“Step out of Line, the Man Come and Take You Away”: UC Davis, OWS and Pepper Spray

You know, I have mixed feelings about demonstrations generally – we’ve had some grand protests and protest movements over the decades, and we’ve had some confused, anarchic gatherings that may have done at least as much harm as good.  I leave aside the question as to the precise degree of good the “OWS” movement is doing.  But it seems to me that some of the police tactics that are being used to stop these people, who are in the main clearly not oriented towards threats and violence, are WAY out of line.  Witness the video in the article referenced by this link: UC Davis Police Pepper-Spray Students. It looks to me as if pepper spray is used there not to neutralize a threat but rather to engage in crowd control or just to remove protesters who have been deemed inconvenient. 

Well, damn it all, democracy is always mighty inconvenient for certain authority figures and plutocrats, and at times it’s a hassle for all of us.  But you don’t spray pepper solution into young people’s eyes because you’ve simply become impatient and want them out of the way – that treatment should be reserved for out-of-control, violent and threatening offenders whom you judge can’t safely be taken down by other means.  If they needed to move a small number of uncooperative college students, how hard would it have been for the police simply to cart them off without temporarily blinding them first, and making a big show of it at that?  Were they really expecting to be set upon violently by a few college kids?  I rather doubt it.
 
The statements made by the UC Davis spokesperson quoted in the article seem to me remarkably wrong-headed as well; for example: “…. In these budget times, we shouldn't use resources that should be going to our core academic mission going to a tent city.”  Lord!  Not only is that pretty poor English for a “spokesperson,” but I suggest that if the university had hired someone for a million dollars a day to ruin their reputation, they couldn’t have done better than that statement .  Okay, spokesperson, I think we get the point: again, democracy is unruly and damned inconvenient, and to top it off, it’s EXPENSIVE!  I say, “deal with it”: the alternatives are a great deal worse.  Do we really need to quote that famous line by Winnie Churchill about the relative value of democratic rule? 

Perhaps we do – an awful lot of people in positions of authority appear to have grown fiendishly impatient with any form of democratic expression other than apathy or simple assent.  So here goes, in close paraphrase: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms of government.”

Finally, where is the voice of President Obama on this business of using harsh police tactics against democratic expression?  I would like to hear him address the issue and take a stand against such tactics, if he hasn’t done so already.  This is an area where the so-called Bully Pulpit needs to be used and used effectively.  Not to do so in a timely manner, I suggest, will ally him in many voters’ minds with tactics that should appear jaw-droppingly inappropriate when they happen on the watch of a Democratic administration, or indeed any genuinely American administration.