The 3rd Degree: A Detailed Account of Police Brutality
by Emanuel H. Lavine, 1930

(The book's title page has it as "A Detailed and Appalling Exposé of Police Brutality," but Manny Lavine never sounds anything near appalled and so I'll stick to the cover's version. The linked PDF excises a few chapters of redundant jollity; if any dear readers simply must have more Lee-Tracy-ish sadism in their lives, let me know and I'll try to oblige.)

It's not what anyone would call an authoritative and deeply considered overview of American policing, but I found this relic of jaundiced journalism worthwhile in a 'twas-ever-thus-except-where-not way. Cops and criminals have always shared a code of silence, with swift vengeance taken against any transgressors (transgressors of the code of silence, that is; not of the law), but it's been far better preserved by the cops: they suffer less competition from amateurs and fewer interruptions by prison, and benefit from open advocacy groups and freely donated propaganda, guaranteeing generation upon generation of apprenticeship. The complicity of the crime reporter is explicitly in evidence. Even the pundit's favorite comparison point was a chestnut by 1930:

It is for the public to decide whether these practices are really necessary and inevitable. The police in Great Britain, infinitely more efficient than our own, operate without resort to violence....

And then as now the police were merely the most broadly distributed and frequently encountered layer of the American system of injustice, handing off to unjustly distributed attorneys and juries, unjust judges, and unjust punishments, with the powerless pushed farther down and the powerful lifted farther up each stage of the way.

What's changed since 1930? Well, here as everywhere else, Americans have become more productive. Quantified goals for fines, arrests, convictions, and prison populations have goosed the good old lazy beat cop. Across the country, civil forfeiture has formalized the shakedown, with great gains in efficiency. Abundant access to militarized weaponry combines with training on the importance of hysterical panic even in the face of underwhelming odds, so that routine-to-unnecessary tasks can begin already escalated and escalate on from there. There are fewer second-gen Irish on the force and more of anyone else who can follow the rules of the game. And we've now got a genuine fully-attested crook at the top of American law enforcement. The meritocracy works!

What's next? Frankly, I don't see much room for further improvement. Maybe it's time to outsource?

The mouse with the sting in its tail

It’s training them to accept a poisoned environment, one in which their own emotional requirements are diminished and poor and sometimes vicious. Certainly uncaring towards the people with whom they have to share the environment. I think it’s part of the system that it requires the profit motive as a sufficient excuse for any crime, whether the crime be depraving the taste of children or poisoning lakes with asbestos. Profit is for a certain kind of person enough of an excuse for anything they do. If it earns money, they feel justified.

- Thomas M. Disch interviewed by Scott Edelman

In Thomas M. Disch's ironic storytelling prime, his lyricsinging counterpart was Randy Newman: equally American,1 equally capable of abrasive satire or faux-or-is-it? naïveté.

At first thought it's odd that two such expertly offensive illusion-strippers should find their greatest rewards (in American terms) at the Disney Company.

On second, as previously noted, all that's required is to not say the quiet part out loud.

In its prime, Disney's most strenuously maintained illusion was the coexistence of sole-authorship, innocence, and big money. That effort calls for some tolerance from both the exploiter and the exploited — a little erasure here, a little reticence there.... With family in the music business, Newman was comfortable taking music as a business: he first succeeded as a pop songwriter and his soundtrack work stretches from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis through Marriage Story. Disch, on the other hand, was notoriously bristly toward potentially helpful publishers and peers, and it's more surprising that he managed to supply a Brave Little Toaster sequel and the first version of The Lion King than that he got the worst of a familiar creatives-for-hire struggle. As the corporate conscience sang, "If your heart is in your dreams / (And your dreams are in our stuff) / Most requests are too extreme."

Cliff Edwards, AKA Ukulele Ike, the scatting singer of some entertaining off-color numbers in the 1920s, and a thuggishly-mugged character actor, was another established artist who slipped down the Mouse's hole more easily than might have been expected.

It probably helped that the role which provided him with booze and alimony payments carried its own faux-naïve ambiguities. In Carlo Collodi's original Avventure di Pinocchio it's unnamed except as "the Talking Cricket", and it's smashed "stark dead and stuck on the wall" in Chapter IV, albeit returning a bit later as a ghost, and a bit later still, without explanation, complete with exoskeleton.

On the repressive side of their job, Disney staff neatly tidied that contradiction away while softening and infantalizing the murderously delinquent puppet.

On the teasing side, though, they made Collodi's invariably stiff-necked and disapproving Cricket a tolerant insect-of-the-world with a Ukelele-Ike-ish eye for the ladies, and honored his slain-and-resurrected origins by dubbing him "Jiminy Cricket" — Sir Jiminy Cricket to you. Oh, if only the Mouse had left The Little Mermaid alone and produced a no-suffering-whatsoever Gospel of St. Matthew instead!