Drag

In the first season of Mad Men, protagonist Don Draper crashes at the apartment of a would-be girlfriend’s bunch of beatnik associates.  Needless to say, they don’t hit it off.  When asked how he sleeps at night, ad executive Draper replies, “on a bed of money.” 

Nevertheless, they agree on one thing.  They eventually fall asleep after smoking a large quantity of pot.  In the morning, they awaken to a police raid in progress at a neighbor’s apartment. 

Draper, needing to report to work, straightens his tie and tugs on his suit coat to pull out the wrinkles.  As he opens the front door, one of the beatniks anxiously objects, “You can’t go out there!”

Don pauses a beat and says, “No, you can’t,“ and walks out, nodding at the policemen in the hallway as he goes.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago as I boarded a plane for a brief vacation in Mexico.  Walking down the jetway, I passed by a Customs and Border Protection agent.  Suffice it to say, he was playing the part.  Body armor, M-4 carbine slung across his chest, etc.  Briefly looking over at him, he gave me a slight nod.  Reflexively, I nodded back.

A fleeting exchange to be sure, but telling all the same.  Like Don Draper, and unlike many other people, I can pass.  I’m an average-looking middle-aged white male who presents conventionally.  In a sense, I’m above suspicion.  I’m just grateful no one can detain me for my thoughts.  Yet.

At least the CBP agents were clearly identifiable. The news of late tells of law enforcement officials unidentifiable by agency or uniform rounding up migrants and student activists.  Are they or aren’t they actual cops? 

The second coming of Donald Trump has provoked a resurgence in militaristic cosplay.  I first noticed the trend the first time around during the lockdown phases of the pandemic.  We were shown the spectacle of white men donning tactical gear and brandishing weapons at urban civil rights protests and setting up unauthorized roadblocks in rural locales asserting authority they did not possess.  The January 6^th insurrection appeared to be the climax of this nonsense which would simmer down with the absence of Trump and his minions from Washington.

Wishful thinking.  Shortly after the election, I was at the airport waiting at the baggage carousel when I noticed a young man milling amongst us.  He was white, with a beard of course.  Otherwise dressed in civilian attire, he was sporting a tactical vest.  He walked slowly, with a serious expression, thumbs hooked at the top of his vest.  I had no idea who the hell he was or why he was there aside from being an arriving passenger, and I asked myself if anyone else was even noticing this.  No one seemed to.  It is common enough lately that such sights scarcely raise an eyebrow.

Much as they had during Trump 1.0, the real authorities have gotten in the act.  News and phone footage showing what seemed to be ICE agents abducting individuals in public are disturbingly frequent.  The agents are generally clad in black or in casual wear, their faces obscured with balaclavas or masks, and they are not displaying badges or other markings identifying which agency they represent.  Homeland Security officials defend the practice as protecting law enforcement personnel from being doxed.   

Maybe, but probably not.  The intended effect is performative intimidation made more ominous by ambiguity.  It also looks cool, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem is the poster girl for posturing as substitute for public safety.  We see her in tactical gear joining Border Patrol agents on a raid.  We watch her posing in front of a packed cell of deportees at El Salvador’s supermax CECOT, sporting a $50,000 Rolex no less.  She parries a question from U.S. Senator Alex Padilla at a press conference on the wholly unnecessary federal intervention in the civil unrest in Los Angeles by siccing the Secret Service on him.

The optics are lost on her.  Appearing before a congressional committee recently, Rep. Bennie Thompson greeted her by thanking her for her time amidst her busy schedule “of photo ops and costume changes.”  Noem scarcely batted an eyelash.   

As to be expected, bad actors are getting in on the act.  You, too, can buy ICE merch online.  Young white males have taken to stationing themselves in Home Depot parking lots wearing ICE jackets to scare off day laborers looking for jobs.  Even more troubling are reports of midnight “raids” on immigrant households by people claiming to be government agents.  In one instance, a family was told to hand over their phones and any cash in their possession.  Contacting ICE and Homeland Security offices afterward, the agencies denied knowledge.

The Trump administration’s methods of ensuring law and order have encouraged vigilantism and enabled common criminals to prey upon vulnerable people.  You could reason that this is an intended consequence.  In the first category, we have a small group of MAGA diehards who believe Trump possesses extralegal authority and that anything they do on his behalf is justified.  (I call this the deputization defense; several J6 rioters believed Trump had “deputized” them to stop certification of the 2020 election results.)  In the second category are opportunistic crooks and garden variety assholes exploiting people who can’t go to the police.

