¡Viva Zapata! (Invitation to a Police Clubbing) [14 Oct. 2013]

"It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."

— Emiliano Zapata

"You have it backwards. It's better to live on your feet

 than to die on your knees." — Catch 22

            I'm literally a little old Jewish man: between 5' and 5'2" tall (say 1.55 m), depending on the condition of the collapsing discs in my spine, and 70 years old. Still, I have a strong feeling that if I ever get arrested in the USA, I'm going to get hurt, and a fair number of my fellow Americans would approve of my getting hurt.

            To begin, let me tell you where I'm coming from, and "let me tell you where I'm coming from" is a good indication that part of "where" is 1968, and not just because I was alive in 1968.

            The 1968 is relevant here in several ways.

            First off, as a child of the 1960s, I grew up on movies and television and was more conscious than your average bear, or viewer, of the changes in movies and TV — and as unconscious as most on how deeply I was affected by TV and movies.

            For the unconscious part, or semi-conscious, there is the appalling amount I know, or think I know, that comes from movies and TV. The worst case of this was, I eventually recognized, when I had to think about why I had "decided" — and I'm serious about the quotation marks with "decided" — why I chose a specialized college curriculum to become a biochemist. Hey, I'd seen movies on Madame Curie and Paul Ehrlich and Louis Pasteur, and being a scientist seemed a really neat thing to do. It was also a highly fashionable career choice for boys in the late 1960s, but I'd primarily decided on biochem because of biopics, and I was thinking about that decision because I'd discovered that biochemistry really wasn't a good field for me. Biochem rested on organic chemistry, and one of the issues not handled in the movies was that organic chemistry requires a good sense of spatial perception, which is largely heritable, and which I had not inherited.

            Relevant here, movies and television — including TV news — were and remain the source of most of my knowledge on police procedures, and they may be no more accurate or complete on what cops generally do than old biopics were on the lives of scientists.

            In the novel Inherent Vice (2009), Thomas Pynchon's protagonist, Larry "Doc" Sportello, a pothead private investigator ca. 1970, notes how in the old popular culture, P.I.'s were the heroes, and cops were the plodding bumblers who came in when the crime was solved to take credit for the great work of the P.I.'s. And, indeed, that's what I grew up on, from Sherlock Holmes and other British detective stories through Ellery Queen and 1940s noir to Mike Barnett: "Man Against Crime" and Frank Cannon: rotund detective — well, and so on. There were also defense attorneys of note, which in my memory were all played by Raymond Burr, and, reinforcing other of my ideas, ideal cops like Jack Webb's Detective Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet or the DA on Mr. District Attorney. I didn't particularly watch Mr. District Attorney on television — maybe not at all — but I do remember the radio version, and I am not the only one to have memorized the opening. To quote a comment on the IMDb site, "I loved the way the show began each week in front of that singular Los Angeles County Courthouse. The show's announcer would start off with this anthem: 'Mr. District Attorney...Champion of the People...Defender of Truth...Guardian of our fundamental right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' Then the district attorney would respond: 'And it shall be my duty as district attorney not only to prosecute to the limit of the law all persons accused of crimes perpetrated within this county, but to defend with equal vigor the rights and privileges of all its citizens.'"

            As Doc Sportello notes, the times they were a-changin' by the 1970s, and unto today the trend has been to tell stories from the point of view of cops and prosecutors, and cops and prosecutors very different from straight-arrow, by-the-book Joe Friday and DA's committed to civil rights and civil liberties. The turning point may've been the TV pilot movie, Ellery Queen: Don't Look Behind You in 1971, starring Kennedy ex-brother-in-law Peter Lawford as Ellery Queen and Joe Friday's recent ex-partner Harry Morgan as Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery's father. In my memory — which is what counts here — an important culture turning-point got turned when Lawford's Ellery Queen wants to get information from what I think was a doctor's — psychiatrist's? — office, and Morgan's daddy Queen says that the only way he knows how to get files is with a subpoena. Quick condescending look from Lawford and then a quicker cut to the Queens, father and son, flashlights deployed, going through files in what was clearly illegal entry.

            I recall thinking later that that scene signaled a shift laying the groundwork for the Watergate scandal, with its breaking and entering confidential-file snatching committed by people representing authorities pledged to uphold law, order, and the bill of rights.

            "Bad boys, bad boys / Whatcha gonna do …?" — Well, in some cases join the police force and behave very badly indeed.

