http://wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com/501535.html?thread=5053983#t5053983
The Gates arrest was terrible police work above and beyond any kind of legal question.
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(Text of any linked articles under the cut.)
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critical links: Gawker’s story, twitter “Skip Gates”
(This article assumes familiarity with events.)
EDIT (7/28): In the interest of fairness, the headline here is formulated based on inaccurate information. More than one peckerwood idiot was involved (at the very least the moronic dispatcher and arresting officer, possibly the other cops at the scene), and the caller was actually very reasonable about it – she was calling the police on the insistence of an older woman who evidently watched two men forcing their way into a house without saying a word and then summoned someone else to call the police for her – so not just a racist cunt but a chickenshit one as well.
The caller not only noticed and pointed out the presence of luggage, but the 911 dispatcher responded dismissively to it (‘What do the suitcases have to do with anything?’) in addition to demanding a racial category for the entrants and botching other details of the call. So I stand by the headline, but I feel it casts aspersions unfairly on the caller and sincerely apologize. As opposed to almost everyone else in this sorry story, she made the best she could of a nasty situation. -ack
1) What the police do is essential, but the Broken Windows school of criminology along with the modern trajectory of American conservatism has turned them into a stalking-horse for authoritarianism; in the new ideology, we always need more police funded better and nothing they do is inappropriate enough to merit criticism. And what they are made to do, rather than keeping the peace and furthering public goodwill, is harass anyone who sticks out, make arrests on instinct rather than fact, and aggressively dehumanize everyone. While the massive influx of police did have a tonic effect on the crime rate for a time, it’s also generalized the antipathy for and fear of the police once limited pretty exclusively to minorities in large cities and the Border South. Worse, that antipathy and fear has become regarded as positive rather than damning.
2) We have all seen this happen over and over again. Some punk kid at a Kerry speech gets tased for acting a bitch; some skateboarder gets tased for using the word “dude” while cooperating fully with an angry officer’s unreasonable scrutiny; a young man having a seizure after enduring a heavy beating is tased repeatedly with electrodes stuck in his nipple and scrotum; riot cops at the RNC casually pepper-spray peaceable demonstrators (including a woman doing nothing but holding a flower), anti-terrorism resources are used to tail and intimidate journalists. We know this is happening. Why do we tolerate it at all?
3) If Henry Louis Gates Jr. wasn’t named that, and wasn’t a Harvard professor, he’d still be in jail and nobody would care.
4) When my dad was some punk kid and social neoconservatism was just the peculiar way things were done west of the Jello Belt, he had feathered long hair and a scraggly moustache; his parents had basically abandoned him and he lived a block from his fiancee in a house he had to take care of himself. One day, shortly after having a cast put on his leg, he was hanging around on his own lawn when a passing police officer, evidently believing his hair meant he was obviously a drug-dealing filthy hippie scum (mind you, it was 1980 or so!), harassed him, and in spite of his cooperation struck him repeatedly on his casted leg, breaking it more severely and inflicting an injury that remains painful to this day for no real reason. If he were black, he probably would have at least spent the night in jail for the privilege.
5) We have all been locked out of our house; we have helped strangers into theirs; and Gates is old and was accompanied by another elderly man helping him with luggage. When would you possibly see that and think anything but “man stuck outside of his house”, let alone call the police rather than asking him? Answer: when he’s black and you’re a racist. [EDIT 7/28 - Hilariously, the lady that watched them break in and move in their luggage didn't even call the police herself, let alone establish the basic contact necessary to either scare off burglars or establish validity of presence.]
6) Even if we take the police report at face value (it overemphasizes his belligerence and omits several details that the lawyer’s statement and the reality of a police-home intrusion both support, i.e. the badge number, basic cooperation, etc.), it’s striking to read its general tone and sense of events – throughout the report, the officer is affronted by this awful man insisting he’s a figure of dignity and importance, this angry black man who calls racism at the first sign of a police officer barging into his own home, refusing to believe he has any right to be there, and automatically gainsaying everything he bothers to explain. In what seems most obviously like a fabrication, he uses broad and political language, overcompensatorily and non-specifically denouncing the officer’s behavior. If this officer has ever heard someone righteously angry, he has evidently never paid attention – he casts an elderly academic who is being harangued in his own home as a typical angry black criminal. In the officer’s version, Gates knows he has done something wrong and is truculent because that’s how those people are. How in the fuck could that even be possible?
