The Last Stronghold of Hip Resistance

DECEMBER 7, 2006

GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY

December 7, is a day that will live forever in infamy! We are not referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, either.

On December 7, 2001, an off-campus party attended by CU players and recruits was held at the apartment of Lisa Simpson, who later told police she was gang-raped. The incident brewed up into a truly monumental scandal that led to special investigating committees, charges, countercharges, lawsuits, and possibly the worst publicity nightmare of University of Colorado history. Nothing much came of it. One minor Athletic Department flunky was charged with a minor infraction. CU Prexy Elizabeth Hoffman and two other bigwigs either retired with full honors and emoluments or were shunted to other lucrative jobs, with no apologies offered. The lawsuits were dismissed. Football Coach Gary Barnett was eventually sacked for his lousy record and left with big bags of money.

But other weird Boulderian things have happened on the numerologically significant 7th:

Charles Davenport was found dead at age 47 on December 7, 1911. He was beaten to death by unknown attackers, and the case remains unsolved.

In 2003, "The skies above 48th Street and Arapahoe Avenue ... were windy, cold and pierced by high-powered green laser beams," according to the Camera. This was Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., testing "a laser whose 4-inch-thick pulses can deliver of up to 4 billion times the energy of a standard laser pointer." Try as we might, we couldn't see the damned thing from down here under Mork 'n' Mindy's House.

In 2004, an Olive Garden employee gave birth in one of the restaurant's bathrooms, where she locked herself for nearly three hours.

In 2005, a wind chill temperature of minus 34 degrees accompanied the minus 10 degree ambient reading.

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Visiting Fred

Saturday after Thanksgiving I visited the new Frederic C Hamilton Building at the Denver Art Museum on my way home. It was designed by one of the currently big name architects, Daniel Liebeskind.
 
Apparently, the long run of Bauhaus glass boxes is decisively over. There hasn't been one in years for a showplace civic building. However, their influence lingers.  Much new work seems devoted to the proposition, "I'm not Bauhaus!"  This is very much true for the Hamilton Building. It quotes the box idea, but distorts the shapes. It refers to the glossy glass surfaces, but transmutes them to shiny wide-wale Ti siding. Ti siding is expensive stuff, but it's still sheet metal siding. This is pretty obvious up close, but it takes hand prints well, and it is fun to put them there. 
 
Boxes look and are inherently stable. In contrast, Daniel's building, if it were to relax for just one second, would collapse. This is not a structure in repose. Given its considerable size, that lack of repose makes it exciting. It's got shapes galore, inside and out, and these are novel shapes. You have never seen them before, and they will not, I warrant, be copied in other buildings. How good they will look in the future is yet to be determined. 
 
The whole structure is clad with a thin skin. There is little window area, and what there is is used principally as a design element: dark lines on the exterior, bright lines in the interior. The interior thankfully avoids another modern cliche, that of Industrial Chic. All the interior surfaces are finished; so, the structural elements of the building are invisible.  Does it have any? That is part of the excitement mentioned in the preceding paragraph. 
 
Historically, all notable buildings (and most of the rest, too) have aesthetic principles that include some kind of symmetry. We are symmetric beings ourselves, and tend to like that sort of thing in our fellows and our surroundings. The Fred Hamilton Building, I think, has symmetry on its mind, so to speak, but expresses its symmetry by willfully withholding it.  Once again it harvests visual excitement in this way. The question is whether the Fred will retain this excitement over time or merely look dated. I don't know, but it's bucking a long and successful trend.
 
So, by now the reader is wondering how it works as a display space, since that's a principal function of museums. It's OK. Those strange and exciting interior spaces don't seem to get in the way. On the other hand, they do not contribute either. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is an exemplar of a setting that enhances the entire experience. A very different kind of exemplar is Wright's Guggenheim. None of this happens at the Fred, but it doesn't compete, as can happen at the Gugg.

