YOU'RE STILL WRONG.. MYKEL'S JULY 2020 BLOG VOLUME 1 OR SACRIFICE by Mykel Board

YOU'RE STILL WRONG.. 

MYKEL'S JULY 2020 BLOG

VOLUME 1

OR

SACRIFICE

by Mykel Board

Suffering ceases to be suffering in some way at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. --Viktor E. Frankl

Love is not a feeling of happiness. Love is a willingness to sacrifice.

--Michael Novak

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.
--Albert Schweitzer

The Aztecs use an intricate knife. Its wooden handle curls in on itself… so it bulges at the back, like a huge snail with its tail attached to the blade… and the blade… ah the blade. Not metal but stone… heavy, nearly a foot long… chipped to two razor sharp edges and a needle tip point.

Pan back from the knife. Up… up… up… until both pyramids… sun and moon come into sharp focus. Pan closer… Shift to the Sun Pyramid...Flat topped… 248 steps...base to the top. A priest waits at the top of the pyramid. At the bottom, hundreds of people gather. You might think it was an Apache pow-wow for all the feathers, though the blue and gold chest plates and loin cloths might make you wonder.

At the front of the crowd, a mother holds her daughter’s hand. The child, about 10 years old, looks up at her and speaks.

[I translate for readers who do not speak Aztec.]

“Mommy,” she says, “I’m scared.” Tears drip down the side of her face. Mother releases the girl’s hand to wipe away the tears.

“Don’t be frightened,” says Mother. “It’s a sublime thing you’re doing. You’re bringing us health, good harvest, a happy future. You’re doing great things for us. You should be proud, not scared.”

“It’s time,” says a man, dressed slightly different from the rest… more gold… with a headpiece that somehow looks Egyptian.

“Yes,” says the mother, “it’s time…. and remember it’s a beautiful thing you’re doing for all of us.”

Mother takes her daughter’s left hand with her right. Together they climb, step-by-step, the 242 steps of the pyramid. At the top, Mother brings her virgin daughter to a little wooden platform… constructed in the center of the flat space on the top of the pyramid.

“You must lie down now,” she says to the girl. “I will leave. The priest knows what to do. Remember... I love you. And you are doing a great thing.”

The little girl sniffs back a sob, clenches her teeth, and closes her eyes. Tears form under the closed eyes and drip down the sides of her head. She lies down.

The priest kneels next to the platform. He holds the stone knife in both hands.

At the base of the pyramid, people shout. “Huitzilopochtli! Huitzilopochtli! Accept our sacrifice. We love you! Grant us peace and good harvest.”

Hands open, the priest raises the knife toward the sky, as if showing it to God. Then he takes the handle in both hands, and, holding tightly, plunges it into the chest of the little girl.

She screams... a high horrible scream… a scream heard 247 steps below… as the blood flows from the girl’s chest down her sides… from the platform to the top of the pyramid.

The screams fade. The priest presses the knife back into the young girl and slices downward… opening a slit… in the girl’s belly.

He sets the knife next to him, directly on the pyramid. Then… he reaches both hands into the slit. Finding the heart, he pulls down, and pinches off the veins and arteries that attach the organ to the girl’s body. When free, he raises the severed heart above his head… letting the fresh blood drip onto his body.

“This is for you, Huitzilopochtli,” he shouts to the sky, “Thank you for keeping us. Let this blood of a virgin be our sacrifice to you. Preserve us for another year. Give us a good harvest and victory in battle. Thank you, God. You are our savior.”

The people at the base of the pyramid cheer…. Then become quiet…. They are satisfied.

Barbaric?

That’s what you think… waiting at the base of your own pyramid. There is something human that demands a sacrifice. Soldiers are praised for making “the ultimate sacrifice.” We are urged to self-sacrifice… the firefighters website says, Self-Sacrifice Is A Firefighter’s Oath.

