A reader whose opinion I respect a lot sent me the link to this podcast and wanted my impressions. I groaned, as I have limited patience for Joe Rogan’s experiment with reducing the English language to derivations of the admittedly English word ‘Fuck.’ But a request is a request, so I girded my sensibilities and listened.
The guest was Mister Wood, a former Baltimore City Pig from the Eastern District. He suffered a shoulder injury which put him out of the force at around age 30. He is apparently a minor tweet media sensation among liberals, who he agrees with about the evil of white men and the sainted martyr status of black men and youth. He preaches the leftist party line with no nuance.
Before discussing his general points let me say that I have put off doing this review for four days because the podcast made me too angry to write more than fantasies about ripping off Mister Wood’s arm and making a popsicle out of him, about gouging out his eyes, biting off his nose, jumping up and down on his head in my work boots...
There, I am glad not to be angry anymore, so that I can do a fair job on the review of this podcast, which I do reluctantly encourage you to listen to. For Mister Rogan’s part, although he does seem to have bought the leftist contention that all violent black criminals are essentially Jesus Christ on the cross, he does a good interview and makes some reality check comments, like when Mister Wood admits to locking up whites just to make himself feel better about all of the blacks he locked up. Joe mentions that he sure wouldn’t want to be one of those white guys, and Mister Wood claims that they were all good arrests, only minutes before launching into a sermon on how most arrests are just excuses to get black guys behind bars.
As a white man who has spent over three decades of my life being harassed by cops for being a working class white pedestrian and being hunted in the streets, threatened, and attacked by blacks who have developed a virulent hatred of whites precisely because asshole cops like Piggy Wood jack them up for no good reason, I hold him in contempt.
Racial Tension Interlude
I have had numerous conversations with black guys in which we both came into it with an impression that we are the targets of racial aggression and the other one was not. The black dude always had that baseline black-on-black violence to deal with, which does breed a lot of animosity towards their own racial group. This is uniquely stressful and emotionally destabilizing to live with; being a target of your own ethnic group.
I go into these conversations confident that not one of these black men would be justified in feeling any animosity toward me, for I knew that none of them had ever been attacked by whites. That’s just a safe bet. In Baltimore, you have 60% poor and working black, 30% poor and working white, with the other 10% a mixture of white and black elites, Asians and Latinos.
Upon talking to black men my age and older we find out that we have suffered the same frequency of inter racial aggression, only all of their experiences were at the hands of cops. I always object that these cops represent the system, The Evil State, not white people. I get through to the smart ones. The stupid ones will only soften their stance against me when they find out that I too am harassed by cops. Then their solution to placing me in their ethos is to adopt me as an honorary black man! Likewise, the black cops that harass and attack them are considered race traitors and Uncle Toms, and denied a place in their dim, though passionate, collective consciousness.
Jerry’s Plight
Jerry was a tall skinny native of Greek Town who sported an afro-like mop of hair that made him look like Don Brewer, drummer of Grand Funk Railroad. We worked together at two different stores over the course of 10 years from 1992. Jerry was no tough guy. He spent his nights at work afraid he was going to be fired and then spent his commute terrified of the black men and youth who threatened and robbed him regularly.
I first met Jerry on the back of the #23, before we knew we would be working together. He was seated on the back of the bus. There were three black dude back there, two listening to rap, the other glaring at Jerry from the back bench seat. I checked my hip to make sure my 10 inch Othello gravity blade was not tangled in the flannel shirt I wore around my hips to conceal it. I took a seat across from the intimidator and checked to make sure I could deploy the utility knife from behind my belt buckle, from which I had removed the safety guard. I then glared at the enemy until he curled up in a semi-fetal position and went somewhere in his mind.
I got off the bus with Jerry behind me, who introduced himself and thanked me. I snarled something incoherently anti-social, as, at the time, I was a pretty far gone whack job. The three savages were headed out to the Village of Tall Trees where Columbine Joe lived at the time.
