California Dreamin' — Censoring What You Say About It (24 May 2013)

          It was several small masscres ago — about the time when I started thinking seriously about moving to California — and the General Assembly of the Golden State reacted to the demand to DO SOMETHING!!! about gun violence by adding another requirement for shrinks to report to police authorities on their, the shrinks', conversations with their clients.

          "Well," I thought, "if I ever have to talk to a professional in California about mental issues, I'll stick to a lawyer or priest."

         Professional conversations with lawyers and priests are still privileged, even in California, and I sincerely hope Church authorities have kept up, or will soon return to, the old custom of burning at the stake priests who violate the seal of confession. And you can add to the pyre lawyers who tattle on their clients.

         Or, if that seems extreme, perhaps just defrocking priests and disbarring lawyers and banishing them from respectable society.

         You see, I probably should never talk to a California shrink, possibly to no one in the mental health biz, because I say things like my hoping for burning at the stake priests — or lawyers or shrinks — who finque on their clients.

         I sometimes write with violent imagery and sometimes "image" (briefly) baroquely unpleasant outcomes for people who annoy me.

         Although I may not do this as often as most people.

         I declined to see Zero Dark Thirty (2013) because of its torture scene(s), and I've never seen a a Texas Chainsaw remake. (For professional reasons, I had to watch the original Chainsaw and the original Saw and that will do me for that series.) Indeed, I felt compelled to caution one younger colleague when we compared notes on having courses micromanaged by a council of busybodies at our university: he talked about fantasizing walking into one of their meetings with a flamethrower, and I chided him for lacking in his imaginings the personal touch. "A Sarah-Connor-style pump-action shotgun," I said. "You get satisfying imagined splatter while respecting individuality."

         Long before that, a colleague my own age asked me how I could sit through Student Affairs Council meetings smiling beatifically amidst the droning bullshit. I said the secret was using one's imagination. "I play 'Damn the Dean' and picture something out of Dante, just updated."

         She was a respectable woman, the product of a good Catholic upbringing, but one light on the Dante-esque.

         So I bought her a Fantasy Aid: a miniature sound-effects device that you could point at someone and listen to the quiet sounds of machine-gun fire, rockets, and a couple other appropriately nasty noises (crossbow-bolt thuds?). She accepted the present and the advice and went on to finish her term of office — or sentence, perhaps — on Council.

         John of Patmos — John, anyway, of The Book of Revelations — was not the first guy to picture horrible ends for his enemies, and Dante was very far from the last. (And these guys were Christians!) Indeed, women, from time to time, have not been totally immune: one wife in a long-term marriage was asked if she had ever contemplated divorce. "Divorce?" she said. "Never! Now murder (pause) — frequently."

         Would the long-married and probably totally-harmless lady be wise to say that line to a shrink in California? Would the shrink be obligated to follow-up with questions to be sure she had not become a threat?

         Perhaps more interestingly, if Dante Aligheri were to discuss his visions with a clinical psychologist in California would he be reported to police authorities for threats to, say, a Pope or two?

         For sure he could get into trouble talking to a counsellor in some school districts.

         The drugs psychiatrists can offer can be effective, perhaps especially effective when combined with some talk. If the talk is potentially dangerous to a client, however — if it could get "shared" with police authorities or others — then there is an interesting balancing of risks and benefits here.

         Perhaps one would do best to come up with a story for a shrink that might get one healing drugs, but wouldn't get one into trouble. For serious talk, though, at least in California, one might do best to see a priest or lawyer; they're allowed to keep secrets.

Cops, Civilians, and "The War on _______" (1 Feb. 2014)

