Police Bullets [another kind of polemic]

What if I were to present the following as fiction, perhaps what some might call flash fiction, for whatever reason or reasons you may consider, fiction being no less a bearer of truth than non-fiction.

Here is what I would say, write, in preface, although prefatory in placement only because I would likely write it after the fact of what I have written here in the bullets below?

In italics, is my after-word prefatorily placed for you then to decide if what is presented here as one or the other, fiction or non-fiction, is indeed what it purports to be, thus raising yet another question as to the veracity of the notion of Truth and whether fiction is a valid bearer of what we once called capital ‘T’ Truth, or whether that capitalization exists, or if fiction is a valid form of epistemology, which we could venture in further discussions:

What if this were

A page revealed in a spiral notebook found on a seat across from where our editor was sitting aboard a Manhattan bound D Train one early weekday afternoon this past March. It is herein published in its entirety without emendation, or so I say in an attempt to fictionalize the non-fiction that some might want to categorize the following as. You might ask if  fiction/non-fiction is a duality or dichotomy, as I like to now and then, entertaining as a genuine form of inquiry whether the generic boundaries between fiction and non-fiction that we have accepted as conventions of our writing, or telling when what is being told is other than in writing, are indeed plastic or fossilized, rigid in an unbending, unyielding way. The author is anonymous. I am not herein going to venture a discussion of the life or the death of the Author or an author. However, allow me to say, that authorship is the first and the last in authority over the text, but not over the interpretability of the text, nor is author intention or desire the first and the last in interpretation. I do have a preference for, nothing outside the text.

[So, then, you need to determine where this text begins and ends, and that should not be as difficult as some might want to make it; and if you determine one or another place, the response should be accompanied by the appropriate conditional phrasing (or should I say, clausing?).]

 

One

• How is the Patriot Act not an invitation for Police to act more authoritarian?
• How is it that we have not seen the correlation between the Patriot Act and the increase in the exertion of Power?

Two

• How is it that no one I talk to about being a non-White Caucasian understands a thing I say concerning this identity?

 

Three

• How do we not see that too many times short tiny cops have no other recourse but to shoot, being unable to impose physical weight and force to subdue?
• How do we not understand that size here matters more than we have been accustomed to imagine, are allowed to see; unless serious hand-to-hand combat were a recurring training.

 

Four

• How did we not understand that automatic pistols in the hands of the Police would result in more bullets fired and more people shot and killed with no change in policy, protocols or attitudes?
• How is it that we forgot Mencken’s message a hundred years ago about the Police truncheon?
• How is it no one has done the comparative studies concerning police with revolvers and police with 9mm automatic pistols?
• How is it we miss how easy it is easy to empty the clip of a 9mm automatic pistol?
• How is it we do not understand that it was and is impossible to fire previously issued revolvers in the same manner as 9mms are today?

 

Five  

• How is it that we do not hear about unarmed white men shot by the police when their numbers exceed the number of unarmed black men shot (although the percentage of the African American population who are shot while unarmed is greater)?
• How is it we imagine that if everyone woke up black tomorrow unarmed black men would no longer be shot and killed by the police?
• How is it that we consider the variable of race in the equation of black men being shot, but miss the opportunity to consider class as a variable in the equation of police shooting white men.
• What is it that you imagine happening between the Police and the People if everyone woke up White tomorrow?

 

Six

• How was it that my Dad spent twenty years on the job in Brooklyn New York and the thing he was the proudest of was never having to fire his weapon?
• How is it that some can take that as only a matter of luck?
• How is it that others understand my father’s experience as just one example, perhaps, of how to serve the People?
• How is it that he achieved what he did having had occasions to remove his revolver out of its holster?
• How was it that he was able to resolve incidents without having to shoot and kill?
• How is it that I am so certain that my father’s experience was not all and only about luck?
• How is it we lost the value of foot patrol?
• How was it my father achieved what he had while walking the Fulton Street Brooklyn beat?

 

Answer these questions, soberly, rationally, truthfully and articulately, and we might begin to get somewhere we have imagined we want to be as as a society of the People, by the People and for the People.

You do recollect what I have said about Anonymous in relation to ascribed authorship, don’t you?

__-The Editor, The Polemicist