A Song about the Staunton Police Department

I wrote this song about the Staunton Police Department. It's called Staunton PD. I recorded it with one mic into my old laptop. It's dedicated to David Fritz at the Staunton News Leader and Jim McCloskey.

The Staunton Police and the Dead

The police in this town, for the most part, are brutish. I've never liked calling police officers pigs or saying nasty things about "the boys in blue," but in Staunton they are a problem. I haven't said much about them because Staunton is a pretty nice place to live, and I'd like more young people to live here. I don't think that young people would want to come here and work and start businesses and spend money if they knew how piggish our police force is. If Staunton can't have a good police force, it might not deserve to be much more than a retirement community. Some people might be happy with that outcome.

I've seen them push people, intimidate people, and otherwise behave unprofessionally. I've heard them say racist things and speak poorly of Jews. I've even had them leak information to politicians about me, which I think might be illegal. They've done other illegal things that have made the news. But I want to talk about the thing that happened recently in connection with the tragic unintentional suicide of a teenager.

A young man died. He was 14. He took pills on a camping trip and drowned on his vomit. He was a semi-regular customer at the Darjeeling Café. He seemed like a good kid.

His friends and a couple family members gathered at the park for a vigil. There were around 20 of them. They might have blocked some traffic. Someone saw a bunch of kids dressed in black and called the cops. The cops aggressively broke up the vigil. While in one of the police cruisers, the dead boy's brother kicked out its window.

The police are defending what happened, but they defend everything they do. They have proven in this town that they are not to be trusted or believed when it comes to these things. They've had to publicly apologize for lying about events. They're a disgrace.

McCloskey, the cartoonist at the Staunton News Leader, doesn't have a conscience. He drew the cartoon about the event above. I don't expect cartoonists to have tact or to think that anything is sacred or off-limits, but I expect them to have consciences.

The problem is that we have young people living in a town full of old people. The police have not been trained to deal with this. Are they to blame? Maybe a little for their duplicity, but they can't help that they are ill-equipped. They signed up to help people, but they're poorly managed and operate with impunity. They are by far the worst police that I have encountered in all of my travels – worse than Mexican police, worse than German police, and even worse than the Polish police. The worst. It seems a lot of people in this town want to talk about how this is the kids' fault for not conforming or being more compliant. They had a permit to gather at the park. No report of drug use that day at the park has come to light. The only thing everyone can agree on is that they blocked the road that circles the park. . . a road that shouldn't be there anyway (I hate that there's car traffic in our beautiful park). Arguments about how teenagers won't conform are old and too simple and stupid.

Tragedy is complicated and heavy. . . especially when you're young. I remember feeling so much when I was that age. I remember how important everything seemed. I remember how emotional it was when friends died while still teenagers. McCloskey and the Police obviously don't. And that's tragic, too.

Reporting on my vegan Thanksgiving.

Yesterday, the News Leader published an article that mentioned (my) veganism. That's really nice of them. Some of the comments on the article are not so nice.

I think my main problem with holidays is that everyone hates each other more than usual on them because they can't seem to grab what they really want: to love each other more than usual. It's as if there is such a huge expectation for everyone and that everyone feels obligated toward one another, something that is never pleasant and seems as arbitrary and ridiculous as dressing your girlfriend up like a squaw on a Thursday and forcing her to roast you a hideously large, genetically modified, flightless bird.

Then there's tradition.
Tradition is an obligation to nostalgia. Nostalgia is just a rosy version of the past. Yesteryear was not all that great. Every civilization has had a strange notion that the golden age was yesteryear, and now we're circling the drain, waiting for the end of the world.

I am a thirty-year-old heterosexual American with an iPhone. The end of the world is far from my mind. I think we are living in the most exciting times in human history. We are relatively peaceful, most of us aren't starving in America, we have time for art and literature and science, and most people I know have a computer in their pocket that can access more information than anyone ever thought would be available to a person born to working-class parents.

So just relax. No one cares how you were brought up or what you think of the way I eat. It's nice to be nice, and now that we all have the luxury to do so, let's! I don't have to kill animals to survive, and I live such a pampered life that I can act on my compassion and follow my conscience. I can live super-healthy and live as long as possible. Science has taught us what causes heart disease and other killers, so now we can avoid them! How great is that?! I'm thankful for all of that. I wish more people would be. If animals have wishes, that's what they wish for, too. Especially hamsters and flightless birds.

I'm also thankful for my girlfriend and her family, who have gone out of their ways in the past to make me feel welcome. They probably felt obligated. I hope they didn't.

Anyway, chill out, people. This holiday season doesn't have to be "the best ever." It doesn't have to match some imaginary version of holidays in Coke commercials or sit-com specials like Family Ties and Growing Pains. If you just act nicely toward one another, we'll all have a good enough time.
I'm also thankful for Indians. I love reading every year about how Thanksgiving is really celebrating brutality and war. Do you remember that episode of Buffy when the spirit of some Indian warrior was terrorizing the Slayer and her friends on Thanksgiving? I think Angel was int hat episode. Joss Whedon is a creative genius.

