Cops have changed. They used to wear their hair like the two schleps on the series Dragnet. Side parts and lots of combing so the hair lay smooth when the cap was donned. They appeared older, slower, and fatter. I remember them that way because of all the times they came after me as I raced my twin-engined McCullough go-kart around the streets of my suburban neighborhood. Nobody cared. In fact older people smiled and the young fathers of my friends just shook their heads and went back to fussing with their lawns. It was post WW2, a better time when America felt good about it’s future and the generation that would slip into the slot after their elders slipped the mortal coil.

They parked the cruiser at the end of the street. I drove right up to them and slid to a stop. The bald tires, front and back, were good to go on the sand left by the oily trucks that tarred the street. Remember how wonderful that tar smelled? The cops told me to knock it off and if I wanted to race around in a motor vehicle I had better get driver’s license and a registration. Then they smiled and shook their heads in fatherly dismissal, almost wishing they could be as free as a kid again. Maybe it was because they fought the Nazis and brought back something else for America besides the brick kilns at Buchenwald or Aushwitz. That was another America, where teachers were respected instead of being hunted down as they are today for negotiating decent employment contracts. And America wasn’t cutting it’s financial throat. Homes were the rock solid faith in the growth of a nation. Now owning a home is just a cheap, financial move on the chess board of making the American dream work for you even if others suffer. We don’t know our neighbors and we don’t care. We’re hold up in our garaged fortresses, speaking to no one, never knowing what our neighbors do to make a buck in an America thats now ruthless in it’s dismissal of those unable to pull their own weight

Cops now cut their hair like officers in the Weirmacht. I don’t get it. Butch haircuts and butch behavior give a strange sexual impression to anyone sensitive enough to enjoy the oddity. Does anyone see the transition? Reagan gave the go-ahead for this kind of official fascism and it was duped by Bush 1 and Clinton 1 and Bush 2. 40% of all the people alive in America today have known only a Bush or Clinton occupying the White House. And they see cops now as a repressive occupying force in a country where freedom is just another word for wealth. Thats the schematic for the next 200 years, unfortunately. I see young men today itching to punch people down with their new found Gold’s gym musculature knowing nothing of course about fighting streetside. Kick these fucks in the balls and rip their eyeballs out. All the bench pressing on earth won’t keep the Hulk from stumbling around half blind, knowing that his nuts will never be the same even if he can’t see them anymore. A recent nationwide steroid bust put a lot of state cops in a panic because their supply of juice was in danger and about to run out. Ever see the bodies on some of these goons? Jacked up on ‘roids and not a goddamned thing said or written about this chemical epidemic among police departments

The average dope in America today is too cushioned by debt and social impotence to be worried about the New American empire. We rely on quips from cartoon nation like Family Guy and The Simpsons to sear the message into our skulls that the America of Jefferson and Paine no longer exists. Instead we await the fate that befalls all nations when business and government merge seamlessly to deny all of us the simple right to be free and to express ourselves no matter how vulgar or insulting the words. Cops serve the establishment. They always have. Goes all the way back to the Nottingham sheriff who extorted crop growing farmers and ripped them off for half the harvest. Now they look to fill a privatized prison system that would make Dickens sick with rage, tempered by sorrow. I’m no Charles Dickens, but street gangs are just another word for the 21st century incarnation of Oliver Twist. Until we pay educated police officers the kind of money it would take to recruit the best and the brightest, we’re mired in a spiral that will only reach it’s conclusion when the best and the brightest of all of us are locked up in the 24/7 mindset of a nation that makes the Third Reich look like a 9th graders science fair project. A 9th grader who doesn’t dare hit the streets in anything but shoe leather. But wearing even the wrong kind of sneakers could find you face down on the hood of a cop car, nose bulbed and bruised from the impact. It’s a different world all right. Today my go-kart would be towed and checked for drugs and allowed to rot in official custody while all attempts to get it back would depend on how much money the police could get for it at auction so they can buy more shit to spy on innocent people and continue the reign of terror so welcomed by their established and amazingly wealthy employers. Ask my friend A.J. what happened when the Coast Guard found a roach in the head of his dad’s Sea Ray. Ask him how they punished him for this threat to the nation by ripping out the guts of this 100 thousand dollar skiff and letting it wallow in dry dock for years.

Charles Dickens would love it.

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