Authoritarians are drawn to military and police regalia.  Perhaps even more so when the individual never served in the military or law enforcement.  (Consider Trump’s fixation on parades.)  At a certain point, fantasy and reality blur.  At a certain point, the biggest Walter Mitty losers can delude themselves into believing they’re the good guys simply by cultivating a look. Provoked by the violent rhetoric emanating from Trump and his allies or internalizing a belief that white men with guns are sheepdogs protecting home and hearth, and you have a recipe for tragedy. 

Policing in a stable democracy must operate in the open.  Law enforcement should be clearly identifiable to the public they serve.  If you’re acting legally, there is no reason to hide who you are.  Otherwise, you erode public trust.  When legitimate law enforcement is indistinguishable from the LARPers you don’t believe your eyes anymore. 

Perhaps this moment will stimulate reform.  We can set guidelines for law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels relating to how they present themselves to the public they serve.  Place limitations on the sale and possession of certain items such as body armor and certain kinds of lethal and non-lethal weapons (though this probably wouldn’t pass constitutional muster in some cases).  Introduce stronger sanctions against impersonating law enforcement and military personnel.  Any of these would be a good start.

What we may not be able to fix is a cultural toxicity that long predated Trump and MAGA.  They are a symptom or the latest permutation of that ugliness.  The only road to improvement is through individual hearts and minds.  And that is a task fit for Sisyphus.

 

 

© 2025 The Unassuming Scholar

Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

The New Normal

When the headline first hit my newsfeed, I’ll admit I ignored it.

I ignored it until a cascade of related stories made it clear that this was no run of the mill mass shooting.  It’s been almost a week, and the media furor over the deadliest gun violence incident in U.S. history so far has yet to subside.

The Las Vegas shooting has many of the hallmarks of such incidents, and a few baffling twists.  All the usual tropes have been invoked—heroic law enforcement, firefighters, and EMTs, equally heroic vets who ran toward the gunfire as everyone else ran away, devoted couples tragically meeting with the death of one or both partners, and family members wringing their hands awaiting news about the fate of loved ones.  And, of course, the endless speculation over what made the shooter do what he did.

Stephen Paddock fits some of the stereotypes of the mass shooter.  He’s white.  He’s male.  And, he’s been described as a loner.  So far, so good. 

But, he was older.  Affluent.  Successful at business.  He had no past history of violence.  No known mental health issues.  No extreme political or religious convictions, either.  All this has us scratching our heads, because there was nothing at all to lead anyone to believe Paddock was capable of such an act.

Unsurprisingly, rumors and conspiracy theories hang thick in the air.  The ever-opportunistic Islamic State took credit for the shootings, claiming Paddock had converted to Islam months ago.  Even though the FBI quickly debunked the claim, that didn’t stop a couple of my students from using it to argue in class that them Moozlems are a threat to ‘Murica and they should all be rounded up and deported. 

Such reactions are par for the course.  Americans are prone to hysteria, and not just over the jihadists hiding under every bed.  The shooting has brought the never-ending debate over guns, always simmering, back to a rolling boil.

One of the few sensible gun laws we have forbids private ownership of fully automatic weapons, though there’s a grandfather clause which means that such weapons obtained before the ban are available for purchase albeit at a steep price.  Not to despair, though.  The so-called bump stock device can enable your inadequate semiautomatic weapon to produce a similar rate of fire to that of a full auto.  Hence, the particular lethality of the Las Vegas massacre.

For once, congressional Republicans and Democrats appeared open to a discussion over gun laws.  The NRA, which seemed similarly open earlier in the week, retreated to form and has since come out against an outright ban on bump stocks.

The Second Amendment argument is weakest when it comes to private possession of automatic weapons and conversion kits for legally sold semiautomatics.  Automatic weapons are not practical for target shooting or hunting.  Even the military has very specific uses for automatic weapons and machine guns, and most members of a standard infantry squad are riflemen trained in making well-aimed single shots.  Anything else is a waste of good ammunition.

If I haven’t made the point clear by now, it’s this: Automatic weapons have no logical purpose except to indiscriminately kill large numbers of people quickly.  Which then begs the question: Why would any rational citizen want an automatic weapon?

The discussion now returns to the logic, if you can call it that, of gun politics.  I am partial to the argument that it is not so much the presence of firearms in our society, but the culture surrounding them that is the problem.  To put it bluntly, guns are a phallic symbol for certain males insecure in their manhood and eroding socioeconomic status.  They’re basically a substitute dick. 

