After a month of focusing the column on one, or two issues at the most, the many things that are happening in this city, and the world at large, demand a more scatter-gunned approach this week.1. I've said here before how proud I used to be of the Seattle Police Department. Compared to eth boys and girls in blue of my home town, Cincinnati, so bad they were investigated by the Bush Administration's Justice Department-the only agency in the nation so honored-SPD looked like Gandhi standing next to Mussolini. But that's all changed under the circle-the-wagons reign of Chief Gil K. Once again the SPD is involved in a violent act that brings no credit to the department, or the city. A SPD detective shot a Hell's Angel biker in a biker bar in Sturgis, S.D., last week. The off-duty cop was armed, a violation of the local laws in Sturgis, for all folks, including above-the-law Seattle cops. The officer who shot the biker has already been disciplined twice for threats and altercations against and with civilians. Of course, under Chief Gil, discipline means slap-on-wrist at best, or the more commonly practiced sweeping-under the carpet.Why is a cop, off duty in another state, armed in a bar? And why are he and fellow officers "jawing" with Hell's Angels? The officer in question claims he was cold-cocked, but the owner of the bar said the cops and bikers had been verbally going at it prior to the shooting. Watch nothing happen once again unless South Dakota police officials show some backbone and charge a fellow cop. This crap is embarrassing and makes no sense. We need a new police chief. And we need him or her quickly.2. Occasionally in this column, we note the passing of great citizens of the world. One of the bravest writers who ever lived, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who won the Nobel Prize in 1970, died recently at 89. His family said he had written for eight hours, as usual, before complaining of not feeling well. Solzhenitsyn wrote one of the great prison novels of all time, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."Solzy was an inmate for almost a decade in Stalin's Gulag. A political prisoner, not a criminal. After his release, he was diagnosed with cancer and instead of dying from that, wrote "Cancer Ward," a harrowing novel about a provincial Russian cancer hospital. When the Russians evicted him, he came to the United States but made few friends by harping on the spiritual decadence of the West.After the overthrow of the Communist regime, and the breakup of the Soviet Union, he went home to Russia. He was a very good novelist, and a brave witness to the horrors of totalitarian states. The world of letters, and the world in general, will be hard-pressed to replace such a moral force, the antithesis of the hypocrites running things in the good old U S of A, right now espousing morals but promoting economic cannibalism.Speaking of which, the Harper's Index, a compendium of fascinating factoids, noted last month that 75 percent of the economic gains under the current Bush regime went to the top one percent (economically) of U.S. citizens. While 50 million folks, including nearly 20 million children don't even have minimal health insurance.It's my belief that not only crimes of commission should be punished, crimes of omission may be worse, if the criminals hide behind blind self-righteousness, while profiting from the sufferings of the common people.Unfortunately, this seems to be a minority opinion, while almost everyone I know here on the ground, blathers on and on about the Olympics, without mentioning that the games are being held in the largest police state in the world, China, where according to U.S. News and World Report, and other magazines, 50,000 criminals, many of them non-violent, were executed last year en masse. And streams in northeastern Washington are showing signs of pollution thanks to the winds of China, a country where 25 percent of the drinking water is undrinkable, even after boiling, and where half a million people, a conservative number, are reputed to have died directly from environmental pollution in the past decade.How about that beach volleyball, Maude![[In-content Ad]]
