" as the jury from Simi Valley informed the world that the police in the Rodney King episode weren’t guilty of so much as hiding evidence, much less using “undue force.” The ten verdicts fell like empty zeros into the air, and I felt like a person who’d mistaken a mirage for an oasis, as if each of the counts had been cruelly transformed into “Greetings from the Land That Time Forgot!” “Oh,” Renzo said, “oh, oh, oh! Were those people blind or what? I’m stunned. What is undue force, then? "

― Eve Babitz , Black Swans