            As I've mentioned elsewhere, I was in Chicago summer of 1968, and got to see the riots, most closely the police riot at Michigan Avenue and Balbo during the Democratic National Convention; and I was in Champaign-Urbana Illinois in May of 1970 after the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State and got to encounter Illinois State Police with their name tags removed and riot batons out and ready. I can sympathize with the police in Chicago and Urbana, and even to some extent with the Ohio National Guard at Kent State: they were under a lot of pressure, and, at Kent State, possibly intentionally stressed out, with Governor James Rhodes wishing a confrontation: not a deadly confrontation, the rumor went, but a confrontation. The clubbing of demonstrators in Chicago had the net effect of increasing the popularity of Richard J. Daley, the Chicago mayor at the time. For sure there were people in Illinois in May of 1970 who expressed the wish that the Ohio National Guard had killed many more demonstrators — perhaps all the demonstrators — at Kent State.

            In any event, during the "Troubles" of the Long 1960s (ca. 23 Nov. 1963-8 Aug. 1974), I didn't have much cause to identify with the forces of law and order that would be celebrated in the media in coming years as the thin blue line protecting good Americans from chaos and, as time went on, moving to the offensive in the War on Crime and the War on Drugs and, along with it, performing some mopping up operations in the counter-attack against dissent.

            Which brings me from Chicago and Champaign-Urbana and the dying days of the 1960s to Butler County, Ohio, and more recent times.

            I forget the occasion, but a group of us trouble-makers were at the office of our Representative in Congress from what is now Speaker John Boehner's Ohio 8^th Congressional District. I remained outside the office, but a couple or three of my colleagues stayed inside after closing hours and submitted to arrest for trespassing.

            Significant here — and significant, period — was that one of the two or three arrestees was a colleague of mine in the Miami University English Department, a man in his late 60's who'd grown up in the tradition of one of the Peace Churches: a non-threatening old guy committed to non-violence.
            He was arrested, handcuffed, and shackled, and the local head law-enforcement official — Chief of Police of Hamilton, OH, or, more likely, the Butler County Sheriff — waited for the media to arrive and then brought him outside shackled, and paused for the photo-op. The head cop wanted that picture on the evening news: the local chief representative of Good Order and Obedience pictured holding prisoner a definite troublemaker in a jacket, tie, grey beard, and shackles.

            The image has stuck with me.

            I understand why cops no longer ask the old TV question, "Will you come along quietly, or do I have to cuff you?" The protocols call for the cuffs (etc.) because the bosses of the cops want to avoid lawsuits. The Powers That Be don't want cops hurt, and they don't want prisoners hurt. They don't want to be sued for racial discrimination. So they treat everyone as potentially armed and dangerous and, well, uppity — and in America of recent years, and increasingly, there's a fairly good chance that a lot of people they arrest will be, if not all that dangerous, at least well-armed.

            Moreover the cultural norm nowadays is that it's manly — or at least not cowardly — for cops to cuff even old folks, women, and children, and even to shoot first rather than risk not getting off the first shot (but that's another topic, and one I've repeated). In that War on Crime, there are no real civilians: we're all potential insurgents, and all prisoners might be treated like POW's. Except there are Geneva Convention rules for handling POWs, so let's say we're all potential enemy combatants and should be treated as dangerous and not exactly innocent until proven guilty and sovereign citizens commanding respect.

            Which gets me to why I might get hurt if arrested: probably not shot — I'm White-ish, though not Aryan — but tasered or Maced or clubbed behind the knees or at least roughed up.

            I'm an unreconstructed reform, by God!, Reform Jew, and even on the Day of Atonement I don't bow or prostrate myself to God. I am a firm, small-r republican American, and I would nod my head respectfully to royalty, if I ever got in the presence of royalty, or perhaps execute a slight bow from the waist. When I came out west to do movies, I said my ambition was to whore myself to Hollywood but retained two taboos: I wouldn't do blowjobs or public relations.

            If there were a firefight going on, I'd keep very low indeed, but if bullets weren't flying, I'd have trouble bringing myself to get down on my knees if ordered to by cops or, "Get down! Now! Flat on the ground!" as movies and TV sometimes show arrests. If my courage held — a big "if," but if my courage held — I'd raise my hands, say "I'm unarmed; I surrender!" and if told to kneel or prostrate myself, I'd hope I'd repeat, "I'm unarmed; I surrender to you; I'll come along quietly" and live on my feet, if possible, but stay on them and off my knees, and strongly decline to be chained. If I won't kneel or prostrate myself to God, I should refuse to kneel to the State or to some courage-and-courtesy challenged, bad-boy cop — or even to by-the-book cops following protocol. Although if by-the-book cops were really, really polite and apologized for the protocol and said that they themselves weren't wimps but I could cost them their jobs if they brought me in unrestrained — then I might reconsider (but I'd try to make them feel really bad as they put on the restraints).

