“teacher, starve your child / p.c. approved, as long as the right words are used.”
manic street preachers, “p.c.p.”

no one is innocent in the altercation. before reaching the core of this movie’s premise, the death of vincent chin, we’re forced to confront the circumstances leading up to it. by all accounts, he had an active role in what ultimately happened that night.

at first.

two days from his wedding, throwing himself a bachelor party with a few buddies, it’s easy to picture chin’s impulse to add a few invigorating bruises to the night. souvenirs to accompany his hangover and face full of stripper glitter to greet him in the mirror on a shameful and proud walk from the floor to the shower tomorrow morning. a few lasting mementos of what he’d leave behind, ostensibly for the rest of his life.

if only he hadn’t picked a fight with a couple of psychotic crackers in an industrial piss town that is, of all things, proud to make american cars. imagine. worse yet, he had to go and win that fight. against both of them. by himself. then the bastard went and made the fatal mistake of superficially resembling one of those crazy japanese that don’t sleep, eats nothing but rice and human flesh, and is building cars the size of matchbooks you can buy in packs of twelve. of course it was reagan, not competition that killed what made living in america decent by western standards, but i digress.

it’s hard to piece together the scene from the stories, but especially who witnessed what and when. a black cop said he thought that the white guy, parading around in a parking lot at night in a predominately black neighborhood with a louisville slugger, was coming back from a game. another black cop pondered the beating aloud, detailing the level of force and style used by ebens to bring the ash wood club down onto vincent chin’s head to split it open.

the fight had started at the improbably named “fancy pants” strip club over the looks and/or abilities of a stripper called “starlene.” ebens couldn’t abide a comment made by chin about starlene (chin starting shit, like i said), calling chin a “little motherfucker.” words were then traded between the two men, and ebens, finally showing his hand — his sympathy for his unemployed dumb fuck son-in-law’s plight — said something like, “it’s because of you little fuckers that we’re out of work!” starlene was black, so it could be argued that having her as a favorite dancer doesn’t make ebens a racist asshole in any traditional/mainstream/caricature sense, though many racists simply insist that people know their place; so it could be speculated that straddling a filthy metal column in a dank purgatory like fancy pants is an acceptable place for a girl like starlene, in a way that being seen with him in public would not be. he pretended not to know her name when interviewed next to his wife, though that could just be his mundane domestic duplicity rather than any complicated racial dynamics.

the facts that not even the murderers dispute are such:

the fight continued to simmer into the parking lot of fancy pants. ebens went after chin with a bat, but chin bailed when he saw this wasn’t the fist fight he’d seemingly wanted. ebens and nitz somehow get their american car started and sputtered after chin, searching for half an hour (i’ve read they paid a guy $20 to help look). when they spot him in the parking lot of a mcdonald’s, nitz wrestles him into a hold, and ebens wails on the unarmed man with a baseball bat until he’s unconscious. according to the paramedics, chin’s brains are seen on the asphalt. he was dead four days later.

whites may have been a small minority in that neighborhood, as the policeman said, but the grim resignation of local non-whites to ronald ebens’s actions echoed the dead, resigned weight of the staggering ratios of blacks to whites in the mid-nineteenth-century south. a dim-witted managerial prick like ebens would have done well there. no one wanted to call ebens what he was: a filthy murderer. and his loser son-in-law the willing accomplice.

starlene could only go on and on about how ebens was a fan of hers, like anybody could give a shit. a procession of local hicks all testified that ebens and nitz were not racist, ebens had even known chinks in the past that he didn’t beat to death with a stick. they emphasized this, as though this was the fulcrum on which the question teetered, and not whether a deliberate effort was made to locate and bludgeon an unarmed and restrained chin. as far as the beating itself was concerned, everyone just wanted to pretend it was a natural progression for a bar fight, or that he’d only meant to beat him nearly to death, not all the way. as if changing the subject to tolerance or philosophizing about saloon culture could somehow make it go away for the highly inconvenienced ebens and all those other assholes.

“These weren’t the kind of men you send to jail… You don’t make the punishment fit the crime; you make the punishment fit the criminal.
“Judge Charles Kaufman [via Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams]

the handling of the case was a joke: evidence not introduced, credible eyewitness testimonies skipped. the imbecile judge kaufman had taken the calvinist route, and anointed the two elect with the handle of his gavel. they got probation and a fine: a suitable punishment for burning leaves or pissing on the alamo, but not so much a deadly beating.

if the roles were reversed, chin would have been crucified. you know that.

the circus of minority advocacy groups that finally converged on the case got it to the federal court, further inconveniencing the already heavily inconvenienced ebens, forcing him deeper into hysterical paroxysms of self pity. but again, the two assholes walked away free, and we learned the value of a chinaman’s life in early-eighties detroit.

the black reporter being interviewed said it all. a sardonic smile twinkled, then slowly faded into solemn recognition. he said when he first looked at the jury, he knew what the outcome would be.

Last Modified : May 10th, 2009 Filed under : LAAPFF 2009 (25th Anniversary), Movies, Uncategorized Navigate : Previous post / Next post