"Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" — A Couple Tentative Answers to a Rhetorical Question

The 1A show on NPR on May Day 2018 was on "Big Guns," a title of a book by former U.S. Representative in Congress Steve Israel, with the subtitle for the 1A broadcast, "Fighting Firearms With Funny." There was a significant rhetorical question raised, one I'd like to answer. The question was something like, "Who'd want cop-killer bullets?" 

One answer to the question is, criminals sloppy enough to have to figure on getting into shoot-outs with police or pathological enough to really desire a shoot-out with police.

More significant, though, are those for whom the Second Amendment primarily protects "The Right of Revolution" and (mis)understand revolution as mostly partisan warfare against the military forces of the State. And who are the front line of those forces of the State? The police, who sometimes where protective gear that will resist passage of ordinary bullets. 

This reading of "The Right of Revolution" also explains why one would want not just military-style weapons but military-grade weapons, 'cause that's what the military and paramilitary forces of the State have. The position usually involves paranoid fantasies of vast conspiracies by ZOG (the Zionist Occupied Government) or more fashionable embodiments of The World-Wide Conspiracy — and/or anticipations of race war — but after granting the assumptions, there is a logic to it. It's just not a logic you'll like if, say, you're a police officer or have police in the parts of the family you like or depend on the police for protection or dislike cops but not enough to want to kill them or want to improve the current American Republic and not overthrow it or have ideas about revolutions that are based more in history than in video games.

In the US, we tend to talk too much about "senseless violence"; here and elsewhere, we need to analyze  the ways in which most acts of violence do make sense — but are unjustified and evil.

Politics and the Summer Flick: A Note on the Climax of THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD (2017)

Note: I'll get into an important plot-point here; if that's a "spoiler" for you, and you intend to see THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD (2017), stop reading now. Also, please note that I came out to California in part to become a Hollywood Whore but never made it beyond Burbank Bimbo, Toronto Trollop, and, arguably, Chicago Chippy; I was not consulted on BODYGUARD.

THE HITMAN'S BODYGUARD is a fairly-well-received, fluffy summer romantic comedy, just with language coarser than usual and a very, very high body-count. It also has an A-list cast, good production values, and handles more seriously than usual — i.e., more than tangentially — Interpol and the International Criminal Court in the Hague. BODYGUARD raises the question precisely of international criminal justice and the possibility of justice under law as opposed to vigilantism.

The climax of the movie is a moment of choice by the Hitman between do-it-yourself justice and law; and if I had been asked for Notes — and recall that I definitely was not — I would have complimented the script for drawing the choice so starkly and pointed out that the writers and film-makers in turn had a political choice to make. Should we have a change in the Hitman, bringing him over to justice under the law, or should he continue to cooly continue — and this is Samuel L. Jackson cool — continue to continue in doing his murderous thing?

You have one guess.

Jackson's serial-killer Hitman, of course, kills the mass-murderer, tyrannical motherfucker villain, for part of the traditional comic happy ending.

See ROBOCOP, the original one, and cf. Shakespeare's romantic comedies and what we might call The Challenge of the Alazon. Tragedies move toward isolation of the hero, often — well, *always* in Shakespeare — the final isolation of death. Comedies move toward integration, with a new and somewhat better society coalescing around a central heterosexual couple (that's a formula out of Northrop Frye, with me correcting the chemical image — Frye suggests "crystalizes" — and nowadays specifying sexuality). Comedies tend to incorporate as many people as possible, but that "possible" doesn't always include everyone. Often there's an "alazon": a guy (usually) who demands too much, the comic villain who can be expelled and not included in the final comic "Komos": revelry, party or, often in Shakespeare, a dance. That gets tricky, and Shakespeare finally gets it totally right with Malvolio in TWELFTH NIGHT, who exiles himself.

BODYGUARD could have made Jackson's character more dynamic and on its way to the final happy ending — with dancing — could have made a small but real contribution to popular ideas of justice under law and international norms. A lot of very smart, very talented people, with prodigious resources to work with, missed or passed up that opportunity. I'm not sure I want to hear any of them any time soon mouthing off in public against real-world political violence.