This fixation expresses itself in its mildest form in the lobbying for liberalized concealed carry laws.  Essentially, it’s an argument rooted in the man-as-protector ethos.  It goes something like this: If only I had a concealed gun, I coulda stopped that maniac shootin’ at everyone. 

This assertion doesn’t account for the likelihood of the would-be hero being mistaken for a bad guy by yet another would-be hero packing heat.  Or by the police.  It also doesn’t account for situations such as last Sunday’s where a handgun is a useless countermeasure against a guy firing a rifle from a 32^nd story window.

The fixation’s most troubling manifestation arises from our cultural celebration of violence.   A real man teaches his enemies a permanent lesson.  And the thought of apocalyptic vengeance is appealing.  It’s the ultimate form of dominance over other, lesser people.  It’s like playing God.

Most of us sublimate these fantasies by watching action movies or playing first-person shooter games.  NPR this week profiled a venue in Las Vegas which offers patrons the simulated experience of firing an automatic weapon.  A soundbite featured a couple of them telling the reporter how exhilarating it felt.

How did Stephen Paddock feel as he fired into the crowd of concertgoers below him?  If it was anger, it was an anger no one had noticed until then.  He carefully planned and methodically prepared for the shootings, and thus can be assumed rational enough to have known what he was about to do was wrong.  Had he not been cornered in his room at the Mandalay Bay and forced to commit suicide to evade capture, Paddock had planned an escape from the scene further demonstrating he was compos mentis.

Maybe he did it because he could.  Capability is motive enough for some people.  We probably will never know for sure, and it really doesn’t matter. 

The one certainty is that another mass shooting awaits us in the not too distant future.  Get used to them if you haven’t already.  It’s the new normal.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Home of the Brave

I almost missed this story.  I only found out about it from a New York magazine piece linked on Longform.

There was a mass panic at New York’s JFK airport last week which led to stampedes in Terminal 8.  It appears to have been instigated by waiting passengers cheering Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold medal win in the 100-meter dash.  Their applause echoed in the terminal, which sounded like gunfire to people further down. 

When a woman reportedly shouted that she saw a gun, passengers began running for their lives.  In their panic some dropped objects such as their phones; the resulting clatters sounded like more gunfire.  One group ran out a door and onto the tarmac outside.  Another hid in an unused jet bridge.  TSA workers at one inspection line fled their posts.  Misinformation and panic were undoubtedly amplified by flurries of texts and tweets.

It took several hours for Port Authority police to restore order and for normal operations in Terminal 8 to resume.  Other terminals had been evacuated, adding to the confusion.  And yet, hours after the incident happened, news outlets had moved on to other stories, which is why I learned of it via Longform.

It’s a sign of the times.  Elements of story were all too familiar.  When a terrified woman in a hijab, separated from her family by the unreasoning herd fleeing for safety, cried out in fear and reached out her arms to her child it caused one gaggle of passengers to erupt in a renewed paroxysm of panic.  Because everybody knows all Muslims are terrorists, all of them.  I'm a bit surprised that the Second Amendment crowd didn't take to the airwaves afterwards claiming the stampede was still another reason we need an armed public (even though anyone with the merest shred of sanity would see it as still another reason why an armed public would be a terrible idea).  Considering that the incident took place in NYC, I'm even more surprised that Donald Trump didn't tweet or soundbite about how we have to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States.

I can only imagine what would have happened if the panic had occurred in Texas, let’s say, rather than cosmopolitan, multicultural New York City.  The mom in the hijab might well have been set upon by the crowd, perhaps thinking themselves the earthbound equivalent of the heroic passengers of Flight 93.  Incidents like these make me want to barricade myself in my house with a month’s supply of essentials not to venture out unless absolutely necessary.  Not from fear of Middle Eastern terrorists, but from fear of my own people whenever I venture out in public.

We are a greedy, superstitious, and paranoid lot sorely lacking in self-awareness.  Once I was asked by a Canadian acquaintance to describe my compatriots in a single word, completing the sentence “An American is ___________.”  With scarcely a thought I replied, “Oblivious.”  And in few areas are my people more oblivious than in their understanding of the world.

Nearly fifteen years since 9/11 and the declaration of a Global War on Terror, after two disastrous incursions into the Muslim world with a third in progress, we live perpetually on edge.  Despite this we still believe that despite our hostility toward whole faiths and entire peoples we will someday succeed in making ourselves absolutely safe.  This is a false hope.  Even if we prevail against Islamist terrorism, we will still experience acts of terror by perpetrators with different motives.  Terrorism is a political tactic, and it is as old as politics itself. 

