Big Man with a Gun

"Black and blue and broken bones
You left me here, I'm all alone
My little piggy needed something new.
Nothing can stop me now 'cause I don't care anymore."

NIN - Piggy


So, some months after the whole delightful soiree a couple of years ago in St. Louis the ridiculous catchphrase "hands up, don't shoot" got debunked. Still, that and a chain of other murders and harassment by cops, especially of lower-class people of a noticeably dusky hue of skin, fed a great deal of popularity to the Black Lives Matter social activists. This prompted an odd, awkward quasi-parody of the movement throughout various pig-pens across the U.S. entitled Blue Lives Matter, complete with their own hashtag and billboards like any good modern display of chest-thumping.

Wait, blue lives matter? No they don't.
I mean, yes, in the absolute, as a quality as intrinsic as to any other life, they matter, sure. Pigs are people too. However, compared to every other life around you, my fine flatfooted fiends, your safety does not matter. That is the whole fucking point of... well, you! That's the idea of hired muscle. We all pay through the nose for you to assume society's danger in our stead. Black lives didn't choose to be black, to be designated lower-class by birth. You chose to be blue.

Of course that ignores the usurpation of so many societies by their hired muscle, by their peacekeepers, praetorian guard and secret (or not) police of every breed and appetite for power. Hand people weapons and task them with imposing rules over others and they'll very quickly assume a position of high relative social rank, and such ersatz aristocracy will defend its power every bit as ruthlessly as the real deal, choosing convenient victims and striking down to push up.

Stop trying to convince us that you're poor, beleaguered, well-meaning peacekeepers. Cops, soldiers, prison guards, whatever, you're not our protectors. You're the degenerate sadists holding a bayonet to our chest and threatening to skin us alive if we don't bow to our aristocratic masters. You slap innocents around to make a show of strength. You perpetrate highway robbery as much as you stop it. Hell, what else do you call speeding tickets?

To whatever extent such a "monopoly on violence" may be necessary to keep our world from splintering into a thousand warring factions, it's a grim necessity and not an ideal. Laws and law enforcement even at their idealized best are not the pinnacle of society but the channeling away of its filthy detritus, and blue or khaki lives deserve no higher esteem than the sewer system.