Gee, Officer Krupke...

On February 28, 2007, something happened to me that had not happened in almost 25 years.

I got a speeding ticket. On a cold, gray morning on Interstate 90 in the State of Washington, driving from Spokane to Post Falls, Idaho on a routine booze run, I went to pass another car and as I did so, the speedometer on my 2006 Chrysler PT Cruiser crept up to 70 mph. Next thing I knew, wham, there were those flashing lights in my rearview mirror. Now, I had thought that that entire stretch of I-90 was posted 70, but it turned out that I was wrong -- the 70 mph zone did not begin until a few miles further down the road, when the Interstate passed the town of Liberty Lake. Where I was,the limit was still 60 mph.

Just in case anyone wants to ask the obvious question, why was I driving all the way from Spokane to Post Falls, a distance of about 20 miles, just to buy liquor? Washington and Idaho are two of many states (Virginia is another)  where the sale of distilled liquor is monopolized by the state.  Beer and wine can be purchased almost anywhere, but if you want a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label  or Stolichnaya, you have to go to the State liquor store. The State of Washington does not have any sales tax, so naturally they make up for that by taxing the bejeezus out of specific things, like booze.

Idaho, unlike Washington, DOES have sales tax, and for that reason the state levies fewer taxes on  hard liquor than its neighbor to the west. Hooch is cheaper in Idaho than it is in Washington, and I was willing to drive a few miles out of my way to save some money.

Okay, now that we've gotten past that, back to my adventure. I got pulled over by a Washington state trooper. From the looks of him it was obvious that he most likely had not even been born yet when I got my last speeding ticket, which I picked up in the spring of 1982 on I-5 in Tehama County, California while driving from Benicia, where I lived, to Redding, where I was to be interviewed for a job on the newspaper there. Somewhere between Corning and Red Bluff I got pulled over and cited for doing 75 in a 60 zone.

1982. I was 26, Reagan was president, and the film E.T. The Extraterrestrial was about to hit theaters.

You get my drift. It had been a long time between tickets. The trooper cited me and handed me the ticket. I could not resist telling him what I just told you, that in all likelihood he had been in kindergarten, if his education were that far advanced even, when I'd gotten my last speeding ticket.

I paid the fine.

But that was only the beginning, as I was to learn. In 2009 I began driving a taxicab out of Alexandria, VA, just south of Washington, D.C. Over the next year I would get three tickets: one for speeding, one for rolling through a stop sign and one for driving around with a busted taillight (I'd backed into a tree while trying to park my cab.)

Those experiences, plus a few that I've had while driving a cab in San Diego County, convinced me of the truth of one of life's great truths: cops LOVE to hassle cab drivers. I treated of this subject in a blog posting in April, 2010 (see "Homage to Bratfisch," http://www.kelleyo.blogspot.com/).

This ain't paranoia, folks. The truth is that cab drivers and cops are enemies as natural as cobras and mongooses (mongeese?)

You see, cabbies are "easy pickins" for cops: for one thing, there are a lot of us out there. We're highly visible, owing to the markings and dome lights on our cabs. We spend more time in our cars than most people do (I would daresay that includes most cops) and, perhaps most importantly, to your average CHP, state trooper or local cop, a cab is more-or-less a "known quantity." When a cop pulls over any chance motorist, the Forrest Gump principle applies: he doesn't know what he's going to get.

But because taxicabs are highly visible, plentiful and usually on the road, we're easy prey, and then there's also the fact that cab drivers are just business people doing their jobs, not partiers on a possibly-sociopathic binge. There is a San Diego county ordinance prohibiting us from carrying anything to protect ourselves with: we're not even allowed pepper spray. Hence, when a cop pulls over a taxi, he can be reasonably sure that the driver is (a) not soaring on crack cocaine or khat, and  (b) that there is virtually no possibility he'll be packing a sawed-off Remington 12-gauge, a Saturday Night Special or a live python.

In short, for your average cop, hassling cab drivers is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. If it's close to the end of the month and the cop has not yet met his quota of traffic citations, pulling over cab drivers for chickenshit offenses to "fatten up" the old citation book is a cheap out.

But of course that doesn't explain why I think the cops in my home town of Chula Vista, California are more reality-challenged  than most. Read on.

