1st Amendment gas pains

There are some hilarious videos of brazen individuals emitting sounds of certain bodily functions in crowded public places.

That is, they’re hilarious if you never outgrew the bathroom humor stage.

A newer version of this YouTube video phenomenon is occurring in Kootenai County. The only difference is, the noise is coming from another aperture.

People who call themselves First Amendment Auditors or Independent News Journalists are capturing video of public employees in public places. Most of them follow a formula, as scores and scores of similar videos on YouTube attest:

Go to the post office, a military installation, a police department or sheriff’s office or some such public facility, walk around taking video with accompanying commentary, and attempt to entice one or more of those public employees into confronting you. The motive varies. It could be as simple and stupid as trying to attract a bigger YouTube audience or as sinister as inciting an incident that leads to a profitable lawsuit. What it does not do is raise awareness of or strengthen the First Amendment.

The Coeur d’Alene Police Department was recently the target of one of these auditors, who succeeded in attracting plenty of uniformed attention, including a verbal exchange. (A verbal exchange is the first step into the auditor’s trap, especially if it’s contentious or sounds adversarial). This auditor, like most of them, refuses to identify himself and demands the officers identify themselves, with names and badge numbers. He also asks if he’s being detained or arrested; that goes right along with the generic script. Coeur d’Alene Police accommodated him further by following him in marked units when he walked away from the police department.

When watching the video, if you’re a relatively rational human being, you might entertain a fleeting fantasy of a fist flying toward the auditor’s camera, followed immediately by cracked footage of the sky. That would be satisfying but illegal and play right into the auditor’s ploy. Yet it is infuriating that some knucklehead would go so far out of his way to provoke the people who want to protect him.

No, the best reaction, experts suggest, is to either ignore these ambulatory oddities or to engage them conversationally, rather than confrontationally. Chances are they are not breaking the law. Chances are they’re just breaking wind.

Ric Clarke, RIP

On June 26, 1990, the all-time high temperature record in Phoenix was shattered.

The following day, The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest and most distinguished newspaper, published a long, cumbersome opening (called a lede) about the historic heat. Readers were exhausted by the end of the sentence. Some wondered why all that info wasn’t spread out over a few sentences, or 40.

Meanwhile, the little Mesa Tribune’s lede went like this:

Damn right it was hot.

The man who wrote that was Ric Clarke. He wrote hundreds of excellent stories before and after that event for the Coeur d’Alene Press.

Ric died Thursday morning. He was just 68.

Damn right he’ll be missed.