So why do we still cling to the delusion we can one day be safe for good?

One reason is the emergence of security theater since the September 11^th attacks.  Aside from the Boston Marathon bombings there haven’t been any major incidents involving a non-firearm mass casualty device in the U.S. since 2001.   Notwithstanding this we’re constantly on edge.  It was understandably worse in the first years following 9/11.  Eight weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, an American Airlines flight departing JFK crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff.  While the cause was later found to be rudder failure brought on by an overreaction by the pilot to wake turbulence, media speculation immediately centered on terrorism.  (It didn’t help that a Palestinian militant group claimed credit for the crash immediately afterward.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks took place around the same time.  Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to the offices of two U.S. Senators and several news outlets killing five people and sickening 17 others.  (It would be nearly a decade before it became known that a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible and that his motives were personal.)   Throughout the fall of ’01 and into the following year the media ran stories of people trying to obtain military gas masks and creating so-called “safe rooms” in their homes.  At one point I read an article on this topic in which the quoted expert’s sole credential was that she had been a producer of the 1995 film Outbreak, which portrayed a fictional epidemic caused by a military bioweapon.   

It was in this atmosphere that Congress and the Bush administration created that bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster known as the Department of Homeland Security.  A mishmash of formerly independent executive branch agencies and agencies formerly belonging to other cabinet departments, DHS is a model of bureaucratic inertia.  (One need only consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina to recognize this.)  It is also a font of questionable policies, particularly in the arena of air travel.

Remember the color codes?  You know, the ones depicting the terrorist threat levels.  It was called the Homeland Security Advisory System.  There were five levels, running from Low Risk (green) all the way to Severe (red).  We were only at red once for a few weeks in 2006, and it only applied to incoming flights from the UK.  The level reached High (orange) several times between 2002 and 2004 though never again on a general basis after that.  (There were a few partial oranges after that.)  The default state, as the advisory at the airport’s entrance would inform travelers most days prior to the demise of the advisory system in 2011, was Elevated (yellow).  Never during the system’s existence was the country ever at Guarded (blue) or Low Risk status.

I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what any of these states actually meant.  In fact, that’s why the system was eventually abandoned.  It was just a meaningless way to reassure an anxious public.  Fox News Channel, which practically held itself out as an arm of the government during the War on Terror’s first years, was the color system’s most assertive proponent, ostentatiously displaying the day’s threat level at the bottom of the screen just above the crawl and near the FNC hologram superimposed over the American flag in the lower right corner.  (My antipathy toward Fox hardened into its present state in those days.) 

The climate of fear simmers in the background of our lives, stoked by a cynical desire for ratings on the part of major news outlets, only to boil over suddenly into mindless fright.  That is what I find intriguing about the American character.  We love to beat our chests, hold our index fingers aloft and proclaim, “We’re Number One,” and moronically chant “USA! USA!”  (This last was a fixture on The Jerry Springer Show, often chanted by the studio audience whenever the menagerie of cretins guesting on the program that day would suddenly erupt into violence.)   Yet when danger approaches we scatter blindly and helplessly.

It doesn't help that Americans seem to suffer, individually and collectively, from the Dunning-Kruger effect.  It's especially strong in conservatives.  Registering Republican apparently makes one an automatic expert on national security even when the person is an insurance salesman or dentist who never served with the armed forces or been part of an intelligence agency.  Believing we are in the loop, that we are active participants in this epic struggle against the terrorists and other boogeymen who lurk in the shadows reinforces our sense of control.  Again, this is particularly the case with xenophobic conservatives who already have strong authoritarian tendencies.  

In some respects the tenor of the War on Terror’s beginnings remains.  “Security moms” are a quotidian feature of American life in 2016 in the way “cocooning” at home with the family and driving them around in an SUV to ensure their safety were in the early 2000s.  We idolize Navy SEALS the way we did first responders a decade ago.  We still tear up and sing along with Lee Greenwood.  And still we are as skittish as a kindergartner on her first day of school.

Just watch the news coverage of the JFK incident if you don’t believe me.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Current Events, Old Attitudes

“They never tell you the whole story.”

This sage observation came from a student sprawled in a seat towards the back of the room in the minutes before class was supposed to start.  A couple of weeks into the summer session, I had learned a few points of his backstory.  Recently discharged after six years in the Marines, Mitch is back in school working on a criminal justice degree.  He’s the student vet from central casting, right down to the shaved skull and sleeve tattoos.