My experiences with Chula Vista's Dumbest go back to the 1970s. I'm a native of this area, so I know whereof I speak, as my father used to say.

Back in those days, our city had a Police Reservist program. I guess the idea was to train the Cop of Tomorrow, I don't know. Maybe they were just short-handed. But the city had a program through which almost anyone who had ever dreamed of himself on the screen as one of The New Centurions, and who could sit up and say "da-da," could get the experience (unpaid, of course) of wearing a real police uniform, carrying a real police badge and toting a (heaven help us) real police service revolver, usually a hair-trigger Colt of the sort most cops, real or imagined, carried in those days.

Word on the street back then was that the PD would "hire" virtually anyone who walked in (and didn't already have a rap sheet) as a reservist. Hence, by the late seventies, the streets of my home town were swarming with armed nitwits whose day job was probably at K-Mart, now empowered to Enforce the Law (read: play out their fondest Joseph Wambaugh fantasies.)

Talk about asking for trouble.

Now, I won't get into any freudian cheap shots about the gun's status as a substitute penis. That would be too easy. Suffice it to say that it was pretty easy to spot the difference between a real cop and a reservist. Real cops were generally laconic, even in the performance of their duties, generally soft-spoken and, to give credit where credit is due, generally polite. If you've been doing police work for a dozen years even emergencies become routine. Most cops were, to put it simply, businesslike. That is, real cops were.

Reservists thought they were in the movies. If you, as a citizen confronting the law,  found yourself on the receiving end of smart-ass talk, put-downs and wisecracks of the sort you'd expect from Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry, chances are you were dealing with Weekend Officer Lester Clopps, whose real job was changing tires at the Big O and had decided that his dull, gray little life needed some real macho excitement. At the Big O he was just Lester the Jester. But once he had that CVPD uniform on, he became Martin Milner on Adam-12. (I'm using dated TV analogies on purpose: remember this is the 1970s I'm talking about. NYPD Blue and CSI were still years away.)

Okay, so C.V. went through its historic period as the Barney Fife Training Academy. But that was in the 1970s. Things are different now, right?

Well, not so much. The Chula Vista PD still has an unfortunate tendency to recruit the odd Eager Beaver, from whom heaven protect us. The Eager Beaver is a usually-younger cop who takes himself VERY seriously. He or she has absorbed the message learned at the Academy, "We're the Good Guys," lock, stock and autographed photo of the late Jack Webb." That means everyone else, you included, is potentially "The Bad Guys."

See "heaven protect us," above.

Back shortly before Christmas of 2010, on a rainy Friday night as I was getting ready to go out and drive my cab, I received a Facebook heads-up that Chula Vista was going to be gridded with DUI checkpoints that night. Now, to a cab driver such as myself, who doesn't drink either on the job or off, this was good news. Drunks are good for business if you're a cabbie, and if word is out that the local constabulary is trolling for drunks, that means that even more of the Friday-night party crowd will be conscientious about not wanting to get caught, and will naturally incline toward taking cabs home.

So I was looking forward to a busy and profitable Friday night.

But then I ran head-on (figuratively) into an Eager Beaver.

The cops were running a DUI checkpoint at the J Street Marina, right next to the on-ramp for Interstate 5. I knew about this, not only from the Facebook warning, but also because I had seen them pull over a driver there already. Whoever the poor schmuck was, they had him sitting on the curb while they roamed around, red and blue lights on their cars flashing, and looked officious. I was impressed, all right. Was the guy DUI? Who knows? He was no customer of mine.

About an hour later I was sitting down at the J Street Marina myself, waiting for calls. I often sit there waiting for calls, because it's peaceful, I like being close to the water and anyway, seagulls are my kind of people.

I got a call to go and pick up a shopper at Wal Mart. Pulling out of the marina, I made a mistake. Yes, I admit it: I made a mistake. It was raining, I was in a hurry and when I got to the stop sign just before the trolley tracks, I did a "California" boulevard stop, which is to say I slowed to a crawl, saw that no one was coming, and proceeded. Yes, I failed to come to a complete stop at the stop sign. My bad.

