Word: diallo
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Bruce Springsteen rubbed some men in blue raw at his tour-closing concerts at New York City's Shea Stadium. It was when he performed American Skin (41 Shots), his song about the 1999 killing of West African immigrant Amadou Diallo by four police officers. The N.Y.P.D. yanked his escort for the next few nights, claiming it had been, after all, only a courtesy. Springsteen didn't sing Skin in his next two outings, and--presto!--his police detail was restored. Did the champion of the workingman back down? Maybe he just appreciated anew the lyrics of his song Thunder...
Last week's vague declaration of help was not exactly cause for celebration--either in Monrovia or at the U.N. "I don't trust the news anymore. I want to see action on the ground," says Ernest Diallo, 35, who is living in a tent camp housing 25,000 war refugees inside the U.S. embassy's residential compound. "We are hearing news every day that 'they are coming, they are coming,' but we keep dying." Said a U.N. official of the U.S. statement: "It's reasonably welcome, but it's not the same thing as a military commitment...
...police work and the limits of individualism. Cop dramas are dispatches on America's relationship to authority, and like The Shield, The Wire is a daring and timely one. We responded to 9/11 with a national narrative of teamwork: unite behind our institutions, and let's roll. (Waco? Diallo? Old news.) The rhetoric of good and evil was ascendant; anything in between smacked of moral equivalence. And yet the news since then has been Enron, the FBI, the church: institutions failing their charges...
Among other inane things, the council condemned the human rights records of China and Burma in 1997 and reviled police brutality in the Amadou Diallo case in 2000. While we have no quarrel with the content of these resolutions, they were ineffective in accomplishing anything, both for undergraduates and for victims of human rights abuse or police brutality...
...does point to a potential flash point for the revival of protest music in the West: capital punishment in particular and law enforcement in general are bringing together black and white artists as few issues have since apartheid. The New York City police shooting of African immigrant Amadou Diallo created a mini-genre of tribute songs--Springsteen's heartfelt if monotonous American Skin, Wyclef Jean's lilting Diallo and Erykah Badu's oblique A.D. 2000. The justice system may be to the rebel music of the 21st century as the military...