The Fat Tuesday Mardi Gras violence was, in a word, sickening. Far more than, say, the Santee shootings (can't trust those white boys!), or the Bush Presidency, The fact that feral gangs of young people exist isn't all that exceptional, but Seattle's Fat Tuesday evoked the worst of modern America for at least a couple of additional, chilling reasons.

First, we can put Kris Kime down as the first death directly attributable to the Paul Schell Re-Election Campaign.

(Granted, there are a few intermediary steps involved. And it may not be the first; after Paul's announcement, somebody jumping off a bridge may have left behind a note we don't know about.)

Public officials, through action or inaction, contribute to the deaths of citizens all the time. But rarely is the chain of causation so clear and so avoidable. The most regrettable aspect of the next day's earthquake is that it came only hours before the start of an uproar that would have guaranteed the removal of this breathtakingly incompetent and venal man from elected office once and for all.

Let's review. 1) Young thugs roam the streets, preying on the weak and drunk. They attack a young woman. Why? Because they could. 2) Kris Kime comes to her aid. Why? Because unlike most of the Mardi Gras revelers, he was honorable enough not to stand by and watch someone getting the life thrashed out of her. 3) The thugs turn on Kime. Why? See 1). 4) Riot cops are present in great numbers, and, unlike Kime, are fully equipped with riot gear and a full arsenal of weaponry--not to mention professional training in intervention and a professional obligation to act. They stand nearby and watch. Why? They are under standing orders to stay put. 5) Why? Because the police department and the mayor were strongly (and rightly) criticized for acting too soon when there were few problems the previous weekend. This wouldn't matter--to the point where they stick to it even as a citizen is obviously and publicly being murdered--unless the order had come from very high up. Like from a man who was trying hard to please the public and remain in office, and who could sleep comfortably while hell was paid.

Schell shrugs it off as a police matter--the "not my department" routine. In Seattle-Tacoma-Everett, 3.2 million people know this is bullshit, just as it was when, during WTO, Paul used the same line to disavow police abuses so flagrant and well-documented as to horrify the world. After the events of the weekend, if Schell didn't at least review the plan, that's incompetence, too.

If he didn't, Kerlikowske did, with an eye toward pleasing Schell. But watching silently while the public commits violent crimes is not in Kerlikowske's mold; he's a cop. Schell is not. Standing down no matter what is a civilian's order, and the new police chief was following orders. This has Schell's bloody fingerprints all over it.

After what happened to Norm Stamper, Kerlikowske must be wondering how he, too, got sucked into taking one for the mayor--right down to explaining that the situation was "too dangerous." That's what we pay police for, and they take pride in it. If it's too dangerous an action for riot cops to save an obviously threatened life, it's too dangerous for anyone to be there, and the crowd must be dispersed.

Apologists cite the difficulty of pleasing everyone. You go in too early, people criticize you. You go in too late, people criticize you.

Here's an easy guide: If nothing's happening, don't assault crowds with riot cops, tear gas, pepper spray, and sting bombs. If someone's dying, act. It's really not rocket science.

It wasn't Schell's fault, obviously, that those violent kids wanted to act out on a mass scale. But it was his fault that they got the chance. Schell has now proven, once again, that his judgment is far, far worse than poor; wittingly or not, Schell is an extremely dangerous man in a crisis. We were lucky Paul Schell didn't kill anybody during WTO. This time, our luck ran out.

And the remarkable thing is, almost nobody (present company excepted) is calling him on it. Usually, media and pundits are reluctant to point out the occasions when government acts, and it hurts someone. This time, government didn't act, and the result: one dead, 71 injured, an unknown number of women raped.

Which brings us to the second disturbing aspect of Fat Tuesday. It wasn't just the police that stood and watched. There were thousands of people milling the streets in the midst of these crimes. When the attacks occurred, they almost always stood and watched. One person couldn't do much (and, as Kime's case showed, it was extremely dangerous), but a lot of people could.

At the very least, you'd expect that they'd go running for the cops. Nope. What does this say about Americans' willingness--even while drunk--to sanguinely watch while horrors are committed in front on us?

A sickening, sickening spectacle.

Our local media also didn't exactly distinguish itself. Let's set aside the dropping (for a time) of Fat Tuesday for breathless earthquake coverage, when Mardi Gras was a much bigger story in terms of what we need to do in the future to address it. That was predictable. But there were other disturbing aspects of the media coverage.

There were at least four full television crews--and who knows how many others--reporting up close from scenes where people were being brutally attacked. I'm sure that if any of them actually tried to intervene in the crimes being perpetrated, we would have heard about it.

And then there was the coverage itself. In the first day, every single image of violence that was broadcast was black-on-white attacks. Witnesses conflict as to whether this was the only combination of violence happening, and whether it was racially motivated--but our chickenshit local media didn't even acknowledge that this might be an issue until three days later, when African-American leaders met with Schell and Kerlikowske. And if those images weren't representative, a whole different, ominous set of questions comes up.

Even more invisible, in terms of media commentary after the fact, was the violence against women. It was well-established that women were attacked, and at least some eyewitnesses were claiming to have witnessed rapes, but that didn't make it into the news until SPD acknowledged it ten days later.

All in all, it's hard to perceive of anyone who came out of this ugly mess looking good. Probably the only thing it helped was the mayoral ambitions of Mark Sidran. As Bruce Anderson, the sagacious editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, is fond of saying, these are, indeed, the Last Days.