What a terrible weekend. Demonstrations both nights (good thing), followed by the window-smashing and general mayhem (bad thing). The curfew went into effect an hour ago, and the police started firing tear gas and moving the crowd back shortly thereafter. I expect the window-breaking and so forth will start any time now.

It’s getting worse by the night. The first, the police seemed fairly tolerant; Kate walked in the first demonstration, which was peaceful. The organizers wished everyone a good night, and many people went home. But many didn’t, or maybe more showed up, but whatever happened, the window-breaking started at nightfall.

That was the night similar action took place in Fort Wayne and cities all over the country: Peaceful start, violent finish.

The outside-agitators line is being sold, and if the details are true, it holds up — most of those arrested were not Detroiters, and from the photography, most weren’t black, and in a city that’s more than 80 percent black, well, it stands out.

Saturday was uglier, and the same pattern: Peaceful protest, ugly end.

The Freep noted as much:

Following a script seemingly set the day before, protests in downtown Detroit and in many cities nationwide began Saturday afternoon with crowds of peaceful marchers voicing chants about racial justice.

But after dark, those crowds were less peaceful. In Detroit, Friday night’s protest had become tense and led to arrests, and it even involved a fatal shooting, although that was later determined to be unrelated to the protesting.

Saturday night was worse. Participants threw rocks and fireworks at police, refusing to disperse until hundreds of officers converged to use tear gas and make dozens of arrests, according to reporters at the scene.

Saturday was the night they pepper-sprayed reporters, too.

Again, this is a majority-black city, with a majority-black police force. They’re not perfect, but they haven’t had a major brutality case in years. This isn’t Minneapolis. But some people just want to fuck shit up. And the police are getting surlier as this drags on. I hope things calm down, but I don’t know that they will. Lots of people with time on their hands (unemployment), lots of people with energy to spend (confinement), lots of people just mad at everything (Trump). It’s a bad combination.

How were things where you were?

With the sun rising at 6 a.m. and warm-enough mornings finally here (you can say that again; 30 degrees of difference in about three days), I’ve been taking some early-morning bike rides again. Get my sweat over with first, shower and face the day – it works for me.

Sunrise is a nice time of day to be out, even when you miss it by, oh, 20 minutes or so:

And then I headed inland. Good shadows on a day like…whatever day that was. Tuesday, I think:

In between, I passed a woman on a street corner, that goes around one of the two nearby hospitals. She was kneeling on the sidewalk, hands clasped in what looked like fervent prayer, face upturned toward the building, eyes closed. A relative or loved one inside on a ventilator? Just a generic prayer for the “health care heroes,” as the local yard signs say? Dunno. The weirdest detail: A toy-sized dog, fluffy, sat patiently behind her. (I think she was kneeling on its leash.) Looked like a papillon, very well-groomed.

I’d have taken a picture of that, but it was a private moment. Don’t be an asshole. The world has enough of them.

As I write this, the breaking news – and there’s been so much of it this week – is the president’s executive order on social media:

“We’re here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers,” Trump said before signing the document.

While Trump has threatened such action for years, his signing of the order Thursday was precipitated by a decision by Twitter earlier in the week to mark two of his erroneous tweets with fact-checking labels. The small move set off a firestorm of tweets by the president threatening social media companies with regulations and other punishments.

I’m not sure why, but I started thinking about this one guy, who was included in the Bridge project on the political division of the state when I was there. He was an affluent gent in his 50s who retired early by being a lifelong cheapskate and loved the president with his whole heart. After the election, he joined Twitter. No profile, no bio, no cutesy name. He follows one, just one, account: @RealDonaldTrump. I believe at the time he said he wanted to read the president unfiltered. (Like you have to be on Twitter for that.) I wonder what Twitter is like when that’s how you’ve crafted your experience, eh?

As I recall, he was stupefied – unbelieving – that anyone could not see the Greatness that had been unleashed upon our land by Trump. And yet, sitting there reading the president, oh the things he must be learning. And now this.

November. November, November, November. It’s my birthday month. I’d gladly give up five months of my life and the whole summer and fall ahead to get this shit over with, now.