Mitch was holding forth on the recent demise of Alton Sterling at the hands of police.  Mitch was of the opinion Sterling had it coming.  “He was resisting arrest, you know.  If he hadn’t been such an asshole he’d still be alive.  It’s not like it was his first run-in with the cops.”

A couple of students sitting nearby nodded in agreement as I sat at my desk going over my lecture notes and pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping.  One of them said, “He shouldn’t have provoked them.”

The other student remarked, “Those people don’t have any respect for the law.”

Those people?  This discussion was beginning to raise my blood pressure, but I kept my mouth shut.  The next exchange wasn’t much better.  Mitch was also taking an introductory sociology class, it seemed, and he wasn’t too enthralled by the subject matter.

“Yeah, the professor was goin’ on about ‘white privilege’ and how bad minorities have got it here.  He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.  Nobody I know’s privileged.”

Billie, another student sitting near the group, bobbed her head emphatically.  Billie is another “mature learner” in the class.  Rather diminutive and weather beaten in appearance with a number of missing teeth, I would guess she’s in her early thirties though she looks years older.  Billie chimed in with a short, harsh laugh, “Yep.  I’m white and I don’t have no privileges either.”

Up to this point I’d found Billie kind of endearing.  She's enthusiastic about the class and while she isn’t a natural student it's clear she's a hard worker.  My initial impression of Mitch and the other two students had been positive as well, but as has been so often the case with me the more I get to know someone the less I tend to like that person.  I’m a hopeful misanthrope, I guess.

After class, I found I was still disturbed by the overheard discussion.  Should’ve minded my own business, I kept saying to myself.  Alton Sterling was no saint, that’s for sure, but that did not justify his being summarily executed in a convenience store parking lot in the middle of the night.  I recall similar remarks after the Rodney King beating and the murder of Oscar Grant: The guy was an ex-con, a troublemaker, it was just a matter of time. 

Yes, it is true Alton Sterling was breaking the law when confronted by police.  And, yes, it appears he was carrying a gun (though the record’s unclear as to whether he had brandished it as the phone tip claimed or had pulled it on the officers).  Sterling’s selling CDs was an effort to support himself and his family, other legitimate occupational pursuits being closed to him because of his criminal record.  It probably wasn’t a good idea for him to carry a gun, but, as the NRA folks like to point out, they’re the best protection from anyone who wants to do you harm.  Maybe he acted aggressively toward the officers, which is never the desirable course of action in such encounters.

None of this should matter.  It was incumbent upon the officers to deescalate the situation.  Tasering Sterling alone should have brought the confrontation to a rapid and nonlethal conclusion.  (I’m not a fan of law enforcement’s use of tasers but in this instance it was preferable to what happened next.)   I won’t try to guess at what the officers were thinking, but it’s pretty clear that for many whites following the story they acted appropriately.   

As I wrote in the preceding post, we are making dismal progress on race in this country.  Common white reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement make this quite clear.  Leaving campus the day of the overheard conversation I found myself behind a vehicle (an SUV, naturally) with a bumper sticker which read “Police Lives Matter.”

I agree.  The lives of police officers do matter.  And so do those of the citizens they are paid to protect, all of them.  I also mentioned in my last post that many whites seem to interpret Black Lives Matter as an anti-white movement rather than as a protest against the daily brutality which arises from the police occupation of the black community.   It all comes down to mindset.

A post by Steve Martinot on the Counterpunch website summarizes the problem quite nicely.  Police are in the community, but they’re not of the community.  The resulting “us vs. them” worldview empowers law enforcement personnel to act aggressively toward the most vulnerable citizens.  Add to that the influence of the police lobby in state legislatures and Congress, and there is little political will to hold departments accountable for incidents of police violence. 

There is a dimension of social class in where folks fall on the blue-on-black violence issue.  My students at Verdant Fields Community College are predominately working class, even though like most people who share their station in life they would probably insist they are middle class.  I’m often reminded of Jonathan Rieder’s 1960s study of the blue collar residents of Canarsie, Brooklyn.  Rieder noted that his subjects were contemptuous of liberals in part for their perceived masochism, for their tendency to blame white Americans for the country’s ills and America for those of the world.  The students in my classroom undoubtedly feel the same way.

However, I would argue that the white working class suffers from its own brand of masochism.  While I’ve managed to cover my origins with an admittedly thin veneer of culture, my neck is still as red as theirs.  I’ve experienced the full range of their attitudes, paradoxical as they are.  Working class Americans, despite their surface attitude of independence and rugged self-reliance, worship authority and its exercise.  That is, they favor authority which has the means of wielding violence on earth (police and the military) as well as in the afterlife (the God of evangelical Christianity).

