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Police State

Police State

I was born in 1971, too late to have witnessed the convulsive events that characterized the end of the 1960s. I know of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago from reading about it and seeing old news footage. The massacre at Kent State I knew chiefly through the song Neil Young wrote about it. I always wondered what it must have been like to live through that, to see our country turning on itself like a snake swallowing its own tail, and ask, “What’s happening to us?”.

I’ve been following the story of Ferguson, Missouri, and the riots and unrest that have followed in the wake of the death of Michael Brown. And I think, maybe, I get it now.

The pictures that have emerged from Ferguson are the most shameful images I have seen of American life since our first glimpses of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina drowned it. If you can look at images of a garishly militarized police force training assault weapons on unarmed American civilians, and not feel some mixture of horror, outrage and despair, I really don’t know what to make of you. This is exactly the kind of thing that, we used to tell ourselves — accurately, for the most part — only happened in other countries.

It’s true that there has been rioting in Ferguson, and at least a possibility that police officers were threatened by people in the crowd. And none of that — neither threats nor rioting nor anything else — justifies the grotesque display of paramilitary zeal that ensued. A police force that properly remembered its mission to serve its community would have gone into this situation with the goal of defusing it, of letting tensions bleed off and subside. The Ferguson police seem to have made the opposite decision: to meet force with force.

Here is what Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker:

What transpired in the streets appeared to be a kind of municipal version of shock and awe; the first wave of flash grenades and tear gas had played as a prelude to the appearance of an unusually large armored vehicle, carrying a military-style rifle mounted on a tripod. The message of all of this was something beyond the mere maintenance of law and order: it’s difficult to imagine how armored officers with what looked like a mobile military sniper’s nest could quell the anxieties of a community outraged by allegations regarding the excessive use of force. It revealed itself as a raw matter of public intimidation.

It’s important to bear in mind that there is another, equally important objection to the conduct of the Ferguson police. Beyond being grossly excessive, it was incompetent. They could hardly have made the situation worse if they tried. It’s staggering to think that no one in a position of authority in that town thought to wonder, given a populace severely on edge from what they considered an unjust use of police force, whether suiting up the police in riot gear and sending them into the streets in military-surplus armored vehicles with roof-mounted machine guns might be, you know, misconstrued. As Matthew Yglesias wrote, “you do crowd control with horses, batons, and shields, not rifles. You point guns at dangerous, violent criminals, not people out for a march.” The law-abiding people of Ferguson were done a terrible disservice by the people sworn to protect and serve them. And you needn’t take my word for it, as a cursory glance at the Storify page Veterans on Ferguson reveals. A few of the more on-point comments:

In the USAF, we did crowd control and riot training every year. Lesson 1: Your mere presence has the potential to escalate the situation.

 

Also, we contained riots in Baghdad next to mosques with less violence than the police are employing.

 

A lot of vets, me included, would go to Ferguson and gladly teach some classes on crowd control and patrolling[.] You are fucking it up.

I do not write this from any kind of anti-police animus. I’ve relied on help from the police several times in my life and was grateful each time; civil society could not function without them. By the same token, I do not recognize the generous, selfless police officers I’ve encountered in these images from Ferguson, and I’m confident that were I a police officer myself, I’d be every bit as appalled by what has occurred.

As of this writing, it appears cooler heads are starting to prevail. The Missouri State Police have taken charge of the situation, and its captain has taken the radical step of opening a dialogue with Ferguson citizens to begin to undo the damage of the last four days. I am relieved. Maybe Ferguson will escape its name being inscribed alongside Kent State and Chicago on the list of the grossest abuses of state power in America. And maybe, as the dust settles and we begin to take stock of what’s happened, we can have a long-overdue conversation on the wisdom of arming local police forces like platoons of Marines. And, of course, there is the matter of Michael Brown: how he died, why he died, and what could have been done to prevent it.

So many conversations to have. Just so long as we do have them, that all this might not be for naught.

We Allowed This to Happen

We Allowed This to Happen

That is all I could think as this horrible story unfolded. Sure, some of us speak up every time a new outbreak of violence occurs while others of us make excuses. But we all settle down afterwards and, in effect, shrug our shoulders. Yeah, there’s some nutcases out there. What are ya gonna do? We’re horrified, and then we get over it, and then it happens again, each incident somehow more senseless — and in an appalling way, less surprising — than the last.