From that slight on Jerry never liked me, at all. He was a good guy, a good clerk, and made night captain some years later. Just before he made night captain at the Fort Avenue store I was transferred there. On my first night I walked by him and JoJo sitting on the smoking bench at the store front and heard her say to him, “Awes, that homeless guy walked all the way from the Inner Harbor. I saw him on Light Street. I should have given him a lift.”
Jerry grumbled, “He ain’t homeless—that’s fuckin’ Tarzan of the Apes.”
To give you an idea how much Jerry liked me, he used to pay one of the clerks to drive him into work so he would not get mugged or attacked by blacks. One January night, when the temperature was below zero and the wind chill was around 40 below, I was halfway to the store, walking numb-faced against the wind out Light Street, when he and the clerk pulled up next to me. They both looked me in the eye, and did not even wait to see if I was going to ask for a lift [which I would never do] and shook their heads ‘no’ and then pulled off, grinning.
A year later, I think in 1998, when that dude’s car was broken down, and Saturday morning rolled around, Jerry said, “Hey, Tarzan I’m afraid to take the bus with the ոiggers and I don’t have enough money to get a cab all the way from here and pay the toll and still get my fifth. If you get me up town without a spear through my chest you can hop in the cab with me.”
I said, “Okay, I’ll visit Pops and Nasty Nick at the Highland Café,” which was 7 blocks from his house. Jerry stayed inside all day and drank, only occasionally going out drinking with friends. He lived in an East Baltimore patrolled by goon cops who loved locking up white boys, and by the Patterson Park Boyz, who hunted white boys with guns and knives. This is the core of the area Mister Wood, Pig Officer of Baltimore, patrolled. Of course the few black men and youth out and around avoided me like the plague, as I stalked back and forth like a caged tiger with my hand on the butt of my utility knife at the stop and cab stand, and glared at them on the bus.
Jerry always wore threadbare jeans for work, in which you could see the imprint of his case cutter in the back pocket. He was an excellent clerk and I hope he has made store manager by now. Unlike most he had a future in the business. The cab let him out at O’Connors Bar on Eastern and Ponca and took me up to Highland and Lombard to the Highland Café.
As he walked into the bar to buy his fifth of temporary sanity a big white cop smacked him up against the wall, took out his case cutter, cuffed his skinny ass, and then dragged him to his cruiser.
Jerry got roughed up by the cop, spent Saturday and Sunday night in lockup, where he was threatened but not attacked by blacks, and lost 2.5 days worth of pay before the court commissioner threw his 'concealed weapon' case out. He also earned an occurrence. That supermarket chain allowed 4 occurrences per year before beginning the termination process. An occurrence is any unscheduled absence, any. If you die and it's unscheduled, they will write you up!
Jerry said to me, “A white boy can’t win. If the ոiggers don’t get you the pigs will.”
When Pigs Squeal
The information that Mister Wood gives of police procedures—legal and illegal—and drug war policies, is all accurate and well know to everyone that lives in Baltimore, but seems like a sick fantasy to suburban residents.
Like many Baltimore City Pigs he was not a resident, but a middle class white boy from the county. I know white guys like him who got on the force specifically to “get paid for beating the shit out of ոiggers.”
He is not of that type, or the pension hunter either, because he could have found a way to stay with the force. He joined the marines to prepare for being a city cop. He was an adventurer, one who now repents his playing Elliot Ness at the expense of poor blacks, but not at the expense of the poor whites he locked up to sooth his blooming guilt. I can forgive all of his delusion guilt-shrouded liberal beliefs. I can forgive his counting me for nothing and counting the drug dealer on the corner for something. He is just buying the white guilt template.