One authority they emphatically reject is academic or intellectual authority.  The prevailing culture is infused with an admixture of practicality and blind faith undergirded by an inchoate anger and a desire to punish.  The treasured national myth of equality is belied by differences in ability (not to mention the family wealth of the 1%), though no one is inclined to accept this.  The knowledge held by my colleagues in the humanities and social sciences aren’t “real” knowledge to their students.   If it can’t lead directly to turning a buck, it isn’t worth knowing.  This outlook reminds me of a passage in Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting with Jesus where he describes a real estate agent he knows who is functionally illiterate but is nevertheless prosperous.  Why bother learning to read above grade school level if you don’t have to?

Which brings me back to the students’ comments concerning white privilege.  For them, white privilege isn’t a “thing.”  It’s just a bunch of bullshit made up by a bunch of overeducated smartasses to insult and undermine everything they know to be true.  The popularity of a certain internet urban legend is instructive.  A strawman college professor announces to his class that there is no God.  When challenged, the professor tells the students that if there was a God, He would strike the professor down right where he stood.  The professor is then punched out by an ex-Navy SEAL in the class who proclaims to the godless academic that he’s a Christian, Navy SEALs being the right-wing heroes of the moment.  (Fifteen years ago the God-fearing student would have been an ex-firefighter.) 

Good luck trying to get them to understand that their attitudes are part of the larger race relations problem, or just to understand their attitudes period.  As far as they are concerned, blacks and other minorities have already been “given” too much as it is.  They fail to grasp that such statements imply that people of color deserve to be second-class citizens.  It’s probable that few of them care.  They’ve made up their minds, and you can’t change them. 

Ever. 

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

In Memory of Mr. Deadwyler (…and Others)

On a day slightly more than fifty years ago, a young black motorist was stopped by the LAPD.  His name was Leonard Deadwyler.

Mr. Deadwyler had led the police officers on a 50-block pursuit before stopping.  He had good reason: His pregnant wife Barbara was in labor (though this later turned out to be a false alarm).  The officers were unimpressed by the young man’s urgency.  One of them, 23-year old Jerold Bova, leaned inside the car’s driver side window, gun drawn, to discuss the matter.

In his haste, Mr. Deadwyler had neglected to take his car out of gear.  The car edged forward a bit.  Officer Bova, thinking his suspect was making a break for it, fired his gun into the car, killing Mr. Deadwyler.  Bova claimed at the coroner’s inquest that his weapon discharged “accidentally.”

This tale from the distant past has a sickening familiarity about it.  As everyone knows by now this week has witnessed the senseless-to-inexplicable shooting deaths of two young African American males at the hands of the police.  Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge was selling CDs outside a convenience store when accosted by the police, supposedly after Sterling had threatened an anonymous tipster.  Much like Leonard Deadwyler, Philando Castile was shot dead in his car by police in a Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb during what should have been a routine traffic stop.  

The Deadwyler incident happened less than a year following the 1965 Watts Rebellion.  Popular reaction to the shooting was comparatively muted, though there were a few street disturbances in protest.  Thomas Pynchon, in his own inimitable style, wrote of the Deadwyler case in the West Coast edition of The New York Times.  Pynchon portrayed the image of a black Los Angeles as an unwelcome intrusion upon the popular culture notion of an LA of palm trees among opulent houses with well-manicured lawns overlooking pristine beaches teeming with well-scrubbed blonde haired, blue eyed youth. 

It’s a point hard to argue with.  The mainstream view of America remains very much a white perspective.  People with dark complexions still scare the living daylights out of millions in white society, not to mention the very thought of anything connected with Africa.  (Don’t believe me?  Just recall last year’s Ebola outbreak when a Liberian man thought to be infected with the virus was reported to have visited a Texas school.  Within minutes of the media report the streets around the school in question were jammed with polo shirted and khaki wearing tract house dwellers in SUVs anxious to save their precious spawn from the dark peril lurking among them.) 

Pynchon wrote that black encounters with white America entailed a plethora of negative presuppositions on each side; it’s pretty clear that this is as much the case in 2016 as it was in 1966.  Even as the Obama administration draws to a close it is still a mistake to claim we live in anything close to a post-racial society.  Two years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and a little over a year after Freddie Gray died in the back of Baltimore police van, it doesn’t seem as if minority communities have made any progress in their relations with law enforcement.  In fact, an already deep chasm has merely gotten deeper.  The Black Lives Matter movement has raised the hackles of certain Americans, further deepening the racial divide and, I think, implicitly increasing their support of cops involved in the deaths of African American citizens.

