Happy Anniversary LA Riots: Or the Lessons the US Learned from Sgt. Stacy Koons

  This past April saw the 20th anniversary of the LA Rebellion (or riot depending on which political side you dangle) and the images of Rodney King remain tattooed onto the brain of a generation of citizens.

It was a sad lesson in the truths that Black people speak, as the video above had made visceral a tradition in African AMerican folk culture of the combative relations between Blacks and the police. From the song "Po Lazarus"

to hip hop group NWA (Niggas with Attitude) classic cut. Much has been said and can be said about Blacks and the criminal justice system yet there is an even more frightening lesson taught us by the trial of four of LA's Finest.
   The explosive response to the verdict was not based on the injustice of the act, again, there is a long history of police abuse, wrongful incarceration and even murder of Black people. So an innocent verdict was not new, what was new was the fact this verdict had been delivered in the face of images taken in real time of the assault on Rodney King. What the verdict said to the Black American public was, "You gon believe me, or your lying' eyes." (Richard Pryor) In essence the outright denial via verdict of the guilt of the four LA patrolmen, was an assertion of a lie so gross, "Mr King was in control of the situation," so stunning "The four officers felt threatened" in its audaciousness that it bent the warp and woof of human consciousness. In a moral universe, stars burned out in response, planets fell out of orbit and matter danced an intimate belly rub with anti-matter. The dangerous lessons taught by the trial of the four LA patrolman was that 1) we do not live in a moral universe. The arc of the moral universe? never heard of it! And 2)"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." (Joseph Goebbels).
  Mitt Romney is presently attempting to make use of the "Big Lie".

In the face of the growing evidence that Romney's core campaign stances, those used to convince Republican primary voters that he is severely conservative, are at odds with the views of most US citizens, Romney is now trying to systematically claim he was for all of Barack Obama's policies before he was against them. It is not new that politicians lie. It is not new that politicians running for the presidency, tack to the center in the general election. What is new is the hypersaturation of the media and the near absolute recording of every word public figures speak. So Romney's desire for credit for the saving of the US auto industry through direct governemt intervention buts up against this

Thus the Big Lie, the shocking, flaunting of the recorded and documented truth. Welcome to 1992.