Parents sacrifice their freedom for the sake of their children. Pedestrians wear masks that sacrifice their comfort (and maybe their individual health) for the sake of the community.

But how about sacrifices like the Aztec little girl? Certainly we don’t sacrifice human beings for some vague principle, right?

You bet your stone knife we do. Our court system… the entire idea of “justice” is based on human sacrifice. Do you think there was any way that Harvey Weinstein could have gotten an objective trial anywhere in America? An innocent verdict would have caused riots. I don’t know if he was guilty or not. It’s my guess… but only my guess… that his accusers saw one thing and he saw something else. That’s beside the point.

Even if he were as innocent of forcible rape as I am of the Kennedy assassination, he still would have been convicted. The gods (goddesses) of #metoo needed a human sacrifice. They needed someone… (actually some ones… I count Bill Cosby among their victims) to be slaughtered on the pyramid… someone for the public to see… someone to bring them good fortune in their future ventures. Guilt or innocence have nothing to do with it.

Before Weinstein… before most of my readers were born… was the Vietnam war... a horrible American atrocity. US planes dropped firebombs on men, women, children… civilians all. Massacre was the name of the game as soldiers collected oriental ears as souvenirs.

In one place, Mi Li, someone caught it on film… hard to do in pre-cellphone days. An entire town massacred. The carnage caught by the camera.

Lieutenant William Calley, was brought up… court martialed… there were posters of the massacre. He killed babies! Though convicted, Calley only spent 3 years...not in jail, but under “house arrest”… like Martha Stewart.

There was outrage. How could someone get away with that? Calley was a murderer! He should spend the rest of his life behind bars. Hey buckaroos! He was a soldier. Soldiers kill people. That’s their job. But Calley was supposed to be the sacrifice for all the evil done by ALL the soldiers... the sacrifice to public opinion… That one didn’t work out.

It’s 2020 and you’ve seen the picture: Officer Derek Chauvin, his knee on the neck of George Floyd as Floyd chokes out “I can’t breathe.” I don’t need to reproduce the picture, you’ve seen it on every TV channel, on every page of social media, on every poster in every march. My pal, Bob Black, believes he’ll get off scot-free… or with a 3-year slap, like Lt. Calley. I think he will be both scotless and freeless.

I think he’ll be a human sacrifice to the gods of Black Lives Matter. A legal knife to the heart to satisfy the call for blood (under the term justice… another word for blood). From what we’ve seen, he is guilty. We certainly have more evidence than did the Harvey Weinstein jury. But that’s not the point.

After this sacrifice, people will cheer, then be quiet. Things will go back to what they were. Cops will be soldiers… whose job it is to kill. Nothing will change about police or policing. One person (maybe with a few others) will be offered up to the God of public order shouting at the base of the pyramid. They will be satisfied.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com

→ Music dept: The Boston Typewriter Orchestra has been performing its unique brand of music throughout New England since 2004 and will now be releasing its first vinyl album later this summer. Self-proclaimed conductor Tim Devin and a group of friends founded the ensemble as a joke. After premiering at Boston's Art Beat Festival, the idea took off. Using vintage machines to rhythmically clack, roll, spin and bang out "music," the typist-musicians say different models produce different sounds. "A Smith-Corona Galaxy 12 has a power space function that makes a nice metallic clang sound," explained one of the members.
I wrote my first column for Maximum Rock’n’Roll on a Smith Corona.

→ Something Fishy About This Dept: The Daily Star reports that a 30-year-old man turned up at Zhaoqing First People's Hospital in Guangdong, China, on June 3 suffering from abdominal pain. Doctors performed a series of scans before discovering a whole freshwater fish in the man's rectum.
How’d that get there?

The man explained that he had “accidentally sat on it.”
"Do you think I'm an idiot?" one of the doctors replied.

The spiny fins of the Mozambique tilapia had caused ruptures in the man's intestine and had to be removed through his abdomen by surgery.