Then my editor calls and tells me he was driving downtown, just to check on our deserted office, when he saw a goose family crossing the street. Geese are unusual downtown, but the river was only a couple blocks away, and that’s probably where they were headed. Another motorist stopped, and the guy got up, rushed the flock, scooped up two goslings and put them in his shirt before getting in his car to drive away. That story wrecked me for the rest of the day. WHO DOES THAT? I’m still bothered by it.

So let’s part on a more humorous note with… this. As usual, the best stuff is in the briefs at the bottom. Especially the item about Mnuchin.

The police arrested a “Detroit man,” a white real-estate agent living downtown, for what they called credible threats against the governor, attorney general, mayor and Rashida Tlaib. His Facebook page is public, and still is, and it’s interesting to see the outlines of his obvious-but-not-too-obvious mental illness – paranoia, threats, conspiracies, etc. It reminded me of something that’s interested me for a while, i.e., how mental illness is shaped by the times.

In fact, I think we’ve talked about this here before, how once, people claimed demons visited them in their sleep, usually having sex with them. Today, they’re more likely to claim aliens did it. A transparently obvious memory of, or reaction to, sex abuse of some kind gets wrapped in the trappings of the time.

We’ve also talked here about Edward Bodkin, the Huntington castrator (Google it). I still remember the debriefing from a colleague who’d just hung up the phone from interviewing the editor of Ball Club magazine. He was trying to get an idea why men would go to a grimy house in rural Indiana and willingly let someone cut off their testicles (free of charge, but you had to agree that the procedure be videotaped). The editor explained that some might have been transsexuals (we didn’t use terms like transgender then) who couldn’t afford sex-change surgery (we didn’t say gender-reassignment or gender-conforming then), and figured getting rid of part of the offensive anatomy was good enough.

But then he went off down a rabbit hole about the whole cult of body modification. These are people who simply don’t think the body they’re in is the one they’re supposed to be in. They’re not trans, just…unsatisfied. If there were a spectrum, at the mild end might be tattooing, with extreme plastic surgery closer to the middle, and at the other, people who use shotguns or saws or other implements to do enough damage to a limb that a doctor might have to just amputate what’s left. Because in their minds, they are amputees.

(You might put fitness freaks somewhere on that continuum. Rare is the person who is 100 percent pleased with every pore on their face, but I also think there’s a reason so much fitness activity is dressed up in the virtuous clothing of better health. Certainly it is better to be active than sedentary. But if you’re spending hours and hours a week in search of a different pair of arms, maybe you belong on that scale, too.)

Hoarding – was that a thing before the last 20-30 years? We’ve called people pack rats forever, but there’s something about the great, post-1980 age of Getting and Spending that seems to fold into hoarding rather neatly. Animal hoarding, ditto.

And so now we’re in an age when people in the highest offices in the land freely talk bullshit about American carnage and Qanon and pedophiles in pizza joints, and suddenly we have all these very suggestible, mentally fragile people making threats against the political enemies of those who, just to use one example, imply that a U.S. senator is a pedophile, and, well, you see what happens.

(The president’s eldest son, I have zero problems diagnosing from this distance, has extreme daddy issues and, I am sorry to say, these tactics won’t work to make daddy finally love him.)

Back to the guy who was threatening the Michigan politicians. If he hadn’t included the mayor, I’d think he also has…problems with women, shall we say. Actually, I will say it: He has problems with women. The other day I was emailing about this with a former colleague, who didn’t think the complaints about Gretchen Whitmer are motivated by sexism. I said, what are we to think when the expressions of those complaints are so often made with gendered insults? TYRANT BITCH, etc. Hmm? No answer.

Of course, part of the problem is, there are far fewer gendered insults for men. “Prick,” maybe. But even “asshole” doesn’t work; we all have them, after all.

OK, then. How was everyone’s weekend? We had one perfect day and one rainy day. Rode my bike on both. The Spotify mix tossed up “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” which is always amusing, and I regret to say that was the high point of Sunday’s ride, because then it started to rain and the now-predictable right-side lower-back pain came in right behind it. Saturday’s was better; I went with a friend and when it was over, got a couple of tall boys from a nearby likka sto’ and that was the cool down. We sat at opposite ends of a bench and talked about different types of feta cheese.

