A Rumpus Exaltation of the Rule of Law:
The video shows us everything; the outside of everything anyway: the UC Davis students on the sidewalk, their heads bowed, the law officer brandishing his canister of pepper spray to the assembled crowd, the thick mist spattering the face and hair of those kids.
And who else remembers now the fanciful claims made by those advocating another war with Iraq: that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical weapons. Imagine the horror: chemical weapons dropped onto innocent Americans?
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It’s more complicated than that. It’s always more complicated. The law officer isn’t just some psychopath. He believes he’s protecting the peace, doing what he has to do.
The kids know their civil disobedience. They’re prepared to be removed for blocking a public sidewalk. So our officer has to figure out what to do. Do me and my men drag these kids off this sidewalk, or do I blast them with a chemical agent that will soften them up first?
Maybe he feels agitated by the omniscient gaze of all those camera phones, angry at the way his actions will be thrust into the public domain without his consent. Maybe the cameras make him determined to appear authoritative, to send a message to others who might disrupt the peace of his given precinct by sitting on sidewalks. If I don’t send a message, he figures, it gets worse. Isn’t my job to keep things from getting worse?
There’s some part of him that enjoys wielding his power, of course. We all possess such secret nodes. Maybe he sees the kids as spoiled brats who won’t listen, who need to be taught how the world really operates. He’s going to teach them. You don’t get into law enforcement just to write tickets.
He has to make a decision. It always comes down to this. One person—one imperfect person—has to make a decision about what to do. It is in this way that the Rule of Law devolves into the Rule of Man.
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It’s happening all over: New York City, Portland, Oakland, your town. Police officers are taking matters into their own hands, deciding to harm unarmed citizens, often unnecessarily. In most cases, these folks are breaking no law. They have a constitutional right to peaceably assemble. Such abuses are nothing new. What’s new is that there are all these cameras around. Perhaps this is what happens when a surveillance state finds itself surveiled.
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In a recent Republican presidential debate, the moderator noted that Rick Perry had overseen 234 executions as governor of Texas. The crowd seated in the Ronald Reagan Library offered the loudest applause of the evening.
They weren’t being ghouls. On the contrary, they were expressing support for the authoritarian model, in which punishment of the wicked is the most effective means of establishing order and therefore the highest civic good.
There is a reason that police procedurals such as Law & Order and 24 hold such power over the American imagination. They are modern fables meant to reassure us that the wicked will be brought to justice, that our authority figures will protect us from chaos, even if they must abandon agreed-upon standards of morality to do so.
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And what about the ethical climate in which these authority figures exist? Does it matter that our domestic police force has been dramatically militarized over the past two decades? That officers recruited to protect and serve a particular community have been enlisted in a national War on Drugs, then a War on Terror, and have been armed with increasingly sophisticated tools of war? How, exactly, can this not matter?
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I don’t imagine that anyone who applauded for Governor Perry’s execution stats would have made the connection, but Ronald Reagan himself owes his political legacy to civil unrest. Back in the 1966, he won the governorship of California in part by promising to “clean up the mess at Berkeley.” He meant the anti-war protests, which he claimed were being carried out by “cowardly fascists.”
Three years later, Reagan ordered in the California Highway Patrol. The ensuing clash left one protestor dead, and another blinded. Reagan then sent 2200 National Guard troops to occupy the city of Berkeley and crack down on protestors. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” he explained. “No more appeasement!” Several days later, four students were shot to death on the Kent State campus.
Reagan explained that his remark was “only a figure of speech.”
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As with the movement for Civil Rights and against the Vietnam War, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) arises from a vacuum of moral leadership. Our elected officials refuse to confront the corrosive greed that fuels late-model capitalism: the sickening concentration of wealth at the top, the conversion of that wealth into raw political power.
The basic message is the same as Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. It poses the same sort of radical challenge to those invested in the status quo. This is why a prominent lobbying firm recently offered the American Banking Association an $850,000 plan to promote “negative narratives” about the movement and any politicians who support it. This is how corporate interests express panic: they hire lobbyists.
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Please don’t be surprised to see conservative activists attempt to “infiltrate” OWS, or otherwise foment chaos. The conservative movement has invested billions of dollars in think tanks and media infrastructure and public relations firms. So long as people believe that a “community organizer” is a communist in disguise, or that an agency dedicated to the poor exists to enable child prostitution, that money is well spent.
The notion that the nation’s moral discourse might be shaped by a spontaneous uprising of self-interested citizens is surely terrifying to them.