But, oh, you should have seen the hell that broke loose! The Eager Beavers were running a DUI checkpoint, you see, and a cabbie who rolls through a stop sign just HAS to be two sheets to the breeze, right? What?

All of a sudden I had a squadron of them all over me. Those red-and-blue lights flashing like Armegeddon, they pulled me over and pretty soon there were three police units and six cops on the scene, armed and ready to protect the public from this desperado who had gone through a stop sign at about four mph.

One of them must have been bucking for merit badge: this armed youngster simply could not be convinced that I wasn't "on something," if not booze, then something else. As I stood there like some inmate of San Quentin who's just been caught trying to go AWOL in a laundry truck, surrounded by vigilant protectors of the public safety, I was subjected to all of the following: (remember, all I had done was roll slowly through a stop sign.)

1. Eager Beaver No. 1, finding no booze on my breath or anywhere near me or my car, wanted to know if I was in the habit of using cocaine. I was nervous, and had had a lot of caffeine, so naturally I was shaking. He refused to accept nervousness and coffee as explanations. He insisted that I must be either on cocaine or "tweaking."

2. He took my pulse, looked in my mouth, looked under my Boston Red Sox cap, and then, for the piece de resistance (no pun intended), he made me put my hands behind my back and patted me down for weapons. (A cab driver, wearing sweats. Where would I have a weapon?)

3. (I LOVED this one). He asked if he could "search" my cab for "illegal substances." 

"Be my guest," I replied. "Enjoy yourself. You won't find anything in there but two library books and a 7-Eleven coffee cup."

E.B. eagerly searched my cab. He found ... two library books and a 7-Eleven coffee cup.

By this time two of his colleagues had decided to join in the fun. "Sir, would you object to taking a breath test?" one of them asked me, looking no doubt, for panicky evasiveness.

Oh, dear. They were disappointed again. "Bring it on," I said. "Bring it on! I haven't had a drink in weeks!" 

I was telling the truth, by the way. A recovering alcoholic, I had quit drinking by then. For good. Yes, it was, perhaps a bit sadly, true: I hadn't had a drink in weeks. (I haven't had once since, either, but I will say this: had I still been a drinker that night, this experience would have been enough to send me -- or nearly anyone else, for that matter -- over to Third Avenue for a stiff belt at the Silver Dollar.)

After about 20 fruitless minutes worth of this roadside-drunk routine, they had to let me go. E.B. was so visibly disappointed at not getting the drug or alcohol bust after which he'd been lusting that he didn't even bother writing me up for rolling through the stop sign. I could just picture the poor thing going to his mother that night and, with a chagrined snap of his fingers, saying something like, "Aw, gee, Mom! I almost HAD one!"

I had a similar experience again recently. No DUI checkpoint this time, and it was the middle of the afternoon. I had just bought some items at the grocery store, one of which was a roll of paper towels. I keep paper towels in my car in case I spill coffee or something like that. I was waiting to make a left turn, and as I did so, trying to get this roll of paper towels "started." You know how that is? Your fresh roll of paper towels is glued. You have to tear the first sheet free before they start unrolling. Well, I was waiting for the guy in front of me to make his left turn, and as I did so, was also trying to get this roll of paper towels "started."

Wouldn't you know it, the light turned red in that fraction of a second that my attention was on the paper towels. I looked up and there it was, a red light, with me still sitting in the middle of the intersection. I followed my instincts and quickly darted through my left turn, wanting to get the heck out of that intersection as fast as I could. Well, of course some automaton in a pickup truck had decided to go ahead and proceed across the intersection whether I was there or not. I had to swerve to avoid him.

One of our local dumbest -- er, finest -- saw that, and came after me with red-and-blue lights a-flashin'. Now, as Arlo Guthrie once sang, there was only one or two things that Officer Obie could have done, and the first was to bawl me out for not getting out of that intersection fast enough. But I hadn't reckoned upon the collective IQ of the intrepid PD. When I had seen this officer's red-and-blue lights in my rearview mirror, I had reacted as any motorist would: before pulling over to let him have his fun, and with a few choice obscenities to myself, I threw that roll of paper towels down on the passenger seat.