And Friday was our 27th anniversary. There was cake, there were flowers, there was a mushroom risotto. It was all quite nice.

And now the week ahead awaits. Let it be peaceful and healthy for all, but if Barack Obama’s gentle reproof in his virtual commencement address makes a particular skull explode, yeah well shit happens.

Sorry about the midweek no-show. I find my energy, and mood, and energy, and sleep patterns…undulating this week. Time to go back on the bedtime marijuana, I fear.

In the meantime, there was another state capital demonstration in Lansing today. They string a big banner between the columns (you can see it here) that reads FREEEDOM. I assume the three Es are probably a reference to Mel Gibson’s big speech in “Braveheart,” because none of those people actually read books, I suspect. Everything is a pop-culture reference, and I’m missing out on pop culture, the older I get. Psst: I never saw “Braveheart.” A friend told me it was long as hell and “it takes Mel Gibson like 45 minutes to die,” and I noped out of that, oh yes I did.

But throw in video games and movies that I wouldn’t see at gunpoint, and half the time I feel just out of it. But at least I’ve read a few more books than these goobers. I listened to about five minutes of the speakers; one did a whole bit on the “admiralty flag” thing, which was a joke on “King of the Hill” years ago. Ai-yi-yi.

Meanwhile, one of these aforementioned goobers showed up with an axe. Not sure what it was about, but it was confiscated.

Oh, and look — he has a criminal record. What a nice man.

This is really getting to be an embarrassment. I’d say, “We’re not really like this,” but clearly, we are.

More bad news today: Our city pool won’t open on schedule, and probably won’t open at all. I was hoping they might have early-morning lap swimming at the very least, but it’s looking like no go. This sucks. I haven’t been in a pool since mid-March and god knows when I’ll be in one again.

At least it’ll be warm this weekend. Although rainy, too. Yesterday was sunny:

Hope yours is good.

And so we lurch toward the end of a…surprisingly unproductive week for me, although I have high hopes for Friday. I worry I’m losing my mind. I worry I’m losing my motivation. I worry I’m going to gain even more weight before this is over. I worry. I could use some therapy, maybe in the form of a socially distanced walk with the world’s best therapist, but I don’t think that is on offer these days, and anyway, I can’t afford it, and anyway, my insurance wouldn’t cover it, and anyway, fuck all this shit.

The governor extended the stay-at-home order through May 28. Alan informed me he’s work-at-home through June. Kate is itching to get a Real Job and move out, and I don’t blame her. It’s what I wanted at her age. All week long I’ve been reading, or editing, pieces about the policy/budget fallout of all this, and I realize just how long this is going to continue, and how bad it’s going to be.

So yeah, just a little out of sorts, sorry.

The latter half of today was amusing. My editor wants a story on what it’s like to date in a pandemic, or to be more precise, to kinda date. To look forward to dating. To flirt online, maybe. Since my dating days are over, I asked some younger people I know. Had one spectacular interview, with a woman, who informed me Zoom has a setting called “enhance my appearance.” But it’s hard to find sources. So today I went ahead and just installed a dating app and started trawling for subjects. I described myself as bisexual, I guess, because I said I was “interested in everyone.” I started Liking pics and pasting in a note that ID’d myself as a journalist, looking for sources. The first respondent was a woman, who wanted to know everything about me, then went dark. The second was a man named Rod. OK, then, Rod, here’s who I am, here’s what I want and…

…he said, “You’re a little old for me, anyway,” but he was willing to talk, and I have high hopes for our chat tomorrow afternoon.

Meanwhile, the weather has turned south again. I got an actual, no shit freeze warning on my phone a few hours ago. Low of 28 threatened for tomorrow, and won’t touch 50 all weekend. And it’s Mother’s Day.

So. In the interest of getting out early, just two bits of bloggage today. First, a death worthy of a “Six Feet Under” cold open:

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The woman attacked and killed by an alligator in a gated community along the South Carolina coast was visiting the homeowner to do her nails and was trying to touch the animal when it grabbed her, authorities said.