–James Milstein

______________________________

James Milstein, aka Meher Milstein, is an Old Boulder Bozo emeritus who lives in Pagosa Springs, Colorado. He has been a surveyor, homesteader, and computer engineer, as well as guru. He used to ski at Wolf Creek Pass before he spent all his money building a house. His first foray as a self-taught architect, Asterisk, [scroll down to: July 27 ] is beginning to attract attention. It could be yours if you gave him a whole lot of money. Listen for an interview with him on NPR "sometime in the next four months or so."

He does not have a Peace Wreath.

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NOVEMBER 20, 2006

GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY

In 2003 the temperature at 2 p.m. on Nov. 20 was 72 degrees. At 2 a.m. Nov. 23 it was minus 2 degrees. That's a drop of 74 degrees in just 60 hours, according to the Camera's weather reporter Matt Kelsch.

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Impeaching George W.

The latest from our favorite activist is that there is now an IMPEACH BUSH book, TV report, song (by Neil Young -- say, isn't he a Canadian?), poster, T-shirt, and Congressman.

What a brilliant idea!

In one bold stroke, left-wing Democrats could eliminate the looming threat of a political middle and the possibility of achieving anything substantive in Congress in favor of years more bitter, partisan political wrangling. This would fragment the party nicely and get the Republicans back into office where they could continue screwing up and thus foment a World Revolution involving anarchists dressed in black hoodies and giant street puppets smashing the State and Ronald McDonald in one swell foop.

Or something.

Mondo Boulder's own Directorate of Weird Politics feels the whole Iraq thing has given magical thinking a bad name, and that it went out with Donald Rumsfeld and pragmatism is due for a comeback. But for Boulderia's beloved wild -eyed and -assed activists, they've prepared a special package: Two George Ws For the Price of One.

Why not a posthumous impeachment of the other George W? After all, he, too was a war criminal. As a young officer, he allowed Indian allies under his command to slaughter captured French soldiers. This was as unfortunate as it was criminal, because if George's French hadn't been so lousy he'd have known they were on a diplomatic mission.

So it's possible George thereby caused the French and Indian War, involving still more atrocities. But we won, so nobody held it against him. He had a spiffy uniform made and wore it to the Continental Congress which gave the other Founding Fatherpersons the idea of putting him in command of the Continental Army.

George was madly in love with a married woman, and was all set to dump Martha for her, but she turned him down. Some of his political opponents said he was no better than a "common criminal." Ugly rumors have circulated for years about the destruction of an environmentally-sensitive forest of cherry trees.

All that's enough for impeachment right there, but a little research could probably show conclusively that George was involved in a conspiracy to topple the Washington monument that failed only because the Washington monument hadn't been built yet.

It may sound crazy, but it's only slightly less likely than successfully impeaching the current George W. So why not dare to dream?

We're getting right to work on the book, TV show, song, and T-shirt.

–Peter Aretin

NOVEMBER 7, 2006

Pissing on forest fires

MAGICAL THINKING AND THE CULT OF GOOD INTENTIONS

Consumers should always do their homework about a particular charity before opening their wallets.
–Colorado Attorney General John Suthers

Attorney General Suthers, quoted above, is warning consumers against those dishonest scams that plead for money to help "poor widows and orphans" or other worthy causes, but instead spend all the cash on salaries and other perks for people running the charity.

But the AG could just as easily be talking about Boulderia's ClimateSmart, Ballot Issue 202, being voted to an easy victory by the simple, good-intentioned peasantry of Boulderia as I write. The very name is pure Madison Avenue, since the program will have no humanly-measurable effect on climate, and it's not only un-smart, it's downright dumb. But if H.L. Mencken were alive and well and living in Greater Boulderia, he'd observe that nobody ever went wrong flattering the intelligence of Boulderian voters. P.T. Barnum would just smile.