Censors to the Right of Them, Censors to the Left Volley and Thunder

      I've participated lately in some ListServ and Facebook discussions of what a professor can get into trouble for teaching nowadays, and two closely related works that came to mind were Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 CLOCKWORK ORANGE film, at least as I taught them at conservative Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) — in John Boehner's Congressional District, alma mater for Paul Ryan — in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries.

      They are interesting works to teach.

      In my classes, the film was much more controversial than the novel even though Burgess cheerfully admits in his preface to the reprint we used that his novel is heretical in Christian terms and most of my students were pretty orthodox Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (with a few theologically radical evangelicals thrown in). The 21-chapter British version of the novel — unlike the initial 20-chapter US edition and the film — is "Pelagian," Burgess says, claiming for human beings an essential goodness and the freedom to choose the good. St. Augustine of Hippo would not have approved, and Augustinian views on Original Sin and a variety of innate, essential depravity are orthodox in Christian tradition — and my generally pious students didn't give a rat's ass. What concerned those who disapproved were the images of sex and violence in the film, and Burgess's once damnable, burn-at-the-stake heresy was no big deal.

      As I said: interesting.

      Also interesting and highly instructive were my students' fairly typical perceptions of the sex and violence in the film.

      To start with something memorable, the Rape Scene in the film and how my students remembered the rape but sometimes forgot that this is also the Crippling Scene. Kubrick's camera pays a lot of attention to the rape of Mrs. Alexander, a woman in young middle age, but it also shows in graphic detail the beating of Mr. Alexander, a man entering a vigorous old age — until that crippling beating and being forced to watch the rape. (Adding to the trauma, Mr. Alexander tells us that the rape killed his wife, but we only have his word for that, plus the problematic trope of rape being lethal to virtuous women. We can be confident, however, that Mrs. Alexander has died.)

     My students' attenuated concern for Mr. Alexander got me asking myself for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE a question from studies of Christopher Marlowe's plays on how audience's perceive violence. So I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the on-screen violence in the film and asked my students for their estimates of how much time we got to see violence against various characters.

      One of the reasons I'd probably get into trouble teaching Kubrick's film is that I think it ethical for a critic to sit with a stopwatch and get some numbers on who on screen is messing over whom and to what degree and for how long. Period. However much in Trumpian times the Left has endorsed fact-base studies, there were academic attacks on Empiricism in the late 20th/early 21st, and I suspect some of that ill-will toward number-crunching horrors still remains.

      It depends on how you evaluate such things, but the major victim of violence in A Clockwork Orange (novel and film) is its nasty antihero, Alex. My students were surprised with this because (I would argue),
            * In the tradition of audiences going back to that of the first English theatrical blockbuster, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, my students judged violence to a large degree in terms of the victims' worth, and Alex was an attractive but still violent, dangerous, and misogynistic little shit who had it coming. Except with Tamburlaine most of the audience apparently identified with a noble superman, the serial mass murderer Tamburlaine, and not his banal victims.
            * My students sometimes didn't see violence committed by the State and other authorities as violence. I told them that the State's claim was a monopoly on legitimate violence, but that the traditional idea was to allow that violence is violence, and they didn't argue the point; still, they didn't see justified violence as violence. Alex's acts of violence were violence; the violence of State authorities against him were in some sort of unnamed limbo.
            * Etc.

      My students' attitude was something like that mocked in the 1960s with the joke, "I hate violence and them violent demonstrators. Violent people should be taken out and shot!"

      Returning to A Clockwork Orange as novel and film would be interesting nowadays for how different groups would value the value put upon freedom by the story and the question of how much freedom should be restricted to protect decent folk from young monsters like Alex and his drugs. Not to mention how much young readers should identify with decent older people as opposed to guys nearer their age, however despicable those guys — or how much old teens and 20-somethings should be on the lookout for, and push back against, youth-bashing. And it would be fascinating in terms of victims.

      US President Donald J. Trump at least claimed to be appalled by the violence of killing babies with poison gas in Syria, so he blew up property and (enemy) people with Tomahawk missiles, and then went on to use in a related battle the MOAB ordnance: a very large explosive device. Justified or not we can argue about; what I find downright fascinating is the many Americans would not see Mr. Trump's actions as violent. It's unlikely Americans generally could have a rational argument about the actions of the all-too-real Mr. Trump; it's possible we could have one about Burgess's and Kubrick's fictional Alex.