After briefly getting away from the alligator Friday, the woman stood in waist deep water in the Kiawah Island pond and said “I guess I wont do this again,” but the alligator grabbed her in its jaws again and took her under, according to a supplemental police report released Tuesday.

Of course the poor gator had to pay with his life. The whole story is fantastic. Read.

And as someone else on my Twitter feed said today, “Axl Rose owning the Treasury Secretary on Twitter was not on my 2020 bingo card.” And yet? It happened.

OK, then, I’m outta here and I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. I’ll be shivering.

Just bloggage today, I think.

I think it was Mary who posted the story that Shouting Michigan Man, the guy screaming in that photo from last week, was actually a known white supremacist from California, i.e., an outside agitator . I looked up pictures of the other guy and thought there was only a vague resemblance, but that the truth will out.

And it did. Shouting Michigan Man is not a Californian, but as I suspected, just another constantly stoned dude from Oakland County. A flooring installer, Brian Cash. One look at the guy and I know everything about him: Probably drives a full-size pickup with an InfoWars bumper sticker. Doesn’t trust the government, etc. And then I read it, and yep:

Other details about Cash: He is not concerned about the virus (“Not at all”); he doesn’t believe masks protect people and won’t wear one (“Ever”); he doesn’t agree with the stay home order because people are still going to stores, pharmacies and gas stations anyway (“So what is the point of staying at home?”); he believes the virus was intentionally released by the Chinese government, and he said he had never voted before the 2016 election (“Because f*ck the government, you know?”).

Cash, who expressed dislike for both the Democratic and Republican parties, said he voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, and then Donald Trump in the general election.

He also is a marijuana advocate and said he was high during the interview with the Free Press. “If I’m awake, I’m high,” Cash said. “But I’m not high; I’m normal.”

Guys like this are as common as whitetail deer around here. He sees no cognitive dissonance between believing the virus was bred by Chinese Commies but also nothing to worry about, or between Sanders and Trump. He wants to fuck shit up. And that he has.

I’m not in agreement with those who seem to believe the major offense here was yelling in a cop’s face. It’s the violence in his face that bugs me. But that’s me.

Moving on, I want to amplify a piece that Sherri posted in yesterday’s comments. Caitlin Flanagan is dying. Yes, aren’t we all, but maybe a little faster. She’s at Stage IV, and now, well:

Now here I am—here we all are—with our health in the hands of Donald Trump, M.D. When the coronavirus appeared on the horizon, he did not get closer to the science. He mocked science. He said the panic around the virus and the criticism of his response were a big hoax; he said the outbreak would end with warmer weather in April; he said the virus was no more serious than the common flu; he said there would be a vaccine soon; he said the virus would suddenly disappear “like a miracle”; he said there were plenty of “beautiful” tests and anyone who wanted one could have one; he said the number of U.S. infections was going “substantially down, not up.” He said an antimalarial drug cured COVID-19 and the FDA had approved it for use by prescription. He said there were only 15 patients with COVID-19 in the U.S. and the number, “within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.”

He said, “That’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Finally, a few have noted the story of the editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times who was fired from the job and then evicted from the company-provided apartment in the same building. He’s now “a homeless blogger,” but I can’t get past how weird it is that he’d live in on-site, something I’ve never heard of before. Man, has journalism fallen. What’s next, company scrip?

Later. Slept badly last night and can’t wait to see my pillow again.

Normally my week is front-loaded, and gets less nutty as it goes on. Last week was…all-week loaded, I guess, topped off by two bad-sleep nights, and that’s why I couldn’t rouse the energy for three blogs last week. In other words, Excuse No. 23, i.e., I Dunno, I Was Tired.

Certainly there was no shortage of news last week, particularly in Michigan. The midweek display of wingnuttery at the capital certainly got its share of attention; nothing like a bunch of jerks standing in the gallery of a state legislature displaying assault weapons, perfectly fucking legally, to bring the wonderment of the outside world. I don’t know what to tell you about that other than: If you live in a state of any size, you might notice it is vastly different from one end to the other. When I was a journalism fellow, our BBC guy was amazed – amazed and appalled, actually – that there was no national driver’s license. All I could tell him was, hey, it’s a big country. There are parts of this state that are pure Tim McVeigh country, and others that aren’t.

