- What's dis yere? A pile of trash?
- NO, fool. Dat be a memorial to Mike Brown, killed by the racist Ferguson police!
- But it sho looks like trash. Look, you can even see where it been burned.
- Hey, dat was an accident. Somebody din't know dat if you puts candles next to teddy bears and balloons, dey gonna burn.
- Well why it lyin' all down da middle ob de street like dat?
- Fool! Din't I tell ya, all dem Ferguson people racist! Some honky done drove his car into de memorial.
Well, I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder. But "a pile of trash" was what it looked like to Officer Timothy Zoll of the Ferguson MO Police Department. At least, that's what he told a reporter for the Washington Post who called what about a tip that the trash had been trashed on Christmas Day by an unsympathetic (and doubtless white) motorist.
The Post quoted Officer Zoll as saying, "I don't know that a crime has occurred. But a pile of trash in the middle of the street? The Washington Post is making a call over this?"
Seems to Walt like a good question, but the Post characterized the comment as... wait for it... racist. But St. Louis radio station KMOX later reported that Zoll told its reporter he had been misquoted and actually said that the memorial might have been destroyed by a motorist unfamiliar with the area who had mistaken it for a pile of trash.
That explanation didn't wash with the cop's bosses though. They said yesterday that "the officer admitted to Department investigators that he did in fact make the remarks attributed to him, and that he misled his superiors when asked about the contents of the interview."
For his sins of racial insensitivity and political incorrectness, Officer Zoll has now been placed on unpaid leave, while the investigation into the dastardly crime continues.
City officials were at pains to note that police Chief Thomas Jackson kept investigating the statement even after Officer Zoll initially denied making it. "The City of Ferguson wants to emphasize that negative remarks about the Michael Brown memorial do not reflect the feelings of the Ferguson Police Department and are in direct contradiction to the efforts of City officials to relocate the memorial to a more secure location."
A more secure location? Walt suggests the Ferguson Memorial Sanitary Landfill. And my suggestion has nothing to do with the identity or race of the dear departed who was being "memorialized". It's just that I am sick and tired of seeing these unsightly and pointless "memorials" that pile up on the site of any sudden and public death.
The practice of leaving flowers, candles, teddy bears, balloons, crudely lettered signs and other detritus at the scene of the accident or crime is maudlin, mawkish and pathetic. Pointless, too.
The only people who are made better off by these empty gestures are the sellers of toys, flowers, candles and what-have-you. For them, a sudden death -- particularly of a child or other "innocent" -- is better than Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Christmas all rolled into one!
I don't know how, where or why this sloppy sentimental nonsense started, but I hope one day we'll see memorials, in the more dignified form of flowers and wreaths, confined to the cemeteries in which the victims are buried. Toys, balloons and suchlike dumped in the city streets deserve to be treated as... well... trash.