7) Finally, note the fashion in which the officer treats the arrest – it’s perfectly reasonable, in spite of how terribly things have gone, to haul this man into custody. He sneeringly describes the pathetic old man whining about needing a cane to walk and the handcuffs being too tight. Shoulda thought about that before you started acting like you had rights, buckwheat.
8) Because this is a fantastic case, the officer responsible may well wind up falling on his sword. (In spite of an inevitable countersurge of hagiographies, aspersions, and race-baiting by the bigotry industry; in the Republican mythology he will become a sort of put-upon Aryan hero, a crass metaphor for the way they believe America thinks about Obama, rather than a jumped-up dipshit.) However, what he did was the result of how all of these cases normally go – the local community at most gets angry, the officer gets a slap on the wrist, the department has his back.
9) So here you have America: a country fallen so far into depraved authoritarianism that the police consider it their prerogative to mock old men for needing a cane on official documents.
Elders are an important information vector in human societies, and a critical one in preliterate ones; they have a long memory, an uncommon education, and a generally high level of respect, time for reflection, and external support. One of the major watersheds between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon was the far more efficient care for the elderly among the latter. More members of your group living to old age meant that you would never live in a society without generations of learned experience. While all other things being equal women tend to live longer, in early man all other things weren’t equal – women had to expend enormous amounts of resources to go through pregnancy and childbirth, and the unprecedented likelihood of death during childbirth made it a risky endeavor.
Menopause was helpful here – it meant that women’s reproductive lives would end past their ability to survive the average pregnancy, costing little in reproductive terms and being of tremendous benefit to society. But there would have been a tremendous social advantage to the existence of spinsters – infertile or minimally-fertile women – in that they would be much more likely to live to old age than their fertile sisters.
While same-sex sexual contact is common among primates and other animals, homosexual pair-bonding is only frequently observed in adulterous species – those with marital bonds often broken by their participants. It probably serves a significant social purpose in decreasing the mating pool without decreasng the number of socially active adults or causing sexual tension; whatever its purpose in reproductive biology, the prevalence of homosexuality in human societies would have a desirable side-effect of producing spinsters, who would significantly boost the average number of elders in a group at any time. In purely natural-selective terms, being homosexual means your relatives are more likely to pass on their genes.
The result of more elders is an increased reproductive incentive towards intelligible speech, mechanical deftness, and innovation, and away from strong instincts. In social terms, it means non-elders live longer and better, have more time to think and participate in culture, and have more information to pass on to their children.
It might be an exaggeration to say that the existence of (near-)exclusive homosexuality is responsible for human civilization, but it might not be. And at the very least, it’s pretty important.
There is a specific green color you have never seen on a monitor. There may be a way to approximate it that I don’t know of, but unfortunately I just don’t have any way of showing it to you here. Here is where I have seen it:
- certain particularly green turquoises;
- emeralds cut so as to sit right on the boundary of transparent and translucent;
- A shallow inlet over coarse white sand seen from a height;
- One of the colors in a Paas easter-egg dye kit;
- Copper let to patinate in saltless air.
I’ve always regarded this with a sort of aesthetic familiarity for no particular reason – odd in that, within its own region of our visual spectrum, I tend to prefer darker rather than lighter colors. And because the easter-egg association is the only one I have significant personal experience with – and because it’s been a decade since I’ve colored an egg – there’s a certain nostalgia to its appeal.
As it turns out, the appeal and nostalgia and my inability to just link you to the color have a specific, shared reason: It is outside of the RGB gamut. You can produce it with no standard color monitor. For computerized design (which on the balance I prefer), it is well outside of the toolbox – and as such, most people capable of finding work in graphic design have not used it since the 80s. Not only is it impossible to view on a monitor (and I’ve been glued to one since age 3), it’s impossible to work with on a computer.
To sift through humanity’s intellectual output such as it has been for the last five or so years, one would find vanishingly little evidence that the color was known to us at all.
