* I’ve decided to put all my Occupy Wall Street stuff in its own round-up post today rather than mix it in with the usual comics/etc. talk, primarily out of lingering embarrassment over the intellectual and moral failings of much of my previous political writing. At the same time, I feel very passionately about this and can’t not write about it. I encourage you to read or not read as you feel befits me writing about political matters.
* Real Life Horror: I remain stunned by and frankly fixated on the weekend’s assault on peaceful protesters by pepper-spray-wielding police at UC Davis — both by the repugnance and casual ease of the act itself, and by the student protesters’ remarkable response. I’d like to note that the coverage of The Atlantic in particular has been thorough, informative, and impassioned. A sampling:
** Ta-Nehisi Coates links the use of a chemical weapon to force compliance on nonviolent protesters to the commonplace extralegally punitive “contempt of cop” violations common among poor neighborhoods and prisons.
** Coates also notes that the use of pepper spray for non-compliance is quite literally standard operating procedure for some police forces. I’m not a fan of ready-to-hand non-lethal weaponry like pepper spray, tasers and the like, because it’s clear that too often they’re used not as an alternative to deadly force but as an alternative to no force, or to just physically subduing a dude with no weapon who’s being a pain in the ass. That said, I assumed that there at least had to be some kind of defense-of-self-or-others justification for their use, like the bubbemeise the UC Davis police force initially ran up the flagpole about the cops being surrounded and cut off. But apparently I’m wrong, and in places like Baltimore police are taught to assault people for the crime of not following orders.
** I also want to make clear that as Coates says over and over, we get the police we want. I don’t wish to demonize the occupation (as in job) of being a police officer, or police unions. We should all have unions that wield that kind of power. To the extent that police behavior is problematic, and it’s hugely problematic as far as OWS is concerned, we the people have invested them with the powers they’re using to cause those problems, by electing people who are comfortable giving them those powers, and not saying anything when they start using and abusing them.
** How problematic is police behavior against OWS? Garance Franke-Ruta has a video-heavy roundup of incident after incident of police brutality against nonviolent, passively resisting protesters. Again and again, the deployment of riot gear and anti-riot tactics against people who aren’t rioting. Again and again, the use of non-lethal weapons where no weaponry is called for. Again and again, noncompliance and passive resistance treated as a crime requiring onsite corporal punishment or paramilitary-style force. I don’t know how to see this as anything but a sustained campaign of political violence against dissidents. Against dissent.
** How did we get to this point? Alexis Madrigal traces the history of police response to protest events by American police forces throughout the modern era. His argument is interesting in that he follows a track parallel to the one many commentators are using, that of militarized police forces via the war on drugs and the post-9/11 security state. Rather he focuses on the 1999 WTO protests — “The Battle of Seattle” — as a transformative event that inspired police forces nationwide to toss their more tolerant post-Vietnam/Civil Rights procedure for protests out the window, adopting instead a proscriptive approach that greets any protest that escapes predetermined boundaries with overwhelming force. He also factors in the rise of “broken windows” law enforcement, arguing that an approach originally intended to enhance quality of life and set an “as below, so above” model for fighting major crimes by targeting minor ones instead ended up elevating order and cleanliness to moral imperatives, thus rendering anything that threatens totally smooth sailing a public menace. His point, again, is that the problem is much bigger than a problem with Lt. John Pike, the pepper-spraying cop, and his fellows at UC Davis, or in the other police forces that have attacked OWS protesters. The problem, for the protesters and the public but also for the police themselves, is the system that makes men like that men like that. This may be the meatiest article of the lot.
** James Fallows’ post comparing the instantly iconic imagery of Lt. Pike sauntering up and down a line of college kids blasting them in the face with a corrosive chemical agent to similar images of Southern police and fire departments attacking Civil Rights demonstrators with fire hoses and the like raises an important point. With the civil rights protesters, the commonality between the attacks and the underlying issues was clear: These people were demanding the right to be treated like human beings by the authorities, who responded by not treating them like human beings. As Josh Marshall says at Talking Points Memo, however, Occupy Wall Street wasn’t about physical human rights violations of this sort until the police started physically violating the human rights of the OWS protesters. The underlying issue of economic exploitation of the middle and lower classes by the ultra-rich and the corporations they control really doesn’t have much to do with police misconduct at first glance. But as Donald Rumsfeld will tell you, when you can’t solve a problem, enlarge it. And as Glenn Greenwald or the comics blogosphere’s own Tim O’Neil will tell you, the ease with which civil authorities can send police to violently suppress protest movements is a symptom of the same system of two-tiered justice, economic inequality and immobility, and elite seizure of all the levers of power for their own ends that produced other symptoms like the bank meltdown, the European debt crisis, the American housing crisis, the current and ongoing un- and under-employment crisis, and on and on and on. The system may be broken, but that is not to say that it is not still a system, one designed to achieve certain results for certain people. The ease with which Mike Bloomberg could dominate the front pages of every local newspaper and the opening segment of every local newscast this morning with some farcical lone wolf “terrorist” bust that even the bust-manufacturing Feds couldn’t be bothered with is another case in point. Noise can be made and pressure can be applied, but only the right noise and only on the right pressure points.
* Finally, I want to be sure to encourage you to watch this remarkable video of a silent protest against UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi: Dozens of students sat silently, arm in arm just like the people who were pepper sprayed, forming a path from the Chancellor’s office to her car, watching in respectful but reproachful silence as she left. When I first saw this I gasped. If you put this in a movie people would think “Eh, that’s a little over the top, don’t you think? A little unbelievable?” Indeed it was. There’s power here.
Tags: real life
i say keep bloggin it man!