What's really blush-making about this turkey is that the thing went virtually without opposition. All the local papers and prominent poohbahs (that cozy club that decides what's real and what is not) scrambled to get on the bad gas bandwagon. The assault was prepared by an artillery barrage in the form of a public chorus of affirmation that human activity is indeed causing global warming. The conclusions drawn as a result of this "debate" are a perfect illustration of the imperfectly understood distinction between what is scientific and what is rational. It's a scientific fact that incombustible liquids retard fires, but trying to slow a forest fire by pissing on it, or, worse, pouring a bottle of Moët et Chandon on it, is just irrational. That's about how effective ClimateSmart will be. And to think this pharisaical exercise in tax-financed public piety was concocted by people who slag the Bush administration for faith-based legislation!

A couple of brave souls, including former councilperson and county commissionperson Paul Danish pointed out the utterly inconsequential effects of the measure, and there was faint protest about the sham-charity aspect of ClimateSmart: 60 per cent or so of the money collected under the plan will go toward increasing City bureaucracy, not directly toward common-sensical energy-saving measures that would at least have the homely virtue of, well, saving energy. We will create instead a Ministry of Carbon that will generate PR and oversee the War on Bad Gases. This reminds me of nothing so much as the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA and its predecessors have always been able to use the public's own money to stifle meaningful public discussion of drug issues and ensure the longevity of their own expensive and ineffective War on Drugs.

Never mind there are supposedly powerful economic incentives for energy savings, we must have a Ministry of Carbon, that like the DEA, will always be with us, tooting its own horn over what meager successes might be achieved and using its own ineffectiveness as proof that more money is required if Boulderia is to save the world. And, typically, the War on Bad Gases will be financed by yet another regressive tax that will transfer wealth from people of lower income to the affluent folks who can afford energy-efficient hardware and housing in the first place. And to think this thing was put together by folks who bitch incessantly about Bush's tax breaks for the rich!

But mostly, ClimateSmart's few critics failed to damn the one thing that makes it a weasely little scam that lacks the courage of its convictions: it's yet another blank check. The language of the proposal doesn't require the City to follow the proposed plan, bad as it is, or any plan at all. City council can spend the money any way it wants, for anything it wants.

Typical of the weak-kneed analysis of ClimateSmart was former councilperson Matt Appelbaum's commentary. "I trust, however," he wrote in the Camera, "that we won`t set up an inflexible, static city infrastructure. And I also trust that the council, although understandably excited about the plan, will take a critical look at its successes and failures, and not only be driven by the rather artificial Kyoto goal but by how to accomplish a meaningful and effective outcome."

He's very trusting.

But there's no reason we should trust city council after the way they dishonestly increased the Trash Tax, another blank-check tax, to launch Climate Smart, and there's no reason we should trust Matt Appelbaum, either.

What Boulderians were sold is a tax on energy to reduce energy use. Success would mean falling tax revenues, which would lead to raising the tax rate in order to keep feeding the Ministry of Carbon. Smart people don't give to fake charities, and smart people don't vote for insulting junk like this, they send it back and ask for something better.

It should have been a tipoff that the tax starts April 1 next year.

–Peter Aretin

NOVEMBER 5, 2006

Today (1928) is the birthday of AAA God, who moved to Boulder in 1966. Born Arnold Stein, he legally changed his name to AAA God. He was known for his accordion playing at the Elks Club. He had a degree in electrical engineering, worked for seven years at IBM and taught skiing at A Basin. In November, 1990, AAA God dragged his burning mattress out of his Olde Stage Road home, setting a fire that burned 2,200 acres and 10 homes. He was later convicted of arson. According to friends, he wrote in one of his many notebooks, "Wash your robes of consciousness so that you may be forever." AAA God died March 13, 2006.

Today in 1984, the Colorado Daily published an all-editorial pre-election edition, "Ronald Reagan: A Commentary." According to Westword, highlights included "a smiling Reagan dressed as Darth Vader, a poster of two elephants mating labeled 'The Making of a Republican,' and a doctored photo showing a football placekicker about to boot Reagan's head. Pam White, later Daily editor and current editor of Boulder Weekly, told Westword "I was sitting at my desk when a bunch of campus Republicans barged in with armloads of the paper that they'd picked up from all over town -- and they threw them on the floor and called us 'fucking communists' and spewed profanity and otherwise demonstrated their commitment to the First Amendment. I always thought that was funny." We miss you, pungent, fiesty Daily of old!