We have decided, as a culture, that these endless massacres are an acceptable price for what we choose to interpret as “freedom.” We’ve decided this because a substantial number of us feel that without free access to weapons, our liberty is not guaranteed — and that any effort to restrict gun ownership is, ipso facto, a direct prelude to enslavement.

We as a culture have to un-decide that.

There are legal remedies that would help prevent these incidents, were they properly enforced. But laws can only go as far as the culture will allow. There is a faction in this country — and yes, I am shifting from first person to third at this point — who have long ago made some kind of accommodation in their hearts to the mass murder of their fellow citizens. I have no problem with hunters who want to be able to take out the occasional deer or pheasant; it’s not my thing, but I don’t begrudge it. I have a huge problem with Second Amendment absolutists who talk tough but who are consumed with fear: of their neighbors, of other races and religions, of their personal existential powerlessness, and most of all, of their government.

It’s dark moments like this that lead me to think the American experiment has failed, and that there really are two distinct and incompatible cultures striving for dominance in this country. One is pledged to the values of the European Enlightenment, embracing one of mankind’s finest inventions — secular representative government — as a means of expanding the potential for success, happiness and progress for all people. The other is permanently stuck back on the frontier, believing that man is essentially ungovernable and that the only liberties you have are the ones you can defend with your own hands.

“We have met the enemy,” satirist Walt Kelly once said, “and he is us.” How is it that the thought of the government taking away your assault rifle is more frightening than the thought of another group of kids being senselessly cut down? How do we stop choosing to let things like Newtown happen?

How pretty is *your* iTunes library?

I am more-than-averagely obsessive about my iTunes library. And yet, this is what most of it looks like. Ever see those pictures of ancient relics being restored in museums, when they’ll have exactly six pieces of some ancient textile and try to somehow fill in the gaps? It’s kinda like that.

Assuming I am more diligent about matching graphics with my albums than most people — and assuming most people acquire their music the way I did, rather than buying it exclusively through iTunes or Amazon — then it stands to reason that most iTunes libraries in the world look like this, or worse.

Kinda depressing, somehow.

24 Cigarettes and One Pipe: Hammett and Chandler

When I was a writing student in college, I came across a how-to manual called The Essence of Fiction, by Malcolm McConnell. It was not like most other writing books I had read before or have read since. My professor, to whom I showed it, was mildly appalled at its strict focus on the mechanics of story construction, and indeed, The Essence of Fiction has no clever exercises a la John Gardener’s The Art of Fiction, nor does it inspire you to live a life devoted to creativity a la Natalie Goldberg’s excellent Wild Mind. Essence is plain and direct and even, to my old teacher’s point, rather crude, but one of its precepts has stuck with me over the years: the rule against “cigarette action.”

Cigarette action is McConnell’s term for the meaningless physical business a writer will assign a character in order to pace a scene. When writing a dialogue scene, you can’t simply follow one speech with another and then another: it gets fatiguing to read, and the scene gradually loses its sense of place, its physicality. (Not that that stopped Elmore Leonard.) So writers solve this by having their characters do … something. Get up and look out the window. Check themselves out in the mirror. Change positions on the couch. And, of course, light cigarettes. Continue reading →

Thanksgiving at Home

Thanksgiving at Home

Midway through a generous helping of turkey breast, gluten-free stuffing, salad and roasted potatoes, a peculiar realization struck:

This year was the first time I ever ate a full Thanksgiving dinner in my own home. I never realized how subtly unrelaxed I have been at every previous Thanksgiving celebration until I experienced the ease of having one in my living-slash-dining room. There is a certain satisfaction in celebrating an occasion like this in your own space, with your own things — and of course, with the people you love. I noticed, too, that it made me determined to eat all the more; after all, I had paid for all this stuff.

In the spirit of the season, an incomplete list of things for which I am thankful:

  • My health, such as it is
  • My wife
  • My family
  • My wife’s and family’s health
  • The reelection of President Obama
  • Our cat
  • My brain
  • The music of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and about a hundred other people and bands; I shan’t bore you
  • Agave

There is more, but those are the highlights. (The couch, for instance, is nice and comfortable.)