I've always disliked Thanksgiving, and I thanked the Indian tribes of the USA every year for giving me a reason. Now I kind of like it I guess. I mean, it's not Christmas or anything.

Poetry as Religion, Masturbation, and Science

The Oakland Fuel Dock is more important than any poem ever written, and it demands more respect. The container cranes stand with more majesty and pride over the gulls cracking mussels on the cement sides of slips because poetry, like all art, has no dignity.

It's easy to think of poetry as a religion. We experience poetry alone with a book or with a reverend-like reader in a group. and the more sinister boors of us will always try to make poetry a religion. Boors see a place where they can impose their own beliefs on others who love the art, and they will strive to turn those beliefs into dogma. Every religion has the arrogance to think that their set of rules are the right ones for anyone who loves God; of such stuff are proselytizers made. People who call poetry a religion are arrogant in the same way. When you refuse their dogma, they shake their heads and call you uninformed, like Martin Luther did when he said the Jews of Germany only refused Christ because Catholics had gotten all the rules wrong.

Rules assume that getting to heaven is a contest. They have holy men and saints, whose names act as place markers for ideas that reinforce those rules. These names have the mystical power of convincing people to believe what they know to be untrue.

The zealots of poetry as religion find saints in old critics. They chant their names in a mantra designed to feign an understanding of the ideas behind them. But reading criticism is analogous to watching the muscles of a very intelligent orangutan as he masturbates. Interesting? Yes. Fun? Maybe. But certainly not important or dignified. Poetry zealots watch to find new techniques so that they too can join the circle jerk of criticism, but they will never admit to having fun with it, and they expect you to stay quiet and reverent. Soon they will learn how to tell other would-be masturbators how it "should" done.

The only way to make criticism important is to change its purpose to that of science. Science's only goal is merely to know. Critics have spent so much time telling us things, eared seals barking orders at pelicans, that the pelicans have swallowed too much sea water and have started to believe that poetry and all other art is a religion. Only in religion do people subject themselves to being told so much. But poetry is not a burning bush and will not tell you anything. Moses was a liar, and so are most critics. They cannot ever tell you what poetry is really saying because it isn't saying anything. When art tries to say something, it fails because it has nothing to offer as a reward for your listening to Metatron. In religion, there's, you know, eternal salvation.

If you think that poetry and all other art is more than a form of entertainment, you suffer from arrogance. Art does not mean more than football. It seems like the more people know, the more they enjoy "fine arts," but who knows why that is? And that why is what's important. Why do we value the arts? Why do we enjoy ink on paper and paint on canvas or the sound wet breath makes through pounded brass? If you allow the educated and educators to stop you from laughing and having fun with the arts, you have been duped in the cathedral into thinking masturbation is evil and unhealthy.

But Art, Entertainment, Criticism, they all are very fun and healthy. The only question is how and why we enjoy the sticky mess they get us in.

Scientists are almost always more fun to be around than priests.

Suzanne S.

Dear Suzanne S.,

People are afraid of you. I was kind of afraid of you when you attacked me. You didn't know me, you had never officially met me, and you personally attacked me. You called me names. You should look up the names you call people because it was pretty funny how you misused the central pejorative in your attack, but that's not my point.

My point is that you walked into a place where people were sparring and shot everyone in the room with pistols. While I was poking someone in the ribs with my finger, you took to my knees with a sledge hammer. Maybe your tendency to overreact is why people are afraid of you. I know you were trying to stick up for your friend, but as admirable as that is, you only succeeded in escalating a tiff into a rivalry and hatred, which was uncalled for.

I mean, I was just talking about how I felt about something that happened to me. I purposely didn't use anyone's real name so that Google wouldn't find out about the thing and hit it on an ego surf. But you weren't there, and I don't think you had any reason to go crazy on me the way you did, vaguely threatening people who work with me. It was gross.

But I forgive you. I know that sometimes people freak out when they are angry because I freak out when I am angry sometimes. I say stupid things when I am hurt or upset. And I am sorry that what I said hurt or upset you. I never called you names, though.

So the last thing is that I hope you will consider wearing fewer animal products. Leather counts. There are lots of jokes that I would like to write about people who wear black leather, but I want these last posts of the year to be taken as sincere, so I won't do it anymore.

Yours in the new year,

Jack Morgan

Michael N.

Dear Michael N.,

You would have gotten an apology almost immediately from me had it not been for then unexpected involvement of Suze Stein. I have started walking toward you with the intention of apologizing many times now, but some other nonsense has stopped me again and again. So, I am doing it here, the most public way of apology I have available to me.

You made me angry, and I handled it poorly, and for that I am sorry. But neither of us has really done anything to the other aside from a little trash talking, and I don't see any reason why we have to do it anymore.

I hope that in the new year, and in a new bar, we can all sit at a table together instead of being lame about it like we were last time we ran into each other. I actually don't even have a problem with you.

I know that we will never be best friends or anything like that, but I hope that we can pretend like all this pettiness between us never happened, and I will try my hardest to be a grown-up about any aesthetic arguments that come up.

Yours in the new year,

Jack Morgan