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!

Oedipus and Agamemnon--lessons from Greek Tragedy

I think I've posted this somewhere before. I would encourage you to spend an hour with Robert Harrison (whose books are fantastic mini-libraries, so full of ideas) and Rush Rehm, a Classical Scholar, actor and director (of classical works).

I have listened to this at least 4 times in full and more even still in pieces.

You will have to be patient, but if you don't have a full hour start in at about the 20 minute mark and listen for about the next 15 minutes and you will be enlightened in many ways about how to think about life and death, the family, our past projected forward into the generations, the house and the state, war, "tyrants", and autocrats.

Especially applicable is the discussion of Creon as a modern autocrat.

Entitled Opinions--Greek Tragedy

The unFairness Doctrine

This is funny, but deadly serious.

Here is the Atlantic piece he referenced: The Rise of the New Global Elite.

Here's a truth, early in the piece, as to how we managed to "turn the other cheek" as poor folk to allow the rich to "do their thing."

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

Facebook makes it all better; and the Googles; and Hollywood; and Charlie Sheen.

If you've been following the news in Wisconsin then you are seeing plainly the ways this very real disparity is being illustrated. The Gov in WI hired Stasi (all dressed in black) to applaud breaking unions and to protect him from the rabble he's trying to further impoverish at the behest of his plutocratic masters. (In case you didn't know, all politicians--at least "national" politicians--do the bidding of Mammon.) Where shall we put our Berlin Wall? We have already built our economic walls and, as Colbert points out, our wealthy live "encamped" within their own walls. Perhaps the real benefit of our digital age is that Mammon can serve itself without even seeing any proles at all; its worshipers are insulated from the rabble--and the rabble is "bounded" (our nutshell of "finite" space) by electronic borders .

[Aside: Branch Davidians, for example, were "encamped"; Survivalists are "encamped"; the rest of us, in fact nearly all of us, are unprotected.]

Our forefathers walked in the world & went to their graves tormented with the fear of sin & the terror of the Day of Judgment. We are happily rid of those terrors, and our torment is the utter uncertainty & perplexity of what we ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we do; and the distrust that the Necessity which we all at last believe in, is Fair. (RWE, 1841))

Alas, we should embrace that distrust. Further, we should be clear exactly who is banging the drums of imminent terror.

I think the American Revolution bought its glory cheap. If the problem was new, it was simple. If there were few people, they were united, and the enemy 3,000 miles off. But now, vast property, gigantic interests, family connections, webs of party, cover the land with a network that immensely multiplies the dangers of war. (RWE, 1883)

And Justice for All

Besides being a pretty good Al Pacino movie, the post title, as you know, comes from the "Pledge of Allegiance". Isn't it funny how you grow up with these things and have no real idea of their inculcating symbolic intention...a flag and allegiance to it. Odd, right, pledging loyalty to an abstraction.

That's not the point though: with the "democratic" challenges to ruling authority in Egypt and Tunisia some have trumpeted the call to liberty (and justice) for all. However, many are asking about the inequality of women in these societies and if that will be addressed in any meaningful way. Will there be justice?

No. To elaborate, equality is a chimera and justice is a legalism of the power structure of systems of government. Power decides what is just and just how equal things need to be in order to be called just. Melville addressed this, as shown in the previous post, with the idea of "fast-fish and loose-fish"; even if a fish is fast this tenet of "natural law" (I have caught it, and I am in possession of it) will be vitiated by the hierarchical law of "civilized" legal systems if Power wants the fish. And this vitiation, this unequal or unfair action will be called "just". And it will indeed be just in civil terms.

We have also heard calls condemning patriarchal systems...I really can't disagree here as I find the psychology of the human male to be the cause of all our ills. Yep, I'm laying at the feet of the biological male animal striving for alpha positions and all the lesser males trying to put one over on the alpha. These "stupid" biology tricks are useful in certain species and social orders do benefit from this kind of organization--but it seems to me that the wrong genes have been in the ascendancy for far too long. The female animal goes about her living in the cycle of care not in the cycle of domination.

Our human reality is dominated by masculine aggression on every level. We pray to the trinity of War, Technology and Money. All of these are masculine ideas. All of these come out of a desire to conquer our very biology--conquer each other--conquer our planet--even conquer our gods. These are our masculine abstractions.

Without a massive alteration in this particular "way" of being there is no hope.

Our only future is in the physical reality of the feminine, body, mind and soul.