You wouldn't believe it, but I actually had a conversation with this reincarnation of Dudley Do-Right regarding, not my momentary brain-lapse about the turn signal, but what it was I had actually thrown down on the seat. He had seen me do this, you see, and he had himself convinced that it was a map I had thrown down, not a roll of paper towels. He insisted that it "looked like a map" to him. "No, it was a roll of paper towels," I said. "It looked like a map," he insisted. "Where's your Thomas Brothers'?"

I had to reach over and get my Thomas Brothers street map out of the passenger door compartment to show it to him.

Now, would someone please tell me just what in the world difference did it make whether what I had thrown down was a roll of paper towels or a map book? I threw something down. But it wasn't a gun and it wasn't a hand grenade and it wasn't a rocket launcher. It wasn't a map, either.  It was a roll of paper towels. But whether it was a roll of paper towels or a map, the fact remains that it was nothing that could have hurt him, or anyone else. Still, we spent two full minutes discussing whether it was a map or a roll of paper towels that I had thrown down.

Why? I'll bet if you asked this criminological genius, he couldn't tell you.

But he wasn't finished. "Are you all right? What's that on your steering column? It looks like blood," he observed.

No, it didn't look like blood. Dried blood is brown. This stuff was red. And sticky. It was ketchup from my lunch.

"That's not blood, it's ketchup from my lunch," I insisted.

"Yeah, well, what lessons did we learn here?" he evaded the ketchup.

I knew what he wanted to hear. And I have long since learned never to argue with the police. Well, maybe if it's a fine point of criminology such as, "Was that a map or a roll of paper towels?" I had to stand up for my rights that time; I was right, after all. But maps and rolls of paper towels represent the highest level of debate upon which I'm willing to engage in repartee with the New Centurions. Anything involving an ordinance, well, I think we all know that the deck is somewhat stacked there. Even if you know, from the bottom of your heart, that you did, you did come to a full stop at that stop sign before proceeding, if Officer Obie says you didn't stop, save your breath. The police always win arguments, because they're the ones whose careers depend upon not making -- or admitting to -- mistakes. And after all, the cop is the one holding the ticket book. You're not going to win an argument with a cop, I don't care if you have 72 witnesses who saw you stop at that stop sign. So save your breath. And your time. Smile, pay the fine and shut up.

"Don't multitask," I recited like a kid in catechism class. "Don't try to do anything else and drive at the same time."

"And that includes eating," he triumphantly pontificated.

I never eat while driving. I might get ketchup on my steering column, (I'm not the world's neatest eater) but I always park somewhere to eat my lunch. Not just for safety reasons, either, but because I like to relax and enjoy my food. But I let him have the point. Had I opened up debate on the subject of my luncheon habits, we might have been there for another 20 minutes. And I had cab business to attend to.

I didn't bring up the one form of multitasking that is most deadly, and which our intrepid cops never penalize, precisely because they like to do it themselves, to wit, steering with one hand and blabbering into a hand-held cellphone with the other. "Guns Don't Kill People, Drivers With Cellphones Do," declared a bumper sticker I saw recently. I loved that.

But there was no more point in bringing that up than there would have been in bringing up how I go about eating a ham-and-cheese on rye. I might have opened up a whole new discussion upon which I didn't care to waste any more breath. Or time.

I decided to just "hang it up" and drive. With gritted teeth, but within the speed limit of course, and without paper towels. Better all around. And if I'm going to be rousted and handcuffed for resisting arrest, I want it to be over something more important than a roll of paper towels.

Blog As You Like And Die happy!

Henry Miller

As a blogger who is also a lifelong Henry Miller fan, I want to draw the attention of my fellow Miller buffs to the following blog:

http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/2006/07/june-at-pepper-pot.html

I've been reading Miller for more than 30 years, and I never knew about this. This is a great tidbit (or a "four pound tidbit," as the late Norman Mailer once said to me at a book-signing in Washington, D.C.) Miller and his first wife June Mansfield frequented a Greenwich Village place called The Pepper Pot during the 1920s. This blog site will tell you all about it. Good stuff!

