Arizona Clown Show

The sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix and suburbs), is one of those distinctly American buffoons who has managed to parlay melodramatically cynical posturing into a long political career. Every few years he manages to get a little national coverage with one of his little gimmicks for tormenting his prisoners. Making the prisoners wear pink underwear was a hit, as was housing them in tent cities.

His latest trick is making the prisoners stand at attention while playing the Star Spangled Banner twice daily. His amazing hypocritical justification is that this is to "increase their patriotism." Now anybody ought to be able to figure out that repeatedly taunting a bunch of people deprived of their freedom with the anthem of freedom is a lot more likely to build hatred than patriotism, but in the land of Faux and Bush, no hypocritical pomposity is sufficiently over the top.

Brad Delong has a nice quote from Fredrick Douglass today.
Frederick Douglas, 1852:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?: I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless;

Unlike the slaves, the prisoners are presumeably responsible for their incarceration, but I doubt that the reaction to the stimulus is much different.

The US incarcerates a larger fraction of its citizens than any other country in the world, handily beating out repressive states like Belarus, Russia, Cuba, and Kazakhstan. No advanced western democracy is anywhere close. The vast majority of those incarcerated will get out in a few years. Turning them into dedicated enemies of the country hardly seems like a good strategy.

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