About those “BLM riots.” There’s just one thing bothering me. Motive.
Imagine you’re an arson investigator and at a burned-out building after riots in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha. No one knows who set the fires but BLM is spray painted on the buildings. Case closed? Are the 15 to 26 million peaceful BLM protestors now guilty by association?
OK, so maybe a card-carrying member of a loosely structured civil rights movement did it. What proof do we have? The fact that there were protests nearby demanding equal justice for black Americans? Should we look at the skin color of the person who committed the crime in a resegregated neighborhood and just assume they support BLM? Should we consider the fact that Tucker Carlson blames BLM for just about everything?
But wouldn’t racists, insurance fraud arsonists and Trump2020 campaign supporters and insiders (as Kellyanne Conway admitted) have a stronger motive?
Peter Falk’s Liutenant Columbo would have put it this way:
“Either there was no motive at all like in those crazy kind of murders that you read about in the newspaper. Or there was a very good motive, one that makes terrific sense. And that’s what keeps going around in my mind — motive.”
There is one more connection between the late actor Peter Falk and BLM. Just as protestors caught up in the Madison Wisconsin mob mentality tore down statues of Wisconsin’s progressive movement and abolitionist Christian Heg, A parody news site reported that BLM supporters in Budapest Hungary tore down a statue of Columbo. If there is any truth behind the story we can consider that:
Sometimes there isn’t a motive at all.
But there’s just one more thing that’s been bothering me. In an October 1961 episode of the Twilight Zone entitled “The Mirror”, Peter Falk played a Castro-like central American worker who violently overthrows his country’s ruler. He then becomes obsessed with a magic mirror which he believes reveals which of his friends was trying to overthrow him.
I’ve often thought with deep fake and similar technology, a mirror could reveal our implicit bias and hidden racism. Imagine if before you purchased a gun, they hooked up heart-rate and polygraph monitors , let you strap on the gear and stand in front of a mirror. But it wasn’t an ordinary mirror, it would show yourself as another race or gender and wearing clothing representing another religion. It would show how you would look if you fit the profile of your own fears.
“Ramos Clemente, a would-be god in dungarees, strangled by an illusion, that will-o’-the-wisp mirage that dangles from the sky in front of the eyes of all ambitious men, all tyrants — and any resemblance to tyrants living or dead is hardly coincidental, whether it be here or in the Twilight Zone.”