      Or not: I'm not sure one could nowadays — or at least not this off-White male "one" — could teach A Clockwork Orange; and that would be unfortunate.  

Guns, Abortion, the Second Amendment ... Logic

            The argument on gun control is like the one on abortion: going 'round and 'round because the two major sets of arguments proceed from very different premises or even worldviews. In the case of abortion, the major disagreement is on the nature of the universe and the nature of human beings, which is about as major a disagreement as I can think of offhand. If a human being is essentially (literally in essence) a creature with a soul, and if ensoulment occurs at conception, then .... Etc. Which is quite different from my idea of a zygote, a fertilized human egg, which I don't see as a human person, and you-all probably don't either.

            Similarly, if you want gun control, youse folk who read Leftish blogs such as this will talk about decreasing gun deaths. But most places in the USA most of those gun deaths are suicides or gang related and can seem a reasonable price to pay for people who believe the 2nd Amendment protects all our rights by giving substance to the Right of Revolution, and if you believe effective revolution requires a citizenry not just armed but armed heavily enough to hold off the forces of the State until the military sides with the revolution and the revolution is won (more exactly, the opening round is won, but that gets into complicated history and political analysis).

            I go with Hannah Arendt in On Violence (1970) and elsewhere on how violence undercuts revolutionary power, but I'd concede that a fair number of bolt-action rifles in the hands of citizens probably would help underpin a right to revolution but add that handguns are officers' weapons to keep the grunts in line and that the AK-47 and similar weapons would be for some sort of right of coup or guerrilla warfare and not classical revolution as such. As a kid I put money in cans to plant trees in Israel, and maybe buy arms to drive the British (and as it turns out, Palestinians) from Palestine; as a young adult at neighborhood pubs, I gave money to help the widows and orphans in Ireland, with maybe a few quid going to our boys in the Irish Republican Army to buy weapons to drive the Brits out of the occupied counties. And money for humanitarian aid freed funds to buy weapons by the NLF, ANC, FLN, PLO, and other groups alphabetical, revolutionary, and willing to use violence.

            Most people who'll read this far think those who think President Barack Obama a tyrant are simply crazy: dissociated from reality. Those who think Obama a tyrant (or a potential one) obviously think otherwise and go from perception to premise to the conclusion that they need high-power weapons to hold off the forces of the tyrant, who will insulate his regime from revolution by seizing their weapons.

            So: the arguments on the necessity for assault rifles and such for personal self-defense and home defense are often just bullshit if you look at the statistics, but that's irrelevant: the serious arguments here are on armed insurrection, and for the most part that's not what people want to talk about, and may be an area (like parts of the abortion debate) where clarity would be more honest and less frustrating but really, really dangerous.

About Those Ultraviolent Video Games: A Plea for More Graphic Realism

            Until very recently if I heard or read "RPG," I understood it as "rocket-propelled grenade" and not "role-playing game," so I'm obviously no expert on gaming. Still, I watch a fair number of animation shows on television — plus The Daily and Nightly Shows — so I see a lot of commercials for games.

            (And that is "see," or see fragments of; I turn the sound off during commercials and listen to an audiobook if I'm on an exercise machine or read if I'm watching from a couch. So screw you, advertisers! May you contract crotch rot and leprosy on your hands simultaneously while all your teeth fall out except one and that becomes impacted! Four minutes of commercials?!? Die, rot and be damned, scum-sucking swine! …. But I digress.)

            Anyway, I have watched a good many commercials for first-person-shooter games aimed at young people (males especially) and, although hardly the most gentle of people in my fantasy life — I curse telemarketers even more than advertisers — I find the general sensibility of many of the games to be disturbing.

            So I have a suggestion: a highly modest itty-bitty proposal that the governments of the United States, Japan, and other games-producing nations, parents groups, Tipper Gore, and similar relevant entities should "incentivize" (i.e., threaten and bribe) game-makers to develop and offer EXTRA BONUS FEATURES!!!! that might help young users consider a bit the implications of their battle-themed games.

            The Bonus Features would need to be appropriate for different games but most could include for the first level role-playing as EMT's, fire-fighters, Army medics, Naval hospital corpsmen, triage nurses, surgeons, the "green ghouls" of Mortuary Affairs and such, with points being scored for coming in after the initial game and cleaning up. The players who save the most lives and limbs, get the corpses identified and on their ways back to the families of the dead, do the best with the most immediate psychological trauma — these are the winners and can move on.