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The authoritarian beast within the American spirit has been roused. It is heavily armed and lavishly underwritten. It wants, more than anything, to reduce our minds to panic machines. The OWS protestors have shown heroic restraint to this point. They’ve refused to fight back. Nor have they backed down. Instead, they’ve greeted the bullying theatrics of the last few weeks as evidence of the growing anxiety among those who oppose them.
Consider the end of the video taken at UC Davis, how the police officers huddle together, looking, for all their weaponry, confused and defenseless. The students watch them go. They chant a little, peacefully. “You can go,” they chant.
And the police do.
10 responses
there are few things that make me prouder than the fact that the OWS protestors have not reacted with violence. I’m not a pacifist. Sometimes I get angry that they haven’t fought back. In the end, however, I believe that peaceable actions and a united front will persevere in the conflict between the haves and the have nots. I admit willingly that I take pleasure in the fact that the corporations are running scared. They should be.
Regan wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t my favorite president, but he did what he felt he had to. Maybe that’s what the police are doing. I’m inclined to believe that they’re enjoying this more than they should. There’s nothing I can do to change that, their enjoyment.
It’s sad. All of it, really. Years ago a man stood up and said ‘tear down this wall’ and it was torn down. So our wall is invisible. It’s a glass wall of power and privilege and hand me down nobility. It is a wall just the same. For the love of god, tear down the wall, before it’s too damn late.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a couple of really vile anti-Semitic comments pop up on Facebook lately, allegedly originating with the OWS camp. Wouldn’t surprise me if “negative narratives” are edging over into disinformation / dirty tricks tactics.
Anti-Semetic remarks originating from the OWS camp? You must mean planted in the OWS camp. In New York, the original one, many of the OWS are Jewish. People against OWS are trying to deflect their message with false ones like anti-semitic messages. A few crazies do not taint the message. Intelligent people get it. The ones that don’t yell “Get a job!” when that is exactly what these people are trying to do.
I was wondering the same thing about the anti-Semitic comments.
For the most part, I like this article with the exception of this:
“Police officers are taking matters into their own hands, deciding to harm unarmed citizens, often unnecessarily.”
You can’t sit in critique of a top down society and then blame the individuals as a few bad apples for the crimes of the hierarchy. It was not a few cops deciding to take matters into their own hands that called in police forces from surrounding cities in Oakland, CA. That was a decision of the leadership. It is not a few bad apples that are organizing conference calls with Police Leadership in 40 cities and Mayors.
Other than the statement in quotes above, the article is okay.
I applaud the calm and determination of the protesters. I have to wonder, though, if they are not chanting the wrong message to the police. Should’t we be asking them “How are YOU going to put your kids through school if tuition keeps going up?” “Doesn’t it make YOU angry that the 1% controls your money?” “Why don’t you put down that gun and baton and step over to THIS side of the line?”
I know a lot of cops; good people, most of them. And in the same financial boat as the rest of us. They are the 99%, and it will be interesting to see what happens when they realize that.
Apparently, there’s also an email circulating, among people who still circulate emails, with a photograph of an “Occupy Wall Street protestor” defecating on an American flag. I read the image is actually from a 2008 Iraq War protest.
What this essay does so brilliantly and importantly is tell the truth. The response to OWS is consistent with a narrative of global repression and rule-breaking (“taking the gloves off,” as the GOP likes to say) since 9/11. The Repressive overreaction and violence against OWS demonstrators is (1) completely consistent with the burgeoning national security state and (2) simply immoral and in violation of our laws/principles, etc. I must thank Steve Almond for his moral clarity here!
Steve – for a guy often oversimplified as a “comedy writer,” you get at some real truth, as always. Thanks for speaking out, caring, and wanting to defend our individual freedoms, civil liberties, while we still have them. Yes, I, too, salute the women and men who fought, sacrificed for us, so Steve and others (more coming forward hourly) have a platform to keep the government (our govt.) in check, working for us. Some like to easily label the protesters as anti-American, anarchists, or some other negative stereotype, but this reveals their narrow-thinking, fear, and ignorance. Thinking beyond ourselves, our own pockets (corporate or otherwise) takes great faith and effort. Some folks don’t want to make time for any of that. That could be our downfall, but the movement gives us hope. Thankfully folks speaking out for civil rights, women’s rights, and other causes, did so. We need to keep the energy positive, peaceful, and not let the truth-twisting spinners distract.
Geez, my opinion of you has been changed after reading this piece of writing. I express that within the context of most of your other contributions here. Seems to me that politics is your strong suit, just the opposite of Rick Moody, whose music writing here at Rumpus is fine stuff, but today at the Guardian website made a fool of himself with a political rant. So it seems that my usual expectations for both of you guys were confounded today. Keep up the good work Steve, and thanks Rumpus for not taking on Rick’s Rant.
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