→ The weirdest year in history continues dept: You may have heard this one on TV. A huge plume of Sahara Desert dust that drifted across the Atlantic Ocean has reached the southeastern United States.

This plume, which the National Weather Service (NWS) expects to blanket the U.S. Southeast and Puerto Rico, is the biggest in at least the past 50 years.

The dust outbreak is "by far the most extreme of the MODIS satellite record — our most detailed, continuous record of global dust back to 2002," tweeted Michael Lowry, an atmospheric scientist.

I wonder how long before they discover that the dust carries with it a new virus, spread through the eyes, that can only be stopped with a blindfold. Stay tuned for a state-by-state report on the blindfold laws. Actually, that might be cool. The REALLY blind folks would be the only ones who could get around!

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

David Goldberg's Busy Microbes Blog

And another Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

NEW: Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com

– See you in hell,

Mykel

You're Still Wrong, June 2020 Volume 2... NO LIVES MATTER

You're Still Wrong, June 2020 Volume 2 or NO LIVES MATTER

YOU'RE STILL WRONG.. 

MYKEL'S JUNE 2020 BLOG

VOLUME 2

OR

no lives matter

by Mykel Board

I grew up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia has a really rough police-brutality history. I grew up in a neighborhood where it was very clear that the police were "them" and we were "us". --Will Smith

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist’s drill. --Leonard Woolf

View from the operating table… looking up at the bright light… all faces masked... like the line at the grocery store during an epidemic… peering down.

“Looks like an aneurysm,” says one face… a man with bushy eyebrows.

“Yeah,” says another, “let’s go in… hand the drill to Dr. Unfahig.”

A nurse, short, brown skin visible around her slightly-oriental eyes, takes what looks like a large luger… with a drillbit at the end... and hands it to Unfahig. The doctor’s hand shakes as he takes the drill from her.

“But… but… but…” he says from behind his mask. “I can’t do this. I’m a dentist.”

“It’s part of the job,” says the man with the bushy eyebrows. “You’ll learn.”

Dr. Unfahig presses the tip of the drillbit against the patient’s temple, feeling for the soft spot… something to do with where Lincoln was shot. He knows from his dentistry class that the hole should be large, cleared of bacteria, go slow... narrow in… gradually widening.

He backs the drill off a bit… pulls the trigger… a high-pitched whine fills the room. He moves the drill to the patient’s temple and pushes it forward… there is blood… a lot of it.

Get it?

You would not demand that a dentist be a competent brain surgeon. Yet you complain when a cop… in what has become a branch of the military… doesn’t function as a mental health officer, a crowd controller, a peace-maker, a domestic dispute arbitrator, a spy, a detective, a public censor, an alcohol and drug abuse preventer, a run-away teen fetcher, and, in the past, a slave-returner.

Training for cops is how to protect yourself… how to use a gun… how to capture people and hold them so they won’t hurt you… all the skills you learn in the military. You fight for each other. Those on the barrel end of the gun are THE ENEMY.

And when the naked schizophrenic walks down the street with a screwdriver… who gets called? The trained doctors from the local looney-bin? No! The cops get called, and they do what they are trained to do… KILL PEOPLE. Winning the war requires killing the enemy… That’s what they’re trained to do. NO LIVES MATTER. Beating the enemy is what matters.

From one side, you hear ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), from the other side you hear… No, cops are good guys and they have to be allowed to do what’s necessary to control criminals… And from a third side you hear, “Cops are just human… like you and me. There are good ones and bad apples. The bad apples must be punished.”

All of this is WRONG! Police are not the problem. POLICING is the problem. Liberals were horrified when Trump threatened to call in the army to support the police. Sure, we wouldn’t want to bring in young guys in uniforms with guns, would we? Yo! That’s what we have ALREADY!

