There was a thing called the Niagara Movement. Founded over a hundred years ago to make a case for a confrontational approach to the problems of segregation and against the idea of negotiation, accommodation patience and compromise that the movement's leaders associated with Booker T. Washington.
In a way, it's typically American and we can look at the way we sing "Bomb Bomb Iran" on one day and try to negotiate a rational outcome on the other and seem not to be successful either way except to argue about what can be said, and how and by whom.
There is another thing called the Niagara Principle, according to which a single episode implies widespread occurrence. Movements of all sorts use it, to cherry pick examples and make them the paradigm and usually without statistical support. Having become cynical in this age of warring movements, I'm tempted to distrust them all and see a nest full of baby birds, mouths open and competing for attention.
So it is with war, revolution, genocide and the proliferation of nuclear weapons in a world shuffling toward armageddon, the question of which puppets and patsies and spokesmen for which warring movements will be selected to be our next president? -- we're not going to hear about it for another period of time. A black man was shot in the back by a South Carolina cop and the national passion play will begin anew. Entropy increases and in America, so does partisanship. When those things increase, so does the power and influence of those who profit by it.
We'll be told the call and response is a "conversation" but anyone attempting to make it one may well be called a racist and have to tearfully retract such an eminently Humanist statement as "all lives matter" because it does not fit the mandated terminology of some movement dedicated to promote one problem and one view of it over another. Stick to the slogan. That's all, and it's not a subset of a greater, nobler and more enlightened principle.
I'll be blunt. We have a problem with over-armed, under-trained and fearful police. It's compounded by the fact that the police have to deal with a high percentage of poor and minority criminals and that leads to prejudice. We have a problem with indigent populations having inadequate opportunity for advancement or even the will to hope for it. But it isn't enough to recognize this or to attempt to improve it, we have to use prescribed language, we have to ignore, forgive or explain away crime insurrection, rioting and violence and we have to stress that any picture must have a prescribed frame. We can't call it prejudice, it has to be racism and we can't call it that unless we dictate who the target is. Shut up -- we're having a conversation here.
We have a problem with every moral and legal and political principle and the language we use to describe it being hijacked by self-appointed authority. We have a problem with honesty and zeal and distortion and hyperbole and tunnel vision and partisanship and most of all, we have a problem separating the cause from the leaders and the institutions. Stating the case isn't making the case and the case we state isn't always more than a small part of a great Niagara washing us all to hell and oblivion and chaos.
If all lives don't matter, then life doesn't matter, yours or mine.
Humans are phenomenally adept at identifying high ideals, they are phenomenally inept at acheiving them.
ReplyDeleteI once wondered why this is so. I no longer due.
Irrational self interest .
Same here. I really think we're not capable of any more than that and because political philosophy seems to assume reason and predictability and the ability to see just what self interest is, I've sort of abandoned hope.
DeleteSuch a blatant misuse of force - more like an execution - but I doubt even this incident will open doors to a fearless self-examination on the part of law enforcement.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, but I have the feeling that if the recent outbreak of outrage had been based on this and other nearly identical crimes, we'd be better off. This shooting didn't need explanation or interpretation, IMO. We were watching a murder, not a fight gone wrong.
ReplyDeleteThis picture doesn't need a frame, a playbook or a script. Nobody is trying to make something ambiguous seem clear, to dress up a victim as being a gentleman and scholar on his knees begging for life and consequently I hear from people who were rather silent about Ferguson and Sanford. You can almost hear the national OMG! Sitting in a doctor's waiting room yesterday one could hear the whispers: "did you SEE that?"
Together with another nearly simultaneous shooting of a man sitting in his car by a cop with a history of brutality accusations, this video may be -- as is so often said about things which are not -- a turning point. I hope it is.
Yes, police policing themselves is stupid, but so is alienating the people in the best position to do something VOTES MATTER and ballots are all the same color. This isn't about the pecking order amongst leaders and their followers, it's about our freedom and our security. We haven't lost the power to change things, only the ability to work together.
Revisiting the sequence of events, on Saturday the North Charleston Police Department released this all-too-familiar statement: The officer felt threatened and his actions were justified.
ReplyDeleteJustified on the basis of an officer's initial account of events that turned out to be a lie and a coverup - exposed by a cell phone video. By Monday, the truth had become so unavoidable, the police department was forced to reverse itself. By default, a victim's account is never assumed to be truthful, as the good ole boys cover their butts and cover up the crime. How many cases of alleged police brutality should be reopened?
What happened in North Charleston can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Without incontrovertible proof, citizens are powerless.
The power of the citizen relative to the power of authority is at the core of our politics and indeed of our history. It's the thing that makes me seem libertarian at times -- but beyond the superficial blather we get about the tyrant Obama and "smaller government" this is a country that kills citizens and which pays more attention to the relative practicalities of gas chambers, firing squads and lethal injections than to restraining the egos and trigger fingers of it's policemen. Perhaps it's that way because we only pay attention to events selected for us and in the cheapest, least effective, but most emotionally satisfying way. We eat junk food, we watch junk news, we crave junk justice and we get sick on it all. Does getting to and staying at some level of justice take too much patience and energy and honesty? Or do we take the traditional approach and demand "justice now" by getting rid of the institutions needed to achieve it and indulging in acts that bring about more repression?
ReplyDeleteThe mob on one hand, the SWAT teams and the National Guard on the other and as I keep repeating ad nauseam, I think people with power and money want to perpetuate the dog fight. We are not as powerless as a group as we are as individuals but that power requires us to stand aside from the bipolar arguments that make us weak and cooperate and as the extremists say, "take back the reigns of power" the ballot box gives us.
The immediate response was to portray this in terms of racism because that's what sells papers and funds air time. Headlines blare "white cop shoots black man in back" as though to assure us and remind us that white people hate black people and want to kill them and ignoring a phenomenon common to all places and times and peoples and using it for a purpose, a livelihood. It's a battle that goes back to the beginning of the exploitation of part of the population by another part -- the thing Democracy was intended to cure and doesn't because we twerk and tweet and set fires in the street -- we watch celebrities on our cell phones while America burns.
the kind of society we're devolving into needs marginalized masses to be intimidated and exploited. Racism is only part of it and racism helps diminish sympathy amongst the people who should be standing together and making them go after each other instead of the exploiters.
. And of course you're right, ANYONE, ANYWHERE, ANY TIME. THAT'S WHAT THEY DON'T WANT US TO REALIZE!
So how do we achieve more "power to the people?" More guns? More cops? Mob justice? I think that's the "discussion" we need to be having, but that takes more effort and isn't as tasty or as much fun as doing the angry dance like savages around the fire.
We certainly do have a problem with excessive government power, in my opinion. We need to address problems that don't make the headlines, things to do with the Patriot act, soon up for renewal. Things to do with civil forfeiture, official secrecy. All sorts of things that effect our freedom and security we dismiss as boring as we obsess about American Idol and Justin Bieber.
Am I a cynic for saying we really don't care about any problem that can't be contained in a 30 second cell phone video?