Racist With the Devil

Just lately it has seemed that every time I watch a news programme I'm confronted by yet another story about US police officers misbehaving.  Well, misbehaving is probably an understatement.  Usually they are shooting people dead for minor violations (who knew that having faulty brake lights was a capital offence in South Carolina, for instance).  Well, to be accurate, it always seems to be white officers gunning down black men.  And if it isn't just happening in small towns in Carolina or Missouri - Sheriff's Deputies in California are also handing out beatings to unfortunate victims.  I guess it's all part of a dishonourable tradition that includes the LAPD and its officers' beating of Rodney King - this set a benchmark for police brutality, sparking riots in LA.  (If James Ellroy's novels are even fractionally accurate, the tradition goes way, way back, to well before World War Two).  Not that I'm saying that this is an exclusively American phenomena - it sometimes seems as if our own Metropolitan Police in London are murdering people on a daily basis.  And getting away with it.  Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is that we only know about these cases because somebody happened to film them - it makes you wonder how many times this level of police brutality occurs when there are no witnesses present.

But to cut to the chase, the fact that the most recent of these shootings has taken place in South Carolina set me to thinking - could this inspire a new plot line in the 'reality' TV schlock-fest that is Lizard Lick Towing?  I mean, the series takes place in North Carolina and you can't tell me that it isn't going to be much different there than it is in South Carolina: full of rural racism and bigoted corrupt local cops, (of the type often found in Burt Reynolds' films of the seventies).  After all, it's high time that those Good 'Ol Boys from Lizard Lick varied their act a bit - there are only so many hill billies and redneck dirt farmers they can tangle with when they repo their vans and tractors.  So, what if they were trying to repo some van and followed it out to the middle of nowhere one night, only to find, whilst observing from a safe distance, that they've stumbled on a Ku Klux Klan meeting and that there are two kidnapped black guts in the back of the van about to be lynched?  Or maybe, as well as being in the Klan, these guys are also Satanists and are going to sacrifice the black dudes from the van to their great white supremacist devil master?  That would make them even more evil.  Anyway, the chief Klan/Satanist guy's hood could slip and our heroes recognise him as the local Sheriff! Then they realise that the other Klan guys are all the local Sheriff's deputies!  Then they get spotted and have to run for their lives (stopping only to hook that van up to their tow truck - they won't get paid if they don't complete the repo, after all).  The next few episodes could show them being chased relentlessly across the state by a horde of corrupt, Satan-worshipping racist cops, trying desperately to hide out for long enough to find someone in Federal law enforcement who believes them.  Heck schlock and social commentary - this could be the future of 'reality' TV.