             I'll repeat a story here from the "Troubles" of the spring of 1970. After the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, after the National Student Strike and disruptions at a number of major American universities, after occupation of sections of the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois by demonstrators and then Illinois State Police and then units of the Illinois National Guard — after a whole lot of shit went down, a group of very nice Methodists or Unitarians or some such thought it would be good to bring together "the kids and the cops" for some discussion sessions.
            Ah, yes: "What we got here is ... failure to communicate."
            The "kids" that showed up were largely graduate students in our mid- and late 20s — the "youth rebellion" never included all that many teenagers — and the cops were a pretty elite group from U of I in-service programs for police on their ways up in their departments.
            Relevant here is one word from the conversation between the professional students who were practicing low-power politics and the professional police who were living, for a while, like grad students: the word "civilians."
            The cops talked about the "civilians," and we asked "Who?" and then snickered.
            "Hey, man; this ain't 'The 'Nam,' and we're not the Cong — and you're not the 101^st Airborne."
            Still, we protesters got a kick out of "civilians," and both groups came to use it for people neither protesters nor cops.
            What turned out to be significant is that use of "civilians" by cops in general conversation, or, more exactly, what it represented, or, still more exactly, what it came to represent. For a long time, a lot of cops had felt themselves separate from "civilians"; by 1970, even highly educated and sophisticated cops were willing to express such feelings in words, to "civilians."
            That cops identified as a group and said so wasn't a big deal; I identified as a graduate student and teacher and more specifically a graduate student and teacher in English; the rest of youse guys were "civilians." In the decades since 1970, however, there have been trends that make that cop/civilian distinction significant, and given those trends, dangerous.
            Since the end of the Vietnam War and military conscription, there's been an increasingly wide gap between a voluntary professional military and a non-military civilian population. Simultaneously, there was quiet undermining of the problematic Posse Comitatus Act and undermining of the much more positive tradition of keeping the military out of civilian law enforcement except in extreme cases, most especially in forcing state authorities to recognize the Constitutional rights of Black people.
            Additional trends were to talk about a "War on Crime" and a "War on Drugs" and to back up the rhetoric not only with using the military for drug interdiction but also with militarizing police forces with SWAT teams and heavy armament.
            And along with that relatively low-profile use of the military to enforce laws — "Counter-drug operations" are part of the US Navy's SEALs' mission — there has been a medium-profile arms race among drug cartels, police forces, and average US citizens.
            I grew up in Chicago back when the City wouldn't have sent grief counselors over to my high school if some kid got shot. Still, it was a shocking story when my mother told us how she and her sister had to hide behind a car during Prohibition when a territorial dispute was moved along by a drive-by shooting with a "Tommy gun"; automatic weapons with magazines were rare. Such weapons are not so rare nowadays, and, indeed semi-automatics and firearms generally are common in much of the United States.
            Cops and the military may be converging, and both can legitimately see themselves separated from and other than the civilian population — at the same time as that civilian population is becoming, in one sense, less civilian. A cop must assume that many of the people around him are armed and trained, or, perhaps more dangerously, armed and untrained in the use of firearms.
            Throw into this set of trends something very good: most police nowadays are far more likely than, say, in the 1950s, to blatantly "profile" Black people and other minorities and mistreat them, at least not where the police brutality might be observed and recorded and cops behaving badly might find themselves and their departments sued. Nowadays, indeed, police officers are far more likely than in 1970 to be Black themselves — or Brown or female or Asian — and far more likely to treat civilians alike.
            The downside here is what I'll call increasingly equal-opportunity "wogification" of that civilian population: civilians are Other and not us and all potentially armed and dangerous and to be treated without obvious brutality — certainly no more public lynchings or castrations — but as if they were all dangerous criminals.
            And maybe detainees and POWs in those wars on drugs and crime.

So: So let me make a couple of suggestions.
            First, everyone, cool it with figures of speech using "war" unless you maybe want to combine William James on "The moral equivalent of war"with Arthur C. Clarke's observation in 2001: A Space Odyssey that space exploration could be as exciting as war. If anyone wants to talk about "the conquest of space," that's fine with me, just think a bit before you open your mouth about how big space is and how ludicrous the idea that it can be conquered. Aside from that: if it doesn't involve intentional production by the State of huge-scale property damage and impressive numbers of dead, wounded, and maimed, it ain't war.
            Second, moving toward third, let's call off "The War on Drugs" and replace crusades against crime with intelligent, compassionate, effective, and robust enforcement of sensible laws.
            And finally, we need some cautious disarmament. Indeed, even as long-term survival of human civilization on a large scale means substantial and rapid reductions in the total number of nuclear warheads, even so, quality of life in the United States depends upon gradual arms reduction among the military, cops, and civilians. Where we Americans are currently, the Second Amendment isn't so much guaranteeing the rest of the Bill of Rights as undermining key parts of it (think "stop and frisk" and locker searches at schools). We also need a cultural shift suggesting that truly tough guys and gals get by with martial arts and, at most, weapons more personal and elegant than point-and-spray descendants of Tommy guns or even aim-and-shoot cowboy guns.

