Strange Events in Ferguson

For those who are ignorant of how legal proceedings are normally conducted, the grand jury failure to indict Officer Darren Wilson can almost sound reasonable.

But in truth, failure of a grand jury to indict is extremely rare.  And presenting the grand jury with ALL the available evidence, including all the possibly exculpatory evidence, is beyond rare.  It doesn't happen.

Grand jury proceedings are NOT a trial.  There are no battling lawyers, no judge, no formal rules.  It's just a relatively informal proceeding that is supposed to help a prosecutor decide whether to bring a case to trial.  Normally, no exculpatory evidence is presented, the TRIAL is the place for that.  It's a proceeding that is supposed to evaluate the evidence against a possible defendant(s) after a possibly criminal incident has occurred, to investigate whether the incident(s) that took place could result in a conviction at a subsequent trial.

This is not what took place in Ferguson.  The prosecutor did not guide the grand jury as he would normally do, he just dumped all the available evidence on them and left them to fend for themselves. With the mountain of conflicting stories available to consider, they had little choice except to give up and say there is no clear case.

But the reality of criminal law is that witnesses almost ALWAYS differ in the details.  The prosecutor would normally point this out, and in any case would never normally present the grand jury with exculpatory or confusing accounts as the prosecutor did in this proceeding.

The process was rigged, it was a crooked proceeding dressed up to look like something fair and impartial.  Most importantly, it was very far removed from anything that would have happened if the shooter had been anyone other than a white police officer in a racist community.  There was enough solid evidence in this case to indict Officer Wilson 20 times over.  If he is innocent of a crime, a TRIAL would have been the place to prove that, not a grand jury proceeding where a prosecutor played the role of Wilson's defense attorney and abdicated his role as a representative of THE PEOPLE.

Mr. Tambourine Man

I've been waiting for a long time for someone to figure out the lyrics to Bob Dylan's Tambourine Man.  I knew what the song meant, but it seemed like nobody else did.  I've heard music professors proclaim pompously that it's about drugs.  Well no, dummy, it's not.

Finally, I found it online...some people had figured it out, and it was verified by someone who knew a musician who was present at a late-night session where Bob actually explained how he came to write such a strange song.

It's really a simple song, if you happen to know who the Tambourine Man really is.  I won't help you there, go find out for yourself.  He symbolizes something and you can find depictions of him in art that goes back centuries.  Bob is a strange musician in a way, he doesn't seem to care that people are too ignorant to understand his references to mythology and human culture.  He never did like the obtuse and ignorant people who demanded to know what his songs meant.  I'm with him on that, actually.  As he once said to a reporter who asked him about the meaning of his songs..."I wouldn't know, I'm just the guitar player."

People who get angry at poets because they can't figure out the meaning are fools.  Poetry isn't for the wife-beaters and dog-kickers of this world.