So a few weeks back a city cop got offed—stabbed whilst enjoying a nice cup of coffee in his car. Tragic, dying in the line of duty like that. Protecting the citizenry from the manifold evils of the citizenry. A parade was held. Seven thousand cops, paramedics, commissionaires and so on shuffling through town to the beat of various drummers who clearly couldn’t hear one another. The paramedics couldn’t march. They looked awkward and more than a little self conscious. The city cops, shoes shiny-ed up and tummies pulled in over Tweedle-dee belts, did a little better. The feds did best, in their Tintin pants and crimson jackets left over from some movie about the Crimean war. Clipping along through the icey air.

Flag waving civvies lined the streets, local TV showed up and some scribblers from the Daily Bugle, tumescently awed by the stretch and pull of all those dress uniforms, waddled along next to the marchers, trying to press the exciting squeak of leather into their sweaty notebooks. Even the Tac-squad was there; stoney-faced boys in blacked out Suburbans, dreaming Blackwater dreams of firefights and enhanced interrogation techniques as the glorious seven thousand shuffled slowly past.

The whole thing put me in a bad mood.

Where’s the pompous eulogizing and endless marching when some Indian kid gets tossed out of a cop car to freeze half to death in the Winnipeg snow? Or a Polish guy gets tasered to death in an airport?