In 2004, The Camera reported that US Rep. Mark Udall, along with Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Linda Salas, County Commissioner Tom Mayer and election officials paid a visit to election headquarters the day before trying to find out why the vote tally was unfinished two days after the polls closed.

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Yes, Virginia

... there really is an Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel!

At a whopping 5 x 7 inches, the Little Towel for Little Churchills® is made entirely from 100% artificial-fiber material by "sweatshop labor pathetically grateful for the chance to make more incomprehensibly useless goods for the baffling, though highly-educated inhabitants of Boulderia." The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel would set you back $90,000 in the CU Bookstore. And it comes with IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS:

WARNING: The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel should only be held in the LEFT hand and used to wipe away tears. Using the Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel to wipe anything else is not supported, may cause irritation and may void your end user agreement. In cases of EMERGENCY ONLY, the Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel may be temporarily employed as a Gary Barnett Crying Towel, but the less expensive fibers used in the Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel could cause chronic irritation to the sensitive parts of more highly-paid University of Colorado coaches and Athletic Department employees. Please test in an inconspicuous area before attempting to use The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel for this purpose.

But The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel is not available at the CU Bookstore or anywhere else. It is being produced in a very limited edition by a local artiste for a print exchange. And that's too bad, because The Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel could be a hot item this season.

The University of Colorado's Mighty Injun of Profit is broke. At least, according to Wardo's attorney David Lane [ pause here for laughter ], the most successful ethnic impersonator since Al Jolson doesn't have "20 grand lying around" to pay Lane for defending him against charges of academic misconduct. Wardo made 120 grand a year steering the Ethnic Studies Department at CU onto the rocks, though right now he's having to scrape by on 90 grand, the amount he's presently pulling down for not teaching. But then the money he made conducting camp meetings on the lecture circuit for the adoring political lunatic fringe must be all gravy. And all those books by the talented Mr Churchill from those little left-wing presses must be just flying off the shelves like airliners into the Twin Towers.

None of this prevented Wardo and Lane from shamelessly trying to mooch $20,000 to cover his legal fees from the university that's trying to fire him. Lane told a Denver District Court judge that without the bucks Wardo would be deprived of his "due process" and will be forced to represent himself or go through the process without representation.

In a profession where a strict adherence to the facts is no impediment to success, David Lane lies with a brio and bravado that puts him in a class of his own, the asbestos pants class. The judge shot down Wardo's suit, but obligingly refrained from doing what mere mortals like you, dear reader(s), or I might have been tempted to do, telling Lane to make Churchill's financial records available faster than you can say "contempt of court."

Where all Wardo's money could have gone is a mystery. If he's ever given more than chump change to Native American causes, it's a well-kept secret. Maybe he lost it at an Indian gambling casino. He still has a big, Boulder Rich Guy house and assortment of vehicles. Wardo and Lane's unsubtle greed and his feigned poverty, along with his fake ethnicity, add insult to injury to impoverished real Native Americans, but in the economic stratum Lane and Churchill occupy, lying is just how business gets done, as long as you don't go too far.

I've mentioned before how Wardo is gradually passing into mainstream American popular culture as the stock figure of the scoundrel professor and left-wing crank. In this vein is a recent CBS-Associated Press piece called "The Culture Of Cheating: Notorious Ne'er-Do-Wells" in which Wardo is part of a pantheon on infame that includes Jayson Blair, James Frey, Stephen Glass, Tanya Harding, Martha Stewart, Jeffrey Skilling, Kenneth "Ken" Lay, Sammy Sosa, Frankie Andreu, Floyd Landis, and James E. McGreevey.

Maybe Wardo should bring out an Official Embattled Professor Ward Churchill™ Crying Towel of his own. Modest Geniuses, Ltd., would be willing to license our Embattled Professor Ward Churchill trademark for a suitably modest fee.

Say, $20,000.