            We need to get to more civil civilians and to cops who are less street soldiers with paramilitary backup and more civil civil servants and civilian officers of the peace.

Opiates and Other Drugs, Endemic and Cyclical (18 February 2014)

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            Page one of my local newspaper for 16 Feb. 2014, above the fold: "Opiates plague east county," a variation on headlines you've probably seen in your newspaper since the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and that I've seen since the 1950s.

            So here's a repetition of an exercise for you. ("Reps" are crucial for social attitudes, as well as building muscles.)

            Start with the observation that "alcohol and drugs" is improper English because alcohol is a drug, and "alcohol and drugs" makes as much sense as "editors and humans." The phrase "alcohol and drugs" may be acceptable as common usage, but it's unethical because it sneaks in a lie.

            Nicotine is also a drug, and caffeine; and if sugar isn't exactly a drug it acts like one, and in terms of the drug/crime connection, the history of sugar is atrocious for its key role in the Atlantic slave trade, where deaths and stolen lives were in the tens of millions. (Tobacco, molasses, and rum were also crucial for the sordid history of American slavery, so that crime/drug connection is very old, very wide, and deep in the cultures of the Americas.)

            So if you drink an Irish Coffee now and then, you're using drugs. Don't feel guilty, not unless you're a drunk, or you're stereotyping the Irish; drug use is normal human behavior and boozing as older than civilization.

            Drug use is normal but a problem since some portion of any population will misuse any drug for pleasure, and if the drug kills pain, significant numbers will become addicted.

            Drugs and drug problems are going to be both endemic — always around — and cyclical: following the laws of economics and trends in politics and even fashion.

            The solution?

            Social problems aren't math problems to be solved; social problem can only be ameliorated, managed. "First, do no harm," and after that, do what harm-reduction you can.

            The local newspaper headline was under the label, "Crime/Courts": That's part of the problem. Drug problems as such, with no immediate harm to others involved, should be handled under "Public Health," not criminal law. Handling drug problems, as such, as crime, does do harm, and more harm than it prevents.

"Senseless Violence" (again) [7 May 2014 / 20 March 2015]

       On a warm evening in March 2015, I heard shots from the park behind my apartment and thought I might report them, but, then the park behind my apartment abuts on the Port Hueneme government building, which includes our police station — Port Hueneme, CA, is a very small town — and if I heard the shots, so did the cops.

         Violence is a  bit more usual in our relatively big-city neighbor, Oxnard.

         On 7 May 2014, the editorial board of the my local newspaper argued that "Street Violence [in Oxnard] calls for more positive moves." I have a suggestion here.

            The editorial refers to "Mr. [Ruben] Alfaro’s senseless death," and the use of "senseless" quotes Oxnard's Police Chief and is correct in moral terms: Mr. Alfaro was shot while "he innocently sat in a van parked outside his Oxnard home." For the solution of this crime, however, and for public policy, the authorities need to work out how it made sense to the shooter to yell "out a gang name" and fire "a single shot" in what may not have been some random event but, the Oxnard cops believe, a "gang-related" killing. 
            There are crimes of passion and random horrors, but some violence, including murders, does make sense: somebody seeks vengeance or other rough justice. Or the violence is "instrumental": a rational means to achieve a goal — eliminating an enemy, killing a witness — just evil.

            With work, luck, and time, the police will figure out who had the means, opportunity, and motive for this murder. There’s a larger question, though, for public policy.

            Crimes of passion happen, and the best society can do is keep more people sane and skilled in resolving conflicts with minimal violence. We need on the streets fewer guns and fewer nut-jobs. However, there are cases where sane young men kill people because it makes sense to them: murder as rational, but evil. 

            War can be politics "by other means",  and gang violence can be "capitalism by other means" and the violence instrumental: as in the GODFATHER movies, "just Business." We Americans need to reduce senseless crime, but — whatever the facts turn out to be with Ruben Alfaro's death — we need to do much more to eliminate situations where crime makes sense.

            We need to do a better job instilling moral codes and punishing harmful acts; we also need to offer young men opportunities for "business" where they can succeed in the world without blowing away other people.