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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?

Pick Your Poison

From screenwriter John Rogers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Think for a moment what a different world we would be living in if just a single man — Alan Greenspan — had fallen for Tolkien instead of Rand. It’s staggering to contemplate. Hell, even if it had been L. Ron Hubbard instead of Rand, I’m thinking it would be a net win for humanity.

Hat-tip to the Daily Dish.

Torture

Having finally gotten around to reading Sam Harris‘ The End of Faith, I was surprised to discover a lengthy digression on torture as relates to the prosecution of what we still called, in those benighted days, the War on Terror.

It would be inaccurate, I think, to say that Harris stood in favor of torture as such. However, he did argue powerfully that our revulsion to torture is essentially hypocritical, extending as it does from a sort of moral blind spot. Harris’ argument is too lengthy to quote directly, so I will summarize it as fairly as I can.

  1. We are resigned to what we call in warfare “collateral damage,” meaning the unintended destruction of non-military targets and the injury and death of civilians.
  2. The toll in pain and death exacted by collateral damage is as gruesome as that of any other wartime horror: men, women and children are blinded, crippled, mutilated or killed, or suffer thirst, starvation and sickness in the wake of attacks that destroy local infrastructure and services.
  3. The pain and suffering of the collaterally damaged is, in fact, qualitatively of little to no difference to that suffered under torture.
  4. The preceding premises being true, one cannot morally object to one but not the other; anyone willing to accept collateral damage in wartime has no basis from which to declaim torture as immoral.

Harris made this argument to illustrate the limitations and biases inherent in our moral reasoning, particularly the human tendency to respond to individual suffering while remaining relatively unmoved by the suffering of a great many people. There is a component of torture — perhaps the way in which it is reducible in our imaginations to a dichotomy of victim and tormentor, the latter holding the former utterly in his power — that seems immediate and visceral. Yet Harris, while admitting even he found his own conclusions unsettling, was not simply arguing as the devil’s advocate. Those who have read The End of Faith will know that Harris has a very large axe to grind against Islamic fundamentalism; unlike most thinkers of essentially leftist bent, Harris has no compunction about denouncing Islam as a religion of ignorance, hatred and cruelty, nor does he balk at describing its war on the West in essentially neoconservative terms: that is, as a clash of civilizations, a zero-sum game in which compromise or rapprochement is out of the question.

As a person repulsed by the torture that has been carried out by my government ostensibly on my behalf, I was brought up short by Harris’ arguments. Had I been too quick to give in to my instinctive reaction of horror and outrage? How can one argue with any conviction that slamming a man’s head repeatedly into a wall is worse than, say, burning a little girl with napalm while denuding the forests surrounding her village? Is one of these things really worse than the other? Continue reading →

Coming out of the cannabis closet … all at once

Andrew Sullivan has been running a regular feature on his blog called “the cannabis closet,” in which ordinary, productive, otherwise law-abiding citizens advocate for the decriminalization of marijuana by admitting to their own use of it, thus demonstrating the possibility of using marijuana responsibly and harmlessly.

It’s a clever idea. As Sullivan and others have argued, the cultural stereotype of the marijuana user is the bearded or beaded Deadhead, a guy (or gal) who, one strongly suspects, actually hangs those centerfolds from High Times up in the garage or the basement. The first step toward sensible reform of the marijuana laws is to shatter the stereotype of the addled pot-smoking hippie, disingenuously arguing for the benefits of hemp clothing when everyone knows he really wants to be able to blaze up at the Phish concert without getting hooked by the law. I already knew pot was far more mainstream than that, but even I have been somewhat taken aback by the breadth of the testimonials Sullivan has collected so far. There are an awful lot of folks out there who demonstrate you can keep your shit together and smoke it, too.

Anyway, having been clean for many years now, I don’t have the opportunity to weigh in with my own testimony. But it got me thinking about a marvelous mass protest that would force the issue of marijuana reform on the national radar in a big way. Let me admit up front there is no way in hell this would ever happen. But as a thought experiment, it’s a honey.

According to statistics, about 12.5% of people in the U.S. smoked pot at least once in the last year. That’s roughly 38 million Americans, between the ages of 15 and 64. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the majority of those — say 35 million, roughly equal to the entire population of California — are at least semi-regular users.

Now let’s say that all of those folks picked a day. Could be April 20, could be any old day. And let’s say that, on that day, 35 million marijuana users all turned themselves into the police.

Imagine husbands and wives, grandmas and grandpas, sons and daughters; school teachers, financial advisors, lawyers and librarians; soldiers, firefighters, grocery clerks, real estate agents — hell, maybe even the occasional policeman — all rolling up to their local police station to give themselves up.

I can’t find any statistics on how many people are currently embroiled in the criminal justice system right now. From DUIs and trespassing citations up to robberies and murders, there are undoubtedly a lot of people working their way through the state and federal courts. Now imagine tossing in a few dozen million more, all copping to the same benign offense. The justice system would grind to a halt. Camera crews would record footage of lines leading out of police stations and snaking around the block. Police would be reduced to taking names and numbers and sending people home, the cases subsequently going unpursued due to “shortages of resources and manpower.” And the people watching at home would, I think, be astonished to see how many of their fellow ordinary citizens pursue this pastime, who are considered criminals under our country’s current laws.

That, I think, would change the conversation in a big hurry.

Another day, another split decision.

So I see Obama has a majority of pledged delegates. And at the same time, Hillary wins another one, this time in Kentucky.

I am desperate for this crap to be over. I was about to donate to the Obama campaign again — but I realize what I’d really prefer to do is anti-donate to the Hillary campaign. Actually sap money out of her coffers. We can encourage people to run by lending support; why not be able to discourage running by actually sapping support? Now THAT would be democracy.

OK, I realize it’s actually a stupid idea. But really, I am desperate for this crap to be over.