            Still, I strongly suspect that if arrested I might get tased or Maced or roughed up, and that few Americans would sympathize. The question, as one man on the street put it in the 1960s is "Who's in charge?", and most Americans, nowadays I think, think disobeying a cop a serious offense and it'd be only right if I got hurt for it.


            Now it might be bad if a decent, patriotic Tea Party person go hurt by the horrible pigs of the US Park Service or DC Police; that would be different. But a stubborn old Jew from the 1960s who quotes Zapata? I think one or more cops could take me down at least to my knees without getting into too much trouble, and might instead be in trouble if they took my word for it that I'd come along peacefully and didn't put on the cuffs. 

"Don't Panic the Herd" (Unnecessarily) [24 July 2014]

             In a way this post supplements my rather insistent request for some apologies from the late 20^th-century "Lefter-than-Thou" Left, this time adding in some issues of pretty much just style.

            Part of what's going on is old resentment on my side. No one on the Left ever threatened to kill me, nor even put a riot baton upside my head, but what I did get from some of my radical colleagues on the was, back when I was visible among the local 1960s peaceniks, quiet contempt for "the short little Lib with glasses" and, later, a kind of active disregard.

            You may now ignore that opening; I included it for, not full disclosure; no one can do that, but to admit some of the personal, and petty, that is always part of the political.

            The more political portion of the political that concerns me here is that some to my Left both did necessary and important work, for which they will usually take credit, but also messed up a bit, about which we hear less.

            One job they did was crucial for me: the loudest and most radical were always useful to those of us dealing with The Powers That Were (and Still Are) trying to negotiate what we hoped would be progress.

            It is always essential in such negotiations that "the Man" in his various incarnations look out the window and see and hear a mob — however small or nonexistent the crowd out there — and think, "If I do not compromise with these relatively moderate Moderates, I will have to deal with THEM outside."

            Indeed, on one occasion there was just too little rabble being roused for even the most paranoid administrator to grow concerned, so on the way to a meeting I had to take off my jacket and tie and go outside and whip up the crowd a bit myself.

            "Always have someone to your Left" if you're on the Left, to the Right if you're a conservative: either way, radicals that make you look eminently reasonable (even if the radical arguments are often more logically consistent than moderate compromises).

            And to a great extent many of us tried hard to look like moderates. 'Cause — in part, as usual — many of us growing up in the gray middle of the 20^th century grew up with the unspoken or spoken rule, "Don't panic the herd."

            Among my friends, the maxim was spoken and should have been expanded: Don't panic the herd unnecessarily, or even (unnecessarily) annoy them.

            We were quietly cocky little bastards, my friends and I, but it's hardly bragging to note that we were smart enough to figure out that our high school's student council was a "toy government" and that class president and similar faux-democratic offices weren't even that.

            And toys are to be played with, and, being wise-asses, we played.

            We saw ourselves as something cooler than kids at play, though; if we were conscious of it at all — and here we were pretty unconscious — we thought of ourselves as cowboys moving along the little dogies, or, just maybe, now and then, a lion sneaking up on the herd at the water hole.

            Anyway, we quietly, offhandedly, and in our spare time, manipulated graduation-class politics and student politics more generally — what there was of student politics at Lake View High School in the late 1950s — and figured if we couldn't be "the popular kids" we'd be the quiet manipulators.

            It was a Chicago high school, Lake View High, so such exercises were good training for adult life if we stayed in the neighborhood; and it was crucial if very basic training for my future political life in downstate Illinois, the academy, and what is now John Boehner's Congressional District. (Hint: However negative the news coverage can be of Mr. Boehner, it's better than we were used to in the Ohio 8^th CD: no phrases in the media like "contributing to the delinquency of a minor" and "counts of bribery and conspiracy.")

            We called our group "Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu," from the initials of our initial motto of "Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk" and because it has a rhythm (at least with an Omega and not an Omicron) appropriate for singing, so we kind of automatically had most of a club song.

            One high point in our brief corporate life — Year Clubs are people, my friends — was when one day junior year I was sitting in the school cafeteria and a kid came up to me and asked me if I was president of Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu, and I replied "I think so." This actually wasn't a wise-ass answer since DCOSM handled transfers of authority in the tradition of the late Roman Empire, but without the violence, and I was pretty sure I had just been impeached. I finally decided I was as close to a president as we had at that moment and asked him what he wanted. He said he was running for some school or class office, and I said, "Well …?" And he asked, "Is that all right?"