What I cannot forgive M. A. Piece-of-shit Pig Wood for is misrepresenting Baltimore. Not far into the interview Joe Rogan asks him to describe how Baltimore is different from places like L.A. He starts out doing well, describing it as an incorporated municipality made up of a patchwork of neighborhoods, about half of them poor and black. Then, instead of saying the truth, that almost half of the city neighborhoods are mixed race working and poor areas, or working class white neighborhoods, barely hanging on under the three-pronged attack of military style drug war policing, black on white crime, and urban gentrification, he describes Baltimore as a patchwork of poor black areas and wealthy white areas, only mentioning poor whites as an unfortunate afterthought! This pig really showed his suburban roots as well as the endemic hatred of cops for poor whites.
Last year we had a group of hoodlums literally sitting on an ATM machine on the main road and following pedestrians back into the neighborhood and mugging them. Dozens of times I have seen pigs ride by these punks sitting five feet from an ATM like lions at a watering hole waiting for the gazelles. On two occasions, one while I was accompanied by Mescaline Franklin, who said, “Bro, look at this heinous shit!” cops drove right by these thugs and arrested a middle aged white man walking on foot for a personal quantity of crack he had just purchased from the open air drug market staffed by more black hoodlums across the street. Of course the black drug dealers now work for people who have lawyers. This poor guy, has only got his grass cutting and snow removal job, and languished for a week in Central Booking before he showed up back at the room he rents across the street from me. I don't like that dirt bag, but he's only a threat to himself. He works jobs to pay for his crack just like Jerry worked to pay for his booze.
Thank you M.A. Pig Wood, and thank your Pig buddies for locking up poor white people who just want to be left alone, and beating the shit out of poor black people so that they will attack us working whites to get even, while you recline on your suburban patio.
If Mister Wood returns to Baltimore, he should not seek me out, unless he has his goon squad of Pig buddies with him.
This podcast is worth listening to and the information on the drug war and ridiculous policing policies is correct.
Check it out.
Joe Rogan with M. A. Wood (
I can respect the cops who sign on to live The Life and fight a war without having to deploy for 9-12 months and deal with idiot sergeant majors and lieutenant colonels. The war they're fighting is stupid and destructive, but that's what's on offer in the US. If you want to be a warrior, you're gonna need a war.
I can respect the ones who decide that the war is stupid and destructive, and being a warrior is not worth serving stupid and destructive causes.
I can even respect the ones who speak out about it, like this DEA guy (thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/12/the-stacks-a-dea-agent-at-war-with-the-war-on-drugs.html). It's a waste of time from the policy change perspective, because from the perspective of the apparatus, the stupidity, destructiveness and unwinnable nature of the war is a feature, not a bug, guaranteeing future cachet and budgets. But if you can make some cash writing a more or less honest book about your salad days putting the boots to scumbags or schwacking terrorists, why not?
But when you go "boo-hoo-hoo, we were brutal, I once stepped on a guy's neck and my partner took a shit on his bed"-fucker, come on. Don't be disingenuous-brutal is what you signed up for. If you wanted to be Officer Friendly, there are plenty of one-stoplight towns in the Appalachians with jobs, and the Fire Department is always hiring.
You didn't want to be Officer Friendly-you wanted to be a warrior. What are you complaining about? It's like a guy who joined the mafia and then writes a book about how after they got done breaking some guy's knees for a debt, his asshole mafiosi coworker spat on him.
As for the blacks getting boots put to them, when you show me an African police force (in an African country with popular government) that treats petty criminals with more dignity and respect than the American cops, maybe I'll listen to those complaints.
My former neighbor, Dave the Cop, had my friendship and respect, because he admitted what he was basically a walking punishment—a night stick placement device, if you will.
As a retail food manger, who was essentially an unarmed undersized bouncer for a 10,000 person a day urban location, I appreciated the brutal no bullshit cops the most. One tough Italian cop basically outlined his parameters of action, and told me if I tailored my actions within those parameters that he had my back and was only 10 minutes away—hopefully five. I consulted him as the expert, just as if I was suddenly in a war zone next to a military guy like you I'd ask you to start giving me orders.
The cops who threatened me and my partner were all weasels when it came to dealing with criminals as far as I could tell. I say chuck out all the pussy cops and have the tough cops deputize location-based security and management.