            The next level would be bomb squads and engineers and demolition teams and construction workers, who can score points clearing away the destruction and starting to rebuild the homes and factories and water supplies and power generation — the infrastructure destroyed in the initial game. And those who rebuild the local area the best can go on to further levels playing counselors, public servants, and diplomats; NGO agents and other leaders and workers who put together societies after the first-person shooters and strafers and bombers and all have finished their play.

            I'd have the Bonus Games highly realistic, and especially graphic from the points-of-view of those handling the wounded and maimed and working with corpses in Graves Registration. A high degree of gore might make the Bonus Games creepily attractive to the sociopaths and psychopaths among the players, but the Dexter/Ted Bundy demographic is small, and it may be just as well if they spend their time playing games. For children, teens, and young adults closer to the medians, means, and modes on psychological curves — for normal young people — a dose of realism in their games would be a damn good thing.

Black Lives Matter: Some Connections (Re)Viewed from that Jagged Orbit

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

— Pastor Martin Niemöller (one poetic version)

            

My cousin Joy was active in the Peoria Holocaust Memorial Button Project, so even living far from it, I'm familiar with their approach to helping people, especially young Midwestern Americans, imagine the Hitlerian massacres by collecting and then piling together in five large transparent containers one everyday item — a button — for each of the eleven million people murdered. Relevant here is that best-estimate figure of eleven million: some five to six million murdered Jews and five to six million other "enemies of the state."

            The larger number is important, as is Hannah Arendt's project in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to put into historical, sociological, political, and ethical context what many of my fellow Jews passionately believe must be seen as the Holocaust, the Shoah — the destruction of the Jews seen as in its essence unique. That is, the Hitlerian attempted genocide of Jews was not unique as all historical events are necessarily unique but unique in the deepest sense of sui generis: literally one of a kind.

            Whatever the ultimate Truth is about the Hitlerian Holocaust, there are two practical (pragmatic, political) problems with seeing it as the Holocaust, sui generis, absolutely unique.

            First, if the Shoah is literally unique there is little to be learned from it. The deaths of some six million Jews in "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question" would be a relatively recent reminder of the dangers of anti-Semitism and the human potential for atrocities, but that is the end of their lessons. On the other hand, if the Shoah fits into larger patterns, there is much to be learned from it about racism, colonial theory and policies, bureaucracy, human psychology — well, and so forth in a variety of areas of far more than mere academic interest.

            Second, if the Holocaust is literally unique, a Calamity for the Jews, why should non-Jews care?

            That is not a rhetorical question.

            Clearly non-Jews should care on ethical grounds: a great evil had been done, and … well, and that is of ethical significance. And then we can go on to consider how decent people should care about great evils and try to do something about them, maybe learn about them and have their consciousness raised and show empathy and compassion.

            And that will pretty much be the end of the matter, which is fine for individuals and of political significance: Compassion and empathy are central to the moral life and ethical politics.

            Looking at those eleven million buttons, though, thinking of the mass murder of eleven million people is a reminder that once a figurative death machine like the Holocaust gets into action — whoever it was designed for initially — it's going to stuff into its maw all sorts of people.

            Which is why various forms of Martin Niemöller's prose-poem keep getting quoted, and why Paul Julian and Les Goldman's animation THE HANGMAN (1964) — from the anti-McCarthyite poem by Maurice Ogden (1951/54) — is one of the more important works of the middle of the twentieth century.

            Indeed, "Black Lives Matter," and more to the immediate point in the autumn of 2015, so do Black deaths. That point must be made and made again and then repeated. Soon, though, the "Black Lives Matter" truth must be complemented by the hard-nose pragmatic political doctrine that effective, long-term politics are coalition politics, and coalitions need at least one thick root in perceived self-interest and/or the interests of one's immediate group. For Jews such consideration should motivate political as well as ethical reasons to commemorate some eleven million deaths in the Hitlerian Holocaust. For American Blacks …

            Well, it's arrogant to give advice, but I have some additional stories to upload into cyberspace, one or two of which may be of use to Black Americans.