            Ah, if only The Godfather had been out, and we had gotten our class rings! It hadn't and I don't think we had, so I just said, "Uh, sure" and tried to look warm and sincere and earnest and wished him luck.
            That was my personal best, but what's relevant here — I will get around to the point, honest — what's relevant here is a group achievement, and its eventual celebration.

            One day, one of my club brothers (one of the guys behind the impeachment) came up to me and asked me for a name everyone in the school would know, or think they knew. I paused and said, "Carlson. Robert Carlson — Robert A., A for Allen, but everyone calls him 'Bob'" and asked why. And my friend said that we were running him for Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council.

            I noted that I'd made up the name, and he said he knew and that that was what he wanted.

            So one of the year-club brothers wrote up a student folder for Bob and filed it appropriately, along with other subsidiary documentation. I didn't follow this part: no "Need to Know," you know, and our, well, forger was very professional about the operation (he went on to become a significant expert in encryption and had a notable run-in with the NSA before that was fashionable). Others worked on the Carlson campaign and wrote a speech for Bob to deliver at the school's election assembly.

            Getting the speech given was something of a challenge, but poor Bob came down with some medical affliction, and we got a hotshot from the current Student Council officers — a guy the speechwriter didn't like — to deliver the speech. The Council officer did an excellent job, and it looked like Bob was a shoo-in.
            And this brought us to a decision point for the, well, conspirators. Some of us wanted to get Bob elected; others noted a problem.

            Lake View did a good job running realistic elections for our toy student government, and we used actual Chicago or Cook County voting machines. Those came cheap, but there was a rental charge; and if it became clear that there'd need to be a new election based on the non-existence of the winner, or even the death or nonexistence of one of the candidates; and either way the machines would have to be rented again or there'd have to be a hand count.

            And costing the school money or making the Student Council election committee count by hand over 2000 ballots: neither was going to be taken as just good clean fun.

            So we killed Bob.

            After all, he'd been too sick to deliver his election speech, and even back before well-publicized school shootings and some poor schmuck's managing to OD on caffeine, high school students did die with sufficient frequency that the story was plausible.

            Fortunately for us, this was before the time of bringing in grief counselors for basically routine deaths; and also fortunately we were able to stop the collection of money for flowers or a contribution to … whatever-Bob-had-died-of fund — and we "pulled the string" as they used to say and whispered it around that good old Bob whom everyone knew had a terminal existential issue.

            There was an investigation, spearheaded by the current Sgt. at Arms of the Student Council, the guy who initially came up with the Carlson-for-Office idea. And we went to ground and kept our mouths shut.
            And the herd was quiet, and we sort of celebrated getting away with the prank by buying ΔΧΩΣΜ club shirts (knitted short-sleeves in blue with black letters: ugly — really ugly — but appropriate for us).

            And then someone got a bad idea, and we upped our celebration of our success by all of us wearing our shirts to school on the same day.

            Hubris yields Nemesis as the Greeks used to say, or in a more decorous formulation: Chutzpah — dumb-ass arrogance — is the pride that goeth before a pratfall.

            We made it obvious who had gotten elected to many of the offices of the toy government and such, and the herd wasn't panicked so much as the flock spotted the owls out in the daylight and mobbed the shit out of them. Less metaphorically and far less melodramatically put, we pissed off a number of our classmates, and the next election that came up — senior class officers —we were out.

            It made little difference who became class president, although the candidate elected instead of our guy made that his first step on a successful career in the cop business and then as owner of McDonald's franchises. Important for me here were lessons about the dangers of arrogance, the limits to how far people (not cattle or zebras or sheep) can be annoyed, and how something as banal as ugly short-sleeve shirts can have unanticipated effects.

            Which returns me to heavier matters.

            "The sixties" as a period in political history didn't correspond exactly to the decade of 1960 through 1969. If you need dates for it, one might say the sixties started in late 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, got caught in a backlash in 1968 with the election of Richard M. Nixon as President of the United States, got shot down at Kent State and Jackson State Universities in 1970, twitched a bit and then got indecently buried in an electoral landslide with the re-election of Richard M. Nixon over George McGovern in 1972. With some important ups and downs, primarily with the Watergate Scandal, the sixties were well over in crucial aspects by 1972, symbolized by Nixon's successful "Southern Strategy" for Republicans and the successful campaigns for President — to overstate — of Southern Eisenhower-Republicans by the Democrats.
            The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s f. (the Margaret Thatcher Revolution to give credit more accurately) helped "roll back" a good deal of the sixties and "the Movement."

