High-Speed Car Chases (2 June 2013)

        I just watched a Fast and Furious movie — it was the 2013 edition, but that's irrelevant — and then Now You See Me, a somewhat more thoughtful film, although that's not saying a whole lot.

       Anyway, I enjoyed both movies, and the previews for similar films, and I got thinking about a lot of movies I've enjoyed less because I've been bored by the car chases. And then I got thinking of my life in the greater Cincinnati area 1971-2007 and about real-world high-speed police chases.
       And then I got pissed off at the makers of many "action" films.

       The web is unfortunately overstocked with troll-attorneys trawling for business, but try a search for actual "high-speed police chase" and accusations of "wrongful death." What popped up first in my search was the story of how "Kelly Spurlock, the widow of NASA engineer Darren Spurlock who was killed when he crossed the path of a high-speed police chase in 2008, is moving forward with her wrongful death lawsuit against the fleeing driver, the City of Huntsville [Alabama], and three officers who participated in the chase" — apparently a "high-speed chase at midday" in a busy area "where it […] put other motorists at risk."

       The Cincy case that comes up early on Google is the recent one reported by the AP with the lead: "The wife of [Mohamed Ould Mohamed Sidi,] a Cincinnati cab driver killed in a crash at the end of a high-speed police chase" in March of 2011 "is suing the city." The short form of the story ends with the sentence, "Cincinnati Solicitor John Curp said the city is not responsible for the criminal acts of others." Now it is certainly true that the City of Cincinnati is not responsible for the criminal acts of its "civilian" residents, but there remains the question of the potential responsibility of the City if three of its police officers "were negligent and caused," fairly directly, "Sidi's death."

       (The "civilian" isn't part of what I'm quoting; it's in "scare quotes" because I recall the chuckles when I first heard cops talk of "civilians," meaning their non-cop fellow citizens. That was during The Troubles in the spring of 1970, on a college campus in central Illinois and far, far away from the slaughter of the Vietnam War, where there were more old-fashioned varieties of civilians and combatants. This encounter with a new word-usage occurred at a meeting between police and protesters arranged by local Christians who took their faith seriously ["Blessed are the peacemakers"]. We protesters chuckled and then both groups adopted the usage: "'civilians', plural noun: neutrals at demonstrations or just in town, not cops and not protesters — folks neither out protesting nor policing the protests." But I digress, though relevantly.)

       It may be hidden on the web — at least without LexisNexis — but very strong in my memory is the debate over high-speed police chases in Cincinnati occasioned by one that killed, injured, and/or endangered a mother and child. My memory is a baby in in a baby carriage while the mother pushed it across the street, resulting in legal action where the cops were cleared and so was the City — although the City at least undoubtedly struck some deal out of court.

       The point here is the debate, which included some older police officers' complaining in public about cop cowboys and an tendency among their younger colleagues to substitute for "Serve and Protect," "Get the Motherf*ckers!"

       I paraphrase, or at least I paraphrase what went into the media, but some older cops did criticize strongly a kind of macho cop culture. The accusation was general, but as the debate went on, at least one cop blamed COPS, the TV show, and nowadays I'll blame even more the techno-porn speed-worship of the high-speed car-chase movie, especially when those chases are engaged in by officers of the law. Cops and many other armed agents of the State are sworn to serve and protect; and the have at their disposal such low-key technological wonders as radio, not to mention nowadays traffic cameras and computers and devices for tracking down an escaped suspect.

       Some place along the line, I want to see a movie where some sympathetic hot-shot cowboy cop buddies hit that baby carriage, kill the little girl therein (and her new puppy) and have to live with that the rest of their lives. I want to see some movies where the camera goes back to a flipped car and gets some medium-duration fairly close shots of what a real-world-style traffic disaster actually does to the human body.

       I came out west mostly for the climate, but in part to live on the edge of the film industry and as much as I can whore myself to Hollywood. So far — in my usual joke — I've made it only to Chicago chippy and Toronto trollop, with some hope of getting to Burbank bimbo; and, indeed, I lust after the sort of resources that allow filmmakers to execute a high-speed chase sequence. Also I taught literature for forty years and film long enough to know that most people can differentiate quite well between real life and power fantasies.

       But come on, guys!

       Those chase sequences normalize policemen behaving badly, irresponsibly; they set up a kind of perverse ideal of disregard for everyday people. This fits into a larger pattern of normalizing bad behavior by cops and other sworn agents of the State — more on that elsewhere — and such normalizing (romanticizing, idealizing) is not right.


