the
time was always evening, and where it was always raining. Why was
the town so big? Because all the residents were so selfish and
self-centered that within 24 hours of arriving from Earth, a new
arrival would have quarreled with his or her neighbors and decided to
move on. Because
their selfishness was
by now
incurable, the residents continued to quarrel, and to move farther
and farther apart. When the narrator in the story asked whether one
could meet any famous people, he was told that they all lived really
far apart. He was also told of an expedition undertaken by a few
ordinary people to visit Napoleon Bonaparte – a journey which took
20,000 years. In order to locate his house, the expedition had to
use a telescope. It
seems those who hold power in St. Louis County have turned it into a
little bit of Hell, which is ironic considering how many churches
there are in the county. Truly
“the salt has lost its flavor!” (Matthew 5:13)
But
St. Louis County seems also to be a shining example of Dmitry Orlov's
Fifth Stage of Collapse,
in
which “faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.” People lose
their capacity for selflessness and concern for others, and become
like the Donner
Party, except that they don't wait for each other to die before
trying to chew on each other. Anglo-American supremacist culture is
an organism born already
collapsed,
with its emphasis on self-reliance, “freedom” from responsibility
to anyone but oneself, and
unrestrained competition. Even the privileged members of our society
cannot rest easy, as their identity depends a great deal on who and
how many people they can identify as being beneath them.
And
that leads to the third strand in this web of thought, namely, how
typical St. Louis County is of a narcissistically disordered family,
whose head cannot stand the presence of people different from himself
unless they are under his heel as scapegoats and dumping grounds for
unresolved anger and insecurity. The thing that many white
supremacists in this country don't realize is that even if they
succeed in ridding themselves of the “named” scapegoats, that
won't be the end of scapegoating, for some of their own number will
be selected as the replacements for the old scapegoats. They
don't seem to have the imagination to picture what that will be like.
St.
Louis County, Missouri. This
is the sort of place where Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was
shot to death by a white policeman.
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