(It wasn’t until just yesterday that it occurred to me these people may well think Covid is a black person’s disease, and hey, if it kills them, no biggie.)

Meanwhile, coronavirus is making its way north, inexorably, and it won’t be long until they get acquainted with it themselves. Not that this makes me happy, I should add. And knowing them, they’ll just say Gramma passed from the grippe or something.

So then, sweet weekend, let me fall into your embrace. The weather was perfect, and by perfect I mean: Per-fect-o. Temps in the 70s both days. Ran several errands on my bike, which made them seem like not-errands. Saturday job day, Sunday funday. Did a double circuit of Belle Isle after the chores were done. Picked up a bottle of Aperol, so we could make alcoholic Capri Suns. And I found my lost pen, my Mont Blanc, which Alan gave me when we were dating. I knew it was in the house somewhere, and lo it was under a piece of furniture that obviously doesn’t get vacuumed under enough.

Things are starting to open up, as they say. I won’t be there for a good long while. Every time I think it’s worth swimming in this deep water, I read something like this, about a 27-year-old emergency doctor who nearly died from this. And then I reconsider.

I haven’t seen a swimming pool since March, and I’m only hoping I’ll see one after Memorial Day. Sigh. It’s going to be a long two years.

In the meantime, I recommend you read this. It’s a wonderful story about how a young man literally 8,000 miles from Detroit found inspiration in one of the city’s more notorious natives. It’s really good, and deserves the love.

It was a few days before the lockdown, sometime in March it must have been. I was still working downtown several days a week, and as we often do, my editor and I walked a couple blocks to a fancy grocery store in search of lunch. Normally the place is pretty crowded at the noon hour, but there were maybe one-third as many people as you’d typically see.

I remembered that Quicken, the biggest downtown employer, was testing a work-from-home model ahead of an anticipated shutdown, still a few days away. I looked at the shelves of expensive cut fresh fruit, which would normally be walking out the door with well-paid office people, and got a glimpse of how these cascading dominoes would fall. No one buys the fruit, the fruit gets tossed, the order for more fruit cancelled.

Last weekend I thought I might try a new baking project: Bagels. But I’m running low on flour and the flour shelf at Kroger is as bare as the one for toilet paper. So no bagels this week. I recently read why I can’t get flour – because lots of people are baking now, and the flour supply chain isn’t set up for a flour surge in spring. In late fall, yes, during Christmas-cookie season, but not now. So no flour.

It turns out the American economy is like a spider web, and supply chains are the strands of the web, and you can’t mess with one without the whole web shaking. Or maybe it’s like an early Model T, back when you had to get out of the car to turn the crank starter, and if it wouldn’t catch you’d have to fiddle with the spark and the mix and if you didn’t get them all working right, you weren’t going anywhere.

I don’t have any great conclusion here, only that “restarting” the American economy isn’t going to be simple or easy. Every day I feel luckier to have a job. Every day I wonder what I’d know with the top economists in the world as close as the phone on my desk, and marvel at how one man who has that advantage could tweet about overflowing churches on Easter Sunday. Also, I’m interested in how things work, how cars are made, how the president can just demand that an automaker start turning out ventilators (because it’s so damn easy) how Big Flour sets up its own supply chains to get the wheat to the mills, etc. I suspect most people never even think of that stuff. I try to consider it from time to time.

I’ve been getting out more with the warmer weather. Everyone is still moving off the sidewalk when you pass, wearing masks and otherwise behaving as though their lives are on hold. This won’t go away quickly.

So, a little bloggage:

I stumbled across this podcast via the NYT’s “The Daily,” and was transfixed. Called “Rabbit Hole,” it traces one young man’s journey into the alt-right web, thanks to YouTube’s algorithm that kept feeding him more, leading him ever deeper. It’s really good. You want to know how radicalization happens? This is how it happens.

