Hot Air

Bang

“I don’t want to sugarcoat it,” attorney Benjamin Crump said yesterday, “[Michael Brown] was executed in broad daylight.”

The only issue I’ll take with Crump is that an execution, by definition, takes place as a penalty for a capital crime, at least in this holy land. Michael Brown not only had committed no capital crime, he’d done nothing wrong at all save for walking in the street and not immediately scooting onto the the sidewalk before his killer opened fire.

In general, we don’t take the lives of jaywalkers in this great democracy.

■

We give cops guns and badges but we can’t give them brains no matter how much funding we allocate for our police departments. The cop who whacked Michael Brown didn’t use his fully human brain when he pumped the kid full of lead Saturday afternoon; no, he used the ancient, paleo-evolutionary part of it, the part “involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays” [thanks, Wikipedia,] the part called by some the reptilian brain.

The cop who killed Michael Brown employed no more reasoning power and compassion than a crocodile.

The only question left is how many more cops are there like him?

▼

Hoteliers

A couple of nice young women came into the Book Corner yesterday. They were from Nashville, Tennessee. One of them told me she was a devotee of the Brothers Grimm. She found a colorful, richly illustrated, cloth-bound compendium of their best known tales. She was overjoyed.

The two told me they were in town to train the staff at the new Hyatt hotel on Kirkwood Avenue.

I wished them well. Their hotel, on the other hand? Ick.

■

[Side note: As I write this I’m eavesdropping on a tale being told by a property owner near the hotel construction site. This property owner says heavy trucks crushed decorative lighting fixtures and much of a perennial garden she had installed outside her building. When she and her people complained to the contractor, the fellow essentially shrugged and said, Whaddya gonna do?]

▼

Bang, II

The American Bar Association last week released a report finding that killings have actually increased in states that have Stand Your Ground laws.

Imagine that!

Al Jazeera America reports on that report, the product of a 2013 National Task Force on Stand Your Ground Laws set up by the ABA. The report recommends states ditch their SYG laws forthwith.

Figures. Liberal lawyers and socialist task forces — of course they’re going to be against laws that virtually declare states in which they’ve been enacted the Wild West.

Standing Their Ground

■

And that is the Wild West of a Sam Peckinpah movie. In other words, a load of bullshit.

▼

Iconography

Writer Miriam Krule points out in Slate magazine that with the death yesterday of Lauren Bacall, “all 16 of the 20th-century stars immortalized in Madonna’s Vogue are now dead.”

In case you’ve forgotten, here the others: