The School Shooting at Uvalde, Texas: A Pandemic of Pussyfooting

Cops charge through doors to kill innocent black girls like Breonna Taylor, but they can’t traverse open doors when young Latinos are dying

By

David Gottfried

I have a confession to make:  Your author, who in his youth had been the idealized incarnation of urbanity and erudition, whose casual reading consisted of heavy tomes such as “To the Finland Station,” spent much of Sunday, July 17, 2022, watching the boob tube.   I listened to, or should I say endured, the “reporting” (the incessant, impotent, affected sympathy) surrounding the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.  

This insufferable coverage reminded me of George Corley Wallace.  He was in many ways a reprehensible man.  He was a staunch segregationist and hate monger who ran for President in 1964, 1968 and 1972.  (Footnote 1)

Although I never liked the guy, I, like millions of other Americans, loved listening to him.  He had the Southern facility for using English the way it was used in “Huckleberry Finn,” an uproarious, visceral, folksy way of talking that made Mark Twain the toast of Oxford and London high society.   

He said that Northern liberal bureaucrats were a bunch of “pointy-headed” fools who “don’t know how to park a bicycle straight.”  He said that if you opened the briefcases of federal employees, you would probably just find peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  And he was really at his best when he bemoaned “pussyfooting.”

“We are pussyfooting on Vietnam, pussyfooting on the domestic crisis (I loved the way he really stressed the first syllable in domestic), pussyfooting on the gold crisis, pussyfooting on all the stuff going on.”

Thus sayeth George Corely Wallace.

Pussyfooting sounds like a bit of a sexist and homophobic slur and is rarely used in citadels of scholarship such as the Harvard that Wallace zealously despised, but it seems so apt when we consider Uvalde.

Today, a committee, apparently convened by the legislature of Texas, released a report on the Uvalde school shooting.   The report, and the cipher-like mandarins on the committee who delivered the report,  was pussyfooting par excellence.

They told us that there were “multiple systemic failures.”   Wow.  I never knew.  I had no idea what was going on until you told me that what we call “fucking-up big time” constituted “multiple systemic failures.” It reminds me of the time I went to a doctor because of headaches.  He said, in a serious and sympathetic voice, “You are suffering from cephalgia.”   I looked the word up in a dictionary and learned that cephalgia meant, “pertaining to, or involving, headaches.” The doctor prescribed no treatment, offered no advice, and promptly billed my insurance company for 300 dollars.

(This is why I went to Law school instead of doing graduate study in something like political science.  I found that too often academic work consisted of the propagation of useless synonyms.  An academic notices something that everyone has seen or experienced, such as a headache, he gives it a five dollar, polysyllabic. Latinate term which means the same thing as headache, and for his linguistic creation he is given a goddamn degree and someday may even get to write a useless report about a school shooting.)

The guy who apparently headed the commission or committee said that because there were “multiple systemic failures” there was no one person to blame.  This not only induced nausea; it also made me a tad homicidal.  That seemed like a prelude to saying dingbat officer A should not be prosecuted or at least fired because dingbat officer B was also a fuck-up.

Cops, in my experience, love to call gay guys faggots.  When a cop doesn’t know what to do with himself, and doesn’t have any black guys to pick on, he traditionally loves to accost a gay man and call him  a faggot.   At Uvalde, the cops distinguished themselves as a gang of heterosexual faggots, displaying all the cowardice that is supposedly a salient character trait of gay men. 

First. we were told that there was no way to breach the door and enter the classroom where students were bleeding to death.  Then, we were told that the cops were looking for the custodian to get a key.   Then, we were told that the door was open !!!!  Today, we were told that they had problems with the locks on their doors. 

Does anyone remember the police killing of Breonna Taylor?  That young black woman was in her apartment when the police, who were supposed to be executing a search warrant of someone else’s apartment, stormed into that innocent women’s apartment and killed that young black woman.   They didn’t have any trouble with locked doors.  They fired twenty shots and broke down the door and broke Breonna’s body and ended her life.    

So when the Police want to kill black people, they can be as tough as John Wayne.  When they have to confront criminals, they cower like stereotypical faggots. 

(Uvalde reminds me of one of the reasons why France fell in 1940:   After the Germans broke through the Ardennes Forest, and had taken Sedan, the allies needed forces to quickly move to the vicinity of Sedan to stop the German advance.    Several hundred thousand British and French troops were situated to the North of Sedan.  Those troops could have plugged up the hole.  But every French and British unit expected that other British and French troops would plug up the gap.)

The commission did a great job of telling us what we already knew:  That the officers were sitting around having what seemed to be a ladylike  coffee Klatch, eating Danishes while sipping cups of coffee.  Jesus, I saw film footage of one cop, running like a guy who couldn’t do a single push up, whose fat, flabby fanny seemed to flounce about like a bottom in a gay porn movie for chubby-chasers. 

Most of all, the ciphers who delivered their “report” did their best to say that which they thought we wanted to hear.   One woman said, “We are here for you.”  What lovely, adorably, touchy-feely nothingness and “shitfullness.”   

We don’t need or want treacly, tiresome, cooing words of fabricated sympathy.   We don’t want synonyms for what Uvalde is all about:  Fucks Ups,  cowards, imbeciles. 

We want to crack the whip and deliver discipline. 

And we want men who are not afraid to bust heads, break down doors and kill murderous culprits who kill our children.                 

   -----

Footnote 1:  Actually, by some accounts Wallace started off somewhat progressive and had been, in part, heir to that Southern Tradition of agrarian populism which sought to negate the persecution, inflicted on farmers, by Northeastern titans of finance capitalism, (Evidenced by the decline of farm income from the Civil War to World War One, etc.).  Wallace believed that his relative liberalism made him lose the Governor’s race, in Alabama, in 1958.  He said that his opponent  had won by being more anti-black.  He vowed that his opponent had “out-niggered” him and that he would never be “out-niggered” again.