I watched the events of Fergusson, Missouri tonight with the kind of morbid fascination one watches an oncoming tsunami or imminent train wreck.  I was ashamed that I was a junkie to the 24 hour news cycle, but somehow I couldn’t look away.  Like watching a Miley Cyrus video or listening to country music, I was not enjoying what I was seeing but I was more amazed that such a thing could happen in a civilized, seemingly intelligent society.  Greg Gutfeld described the situation in Ferguson quite aptly as a ‘bug lite’ that ‘demands spectacle’.  Indeed.

Start with the decision to hold a press conference of the grand jury findings at 21:00 local time, even though the decision was returned before noon on Monday.  What was the district attorney thinking?  The governor had already called in the National Guard in expectation of riotous behavior, so how can you pretend that lighting the fuse at 9:00 pm at night wouldn’t ignite public passions?  Witness the events in Los Angeles after the Kings won the Stanley Cup, or San Francisco after the Giants won the World Series.  Cars overturned, fires started, windows smashed… and that was to celebrate a sporting team’s victory!  How could you expect less after 3 months of race-fueled fomentation in Ferguson?

Yet that’s exactly what Saint Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said in a Monday night interview.  “We weren’t prepared for what we encountered tonight”.  Golly, what were you prepared for, Chief – some harsh words?  “We decided to let it play out like a festival”, said the chief as we watched fires burn unattended in Ferguson.  OK, I understand not sending firemen into a hail of bullets to save a couple cars.  But the point should have been to anticipate the response and head it off before it gets out of control.

The Chief went on to explain that they were outnumbered and outgunned. “It doesn’t take very long to throw some gasoline on a building and set a fire”.  True.  First week on the job, Chief?  How about a curfew?  How about making those National Guard troops visible before the fires broke out? How about the DA announcing the verdict at 9:00 am instead of 9:00 pm, when at least some of the protesters have to be at jobs or school, or at least can’t benefit from a shroud of darkness?  Blatant incompetence comes to mind as a defense.

Some of the interviews inspired a strange combination of both incredulity and profundity.  I kept switching between CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC.  (In situations like this you need to triangulate to find objectivity.)  It was shocking to see so-called journalists discredit the grand jury process as a charade that was an ‘obvious miscarriage of justice’.  These weren’t uneducated, drunken, unemployed delinquents living under bridges, there were accredited journalists and pundits paid for their informed opinions.  I heard one say “this case should have been brought to a real jury”, an obvious dismissal of both the prosecutor’s office and the grand jury who spent months deliberating over the evidence.   I heard an interview with a cousin of Michael Brown (the deceased) in which he declared “There is no doubt in my mind that the officer reacted out of anger” when he shot and killed the young black man.  He had no more insight than any of us into the event, but he clearly had a narrative in his mind about how events unfolded last August, and nobody was going to convince him otherwise.

Then we had President Obama weighing in.  Why?  Was this really something that the office of the President of the United States needed to comment on?  Part of his comments included challenging the police in Ferguson to ‘exercise restraint’ and ‘work with the community, not against the community’.  He went on to rationalize the response in Ferguson with this tidbit:

“But what is also true is that there are still problems and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up. Separating that from this particular decision, there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion. I don’t think that’s the norm. I don’t think that’s true for the majority of communities or the vast majority of law enforcement officials.”

If we are ‘separating that from this particular decision’, why even bring it up?  The only reason for being on the air is to address the issues in Ferguson.  Obama could have pointed out that due process was followed in Ferguson, and that insufficient evidence was found to indict Officer Darren Wilson (who, BTW, now faces a lifetime of threats and hatred for defending himself in the line of duty).  But he didn’t.  Instead, he found a left-handed way to throw this officer to the wolves as if he got off on some kind of technicality rather than being acquitted of wrongdoing.

Is it really so hard to believe the officer’s story after watching the security camera footage of Michael Brown robbing a convenience store and intimidating the store clerk just moments before his encounter with Officer Wilson? Also disturbing was how ready white commentators were to jump on the bandwagon to throw support behind the outrage, without any defensible evidence to suggest why due process wasn’t followed.  Shelby Steele writes most eloquently about white guilt and how powerful it can be to motivate white people to cater to the sentiments of black outrage as if it will somehow ease their conscience about slavery, class warfare, or some other injustice that makes them feel they ‘owe’ something to non-whites.  I’ve not seen it displayed so blatantly since the Travon Martin case, but even then it wasn’t even a white-on-black case because George Zimmerman was Hispanic.

Thinking people recognize that looting, burning and destroying property does not legitimize frustration over perceived racial inequalities.  But outrage still gets a nod of approval from those who are supposed to be society’s leaders, desperate to fill the shoes of Martin Luther King Jr and Rosa Parks.  Problem is, this isn’t 1960 anymore.