I am a student of the humble police blotter. The police blotter is compilation of of minor crime stories published daily or weekly in a shrinking number of American newspapers. A good blotter can be the most telling picture of the human condition that you will ever find. Greed, violence, jealously, thick-headedness, hypocrisy, cruelty: all the things you find in the national news and the mind of Vladimir Putin exists in the local newspaper’s blotter, in distilled form.
Maybe that’s why I cruise the police blotters of America with my laptop and recliner. To find the essence of human fallibility and turn it into structured Japanese-inspired poetry form of 17 or 34 syllables: haiku (three lines of five syllables, then seven, then five) and tanka (five lines, 5-7-5-7-7):
If it’s your car, ma’am,
why do you need those pliers
to start the engine?
The perp’s story was: “No, no, officer, somebody who owed me money gave me the car. He, uh, just didn’t have the keys on him.” That one didn’t wash. But people make that sort of proposition in national politics all the time.
Sometimes the crime that I use for a haiku is not even a crime. Not exactly. The best blotters come from small-town papers, where the little things are of interest to folks So say that someone’s mouth simply gets ahead of them and makes an empty threat to commit said crime. It makes the blotter.
A domestic tiff.
Husband exited grandly,
hinting suicide.
Falsely, so police revoked
Husband’s dramatic license.
Think about that tanka, and then think about all the times you’ve heard a politician “walking back” a statement or threat when called on it. Or, moving on, playing the victim on behalf of themselves or the perpetrators who fund their campaigns:
If she attacked you,
sir, then why is she the one
with all the bruises?
And among the privileged and the powerful, there is such a thing as entitlement. A good small-town police blotter drips with entitlement.
She couldn’t believe that
stealing her parents’ truck
was really a crime.
Yes, think of all the politicians who think that little laws that apply to little people don’t apply to them. Or, you can go full Putin:
Yes sir, that’s his car.
Yes, it’s in front of your house
But it’s not “your space.”
It’s a public space that you use.
Stop threatening to tow him.
I imagine Vlad Putin as the entitled homeowner who’s enraged to see a handicapped van parked on the street in front of his house. That’s HIS space, because he considers it so. Sadly, this small-town Vlad has no tanks of his own. But he’d use them if he could, as the real one did! Because Vladimir Putin is the greatest emperor in history, or thinks he ought to be. Sadly, the world does not agree.
If saying was truth
he could be king of the world.
But he was not king.
Nor a FBI agent
deserving of a free lunch.
This self-aggrandizement thing is definitely going around. But the guy at the lunch counter is just some delusional person acting out. And Vladimir Putin is…. well….
Digressing for a moment: there’s a lot of weird going on in America. Has been for some time. This kaleidescope of bizarre haiku is as good a sketch of that weird as anything else.
“Are you right with God?”
He asked, gun in hand, astride
his riding mower
Angry skinheads trash
a tattoo joint that refuses
to do swastikas.
Her vacuum cleaner.
sucked a bullet off the rug.
Then she saw the hole.
He slashed his wife’s tires.
Now no one wants him except
some judge in Des Moines
Santa with an axe.
Banging it on a stop sign.
Friday night in Hell.
“Jesus” at Walmart.
There are better places and
they took him to one.
America’s in bad shape. It doesn’t know what the hell it is. All it does know is that what it is now, doesn’t work. Some want to move forward, some back.
And it’s been just the right time for a con man like Donald Trump to mobilize the angry entitled and the angry hopeless — especialyl if they’re white — with lies and promises. Now if only Trump wasn’t a half-addled narcissist with no good sense. Like some dumb kid pranking on someone else’s motorcycle:
The King of Wheelies!
He pranced his friend’s motorbike
into a parked car.
He and the law spoke at length
of his suspended license.
Donald Trump’s license will soon be suspended, one way or the other. He may be taken to “a better place,” or vanish into irrelevance and bankruptcy: possibly what he dreads most.
But the haters he mobilized continue to hate, enabled by the mini-Trumps who play to the haters and by the billionaire oligarchs here and in Russia who finance the propaganda.
We face a long struggle, but what we must remember is that what we really facing is the death spasm of a culture of inequity and hyper-concentrated wealth and power that is not only wrong but will not, cannot deal with the issues that imminently threaten humanity.
The old order can be defeated; but if we did not, it would crumble with the rest of civilization. It is leaving; you can see the signs all over the world. The question is whether we leave with it.
I think not. I hope not. But I also trust not. Let me end with my favorite police blotter haiku:
That day the gods smiled.
And the dead man by the road
was merely sleeping.
The dead man’s not dead. He’s just sleeping. We’ll wake soon.