40-years ago, I worked for a company that was struggling to be noticed in a very competitive market. Our CEO was, typically, worthless when it came to . . . anything. But he imagined himself to be an astute marketing person, mostly because marketing is an area of business that rarely receives any sort of scrutiny when it comes to performance or return-on-investment. One of his favorite, mostly meaningless, sayings was “perception is everything.” Of course, in most situations, reality is what creates perception, but that’s a different topic than my point of the day.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department has created an international perception of being little more than a unidentifiable, random-uniformed, masked, over-armed, brutal, lawless, gang of Trump’s thugs who enjoy beating up, arresting, or murdering anyone who gets in their way. Their role in “law enforcement” is about as clear as their 1941 SS and Brown-Shirt German counterparts demonstrated at the beginning of the German fascist catastrophe. The only “friends” these goons have are the other worst-of-the-worst uneducated, unintelligent, unemployable white people who will happily and proudly guzzle whatever Kool-Aid Trump pours for them and Russia’s Republican useful idiots, squatting in Congress, doing whatever treasonous, criminal acts Putin and Netanyahu tell them to do. That’s not a sustainable marketing plan.
There are targets that Trump’s goon squad could be aimed at that would thoroughly distract the public’s attention from the awful, un-Constitutional things they are doing. For example, the old FBI (back when they were, marginally, involved in law enforcement) estimated that there are about 44,000 gang members spread across 300-3,000 Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (OMGs) littered across the United States. The nation’s impotent and timid “law enforcement agencies” have quietly labeled the largest of these groups “organized crime syndicates.” All of these characters are easily identified by the pointless, peace-disturbing noise they make and the “rolling bowling pin” crowds of unskilled “Biker Santas” plodding down highways, jamming up traffic, and crashing randomly. What if ICE pretended to be actual “law enforcement,” just some of the time, and targeted these useless sacks of fat-marbled meat for PR purposes?
Shooting VA hospital nurses and harmless moms in their cars creates a bad image for ICE, but blasting the shit out of a couple dozen biker assholes could turn that around instantly. Assuming the ICE goons clean up their mess, afterwards, of course. Imagine Trump’s weird banty rooster, Bovino, posing over a pile of dead bikers with a bulldozer shoveling the bikes into a ditch behind him. The ICE goons could wear cowboy hats, military helmets, or even full-on clown suits and they’d still get near universal approval for their performance. Bovino would be up for a Presidential medal of something-or-other instead of hanging out with a bunch of washed up fascists at a cartoonish "remigration" summit in Figueira Foz, Portugal. Tim Waltz might even say something nice about him if ICE had wiped out a Minnesota nest of Outlaws or Hell’s Angels.
It’s probably true that an occasional dentist or lawyer dresses up like Sonny Barger and blubbers through his neighborhood posing as a tough guy biker. After a couple of rounds with ICE hitting the news cycle, shown mowing down a bar full of half-witted biker Santas, the dentists and lawyers will crawl back to their country clubs and go back to posing as rich, single guys in Miatas, BMW M2s, and vintage Corvettes. Their overpriced, underpowered, noise-maker Harley’s will continue doing what they do best, drooling oil on the garage floor.
If ICE mismanagement really wants to change the department’s public perception from a pack of untrained, cowardly, goons with no useful purpose to actual law enforcement, this is the shortest path to that goal. Start gunning down bikers and anyone else with illegal exhaust systems[1] and the department will, overnight, go from being universally hated to being cheered where ever they go. And, let’s face it, nobody will notice if every asshole biker on the planet disappeared tomorrow. It’s not like they have ever contributed anything but fear, noise, stupidity, drugs and violence to the nation’s problems.
[1] Every state in the Union has similar laws to Minnesota’s 325E.0951 MOTOR VEHICLE AIR POLLUTION CONTROL SYSTEMS rule, which states:
“(a) A person may not knowingly tamper with, adjust, alter, change, or disconnect any air pollution control system on a motor vehicle or on a motor vehicle engine.
“(b) A person may not manufacture, advertise, offer for sale, sell, use, or install a device that causes any air pollution control system not to be functional as designed.
“(c) A person may not sell or transfer a motor vehicle with knowledge that any air pollution control system is either not in place or is not functional.”
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