Meanwhile, it's no secret among his fans that Miller loved to paint watercolors. He painted hundreds of them. More about that is available here:

http://www.henrymiller.info/gallery/

And then there's my own visual muse, which took the bit in its teeth nearly three years ago. I'm about to start painting again. Here's what I had to say about it when I started out:

http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/search?q=paint+as+you+like+and+die+happy

Cheers!

Talkin' Euro Trash

I saw this on an office wall when I was posted at the American Embassy in Ivory Coast about 20 years ago. I always loved it, and if you've ever spent any time in Europe, it will definitely "resonate," as we used to say.

In heaven, the police are all British, the chefs are all French, the mechanics are all German, the lovers are all Italian and it's all organized by the Swiss.

In hell, the police are all German, the chefs are all British, the mechanics are all French, the lovers are all Swiss and it's all organized by the Italians.

Bada-bing, bada boom.

I am no longer a conservative

I have opted out of the American conservative movement.

Now, before all of you liberals out there start waving your hankies like the fans at a Florida Marlins game, not so fast.

The fact that I no longer consider myself a conservative certainly does NOT mean that I have become a liberal. Au contraire. I find liberals as revolting as I ever did. Their watered-down Marxism, their infuriating smugness, their endless carping about "diversity" which like a ground bass accompanies their efforts to gag and stifle anyone who doesn't follow their statist orthodoxy are as repugnant to me as they ever were. Their endless efforts to create a "class war" in this country, ensuring a permanent underclass to which they can endlessly pander for the resentment vote is, was and always will be both cynical and disgusting. So is their equally-endless pose as the champion of "the poor," while the mean old Republicans, according to orthodoxy, are only the friends of "the rich."

Horseshit. Last year the Democrats took more contributions from rich people than the Republicans did. So what, I hear you cry. Bruce Springsteen said he'd be PROUD to pay more taxes.

Bruce Springsteen is rich. He can pay more taxes and still have plenty of money left over to buy half of New Jersey if he wants. His "populist" pose is phony, as is that of every other limousine liberal. Rich celebrities, and the wine-and-cheese crowd in Fairfax County, VA, are looking for an emotional luxury, a means of assuaging their consciences for being rich. The word "hypocrisy" comes to mind. Anyway the prosecution rests.

No, I haven't become a liberal. What I've become is an Aussteiger. Look it up.

Okay, don't look it up. It's German for "drop-out."

Since the 2008 general election, when "America" (whoever that is) elected as president a one-term senator with no other experience outside of "community organizing," I have been on the sidelines. I don't read the newspapers anymore. For me, now, the news falls into two categories: the stuff that depresses me and the stuff I don't care about. Come spring I might check the sports pages for the baseball scores, but beyond that you couldn't pay me to read a newspaper. As for CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, NBC, ABC and all the rest of them, the plug's been pulled. You couldn't pay me to watch the news, either.

Obama was an emotional luxury for that same wine-and-cheese crowd. He made a few million white liberals feel good about themselves. Well, I don't care whether or not white liberals feel good about themselves. I also don't care about what racial or demographic group the president might belong to. When Obama was elected, my dismay had nothing to do with his color and everything to do with the fact that America had, for the first time in my life, elected a president who was younger than me. Yipe.

As for those who thought that Obama's election was going to herald some tie-dyed "new age," I'm going to throw cold water on you: he just does what he's told, same as Bush did.

So why have I opted out of the conservative movement? Why do I no longer read National Review? Why is it that, when I go to my sister's house and she has the Fox network on, I ask if I can change the channel to the ball game?

Because up until now, I believed, as most conservatives do, that the principles of free minds, free markets and personal responsibility as embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, were worth fighting for.

I've given up that fight. There isn't anything left to fight for.

For conservatism to have any meaning, there has to be something to conserve. There no longer is, and probably hasn't been since the end of the Second World War. As much as I admired the late William F. Buckley Jr., his perspective was that of a man born in 1925, when America could still lay claim to being a country.

It no longer can.

As Saul Bellow pointed out in his Nobel prize acceptance speech, way back in 1976 already, America has long since ceased to be a country in any recognizable sense of the word. America today is a collection of cultures, each one concerned with its own agenda and dismissive of all the others except when it can make "strange bedfellow" alliances with other cultures in order to further its agenda.

