To Enforce and Correct

They’ve been telling police officers for a generation now that they’re fighting various wars, but it’s also because the patrol car has isolated police officers from the communities that they serve. Police officers who live in the communities they serve is also less and less common.

So when you arm a cop like a soldier, when you dress ‘em like a soldier, when you tell ‘em to fight in a war and then send ‘em out into a neighborhood that he has no stake in and doesn’t consider himself a part of, you get a very antagonistic, us-versus-them relationship between the officer and that community. I think that is really pervasive, and the rise of the stop-snitchin’ movement, whatever you think of it, shows there are entire communities in this country that are more afraid of police than they are of the people that the police are supposed to be protecting them from. That is a pretty terrible development.

Radley Balko: “Once a town gets a SWAT team you want to use it”

***

This seems endemic in all "systems" approaches.  The people involved have no stake in the tenor of the community--in the health of the community--in the goodness of the community.

The "trader" loses billions with the "incidental" effect of bankrupting whole communities, or the Teach for America "volunteer" targets his or her end of service agreement using the "experience" to become management-ready, or the Enterprise Rental counter-jockey is aiming for middle-management HR anywhere possible.  I'm sure you can name many examples of lives that are not attached to communities as a member of that community but rather as a kind of service or control employee.

The real threat and power, the daily threat, in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany came from the police.

Then there's that next step.

No government exclusively based on the means of violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler, whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power basis—the secret police and its net of informers. Only the development of robot soldiers, which, as previously mentioned, would eliminate the human factor completely and, conceivably, permit one man with a push button to destroy whomever he pleased, could change this fundamental ascendancy of power over violence.
—Hannah Arendt, “On Violence.”

The good old days will now be those when you once worried about those Haliburton and Blackwater/Xe mercenaries in other countries and pretending to "do good" post-Katrina.

Superhero State Policy

On the way to school today 11-year-old was telling me about a mock trial they would be performing today at the local university.  Apparently Thor is in hot water over his abuse of Bruce Banner, breaking or bruising his coccyx as a preventative measure...that is keeping him "hampered" before he can become The Hulk.

"Thor uses violence to stop violence, Dad.  I mean, the idea is if you kill someone they can't give you anymore trouble, right?"

Hmmm...the trial will be decided on "legal" considerations?  Or is there a moral or ethical consideration?

No answer.

You seem to have stumbled onto the US rationale for being the world's largest penal state and the world's largest invading and occupying military, my boy.

And I suppose we might more easily understand this as a very real aspect of superhero comics.  It is a medium used to aggressively promote Team America (Captain America).

I've always loved the fact that Captain America, patriot-extraordinaire, is an underling meant to simply do the dirty work for the "good guys."

As far as I'm aware these comics were born during WWII and became the building blocks of baby-boomer ideology.

In any event, the simplicity of the story and the medium--there is good, there is evil; our violence and murder and terror is good, any other violence that doesn't fit with our violence is evil and needs to be eradicated.  This is then easily extended to any other aspect of us/them ideology.

Good times!

Killing Abstractions: A stance against war and violence

I am almost utterly against violence...I say almost because I know there are potential circumstances wherein I would react with violence. But my strong sense is that this violence would be "momentous" and personally consequential to my vitality and I would extend this to others in proximity to me who are meaningful to me.

For me, violence must be essentially "of the moment".

To be clear--I would not inflict violence on others but rather would be violent as a necessary reaction to physical harm as it is imminent or being acted upon me or those in physical proximity who are meaningful to me.

This is a concrete position. I speak against the abstractions that we have embodied in all of our living.

That a ground for me to stand upon and say this: I will never support a war. A war is an abstraction to serve ends that are well beyond a single individual's knowledge and/or understanding, other than those that are "making" the war.

I support bringing murderers to justice but believe I could only support a killing justice if I in fact were a party to the injustice in a way that made the agent responsible for it something I could not doubt. Our legal jury system is always and only "dubious" in this regard (but this is another argument).

I do not support vengeance but neither do I support forgiveness.

I find all of this ultimately massively confusing and my response to this is to say "NO" to it all. I cannot know the truth of larger actions outside myself. The taking of life that happens outside of "personal self-defense" is an act of blindly trusting a machinery of abstraction.

I refuse your wars and I refuse your interventions. Your machinery of war is an abstraction. Your belief in the "right" kind of war is an abstraction. If you live, you personally, live life as a kind of abstraction then you will be used as such and you will agree to it.

We are killing people. We abstract them in this "global" world and they are "insurgents", or rebels, or communists or jihadis, or any other label you'd like to use. They are dogs in the street by the calculus of abstraction.

By Their Very Fear (Update)

The community is inhuman, and less than human. It becomes at last the most dangerous because bloodless and insentient tyrant. for a long time, even a democracy like the American or the Swiss will answer to the call of a hero, who is somewhat of a true aristocrat: like Lincoln: so strong is the aristocratic instinct in man. But he willingness to give the response to the heroic, the true aristocratic call, gets weaker and weaker in every democracy, as time goes on. All history proves it. Then men turn against the heroic appeal, with a sort of venom. They will only listen to the call of mediocrity wielding the insentient bullying power of mediocrity: which is evil. Hence the success of painfully inferior and even base politicians...

So today. Society consists of a mass of weak individuals trying to protect themselves, out of fear, from every possible imaginary evil, and, of course, by their very fear, bring the evil into being.

This is the Christian community today, in its perpetual mean thou-shalt-not. This is how Christian doctrine has worked out in practice.

There is no doubt that Lawrence is troubling...that his deep insights into the mind of man and the mind of the collective (not woman per se, though woman is lost in the collective) will often spill over into some very distasteful thinking. But baby/bathwater; wheat/chaff.

There is a clear understanding here of the weakness of humans in general. We fear for our very existence (we are small and soft as predators go) and so we have created systems for protection from the natural world and from each other.

Lawrence believes in the strong, brave aristocrat--where strength shepherds the weak--and believes that the religion of the masses, which is Revelation (as he propounds) and not that of Jesus, exists only to destroy all worldly power with the only "good" being the power yielded by the elect in another world (yet to come, but never arriving). Apocalypse is the theology of those who are already "left behind".

And those who feel this deep sense of denigration in their very soul have a singular desire to "equalize" through violence, to be "tough" in their fear.

UPDATE: Digby details some Tea Party plans regarding budgets, teachers, churches and armed employees of the state.