            Why? Too big a topic for my pay grade, but let's start with "the Movement's" being far from monolithic — a good thing — and at its roots too incoherent (not a good thing). Hippies were not Radicals; the Civil Rights movement and Peace Movement overlapped but were not identical; Malcolm X was emphatically not Martin Luther King, Jr., and Black Power as a movement was not Civil Rights and integration.

            And finally moving into the topic announced in my opening paragraph — the social and cultural movements of Hippies, feminists, gays, and associates (GLBT) overlapped with the other small "m" movements in American society but were far from identical, and not always in agreement on goals and tactics.

            "The personal is the political" is true indeed, but the personal also can and does compete with the more purely political, defined in traditional terms of broad-scale power and economic issues. Identity politics are politics, but they are necessarily particularistic and complicate coalition politics.

            And religious politics are always and necessarily incredibly problematic and dangerous, as can be seen by a quick look at the body counts from the 17^th-century European Wars of Religion as well as those from the older Crusades and battles within Islam.

            Short form here: Some of my colleagues on the Left weren't colleagues at all but provocateurs, and there's a history to be publicized of infiltration of Movement groups by people assigned to act offensively and provoke trouble. More, though, were sincere people who got important work done, but work with costs.

            Obviously, the wise-guys of ΔΧΩΣΜ had the right to wear our shirts to school individually and conspire to all come to school in them on the same day. It was, however, not prudent to do so. Old adolescents and young adults have the right to wear their hair as they like, and it is progress that people nowadays can wear a wide range of hair styles without worrying about what sort of political statement they're making. And that you can display tatoos and that mi-level executives can be pierced — etc., except that fights over hair and clothes and fashion are far less of a drain on the status-quo Right than on the Left, and for the serious politics of Who-Gets-What are largely a distraction.

            And the "life-style" fights of the 1960s and following much too frequently panicked the herd. Indeed even far more serious conflicts — ones with excellent results like getting acceptance of gay marriage — came with upsetting traditionalists more than prudent.

            It can be useful and often necessary to "appall the bourgeoisie," but bourgeoisie is a Frenchified way to say "middle class," and it can be a very bad tactic to appall a middle-class that must be brought into any effective alliance against the reactionary among the very rich.

            It can be galvanizing to attack any orthodoxy, including religious orthodoxy, but go back to the old image with "galvanize" and picture putting electricity through people. They may object, strongly.

            After the American Left lost the power to threaten widespread disruption — basically after Kent State and Jackson State and convulsions that followed them — it was time to cool it and avoid unnecessarily annoying the conventional.

            Plenty of annoyance is already necessary.

            So, a sensible atheist can deal with theist by mildly re-formulating the probably apocryphal assertion by Pierre-Simon Laplace, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — the God hypothesis — and then shutting up unless the theists are trying to control your behavior.

                        * Effective politics are coalition politics, and there are a lot of religious people out there who can be drawn into progressive coalitions on the basis of their/our beliefs.

                        * In the United States, there are a lot of religious people, period.

                        * Historically, going back to the rediscovery of Greek philosophy, science, and "Reason," a standard response to overstated Enlightenment and "modernism" has been calls for a return to unquestioning faith and various fundamentalisms. Hold your ground civilly, but don't encourage that return. You don't have to say the "under God" part of the pledge of allegiance — or any of the Pledge — but you can stand there quietly when others indulge the patriotic impulse.

            All Americans of any, all, and every sexual orientation can cool it with Public Displays of Affection when PDA means public fondling.

            Having established the right to decorate one's body however one pleases, in public cover up anything overly outrageous — and do not think that making an artwork of your body is some sort of significant contribution to a just society.

            And so forth.

            The "sixties" in one sense lasted maybe five years, and after that it's been largely backlash. Most of that backlash was and remains inevitable; those of us Left of center, should not add to it.

            Back in high school, Delta Chi Omega Sigma Mu had the excuse of inexperience in unnecessarily goading our classmates. Older folk have no excuse. Unless it is really necessary, do not panic the herd.

            Unless you have a mob at your back — or your opponents imagine one — civility and restraint are always good options in dealing with people who just might give you what you want.

            You don't have to love your enemies or even your neighbors or "the stranger who resides with you" as on alien in or midst — not unless you Believe. Still, you can be nice to them, where possible, and, prudently, avoid unnecessarily throwing them into a panic, or a snit.

            Pranking people and arguing with them is fun; but it's better to deal with them so they'll give you their aid.