The dad-was-a-soldier, the poor, the uneducated, the unable-to-work-elsewhere, the angry, the true-believers who really want to help. These are the soldiers… AND these are the cops. Giving mostly narrowly-educated people guns and telling them to “enforce the law” is like giving a dentist a drill and telling him to perform a brain operation.

People were horrified when Minneapolis defunded (abolished) the police force, but that is what needs to be done. We need, domestic negotiators, loony-handlers, substance recovery experts, anger-managers, cats-in-trees-removers, old-lady crossing the street helpers… and the list goes on. We don’t need cops.

- end-

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com

→ The Loony Patrol dept: If you need another reason to have a group of mental health workers rather than cops, WKRG in West Florida reports a man is accused of going on a “crime spree” that included getting naked at a flea market, stealing a car, breaking into a home, and ripping someone’s mailbox out of the ground. Sure, jail is the best place for someone like that, don’t you think? They don’t call it the Department of Corrections for nothing.

→ Corona for the lungs, fries for the heart dept: As Corona winds down in Europe, the damage done to the lungs has to be made up for. Why not have some heart problems?

Romain Cools, secretary-general of industry group Belgapom, told Reuters . “We know Belgians like their fries, it’s intangible heritage... our frying culture... so we ask Belgians to consume an extra portion of fries to allow us to process more potatoes and to avoid food waste.”

That’s the spirit… avoid food waste… just fry it up… and eat it.

→ This Bud’s For You dept: Jennie Stejna, of Easton Mass is a 103-year-old woman who recently survived a bout with the coronavirus says USA today.

As Stejna’s condition worsened, the family called her to say what they thought were their final goodbyes. When her son-in-law, asked whether Stejna was ready to go to heaven, she replied, “Hell yes.” But on May 13, granddaughter Shelley Gunn said she got good news — Stejna had recovered. The staff gave the aged survivor an ice cold Bud Lite to celebrate. It was something she loved but hadn’t had in a long time. 

 – See you all in hell, Mykel

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

David Goldberg's Busy Microbes Blog

And another Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

NEW: Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com

And oh yeah, fittingly with this blog, I found a 1991 piece I wrote for THE MOWER zine in Germany. It's about VIOLENCE. You can read it at https://mykelsoldies.blogspot.com/2020/06/violence-in-mower-germany-1991.html

The Santa Death March aka Mykel's Post-MRR Column Number 17

YOU'RE STILL WRONG

POST MRR COLUMNS

Column 17

by Mykel Board

"always have the police on your side...one of the things you learn in the mazes of life.” Louis-Ferdinand Céline

ARRRR-ARRRR-AH-AAAARRRR, screams “the rooster” in my talking alarm clock. THE TIME IS TEN THIRTY. I slap for the off button...WHACK... I miss it. ARRRR-ARRRR-AH-AAA, it screams again... WHACK! Got it! Caught in mid-caw.

Body point by body point... the muscle pains from yesterday's half-hour at the gym return. Back, neck, calf, thigh... Rumble by rumble, the beer from last night's Peculiar Pub adventure returns. Stomach to small intestine to large intestine to colon... pushing against the sphincter with a pain more intense than my need to sleep. Synapse by synapse, I remember that it's Saturday... a day off... a day of rest... and then...

Fuck! The second Saturday in December. A day worse than Christmas... worse than Independence Day... worse than any flag-waving, death-loving day that passes for a holiday in the United States. Memorial Day, Patriot's Day, Columbus Day, Lincoln's Birthday for God's sake... all the horrible holidays pale in comparison to this second Saturday.... SANTACON.

In 2013 The Village Voice writes, “SantaCon was a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.” That was an insult to Mardi Gras. Wikipedia tells me that SantaCon started as an art project... and grew out of a Danish group that took toys from store shelves and handed them to kids as Christmas gifts... leaving it up to the store managers to pry the gifts from the crying kids' hands. A nice metaphor for capitalism... and one worth imitating.