     The City of Cincinnati is not responsible for the criminal acts of criminals, and moviemakers are not responsible for stupid and dangerous acts by people who don't know fantasy when they see it. The City of Cincinnati is, however, responsible at least in part for the actions of its employees and agents; American cities and film-makers, story-tellers and artists are responsible when they encourage bad behavior by peace officers by presenting as an ideal the shift from the wimpoid "To Serve and Protect" to macho (and nowadays macha), "Get the Motherf*ckers! (And if Some 'Civilians' Get Smashed, Well, They're Not Our People)."

¡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. 

"Macho A**holes," "Wogs," and Other Terms of unEndearment

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PATROCLUS.

No more words, Thersites; peace!

THERSITES.

I will hold my peace when Achilles' brach bids me, shall I?

— Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida 2.11

            When Right-wing folk complain about "language police" and "political correctness," they're frequently complaining about what my mother would have called decency in language, and simple manners, and I think she would have been pleased to learn that we've reached a point in America where it's pretty much taboo for White folk, in public, to use the word "n*gger." Personally, I'd prefer if we went for a couple generations with "n*gger" taboo outright, maybe especially among young Black males — and I'll throw in for taboo also casual use of the word "bitch." If one wants to refer to a female dog, let's go back to the old word "brach," which can also be used for the "bottom" in an unequal male/male relationship: in Shakespeare's bitter satire, Troilus and Cressia, the on-stage satirist, Thersites, reduces the epic, love of the Greek heroes Achilles and Patroclus to just another form of lechery and dismisses Patroclus as "Achilles' brach," later repeated as "Achilles' male varlet," and, since Patroclus doesn't know this meaning of "varlet" gets made totally explicit as "his masculine whore" (5.1).
            If people want to call other people whores of the male or female variety, let's insist that they do so outright. "Ho'" seems to be dropping out of fashion, and we could at least have a moratorium on "bitch" and "bitches," and nothing would be lost. There's nothing you can say with "bitch" that you can't say with "brach," and there's no way nowadays you can just throw "brach" around as a cliché buzz-word, sounding relatively cool just filling out a sentence.
            ("Varlet" I'll give you as a freebie, although in the sense of "bitch" it never really caught on.)
            A complete taboo on "n*gger," though, comes with a price, and going over part of that price is the transition between this introduction and topic indicated in my title.
            Consider the story told by Sudhir Venkatesh, at the time, a University of Chicago graduate student doing a sociological study in one of "projects" on Chicago's South Side. Venkatesh asks the gang leader J.T., "How does it feel to be black and poor?"
 “I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly. “Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him. “I’m not African-American either. I’m a nigger…. Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work."
I've heard, anyway — this one I couldn't track down on the web, but there are some fascinating articles of a more earnest sort — I've heard or read somewhere that some of J.T.'s contemporaries can do extended shtick on all the variations of terms for …, I put it their people and the realities these words point to. Loss of "n*gger" may, for a while, make it harder to speak and hear street-level analysis of race issues in America.
            On balance, though, a taboo on "n*gger" is a good idea: for a while, at least if we can move toward the "Utopia" that Arthur C. Clarke presents in his 1953 novel — soon to be a Major SyFy Miniseries! — Childhood's End (ch. 8). In "The Golden Age" given to us before the end of our species, we meet a character of ultimately sub-Saharan African descent and are told that "A century before," in our time, "his colour would have been a tremendous, perhaps an overwhelming, handicap." In the future-present of this novel, "it meant nothing. The inevitable reaction that had given early twenty-first-century Negroes a slight sense of superiority had already passed away." Indeed, race relations were so ideal that "The convenient word 'nigger' was no longer taboo in polite society, but was used without embarrassment by everyone. It had no more emotional content than such labels as Republican or Methodist, conservative or liberal" — although Clarke didn't live to hear "liberal" pronounced by the more immoderate sorts on Fox News.
            There are two other terms of abuse, though, related ones I'd like see come back, a return useful for naming some unpleasant and dangerous realities.
            The first is "macho asshole," which I was surprised to learn was a term and concept pretty much unknown to my students in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. For my students — at least for those who spoke up — "macho" was a positive term, and linking it with "asshole" surprised them, even allowing for any surprise from a professor's saying "asshole" in class. (I noted in my policy statements and made clear in my speech that the one absolute taboo I observe is not pronouncing the name of God [YHWH]; beyond that my rule was decorum in the technical sense — appropriateness to context — so those who attended class regularly wouldn't be shocked to hear me say "asshole," followed by my standard apology to the anus [an innocent orifice and an important one in evolution].)