I could provide many illustrations of this. I'll mention only one of my favorites: radical feminists and Bible-pounding fundamentalists making common cause against pornography. (Now, THERE'S a lost cause. Not porn, which has always been and will always be with us, as long as human beings have both libidos and imaginations, but the "struggle" against it.) Feminists were up in arms about pornography because they claimed it was "demeaning" to women. Bible-pounders were against it because to them, sex is sinful and must be kept locked up in Ma and Pa's bedroom, insofar as its existence is acknowledged at all. So the Ms. magazine crowd and the Jerry Falwell-ites found a place where they could smile at one another, albeit through gritted teeth.

America isn't a country anymore. What sort of common conviction can exist among 230 million-odd people, each of whom has his or her own cable channel?

It would be easy to say that the United States asked for this. We stuck a statue in New York harbor and invited the whole world to send us its huddled, tempest-tossed, etc. Nothing wrong with that. For a hundred years it was common tender to refer to the U.S. as a "nation of immigrants." Okay, troubles lay that way: those already here looked askance at the new arrivals. The descendants of the freed slaves had to battle for their place in the American sun. Racial and ethnic prejudice, and the violence which attends it, have been a steady drumbeat in American history.

But up until some point in the years after World War II, Americans, whether they came from Poland or China, or whether their ancestors came from Sierra Leone, considered themselves Americans. To put your American identity ahead of your ethnic one was expected and accepted. When I was in elementary school, my friend Jim Provenza and I used to tease each other about his being a "wop" and me a "frog." But his mother, overhearing our highjinks, reminded us, "You're an American first, and all that other stuff afterward."

That train left the station a long time ago. Everywhere I look now, in American cities, I see bumper stickers on cars trumpeting the drivers' allegiance to Peru, Puerto Rico, Senegal or Singapore. To the extent that people think of themselves as Americans at all now, they only think in hyphenated terms: "African-American." "Hispanic-American." "Gay American." "Gay, Left-Handed-Ba'hai American" and so on.  Nobody is just an "American" anymore.

Nothing wrong with being loyal to your roots, but as one of my teachers in junior high school pointed out, the moment states' rights override the rights of the nation as a whole, we're no longer a country but 50 little countries. That's fragmentation in a political sense. The fragmentation I'm talking about is much deeper. Once a country becomes culturally fragmented and compartmentalized, it not only ceases to be a country, it ceases to be an idea. Outside of a shared belief in the sanctity of voting, or that one should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, I can't think of a single principle everyone agrees upon anymore outside of "I should have whatever I want." Everyone is concerned only with their own little group and its interests. How big a hunk of the pie it can grab for itself.

America has fulfilled its promise, but not in the way it originally intended. The United States in 2011 is little more than a gigantic Greyhound terminal. Everybody wants to get on a bus. No longer THE bus, but a bus with their own destination and their own crowd. The last thing that tied us all together was television, and if that isn't poetic justice, I don't know what is. Before cable, everybody pretty much watched the same TV fare. There wasn't that much to choose from. On any given Saturday night in my youth, I could walk down the street and hear All In The Family drifting out of one window after another. Now, with 900 cable channels, the chances of my finding the same program playing in four or five households on the same block is much slighter than it once was. Everyone's tuned in to something different, soaking up a different message, a different agenda. Tuning out what they don't want to hear and tuning in only what reinforces what they already believe.

You used to hear people bellyaching all the time about how the country was "going to hell in a handbasket." That refrain is probably as old as the country, or the handbasket, for that matter. I've decided that the country isn't going to hell in a handbasket. It arrived there more than a quarter-century ago. There's nothing left to save.

And hence, nothing to conserve. So while the people I come in contact with daily continue to harp on this or that "issue," getting their knickers in a twist over Obama, or Pelosi, or what's-her-name Palin or for that matter, flag-burning, Bill O'Reilly, gay marriage or the banning of the word "Christmas" from Christmas parades, I've chosen to opt out. I just don't care about any of it anymore. I read, I write, I listen to music, I miss the woman I love. I keep hearing rumors about some global catastrophe coming in 2012. Fine. I'll be reading a book and listening to Mozart when it hits. As Tom Lehrer once sang, "We will all go together when we go."

In the meantime, just leave me out of it.