But the American version, of course, lost its politics and became a drunken frat party. The skimpy Santa dresses worn by big-boobed girl Santas do not compensate for the trail of macho-man-shouting-girl-piss-screaming-pukesters that make the holiday unbearable... and they start at 10AM!! Santacon: a good argument against gun control.

FLASH TO FERGUSON MISSOURI: A grand jury refuses to indict a cop who shoots an unarmed black guy. The victim raises his hands and says DON'T SHOOT! After the shooting, ABC News pays the cop half a million dollars for an exclusive (rehearsed with acting lessons, paid for by the MO cops) interview about how he felt threatened by the unarmed man and IT WAS HIM OR ME!

FLASH TO NEW YORK CITY: A grand jury refuses to indict a cop who strangles a guy for selling loose cigarettes on the street. This, the result of Police Commissioner Bill Bratton's BROKEN WINDOW policy, where crimes like simple drug use or graffiti are more important than murder or the white collar theft of millions. The grand jury refuses to indict the cop although the victim is videotaped hissing I CAN'T BREATHE eleven times before he dies. The man who takes the video is himself arrested by other cops. He is not killed... yet.

FLASH TO CLEVELAND OHIO: A cop shoots a 12 year old brandishing a water pistol. Jury indictment results unknown.

BACK TO MY APARTMENT IN NEW YORK: My phone vibrates. It's an SMS from Jody:

Mykel, are you going to the march against police violence? It leaves after a rally in Washington Square Park. Moves out at 2.

Shit! I had planned NOT to go out today... I don't want to face those Santas. But these murders are just too much. I gotta put up or shut up... and I'm not one to shut up.

I stumble into the bathroom... evacuate last night's Yuengling... brush my teeth... put on my Russian navy coat and detective hat... walk over to meet Jody and go to the park. It's packed.

And what a mix! There's someone giving out leaflets from the Revolutionary Something-or-Other Party... a bunch of white college-agers with bad taste in headwear... colored young people... colored old people... signs galore, most with #blacklivesmatter someplace on them.

A lot of the signs look professional. Corporate printing with boring designs... mass produced:

STOP POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER or LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. Not very exciting...

One Middle Eastern-looking guy has a sign that's more a manifesto... it takes me awhile to read it all:

Down with the racist police who kill Blacks and Latinos in America And down with Barack Obama Police Chief of the world who kills more innocent people in the Middle East with his bombs and drone missiles #Arabslivesmattertoo

I wonder if everyone being systematically killed has his own hashtag. I also wonder if, given the liberal/leftist tendency to attack each other, there's going to be a fight... or several of them. Wait, here's a guy in a yarmulke... holding up a sign... maybe something suitably anti-Arab?

I'm (pleasantly) surprised. His sign says I CAN breathe, and when I do I smell racist injustice.

Oh yeah.

The best thing about this crowd is that THERE ARE NO SANTAS!!! Not one! No red-pants fratboys, walking through the crowd with dripping cans of Bud! Yowsah!

“Hey,” I tell Jody, “the crowd is thinning.”

“Look!” she says pointing to the arch. “They're leaving, walking up Fifth Avenue. The march has begun.”

“Follow me!” I yell, like Custer leading the charge against the Indians. “Full speed ahead!”

We shoulder our way through the mass of masses. Little kids in strollers... black teens in hooded sweatshirts... a gray-haired man walking arm-in-arm with his gray-haired wife... both serious and organically thin.

STOP: Before we go any further, I want to give you my take on all this police stuff.

Imagine you're on a grand jury. You're white... your friends are white... the cops are white... which side are you on? Vote to indict a cop... and your ass is an extremely well-mowed lawn. The DA, who needs the cops for his job, is the guy “presenting the evidence against the police.” I'd have voted the same as those grand juries. You can bet your grassless ass I'm not going to indict a cop. I gotta live here!