I hate the word “meme” pretty bad for anything but the Internet sense, but it’s the best way to describe census-hate as a phenomenon – partially because it’s purely political. It occasionally gets vectored by your Dave Barry / Penn Gillette style politics-as-team-sport guys, but other than that there is just no way to come by this meme outside of direct contact with political operatives; its thesis is not ideological but electoral, and it serves no purpose but to provide cover for Republican legislatures’ creative redistricting.
It’s one of those beautiful examples of a purely top-down idea, and because the GOP’s increasing obsession with itself as a Leninist vanguard has been their only solace as they shrink into irrelevance, it’s something we’re going to be seeing a lot more of. UHAUBHAHUBHGUHBHH COLOR TV NEVER FORGET
(As an introduction, see the seminal Brecher/”War Nerd” article, War Of The Babies.)
One of the great hand-wringings of the xenophobic right (often at cross-purposes with itself, as one sees in our Minutemen regarding Islam with indifference and the hyper-Zionists begrudgingly admitting that Latinos pose no threat to the West) is the idea of birth-rates. The fundamental assumption is that niceties of personality and ideology can be divined from birth as readily and unchangingly as eye color or handedness. This often produces an apparent contradiction in ideology – simultaneous panicking about both the deficiency of a target ‘culture’ and the rate at which its members give birth. This is pretty much the indicator idea for xenophobia as an ideology – with the exception of the crudest, most superficial and unapologetic racists, they must square away the idea that something besides an inferior genome is at work.
The idea of rampaging Moslems is the animating horror in Europe and among fantasy-Zionists; it is passed off as hard-nosed and realistic, but relies more heavily on fantasy and ideology than the most airy-fairy Wilsonian. Whether or not the data bear it out (it generally doesn’t), one of two presumptions arise: the ignorant set and the dishonest set.
Ignorance
The ignorant set is simply blind to any historical or foreign case of immigration or demographic change. It accepts blindly the idea of continuity to first settlement or, in Europe’s case, a more fantastic but academically sanctioned idea of ethnic autochtony. In this view, one is the product of an endless succession of ancestors exactly like one, living in around the same place in roughly the same way and with roughly the same values and appearance. It’s intuitive at first – most of us know our immediate ancestors well enough and are constantly reminded of how much like them we are in various ways – but it breaks down on even casual investigation. This is why “racialism” or “white separatism” or any other form of I-just-love-my-people-ism is doomed to swift failure – it isn’t an internally coherent ideology and has a profound temptation to indulge in contempt for the other. And so the ignorant set comes to parade out the most popular and respectable slurs for the other, producing a kind of coherence and truth from mass repetition and crowd acceptance.
Dishonesty
The dishonest set, on the other hand, is familiar with the contradictions in this ideology, and is more defensive and dishonest about it. They attach themselves less openly to politics and more to “scholarship” and “opinion”. They call themselves “politically incorrect” and revel in the assumption by their friends in the media, government, and economy that those who spurn their views do so because they are too bold for them rather than because they are disgusting. They view the coherence of reality (which their partially-sealed world allows them to see as alternate) as the result of a political and intellectual conspiracy, and they tend to regard disfavored groups outside of the target group as complicit in this. (This has to be the primary reason for the continuing edge of anti-black paranoia in the elite of the American Jewish community.)
Most of all, though, the dishonest set requires an overweening ideology to produce the appearance of impartiality. They’re not afraid of the looming ropy dick of the swarthy interloper, see, they’re afraid of the destruction of their civilization. And as such, they go to great lengths to confuse “culture”, “religion”, “civilization”, “ethnicity”, and “race”. This, coupled with the 19th-century relict idea of demographics as potential for national military strength, produces the Face Fascists Dolan discusses in the eXile article.
As xenophobia becomes politically profitable, the simpler kinds of cultural elitism, provincialism, and chauvinism come to be tinged with bigotry, to be used as stalking-horses for the cause – and because the dishonest outnumber the idiots, paranoia and a conspiracy-driven mindset set in. Other, unrelated causes are dragooned in or grilled for failing to do so. (Thus the attempt by anti-Latino activists to take over the Sierra Club because Mexicans are bad for the environment, the constant, feigned concern by open misogynists about the welfare of innocent little Paki-factories under the swarthy hand of the impostor Mahomet and his Alcoran, et alia.) And there is no satisfaction at, nor real concern for, the achievement of any one objective. When they have banned headscarves it becomes minarets, when they have banned minarets it becomes teaching in Arabic, when they have banned teaching in Arabic the future of civilization depends on brown children wearing green badges.
Part of the reason that this kind of thing receives social acceptance is that most people are fairly easy to manipulate, and operate mainly in terms of superstitions and personalizations. In Europe especially, the outsider is regarded as a fecund savage who requires foreign support to shit indoors – this image is far easier to accept than challenge, and persists even among those who know plenty of outsiders – because all things being equal people seem to prefer having two contradictory data to replacing one datum with the other, and they have a great facility in selectively reinforcing existing knowledge. It is, if anything, easier for someone to form an indelible image of Muslims as a ticking time bomb waiting to flood civilization in children and circumcise their women if one is on good terms with the Husseins and their two-point-four children — after all, it is easier to refute an idea than an observation, and the Hussseins shouting at each other once is worth as much as a thousand honor-killing stories.
My feeling as regards all of this has always been that the correct response is that of Colin Powell (a career military man whose political ignorance is as much to blame for the Iraq war as anything) – not to refute the image of the outsider but to counter and better it. That the reality of the immigrant is and always has been a hard worker and contributor to the economy, that the immigrant family is one convinced at least that a life exists to be made in the new country, that people like them made America a world power and are all Europe can hope for to do the same. You might never convince a soul that Barak Husayn Dhimmitude is a fiction concocted by liars and bigot, but Kareem Rashad Khan’s story is every bit as easy to tell – and has the advantage, in the long run, of being real.
O what awful things I must do for Czechoslovakia, thought Vaclav Havel as George Bush ineptly plundered his ass. It had begun as a threesome, but Reagan had to be repeatedly reminded whose mouth he was fucking, got tired, and was now just watching. Unfortunately, as the senior official in the room, he had to be placated.
“Oh yes! Is democracy balls deep in ass!” He affected the absurd accent to avoid being mistaken for Margaret Thatcher. “Yee-haw! Yankee come home!” The former CIA chief was cold and businesslike, the way he had always been.
The silent vice-president quickened in his thrusts, the best sign he had ever gotten that the dismal work was near its conclusion. “Yes, cowboy! Win big game! Win it for Gipper!”
Reagan looked up, his every inch of flesh sagging over something or other, with a newfound twinkle. “Yeah, Ivan! I’m going to soak you like I did Hitler!”
Silence, then, as George climaxed. A few awkward seconds later, Ronald, noticing, made a series of loud, obviously fraudulent noises and gradually worked his half-limp dick back into his pants.
“Is good, gentlemen. Is new dawn for democracy.”
“Please help clean up the President, Mr. Havel.”
“Sure, is okay.” He picked up the toupee, carefully avoiding the obvious sticky patches, and delicately placed it on Ronald’s spear-bald head. He then reached to pull down the President’s fly when suddenly he snapped into activity.
“God damn it Rock I’m a married man! You can’t just suck me off in public any more, and no one’s more sorry about that than – Oh, it’s just the Russky.”
“Am Czech, your majesty.”
“Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Havel looked to the Vice-President, who nodded curtly, and he finally zipped up the elder man’s fly and moved to flee the room.
O what awful things I must do for Czechoslovakia, thought Vaclav Havel.
“Oh, and Vaclav?”
“Yes?”
“Get Klaus and Friedman on your way out, would you?”
… if this is too obvious or if it’s been mentioned somewhere else before, but isn’t there a fantastic irony in the fact that the same conservatives who are claiming the Holocaust Museum shooter’s hatred of Christianity disqualifies him from being on their team have been spending the last six months or so slobbering about what a noble prophetic conservative hero Ayn Rand was?
I personally tend to identify two poles in the black American community, each with its own praxis, leadership, adherents, and vocabulary: dignity and security. As ideologies proper, I would call them ‘communalists’ and ‘socialists’. Both are somewhat loose matches for the ideology as it is practiced, but a fairly pure pair of modern figures would be MLK and Farrakhan. Between Reconstruction and the Brown-CRA period, they represented respectively the cynics and establishment – the socialists’ strivings to provide education and opportunities to the black community were accepted, but regarded as insufficient, by their philonegrist colleagues.
The Civil Rights Era basically involved a massive level of cooperation between the communalist and socialist elements; the NAACP was the prime mover in herding those angry cats. And they tended to stick to their own – King was a product of the Washingtonian middle class and Farrakhan owes an obvious debt to Moorish Science. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the NAACP is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, success stories in social justice in the West. Others had purer motives or practices and fought worse oppression, but within the bounds their founders could expect, they won.
Anyhow, the communalists tend to emphasize independent religion and culture, group pride, historical revision, social dignity, and just order. As that checklist and their opposition to the economism of the socialists suggest, various communalist strains are paleo/neoconservative in outlook and/or identification. (One extreme example, Nuwabian despot and kilopederast Malachi York, pushed his followers aggressively to vote Republican.) There’s significant crosspollination from conservative social groups and ideas – nativism, essentialist ideas of race and gender, homophobia, hoplophilia, anti-intellectualism and anti-Semitism, and a general tendency towards what Umberto Eco called ‘ur-fascism’. Of course, these are not necessarily part of any communalist’s outlook, nor are socialists immune to them. One might, if one wanted to be particularly careful, divide them into ‘soft communalists’ for whom individual success and personal pride are the primary virtues and the siege mentality isn’t a central factor, and the ‘nationalists’ who tend to follow more extreme ideas.
The socialists emphasize redression of specific wrongs, positive and negative antidiscriminative action, education, improvement of working conditions, improving the distribution of wealth, and maintaining community safety. Because their outlook is more focused on redression and social well-being, they tend to get along with non-black civil rights and social pressure groups far better than communalists. They’ve also been a mainstay of labor politics in America since Reconstruction. They could be divided into liberal socialists (they look after the rafters – the idea being to make sure that members of the community are not kept from achieving and prospering without focusing exclusively on the success of individual people) and progressive socialists (they look after the floor – the idea being to make sure that no members of the community are made completely destitute either by deliberate racist or classist aggression or the vicissitudes of the system).
The latter is the typical foundation-level ideology for black politicians and activists, especially mainstream Democratic ones, and the former tends to be truer of black celebrities. The race riots, bombardment, and rise of the Klan coincident with Booker T. Washington’s self-improvement movement have significantly soured the black collective memory on pure socialist thought, though; pressure is generally towards communalism, as right-wing racists tend to smear black politicians and activists regardless of their alignment and it is much more internally dangerous to be perceived as not radical enough about it.
The career path of the black minister or community organizer involves interacting with people of many ideas and walks of life, and the communalist trend tends to foster aggressive personalization of systemic abuse. Where the socialist identifies their privation with the more general American fat-cat (often explicitly identified as white, although so is the general American fat cat), the communalist sees it in specific persons or groups, and unfortunately that often includes intellectuals and Jews.
The black-Jewish relationship is a complex one. On the one hand, there is the communalist tendency towards anti-Semitism of its own accord. On the other hand, there has since the 40s been a tendency by mainstream and politically conservative Jews to reflexively regard Muslims with suspicion, and black Muslims have always been regarded as a potential threat. Add this to a lot of bad blood between immigrants (especially poorer, working-class ones) and blacks, and the result has been a lingering contempt that nobody is exactly sure of the purpose of, everyone considers unnecessary, and few people are willing to risk their skins tackling.
And partially because of a tendency by older upper-middle-class conservative Jews (who are disproportionately represented among Jews in the media) to behave aggressively towards group slights but instinctively frame, register, and react to them in a political context, the generalized anti-Semitic attitudes – and generalized racist attitudes – of the American lower class present in the black lower class have been significantly overreported. The infamous ‘Hymietown’ remark is perfectly conversant with a lot of New York stereotyping, but because it was Jackson saying it it got repeated to the point of nausea.
A final note on a subject I have always felt intense concern and anger about: Ray Nagin, the comical/literal bete noir of right-wing bigots, has always been a Blue Dog, often on better terms with the Republicans than his own party, and his ‘chocolate city’ remarks fit perfectly into a wider pattern of right-communalist thinking and statements. And like any good Blue Dog or communalist, he is an economic conservative. The disturbing and underreported link between the two groups is underscored by the revelation that told Blanco that Katrina was going to be an unprecedented bureaucratic disaster for Louisiana was Nagin telling her he had been on the phone with Karl Rove.