            The first story is the oldest memory I have with words. My family had just moved to Chicago — a bit before 1950 — and I heard a new and apparently powerful word on the schoolyard and came home and asked my mother about it. The word was "nigger." My mother paused and said very carefully, "For now, let it go with this: If the first word out of a man's mouth is 'nigger,' the second word will be 'kike', so don't use it." I have no memory of when I learned the word "kike," but "kike" I knew, and in that knowledge and my mother's words I could understand that "nigger" was a word I shouldn't use and that those who used it were a danger to me.

            The Blacks, my parents' generation would say, were the Jews' Kapore in America: the "sacrificial substitute," the scapegoat that for once we didn't have to be. Except, as my mother knew, that wasn't exactly right. Among Whites in America who took race most seriously — like the neo-Nazis and the Klan — Blacks were first on the list by a great distance, but, oh, indeed there were others on their lists.

            "First they came for the Blacks …," and US Blacks by a similar great extent are the ones most at risk to be killed or abused by US police; but as we can tell you here out West, Blacks have potential allies with activists in the American Indian Movement and Mexican-American communities — and elsewhere.

            "The enemy of my enemy is" not necessarily "my friend," but s/he could be a co-belligerent; and the groups next in line to get shot by the police are definitely potential allies for Black Lives Matter. 

*

            A quick story from the University of Illinois, the main campus at Urbana-Champaign, on a lighter subject than homicide.

            In the late 1960s, UIUC introduced a program to admit five hundred Black students as affirmative action. It was tokenism — it turned out to be five hundred admissions total over four years, not 2000 — but it was a start. The Black students were put into temporary housing before getting dorm assignments, and they sat-in and protested, arguing that White frosh wouldn't have to put up with such shit. Actually, White frosh did: temporary housing awaiting dorm assignments had been Standard Operating Procedure for as long as anyone could remember. Among the other good things that came of this affirmative action program, was that the UIUC student housing authorities came up with faster ways to get new students into their permanent dorm rooms.

            There's a lesson here, one driven home by more serious considerations with school integration.

            Part of the idea of integration was that integrated schools would be better schools in part because the White establishment wouldn't fuck over White students and parents the way they would Black people, and, to the degree they tried, White parents and students wouldn't put up with it.

            Integration supporters overestimated White folk, underestimating the degree of "White flight" and the degree to which White establishments would be willing to fuck over most of those who remained in integrated school systems and the degree to which the poor who remained would have little choice but to "take it," and/or were willing to put up with a fair amount of school-house shit. (Education is valued highly enough to justify high risk and sacrifice in some cultures and subcultures, but not in all.)

            What should make poor Whites, Muslims, and others nervous about emphasis on Black equality is that part of the move toward equality could be treating larger groups of people equally badly.

            And to some extent, treating all Americans equally badly makes sense from the point of view of police: The assumption that every suspect is armed and dangerous and to be treated as a threat isn't irrational given the gun laws — and sheer number of guns — in much of the United States. There is a fair chance that a lot of people out on the American street are armed, untrained, nervous, short-tempered, and (hence) dangerous to the public and to themselves — and to police.

            Moreover, if it's a "War on Crime," it's to a great extent a counter-insurgency and guerilla war, where it's hard to tell who the civilians might be, and where civilian deaths can count as "acceptable collateral damage" if necessary to protect the lives of "our troops."

            Who those troops might be can get complicated.

            In Vietnam and Iraq, the US military did not leave US racism totally behind them, as indicated by my Chinese-American friend who said one of his more important jobs as an Army officer in Vietnam was as neutral mediator between Black and White soldiers (and the strongest racism he encountered was from Vietnamese who saw him, as he put it, not as an American officer there to protect them but as a "Chink"). And in US warfare in Vietnam and Iraq and elsewhere, the figure of speech Indian or Injun Country speaks volumes.

            Currently, the main "Indian Country" in the US is poor Black neighborhoods, but there is also "Indian Country" in the parts of actual Indian Country not policed by tribal forces — and maybe in some places where tribal police do have authority — and in barrios and in other ghettoized areas. In a "war on crime" with crime treated as a kind of insurgency to be met with militarized police, Black communities become the indigenous populations in which the guerillas hide.

            However, it is not just Black communities, and the whole "War on Crime," and the associated "War on Drugs" are dangerous policies not just for minorities but also for an American Republic seen as an antithesis of a police state.