The problem is not this or that jury or this or that town-- or even this or that cop... but the jury system itself. The system of PEERS... the openness... the possibilities of revenge... retaliation. In New York, the guy who videotapes a cop murdering a man for selling illegal cigarettes... is arrested by other cops. Can you imagine what would happen to someone who actually voted a cop guilty of murder? Who's gonna trust the courts? The jury system? Not me. Make something up... sneeze... anything.. I'll vote NOT GUILTY!

It's illegal to advocate rioting or destruction, so I won't. If it WERE legal, I might say DO IT! Right now, the police get away with murder. The consequences are a few days in court, and then the life of Riley. But, what would happen if every time a cop killed an unarmed black guy, a bank got burned down? Or a different cop got shot? Murders by cops would have consequences-- real consequences-- that might have the deterrent effect the law is SUPPOSED to have. No grand juries on this one. You shoot LeRoy and BLAM, good-bye Starsky and Hutch.

Of course, I'm not saying people SHOULD do this. I'm just asking what would happen IF.

Extra Note: All cops are not murderers (though a code of silence^® makes all cops accomplices). There are cops who enter the force for idealistic reasons... who really expect to help people... who have a view that the world would be a more dangerous place without them. During the World Trade Center aftermath, the compassion, spirit, and volunteerism of all the police was a testament to their basic decency. Cops are not good or bad. They're mixed-- like everyone else. Sometimes one aspect wins, sometimes another. The focus shouldn't be on these cops, but on a grand jury system that makes it nearly impossible to bring ANY cops to trial. That's what's got to change. In the meantime, all consequences for police actions now take place OUTSIDE the realm of trials and grand juries. The consequences are on the streets.

BACK TO WASHINGTON SQUARE: Jody and I shoulder our way through the crowd... past an NYPD ARE THE BROKEN WINDOWS sign and another that says:

Number of Americans killed by:

Isis 5

Ebola 2

Police 500

A not-bad sign shows some understanding of how things are rigged to prevent indictments: The system isn't broken... it's working.

Not a Santa in the crowd. And hey... look at that! Someone gets it right. A woman with a hand-drawn sign: We must change the law-- no grand jury.

Yeah! Now all we need is a little humor and we've got it.

“Mykel,” Jody tells me, “you can't expect humor. Those guys were murdered... You can't laugh at that.”

“George W killed a million people in Iraq,” I say. “And THAT'S funny... I can laugh at anything!”

She frowns.

By now we're through the arch on to Fifth Avenue.

HANDS UP! shouts a skinny white girl with a very semitic nose.

DON'T SHOOT! answers the crowd.

HANDS UP! she repeats.

DON'T SHOOT! answers the crowd.

This goes on for the next half a dozen blocks until someone I can't see begins shouting.

I CAN'T BREATHE, he says, sounding quite accustomed to chant leading.

ONE! answers the crowd.

I CAN'T BREATHE, comes the repeat.

TWO! answers the crowd.

This goes up to ELEVEN.

Then there's an older black guy with a hint of gray-streaked beard. He's holding a generic #blacklivesmatter sign. He shouts, NO JUSTICE

NO PEACE, shouts back the crowd.

NO JUSTICE, again.

NO PEACE, again.

“I don't get it,” I tell Jody. “This is a march up Sixth Avenue and down Fifth Avenue. There's a permit. Nobody is breaking any windows. Nobody is burning police cars. Nobody is even stepping out of the parade route. Where is the NO part of NO PEACE? It looks pretty peaceful to me.”

“It's just a slogan, Mykel,” she answers.

A groups starts chanting THE NYPD IS THE KKK!

A few of the crowd pick it up. I look at the cops on the sides of the march. They're NOT in riot gear. No horses. No hostility. A few black cops... a few hispanics... a few women... a few black women. They're chatting with each other, guns safely holstered. They don't even look angry.

THE NYPD IS THE KKK! shout a few more people.