–Peter Aretin

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OCTOBER 23, 2006

GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY

A 23-year-old student named Cox decided to get naked on Oct. 23, 2004 by streaking a CU football game at Folsom Field. But he wasn't actually naked. He was wearing thong underwear and using a CU Buffaloes flag as a cape. After performing various hijinks, he was arrested for trespassing, thus concluding the intelligent portion of the afternoon's entertainment. He should have called it "performance art."

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Wanks for the Memories

It seemed like such a good idea: annual Boulderian awards in the grand tradition of Esquire Magazine's Dubious Achievement Awards.

It was 2001, the time of the Great Flag Flap, when every business had a flag placard in the window and patriotic busybodies roamed the streets. Gosh, where are all those flags, now? And hard on the Flag Flap came the Ceramic Penis Controversy. Mondo Boulder's new awards would recognize exceptional Boulderian feats of "Foot-Shooting, Ham-Handedness, Fifth-Dimensional Logic, Egregious Fuggheadnery, Wankosciousness And Good Intentions Gone Bad!"

And who exemplified all this more than the obnoxious, self-promoting art vandal, El Dildo Bandido? So we called our honors The Dillies! after him, and whipped up what was to be the first of a scathing annual smorgasbord of dubious achievements.

But it wasn't to be. There are, after all, better things in life than thrashing around in a nest of newspaper clippings and scribbled notes, squinting blearily into a computer screen composing an obscure website for a few, jaded cognoscenti: Things like Sex. Like Air and Sunlight. Like Snow.

Such a project soon promised to be only slightly more work than bailing out Boulder Reservoir with a kid's sand pail. So many idiots, so little time. So time slipped away, and The Dillies!, after their first bold thrust, petered out.

But recently one of the original honorees was back in action again. Although an Aspenite, Rick Magnuson fit right into the El Dildo! saga. Back in 2001, he, too, had been an artist plagued by vandalism. Magnuson, a community safety officer with the Aspen Police Department, had made a piece called "I Dare You to Steal This $100," from acrylic paint and real $100 bill. It had been hanging in the Aspen Art Museum's Roaring Fork Open show for about a month when Magnuson found out that someone had nicked the Benjamin and left five Jacksons in its place.

So, while nothing had been stolen monetarily, the prankster had accepted the artist's challenge and one-upped him, actually making the piece more interesting and collectible, in the expert opinion of the Counter-Intuitive Agency's in-house Weird Art mavens.

But these subtleties eluded Magnuson, and though the museum replaced the $100 bill, Magnuson griped "I wanted someone to try and steal it and catch them and this makes it vague now. It ruined the whole aesthetics for me. I don't think it's a valuable piece."

Well, it was still worth $100. The whole incident was a refreshing inversion of the idiotic El Dildo Bandido business, and Mondo Boldo awarded Magnuson a Dilly! for general poor sportsmanship and self-importance.

Apparently, the honor did not inhibit him, because he's back in the news, running for Sheriff of Pitkin County on, off all things, a stronger drug enforcement platform. But it's his art that has people talking. Art resonates in Aspen, which like Boulderia, is full of rich white people and Aspen is hence a sort of illegitimate sister city to us.

Magnuson's work, which has added spice to what would be just another sheriff's race, is a 12 minute film shown on Aspen community TV in which he digs a hole in the Mojave desert and is shown (from behind) masturbating into it. "In life, everyone will have problems and issues. The healthiest, most therapeutic way to deal with issues is through art. It's much more healthy than sedating yourself. I would encourage everyone to use art in their lives," Magnuson told the Aspen Daily News, hinting, perhaps, that self-abuse is preferable to drug abuse. "Aspen is very accepting, but that's pretty strange," a long time resident told the paper.

The film reportedly was Magnuson's response to a breakup with a girlfriend, which we think is pretty strange and downright insulting to the girlfriend.

Rick, you're still a Dilly! Without further delay, download your Official Honorary Citizen of Boulderia certificate right now!