*

            Even if racial issues magically disappeared, we'd still have problems. I was intrigued by some informal surveys I did in classes where we studied Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and I asked my students to estimate screen time of various acts of violence in the film. Significantly, many of my students did not consider State violence against the elegant thug anti-hero to be violence. Said anti-hero, Alex, was a Brit teenager played by a young Malcolm McDowell, a kid who was fairly well cultured, if not well-socialized, a speaker of an interesting variety of London English, more or less my students' age in appearance, and emphatically White.

            A joke among collegiate dissidents in the late 1960s had members of The Great Silent Majority of Nixon-loving Americans breaking their silence with the line, "Them goddamn violent protesters should all be taken out and shot!" And when nine people were wounded and four killed at Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970, at least one reaction a friend of mine heard from a co-worker, was "They should have shot them all." Rumors at the time and after had it that Governor James Rhodes — running for the US Senate — had wanted a confrontation, having noted that the police riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 had increased the popularity of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Rhodes lost the Republican primary election to the popular Robert Taft Jr., in a vote two days after the killings, woundings, and at least one maiming (of White folk) in Kent, Ohio — but the vote was very close.

            On 13 May 1970, a half-minute fusillade of some 460 rounds — far more than fired at Kent State — left two dead and fifteen wounded young Black people at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, without the photographs as there were at Kent State and with a racially charged cover-up.

            My point here isn't to give a "Mort Sahl Memorial Grimmy Award" for who's suffered worst — Black wins — but to note that the US faces issues not just in Black and White, not even adding Brown, Red, and Yellow, but also figuratively blue (sometimes brown or tan or khaki). None of the cops at Jackson State went to jail for a deadly shooting spree, nor National Guardsmen at Jackson State. And so forth. The State claims "a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence"; fine, but there is a problem whenever people fail to see State violence as violence and just don't get the sick joke of "them violent people should be taken out and shot!"

            Black Lives Matter and so do cops' lives — but it won't be much progress if we just get more minority and women cops and they get socialized into a cop culture of "Us (cops)" vs. "civilians," if a more diverse population of cops gets integrated into a system where agents of the State can get away with murder both figuratively and literally. If Black lives and Black deaths by police are to not just matter but get significantly reduced, we need political coalitions that can get non-cop citizen review boards monitoring police use of force, plus changes in the laws and procedures that allow police to use force that can be deadly if police officers just feel threatened. We need coalition political action to get laws and policies that ensure reasonable and equitable surveillance of police behavior: recognizing legitimate privacy concerns for police and for the victims of crime and their families. (The capital "P" People have a right to see and judge the actions of those who are supposed to serve us and protect us; TV stations don't have the right to show shooting or beating videos over and over as a kind of violence pornography passing as news.)

*

            Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) is a nicely contradictory and contrarian combination of economic libertarianism with a paean to fascistic and militaristic authoritarianism in most things generally and all things military; Paul Verhoeven's film STARSHIP TROOPERS (1997) is a dystopian satiric sendup of the novel's politics. In Heinlein's intended eutopia, major crimes that we see and hear of are punished by hanging and minor ones by flogging. One flogging we see.

            As becomes pretty obvious in a YouTube search, Verhoeven's film makes clear the S&M aspect of the flogging scene, and the macho masochism. Relevant here, for 1959, Heinlein is excellent on race issues. Heinlein's hero is Filipino, and in the good liberal SF fashion of the period, when humankind's potential hegemony if not survival is threatened by giant pseudo-arachnid aliens ("Bugs"), any remaining racism becomes just silly and dangerous. Put these together, and you get in Verhoeven's movie an important switch. Verhoeven's hero is not "Juan 'Johnnie' Rico" from a rich family in the Philippines as in Heinlein's novel, but "John D. 'Johnny' Rico," incandescent White rich kid from Buenos Aires, and when he gets flogged the noncom wielding the whip is Black.

            Earth without racism is progress. Still —

            "Race Matters," but there are other ways to create caste systems besides race; the idea of race is somewhat fluid; and racism is by definition an ideology, and ideology can be both rigid and highly malleable.

