Today's Must Read

Charlie Pierce notices something about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, specifically the treatment of the body:

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

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.

4 hours with his body lying in the street, with no effort to cover him.

This cannot be seen as anything but a demonstration of raw power to, and contempt of, the community, by which I mean the people of color in Ferguson, Missouri.

It may not say anything conclusive about what happened that day, but it does fairly clearly tell us that the police force of Ferguson do not see themselves as protectors of the poorer side of town. They see themselves as an occupying force.  (Of course, whole Mosul in Missouri thing that has been going has made this pretty clear anyway. )

That being said, read the rest of Charlie Pierce's post. It is quite good.