Only one section of a second round of Dillies! was ever finished, and it has gone unposted until this very moment, when, NEVER BEFORE SEEN, it appears

right.

HERE.

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OCTOBER 13, 2006

GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY

Today in 2001, someone left "obscenity-laden" phone messages with the Muslim Student Association at the University of Colorado threatening death if Muslims didn't get out of Boulderia by Christmas. Glenn Dale Ewell, a former University of Colorado dishwasher, was charged with felony criminal extortion and misdemeanor harassment, and spent nearly a month in the Boulder County Jail before being released without charge. He brought suit, but Mondo Boulder could find no account of an outcome.

In an Oct. 13, 2003, deposition, then deputy DA Mary Keenan said that, at a meeting which took place in CU-Boulder Chancellor Richard Byyny's office, she "clearly expressed her opinion at the meeting that sex was used as 'a bartering tool' by CU" to attract football recruits, according to an account in the Camera. She said she added, in particular to Athletic Director Tharp: "If it happens again, we are going to deal with it very seriously. You are on notice." Others present at the meeting disagree whether this actually took place.

This day in 2005, a Boulder County District judge dismissed charges against three women who staged an antiwar protest at Folsom Field during last May's Bolder Boulder.

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Comfort Me with Apples

	The line snakes around the block at the Apple Store

The Mondo Boulder News Team hopped on its bicycle this morning and headed off to join the throngs at the grand opening of Boulderia's new outdoor shopping mall. The alley alongside Pearl was as invitingly sun-dappled as any English country lane, the air was crisp, and the new center was warmly sunlit like one of those Renaissance cityscapes by Whatsisname.

I'm still annoyed that they let some graphic designer name the place. To that idiot-savant, the hyphen was just an unnecessary typographical frippery, so they called it "Twenty Ninth Street," in other words, "20 9th Street," which it decidedly is not, making the Highly-Educated Boulderian public seem like a bunch of semi-literate rubes. 20 9th Street has an outlet of the equally ungrammatical chain The Territory Ahead. The name comes from the next-to-last sentence of Huckleberry Finn, in which "ahead" does not modify "the Territory."

At best, "Twenty Ninth Street" is a pretty lame moniker for the shopping environment of such a highly-educated bunch as us, and a good example of naming by committee. If they'd had any balls, they'd have called it "The Real Flatirons Mall, Assholes!" because there are gorgeous views of the Flatirons and their scenic rival, the Folsom skyboxes, from the upper level. I'll probably just call it "Crossroads New."

Who could stay away from such a wildly-anticipated event? A lot of people apparently. To get into the spirit of bourgeois consumerism, I bought maybe the second cup of Starbucks coffee of my life. Anything with caffeine in it can't be bad. There wasn't a really big crowd. I skipped the bloviation and explored the place by bicycle. It is eminently navigable by bike, though there aren't a lot of places to lock them, so there may be conflicts on this issue. There are huge, cavernous parking garages, from whence I almost expected Alph, the sacred river, to issue forth. When the place gets the rest of its stores in and starts to roar, traffic in the surrounding area is going to be nightmarish.

And not a pocket park to be seen, so my pockets must needs go unparked.

I didn't see a soul I knew. I didn't recognize any of Boulderia's fiery activists, prominent pundits or professional beggars. Maybe this was all too crassly materialistic, too Republican, for them, though 20 9th Street will have more actual impact on our lives in the next decade than George Bush's foreign policy. So you might think common curiosity would compel a look.

Then maybe they were all just in the line to get into the Apple Store. The line for the Apple Store was unquestionably the biggest thing at the Grand Opening. It was like those lines to get into Studio 54 back before disco sucked. There was a burly bouncer, in case geeks might be tempted to go wild. To paraphrase Sam Waterson's Indian character in that wonderful little film, Rancho Deluxe, "Beware the computer sickness, my son."