            The system of authority and hierarchy in Starship Troopers as both novel and film does not require our ideas of race: it's fascism without racism. In such a fascistic society, a Black man can flog a White man: so long as someone holds the whip, whips the people ordered to be whipped — and the rest of the troops obediently "stand by to witness punishment" — that long the system holds, and it's still fascistic.

*

            In the USA and most of the world in 2015, we are far from post-racial, and it is necessary to assert "Black Lives," and Black Deaths, "Matter." Having made that assertion, however, even having made it come true, there is still work to be done. After making fairer who gets to whip (or club or shoot) whom, we need to greatly reduce the literal and figurative whippings and the all-too-literal clubbing and shooting.

            We need a world where a rich Black American gets the same deference as a rich White, and then work on flattening the distances between rich and poor.

            The importance of greater economic equality and opportunity is driven home by part of the backlash to Black Lives Matter: the argument summarized in the headline, "Police fear 'YouTube effect [is] affecting [their] work, contributing to violent crime," as the Washington Times puts it.

            Going into Leftist-historical mode, I'd ask us to take very seriously the possibility that police body cameras or even just the prevalence of cell phones might reduce violent crime — reducing beatings and shootings by cops — and also reduce the ability of police to do a significant part of their work.

            For much of human history there have been few good jobs and even fewer genteel statuses where one can be free or mostly free from work — and most people had drudgework jobs, many as serfs or slaves. For all of human history, many people have been motivated by a desire for status, to be better than their neighbors even, it has been alleged — alleged by among other Thomas More at the end of Utopia and Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in The Space Merchants — even, it has been alleged, people want to feel superior even if that superiority is bought at the cost of a lower standard of living than might be possible with greater equality.

            Things are better nowadays than they were under slavery and serfdom, but there's no reason to believe that with globalization, automation, and old-fashioned greed and pride we will reach a point even in America where most people have good jobs.

            With good jobs at a premium and membership in the leisure class even rarer, it is handy for those with power to cut down competition with various kinds of caste systems: patriarchy as the most basic, with many of the goodies reserved for older males, but other systems in other places — in the USA in many places caste systems anchored in race. To repeat an oversimplified but still useful cliché, for much of colonial and than US history, White solidarity kept poor Whites allied with their more aristocratic "betters" and kept those poor Whites in their place(s), which was tolerable for them as long as they were better off than Blacks.

            Usually, this was straightforward: "keeping the niggers down" in part with crude terror — as with the KKK from Reconstruction to our own time — but more importantly through law. From the early 17^th century on, there were the more or less savage slave codes in the England's American colonies and then the USA and, after emancipation, "Jim Crow" in the sense of segregation but also use of the criminal law, and with the terror tactics of crimes by cops: KKK and local police were not necessarily mutually exclusive categories.

            Nowadays, the system is more systematic and systemic, as analyzed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" (The Atlantic, October 2015) and — if I understand the argument of a book I've read about but not yet listened to — more specifically by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).

            So Bernie Sanders has reason to listen to Black Lives Matter activists and apply a racial analysis to police violence. A multi-edged bitter joke in the 1960s — told by racists and anti-racists — had it that Ralph Bunch held a doctorate in political science from Harvard University, became the UN chief mediator in the first Arab-Israeli conflict, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, and received the US Medal of Freedom in 1963. The joke then went on to ask what the form of address was for  Dr. Bunch — an African-American — in a recent appearance in Mississippi, with the answer ... "Nigger." For racists it didn't matter at that time and matters little now how well a Black person does: race in racist theories is at the heart of what people are, regardless of action and achievements. Anti-racists used the jokes to mock racist attitudes; racist used the joke to reinforce them. Part of the reason people want money and position for is to get respect; race will matter for the foreseeable future because racism denies US Blacks respect however far they climb up the class and status ladder.

            On the other hand, Black Lives Matter activists should listen to Bernie Sanders because raising income and getting some wealth to poor people will help the class status of Blacks; and most Americans aren't fanatical racists and will show respect to middleclass and richer Blacks that they'll deny to the poor generally and Black poor very specifically.

            Insofar as the State uses violence to keep people in their place, the true "essence" is whether you're among the haves or the have-nots.  A non-racist and anti-racist populist coalition to reduce poverty — as Martin Luther King hoped — will make Black Lives Matter more, and reduce Black Deaths from cops, and from less sensational causes.