I’ve had several conversations with white acquaintances on this subject in the past year, one of whom was a retired police officer, and none of them wanted to have a serious discussion concerning law enforcement’s lack of accountability in incidents of police-on-citizen violence.  Each person I spoke with misinterpreted the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as meaning the only lives which matter and that those of police officers somehow do not.  There was a strong undercurrent of besieged white privilege in their words, leavened with a more than a hint of resentment. 

The killing of five Dallas police officers by Micah Johnson in response to the deaths of Sterling and Castile can only make us more apprehensive.  It also underscores how little we’ve learned from decades of such incidents.  A half century ago Barbara Deadwyler was widowed and left to raise her son on her own.  At the televised inquest, featuring a young Johnnie Cochran channeling questions on Mrs. Deadwyler’s behalf to the witnesses via the investigating deputy district attorney, Leonard was portrayed by the police as being responsible for his own death.  The autopsy report said that Leonard had an improbable blood alcohol level of .35 when he died.    

His wife struggled with the question of guilt long after the inquest cleared the officers involved and a wrongful death lawsuit against the LAPD was lost in court.  Fourteen years after her husband’s death, she was described in a story published in The Washington Post as struggling to make her way in the wake of the tragedy.  Mrs. Deadwyler admitted that she blamed her son for his father’s death for a number of years. 

The blame for many if not most of police shootings of unarmed people of color then and now actually lies with mindset.  Law enforcement in minority communities resembles a military occupation; the community’s residents in turn perceive themselves as living under occupation.  The militarization of policing reflects an entrenched self-perception of law enforcement personnel as being under constant treat of attack. It doesn’t help that for the last twenty years the Department of Defense has made surplus equipment, including semi-automatic rifles and armored vehicles, available to state and local police agencies.  The siege mentality which has taken hold among law enforcement, bolstered by its military trappings, can only lead to trouble should there be any challenge, real or imagined, to their authority.  I get nervous every time I see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror, and I’m a law abiding middle aged white guy driving a late model car.  God knows what was going through Philando Castile’s mind when he was pulled over. 

Compounding the problem is that police violence against people of color is that it appears to have given license to white civilians who suspect minority individuals of criminal activity; one need only remember the controversy surrounding George Zimmerman’s stalking and murder of Trayvon Martin several years ago to recognize this.  The Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils may be thought figments of a vanished past, but racism itself is alive and thriving.  Half the country still cannot come to grips with the fact that a black man is President.  A thinly disguised rhetorical code has replaced the white hood, manifested in doubts over Mr. Obama’s religion or national origin and allusions to his early work as a community organizer. 

Much like the epidemic of school and workplace shootings, the use of excessive force and the wrongful killing of citizens by law enforcement has become so commonplace as to scarcely merit notice.  And why not?  We are products of a violence worshipping culture.  Might makes right, or at least it does in the stories we’re told through literature, movies, and TV.  Whoever shouts loudest wins the argument.  If something bad happens to you, it’s your own damn fault.  Sterling and Castile were probably asking for it, right? 

Until our collective mindset toward race and violence shifts, we can look forward to a bleak procession of more victims in the months and years to come.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Another Reason I'm Glad the Academic Year is Over

Campus shootings (and shooting sprees generally) have become so commonplace that I don’t usually bother to comment on them.

But yesterday’s incident at UCLA, in which a former graduate student killed an engineering professor and one other person before killing himself, caught my attention.  You see, one of the shooter’s reasons for killing the prof was over a grade he had received from the victim.

According to news reports, the professor was well respected and actually popular with students and staff alike.

There but before the grace of God go I…

Trauma

I’m a fan of the journalism aggregator website, Longform.  This morning I read this piece linked to the site from the Washington Post about the recovery of a wounded survivor of October’s mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

Before I go on, I should tell you a couple of things about myself.  The first, which you might know already if you’ve read anything else on this site, is that I’m a community college instructor.  For this reason I closely follow news of campus shootings silently praying that neither my students nor I ever fall victim to one.

The second thing, which I have only alluded to in passing in earlier posts, is that I am a trauma survivor.  I was impaled through the chest in a peacetime training accident while serving overseas with the military.  The injury left me permanently disabled.  I was hospitalized for two months, most of the first spent in the ICU.  It took me more than three years to fully adjust and find my “new normal” before I could begin to rebuild my life.