            Macho assholes are arrogant bullies, and recent attempts to rein in school bullies are right-minded and long overdue but, as practiced, often a variety of kid-bashing: such small-scale macho-assholitry is presented as a problem of boys and some mean girls, distracting from bigger and more general problems across the culture.
            For eight years, George W. Bush swaggered his way across the world scene, and he and his merry band bragged that "the gloves are off" and showed their manliness with shooting friends in the face (accidentally, Mr. Cheney claimed), kidnapping people, torturing people, and invading weak countries.
            Since the backlash against the 1960s — starting in the 1960s — popular culture in the US has habitually celebrated cowboy cops and "rebels" with badges and guns, who "Serve and Protect" far less than cutting Constitutional corners, "kicking ass, / And taking out the trash."
            Some of my students, who'd grown up on video games, had problems recognizing the rather blatant point that the James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd Terminator movies (1984, 1991), were centered on a literal deconstruction of the ultimate macho asshole: a/the Terminator.
            Pop Quiz.: What actor plays the male protagonist in The Terminator?
            Answer: It's Michael Biehn, who plays Kyle Reese, a normal human male who feels pain and is brave and helps save humanity. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays the villain: The Terminator, who is the ultimate macho man, impervious to pain, a stone-cold killer, and, it turns out — for the ethical point of the movie — not a man at all but a machine.
            And, of course, the final hero in the Terminator is "the final 'girl,'" Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor.
            Villains are often more memorable than protagonists, and for a nasty set of pop quiz questions on Shakespeare's plays, a teacher can always ask for the names of the technical (male) heroes or protagonists of, say The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and/or Richard III.
            (If you missed that one, the answers are the bland non-entity Portia romantically wants to marry in Merchant — named Bassanio; Macduff, the Thane of Fife in Macbeth; and Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond and a minor character in Richard III.)
            Still, Cameron and Hurd are explicit in their Terminator films, and it says something that my students, and a whole bunch of other people, deep down inside identified more with the obsessive killing machine than with more humane and human humans.
            And so on for Rambo, Dirty Harry, and the whole set of fictional and real-world bad boys in media from film to games to rap.
            The older macho sorts were bad enough as role models, but they at least tended to be the Terminator sort: the strong, silent type. As American popular culture juvenilized and the male ideal got younger, the understated truly dangerous man got pushed off to the side by the motor-mouth, trash-talking street punk: the loud and pugnacious macho asshole.
            Given current ideas of manliness by, especially, cops and street kids, it should come as no surprise that encounters between the two can get deadly.
            And the frequent violence becomes even more understandable if we take seriously expressions like "taking out the trash" — which brings me to "wogs."
            As the Wikipedia entry saith, "wog" is "a racially offensive slang word referring to a dark-skinned or olive-skinned person from Africa or Asia," but, as the article goes on immediately to note, there is the expression from at least the time of World War I, the "The wogs begin at Calais." This sentence is properly enunciated with a Colonel Blimp, pukka sahib, Rule-Britannia accent, with "Calais" carefully mispronounced to rime with "malice" and one's nose at a steep angle, smelling excrement. Significantly, in Australia, "wog" can (still) be used pejorative or affectionately for "Mediterranean and Middle Eastern immigrants."
            I want to stick to pejorative-abuse and put to use the obvious imprecision of "wog."
            Wogs are the "trash" of the world: all us "wretched refuse" as seen, not compassionately, but disapprovingly by macho assholes and their wimpier, less demonstrative allies. For Colonel Blimp and, with variations, his American cousins, having the wogs begin at Calais was progress, or that stereotypical, reactionary snob was in a particularly generous mood: more often the wogs began in lower-middle-class neighborhoods and could definitely include the uppity working poor, to say nothing of people who "can't find no work" and are "the undeserving poor."
            In America as in England for much of its history, the wogs can be our fellow citizens, living a couple neighborhoods away. They can be wogs in our view because that view is endemic to our family and neighborhood and/or because some powerful group or other has engaged in a "wogification" program, villainizing the other people and making them emphatically, capital "O," Other.
            When macho assholes have to deal with people they see as wogs, there is going to be trouble. When macho assholes deal with people, especially male people, who have had to practice at least some macho assholitry to survive on the streets — there will be blood.
            Arguably worse, when even generally decent people learn about the deaths of distant strangers they/we ever-so-unconsciously see as wogs, the results will be mild sympathy but little practical help.
            And so we get a big portion of the horrendous US statistics on homicide, including police deaths in both senses: death of police and death and injury by police; and so we get in December of 2014 the murder of over 100 children in Pakistan, and even concern over that not lasting two US news cycles.
            We've got the phenomena; we've got the problem; let's bring back the words.