Also, this may amuse some of you students of bad writing. It’s a column by the former attorney general of Michigan, who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year. In it, he speculates that the reason the Detroit Lions suck and Tampa Bay can nab Tom Brady is? Anyone? Yes, state income taxes:

It is not too far afield to suggest Tampa was able to bag the “GOAT” because Brady’s nearly $60 million for the next two years will go yards farther in low-tax Florida than high-tax Massachusetts. Massachusetts income tax rate of 5.5% is one of the highest rates in America. They don’t call it “Tax-a-chusetts” for nothing. Florida has no income tax. Calling signals in Raymond James Field in Tampa, instead of Gillette Stadium in Foxborough could save Tom Brady a cool $3.3 million. Joining Florida in the zero income tax huddle are the states of Texas, Nevada, Washington, Tennessee, Alaska, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming. Other states in the Southeast and Southwest have low income tax rates and are in the game. But on the sideline, on the bench, are high tax states like Michigan.

Brady is not the only free agent to have presumably eyed the income tax rate landscape of NFL cities while planning for the future. The Miami Dolphins reportedly were able to snag Byron Jones, the top cornerback in free agency, partly because he favored Florida’s tax scheme over high-tax New York. The general manager of the newly coined Las Vegas Raiders, cited the move away from (Oakland) California’s sky-high income taxes as major incentive to recruit top talent due to Nevada’s zero income tax rate. Seattle’s rollicking, deafening and (zero income tax rate) crowd is often called the Seahawks 12th man. But, I’d wager low income taxes make for better touchdown dances in the end zone too. Just ask Brady’s favorite and newly acquired Tampa Bay receiver Robert Gronkowski.

What else does Massachusetts have, boys and girls? Excellent schools? Yes! A highly educated workforce and the businesses that depend on it? You betcha. How did they manage all this? Fairy dust, surely. That terrible sports wordplay – “joining Florida in the zero income tax huddle,” etc. – runs through the whole thing, too. Even a person who reads Albom regularly winced. Also, note how he suggests Brady went to Florida for the tax advantages, then just assumes it’s true in subsequent paragraph, where Brady “presumably eyed the income tax rate” in making his decision.

Oh, well. Wednesday awaits, and I have to get up early.

If you’re one of those Extremely Online people, you’ve probably seen the Wall Street Journal dueling op-eds from a couple weeks back. The woodcut-type illustrations say it all:

I don’t have a thing against cats, but I’ve never had one. Alan’s allergic (he claims), and so we’re a dog family. Needless to say, Wendy has been a perfect colleague over the last seven weeks, better than an Apple watch for suggesting, maybe it’s time to stand up, stretch your legs, and…maybe take a stroll around the block? If that doesn’t work, she’s always up for a nap.

People do a lot of dog-walking around here, and when the weather was chilly, it was one place you might run into your neighbors. At the very least, you see another dog-owner, and you nod, or wave. If a person has a dog, there’s a good chance — not a perfect chance — that they have some decency to them. I respect anyone’s choice not to have a dog or cat or bunny or hamster, but someone who simply dislikes animals? Can’t trust ’em. Pets undeniably bring complications to a human life — vet bills and hair and more hair and sometimes middle-of-the-night barfing (thanks, Wendy). But there are so many rewards; they really do enrich your life.

So I was interested to read this piece in the NYT about presidential dogs. Especially this passage:

It’s true many presidential dogs have been used to help shape a politician’s image — cue Richard Nixon and his Checkers speech, or Herbert Hoover’s campaign photo of himself posing with his shepherd, King Tut. But surely the presence of an FDOTUS has other, less cynical effects. Is it so wrong to think that Donald Trump’s character might have been changed — just the smallest bit — if there were a dog beneath his roof?

It almost happened. On Thanksgiving in 2016, Mr. Trump’s friend Lois Pope told the president she wanted to give him a Goldendoodle named Patton (after the general). Ms. Pope thought it might be sweet for Barron Trump, the president’s son, to have a dog in the White House. She showed the boy a photo of Patton, and she said later, “This big smile came over his face, and it just brought tears to his eyes.”

But Mr. Trump told Ms. Pope he was too busy for a dog. Later, he told supporters he didn’t need one. Because “that’s not the relationship I have with my people.”

