Charles P. Pierce over at Esquire has an extended meditation on Ferguson, on one element that lifts the rock under which so much in this country is normally kept out of sight and out of mind. Here's an excerpt. Read the whole thing.
A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war. Bodies lie in the street for four hours on back roads where people fight over the bare necessities of simple living, where they fight over food and water and small, useless parcels of land. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in places in which poor people fight as proxies for rich people in distant places, where they fight as proxies for the men who dig out the diamonds, or who drill out the oil, or who set ancient tribal grudges aflame for modern imperial purposes that are as far from the original grudges as bullets are from bows. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street, as object lessons, or to make a point, or because there isn't the money to take the bodies away and bury them, or because nobody gives a damn whether they are there or not. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street.
Again,
read the whole thing. Pierce has a knack for getting to the heart of matters.
I'm not going to add much to it except to remark that anyone who wants to talk about American Exceptionalism should not leave out of the discussion our exceptional capacity for self-delusion, sanctimony, and hypocrisy. Ferguson is one of those all too fleeting moments when the country is forced to take a hard look at itself, and the experience is so searing, it ends up avoiding the next such moment for as long as possible.