They've made a moderately brave new world here between 28th and 30th, a new city center for the well-scrubbed and affluent. And anyone who thinks that isn't bad news for the Pearl Street Mall has been passing the calumet with Richard Polk. Crossroads New, being private property, will give panhandling vagrants the bum's rush, along with the Rainbows and teen-punk mallrats, petition circulators, political demonstrators, holders of candle light vigils, buskers and unicyclists, homeless vets and kickers of Hackey Sacks. Prominent among the first vehicles to cruise 20 9th Street was a shiny black police SUV.

Could those rumors that the Boulder Police have been ordered to "clean up" Pearl Street (stoutly denied by the department despite a big uptick in citations) have anything to do with the downtown mall's having to compete now with a new, squeaky-clean retail and parking black hole just to the east? Or will people keep shopping in Boulder at all, as the city fathers keep hoping to pile on sales taxes that would push the total towards 8.5%? Will tumbleweeds blow down 20 9th Street?

And there's going to be more typical Boulderian soap opera as Downtown struggles with this question: How can a democratically-minded public space where the unwashed can lay down, not just with the lamb, but right on the sidewalk, compete with a private shopping preserve for the upscale?

–My Name Is Earl 

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OCTOBER 10, 2006

GREAT MOMENTS IN RELATIVELY RECENT BOULDERIAN HISTORY

On this day in 2003, the Camera reported A Boulder Mountain Parks and Open Space planner got a rock thrown through his car window after telling some people to leash their dogs.

According to a letter in the Camera from Al Bartlett, during the night someone stole 11 assorted campaign yard signs from his front yard.

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	Garvey Lives!
	... on Valmont Road

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We’re All Special

"Police are taught that their safety depends not on conflict-resolution skills or communicating with civilians, but on demanding citizens do as they say on command... "

–CU-Boulder sociology Professor AnnJanette Rosga. [ see Aug. 11, below ]

Boulderians are very big on democracy. It may be their very favorite thing after the First Amendment.

But democracy can have its disadvantages, though. Sometimes the bad guys win. That must be why I got an e-invite recently from our favorite activist at vote.org urging me to a join a democracy-loving group called "The World Can't Wait - Drive out the Bush Regime" to make "a powerful statement: 'NO! THIS REGIME DOES NOT REPRESENT US! AND WE WILL DRIVE IT OUT!' "

Apparently, having failed at the ballot box, we're now going to Plan B, which is to "phone, fax, e-mail, mail, demonstrate -- go stand outside their offices or the nearest federal building in the cold and sing hymns or shout rude slogans, chant or make a speech, or start attacking federal property, like a postal box, so they have to arrest you."

No thanks. I did my bit for civil rights recently by nearly getting arrested. I was put in handcuffs on the Pearl Street Mall for refusing to produce an ID card while under suspicion for elbow-touching. Yes, and it wasn't even Cheney's elbow!¹

Naturally, being so passionate about democracy, Boulderians fret a great deal about voting and the sanctity of their votes. They worry that evil Republicans will somehow manage to hack the new electronic voting machines and actually win an election in Boulderia.² Voters are in a constant swivet about the speed with which their votes are counted, too, and are willing to toss gobs of money at this problem. According to reliable angry letters in the Dilly Camera, if your vote is not counted before the outcome of the election is apparent, you have been "disenfranchised."³

So it's not hard to imagine that such a democratic, egalitarian bunch are highly sensitive to charges of Special Treatment. Currently all Boulderia is talking about the recent bust of City Councilperson Richard Polk, for driving under the influence of marijuana. Polk did not have to suffer the indignity of being booked, fingerprinted and spending the night at the slammer. Polk was allowed to taxi home, and cops obligingly parked his car behind his store instead of impounding it.

Did Polk receive Special Treatment? Of course he did. He got Special Treatment going and coming. Polk was stopped for driving "too slowly," and for briefly "straddling traffic lanes." Now, how many times a day do you suppose those things happen as tens of thousands of commuters and residents drive around town?

How many drivers do you suppose the police could easily stop for these traffic deviations if they really thought these drivers are a danger? And what of all the other potential traffic stop pretexts? About 90% of Boulderian drivers seem to think it's legal to change lanes in the course of a turn. And that's not to mention the myriad other laws and regulations Boulderia makes no concerted effort to enforce, but keeps at the ready in case they need to make someone feel special. We stumble along through a kind of regulatory fog that permeates civil life.

So every time a cop decides to conduct a little fishing expedition by stopping one of these thousands of potential Polks out there, it's Special Treatment Time, but not necessarily the kind of ST anyone wants. After some hemming and hawing from the BPD after cries of Special Treatment went up, the Chief released recent statistics that, according to the Camera, reveal that one in twenty suspects get the same treatment Polk received. If officers think suspects aren't too intoxicated, the Camera story says, aren't dangerous and are likely to show up in court, "there's no reason not to release them with a summons instead of taking them to jail."

When Boulderians talk about issues, they usually talk about the wrong things. When they ask questions, it's usually the wrong questions.

A factor that nobody seems interested in talking about in regard to Polk's supposed Special Treatment is how the suspect's willingness to convict himself for the benefit of the investigating officer just might play a role in who sleeps in the slammer and who doesn't. Polk's arrest was a textbook example of how not to behave when contacted by the police: trying to explain, blurting out incriminating things, handing over evidence, doing futile roadside maneuvers. It was like an episode of "Cops."

So getting singled out for special attention is only the first half of Special Treatment. If someone isn't willing to cooperatively confess on the spot, or produce an ID card, or otherwise piss away their constitutional protections, they can be made to suffer a lot of public humiliation and expense. Kick a Hackey Sack, and pay $250 if you do not kiss up.

In Saturday's Camera Letters to the Editor, one of Boulderia's many partisan political cheerleaders declares, "Today, nothing in the world is a bigger threat to my freedom ... than the administration of George W. Bush."

I don't think so. His freedom is much more likely to be threatened by one of Boulderia's Finest. The BPD has a lot more power over his everyday life than George Bush does, because the Boulderian public, fiery civil libertarians that they are, exercises no oversight or control over the policies and actions of their own employees, the police,⁴ who operate as a virtual independent agency, their internal activities kept secret, investigating any complaints against themselves and, invariably, exonerating themselves.⁵

The department and the cop on the beat have tremendous discretionary power in whether to enforce laws in the first place, how to enforce them when they do, and how they target and deal with individual citizens. The police, and not the city council, are the most powerful policy-making body in the local government.

Is this any way to run a democracy-loving peoples' republic?

That's the question Boulderians should be asking.

–Bozo

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EMBATTLED PROFESSOR WARD CHURCHILL™ MEMORIAL FOOTNOTE SECTION

¹Elbow touching must be the latest threat not just to the peace and security of the Independent Republic of Greater Boulderia, but our very Homeland, the U.S. of A. itself. Coloradan Steven Howard, who said he "may have touched Cheney on the elbow or shoulder, like others in the crowd" at an appearance by the veep in Beaver Creek, is suing a Secret Service agent for handcuffing him and telling him he'd be charged with assault. At the jail, that changed to harassment, a state charge, later dropped by the DA.

²We'll immediately know something's up if a Republican wins office in Boulderia, because there are more prairie dogs than registered Republicans in the Shire. Then we'd have to beat up some more postal boxes.

³I am not making this up. Under this line of reasoning, only an instantaneous tally could prevent at least some people from being "disenfranchised."

⁴A citizen review panel that (sometimes) sees police complaints serves at the pleasure of the Chief, has no powers, operates in secret, and sees only cases which, in the term used by the Chief, are not "serious." This is like something from Bulgaria in the Cold War era.

⁵After 63 days of "investigation," and after much coy hinting around in an obliging press, the Lafayette PD has finally settled on seeing fatally-Tasered suspect Ryan Wilson "make movements with his right hand as if to pull out the knife" as the "role" played by the mystery knife, which turns out to be a box cutter with a 1.5" blade. How plausible would a jury find this? Imagine a regular investigation in which the accused takes two months to reveal the deceased had a knife. But investigations of the police do not go before juries, they are given a decent burial by District Attorneys.

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