Since when did the KKK allow Negro and Hispanic members? The NYPD may be Wall Street, but it's not the KKK.

Uh oh, here it comes, a flash of red. My Santa-free Santacon is over.... at a protest march. This is just wrong!

Three big guys in Santa suits-- one of 'em colored. They appear to be sober. The colored guy moves to the front of the march... raises his hands... DON'T SHOOT! he says.

Yes! That's what I've been waiting for. A colored Santa.. hands raised saying DON'T SHOOT.... THAT'S funny. The whole idea of cops shooting Santa is funny. Cops shooting a colored Santa is funnier. SantaCon has done good for once.

The parade turns on thirty-second street, goes over to Fifth Avenue and starts going downtown again.

“I made my statement,” I tell Jody. “Now I need a beer.”

She suggests Old Town Tavern near Union Square. We split from the Parade at 20^th Street... walk East and have a couple of Edelstoffs. We sit among the Santa-less tourists in the place. The two of us share a burger and something else. Jody pays for it all. After beer and lunch-- at least 45 minutes-- we go out again. The march is still moving down the avenue.

We join it again... for a few more blocks. The newspapers will say 25,000... seems to me it's a lot more. Near Union Square is a guy dressed in an American Flag. He wears an American Flag kerchief around his mouth and nose. The skin that shows above the kerchief is light brown. His sign: USA Your racist hypocritical judicial system must be changed. 

Ah, someone else who gets it... now if only he could just make it funnier.

POSTSCRIPT: Who wudda thunk it? Four guys attack cops with a flying garbage can. There's a manhunt. Somehow, when police kill unarmed black guys, that's not indictable... but let a garbage can fly... hoooey!! I was just gonna add that to this post when:

TWO COPS ARE KILLED WHILE SITTING IN THEIR POLICE CAR. The alleged killer allegedly killed himself in a nearby subway station... denying a cycle of revenge that may start anyway. Nadav, a pal of mine who works in the emergency room here in NYC, was assaulted by cops when he tried to enter his workplace. It was the hospital where the ambulance took the just-shot police. I guess they attacked Nadav because he looks Middle Eastern. (He's Israeli.) But the cops must've been in a state of shock... where ANYBODY looks like the enemy. 

The police clearly are on an easy tripswitch... high alert... and I'm having second thoughts. What if, instead of considering their actions, the police just gone on even MORE of shooting spree? What if revenge brings revenge... blacks and cops the 21^st century Hatfields and McCoys? I don't know.

On the other hand, if someone were to always provide consequences for police murdering unarmed people, it might make them think twice before they do it. Riots and bank burnings may be less likely to invite retaliation than cop shooting. Of course, I'm not advocating any of this, I'm just considering the IFs.

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available by subscribing to the MYKEL'S READERS Yahoo group readmboard-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

-->Give it away dept: Ten different school districts in Texas have received free... or low-cost... gifts from the Pentagon. Including 64 M16-rifles, 18 M14 rifles, 25 automatic pistols and fifteen surplus military vehicles.

Ok, just try to come in here and hurt OUR kids! I dare ya!

-->Mohammad and the Mayflower dept: Justice Ray Moore of Alabama spoke at a "Pastors for Life" Luncheon. "Buddha didn't create us. Mohammed didn't create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures... They didn't bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship."

-->You can see my... and Jody's photos of the march by clicking here.

->Keeping the Pressure on Dept: I want to thank reader George Metesky for suggesting a continuing Bring Back Mykel effort directed at Maximum Rock'n'Roll for their (firing me as a) contribution to the world of censorship. Send your comments-- to mrr@maximumrocknroll.com with the subject line: BRING BACK MYKEL! Let me know how they answer.

-->And: I'm on a massive clean-up/divest kick. I'm giving away DVDs, cassettes, VHS videos, CDs and a few 7-inch singles. Just pay separate shipping and handling. Details at: MykelsGiveaway

-end