Maybe. But if he’d become the owner of a Goldendoodle, maybe he’d have had a different relationship — and not just with “his people,” but with all of us. Because a dog might have encouraged Mr. Trump to take himself just a little less seriously. Because a dog might have given him someone to love besides himself.

A man who watches TV all day, has a vast staff to take care of his household needs, including feeding, cleaning up after and walking the dog, gives a refusal that is not only insulting, but like everything else out of his mouth, fundamentally dishonest. And narcissistic. But not a bit surprising.

But you knew that.

A good weekend here. Got one room cleaned down to its individual molecules. Got a bike ride. Got Wendy walked a few times. Got groceries. Can’t ask for more than that.

And now week eight begins. Hard to believe, but there it is.

Sherri said something late in the comments on the last post, about how it’s time for the elected position of sheriff to go away, and mentioned Joe Arpaio. I’m agnostic on the position itself (for now), but she’s right about the office attracting a disproportionate number of lunatics.

Back in the…80s? Maybe? When the tax-protest began to gather steam, there was another group growing alongside them, the Posse Comitatus movement. You can google the Posse Comitatus Act, signed in 1878, but the part that applies to the movement is this:

The purpose of the act – in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807 – is to limit the powers of the federal government in using federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. …The title of the act comes from the legal concept of posse comitatus, the authority under which a county sheriff, or other law officer, conscripts any able-bodied person to assist in keeping the peace.

These lunatics read this to mean: They don’t have to follow any damn laws they don’t want, at least none that federal law enforcement are involved in (like tax protest). And the only legal authority they respect is the county sheriff.

Now, I’ve mainly lived in urban areas my whole life, where the county sheriff worked more or less like the city police chief, enforcing the law in the unincorporated areas of the county. But as the divide grew between whiter, more affluent suburbs and blacker cities, the divide between law enforcement did, too. And lots of county sheriffs got kinda… full of themselves.

In Fort Wayne, the sheriff openly scorned the city, and referred to the county as a “donut,” the hole being Fort Wayne. He ran for mayor, perhaps after he was carried to a legal residence within the city limits on a litter, but lost pretty badly. (See Alex’s comments about the county GOP’s ineptitude in this area.)

Here in Detroit, where the suburban counties go way past mere scorn for Detroit, the model for the county sheriff is pretty different from that of the police chief. You can imagine how.

(Another weird Hoosier detail: The sheriff got a pretty good salary, in keeping with what you’d pay a department head, etc., but he was also permitted to keep a portion of all late property taxes he was somehow able to collect. Indiana is full of weird policy like this, much of it holdovers from the 18th or 19th century. As one of the the GA reporters, a native Bostonian, said in wonderment: “What is this? Medieval France?”)

Anyway, much of the tension in Michigan these days is around the governor’s stay-home order, and the fact Covid hasn’t really reached the hinterlands yet, at least not in the sort of alarming numbers that led to the order in the first place. Four county sheriffs up north have essentially said you can’t make us and announced they wouldn’t enforce the parts of the order they didn’t think were necessary up there.

I find myself torn between two common-sense ideas — that public-health directives are generally not made just for flex, and that local control is best. But one of the sheriff’s made a comment that had an undertone of sneering to it, and was ignorant to boot, something about how “fresh air” was the best thing for this illness. Unsaid: So let’s just get some and wait for it to skip over God’s country, as we all know it will.

Sigh. I grow weary.

So… what else? I am often weary these days, suddenly and without explanation. Zoom fitness, masked trips to the store and the same few rooms are getting on my nerves. Can’t forget the weather, which teases us with one 60 degree day, followed by a week where we’re lucky to hit 40. I told myself I’d go for a bike ride every day it was over 50, and there haven’t been many of those.

Just a bit of bloggage:

An old-style, crazy-polluter, zombie-wasteland steel mill is closing hereabouts. I’ve ridden my bike past the main-road entrance, and always wanted to go back to take a look, but security is very tight.

When a friend offered to take me trash fishing past it last spring, I jumped at the chance, just to get close on the water side.

It looks…foreboding:

The story about the closing is pretty good. We forget that well-paying work around here was often at the price of blowing black snot into your handkerchiefs.

That’s it for me, then. Stay sane, all.