I don’t discuss this much.  While I suspect that the people who know me casually are aware I’m different I’m able to conceal much of the extent of my disability.  I wear long sleeved shirts year round to cover my withered right arm and few people, even family members, have seen the numerous wound and surgical scars that cover my body from my neck to my knees.  When I meet people for the first time they’re mildly surprised when I offer my left hand to shake but they don’t seem to notice much else.  I must say I’m pleased with my ability to pass as a normal, whole person most of the time.  I live alone without help, I’ve travelled the world by myself despite my disability, and I work at a job from which I derive great satisfaction.  Things could be much worse.

Which brings me to the 16 year old girl profiled in the Washington Post.  Eight weeks are a very short time to recover from the severe injuries she experienced and it is not reasonable to expect her to be her best self.  Nevertheless, the article paints a portrait of a very unappealing individual.  She is verbally abusive to everyone around her including her chronically ill mother.  She is demanding yet ungrateful.  Aside from a brief remark that she did nothing to help during the attack she seems devoid of sympathy for or even awareness of the other victims.  Her family members must explain every routine movement about the house lest they startle her unnecessarily.  It’s all about her.

I suspect she was a godawful brat well before the shooting, self-centered, narcissistic, and rude.  I strongly suspect her family insisted on treating her as exceptional throughout her young life.  To a degree it’s a characteristic of her generation.  It’s also true that illness makes most of us short tempered. 

But there are limits.  This girl has a lot going for her if she would just stop a moment and realize it.  She has the full support of her mom and brothers and the concern of her community.  I wish I had had a fraction of the support she enjoys.  My marriage collapsed during my own recovery while my mother and sisters used a power of attorney granted to manage my affairs to help themselves to my assets.  

Once home I was left unattended for long periods of time, during which I had to shift for myself.  I spent the many hours alone reliving the accident in my mind, memories which continue to surface years later.  Naturally I had my irritable moments, but for the most part I was my normal, polite self, with “please” this and “thank you” that in the face of the indifference of those entrusted with my care.  Most importantly I resolved to carry on even though it meant starting over with nothing.

My takeaway from the article was the lack of resiliency in our current crop of youth.  Over the past year or so articles in academic journals and “trade” periodicals such as The Chronicle of Higher Education have commented on counselors and administrators who warn faculty not to discuss things which might “trigger” bad memories or negative emotions in students.  I’ve received similar warnings from the institutions where I teach, as if I’m supposed to know the full personal history of each individual in my classes.  The subject I teach requires discussing controversial topics from time to time, so it’s not a matter of if but when a student will bring a complaint regardless of how carefully or circumspectly I present the material.  I am not sure which is worse, the potentially violent student or the prospect of having students like Umpqua Girl in my classroom.

The girl’s physical injuries will heal.  She can learn to cope with the emotional pain, which will dull though not disappear with the passage of time.  She has every opportunity to lead a normal life.  But from what I read, I think she will wring the shooting for all it’s worth for as long as she can.   She will mope, she will malinger, she will gradually leach the very life from those around her.  Rather than fulfill her responsibility to the dead to live a productive life to the best of her ability, the young woman profiled in the Post article shows every sign of spending her many remaining days draining the energy of those around her while producing nothing of value in return.

I am truly sorry for all those harmed in the Umpqua Community College shooting.  No one deserves such suffering.  But survivors have a choice.  They can move forward, pain be damned, or they can mire themselves along with their family and friends in the misery of a moment irrevocably past. 

It’s too bad that this young person has chosen the latter.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Not Guilty...But Hardly Innocent

Well, it’s official: Murder is now legal in the State of Florida, at least if your victim’s complexion is darker than yours.

The George Zimmerman verdict last night did not come as much of a surprise.  Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law offered Zimmerman a fairly solid defense for last year’s killing of Trayvon Martin.  A cursory look at this morning’s TV and online news offered the expected.  Conservatives are lauding the jury’s verdict as justice done, while liberals and progressives lament the result as another step backwards for race relations in America.

George Zimmerman is an unlikely hero by any standard.  The pudgy, sad sack cop wannabe has had a checkered past which includes charges of domestic violence and assaulting a police officer.  The fact that Zimmerman killed a minor who was simply taking a shortcut home should have rendered him wholly unsympathetic in the eye of the public.  But the hard truth is that we haven’t achieved the postracial society some pundits had hailed after the 2008 presidential election.

In fact, little seems to have changed for the better. Trayvon Martin’s murder calls to mind the lynchings of the pre-civil rights era.  His crime was being in the wrong place—an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood—at the wrong time.  Zimmerman had followed Martin, despite instructions to the contrary from the 911 operator, because he knew that there would be few real consequences from confronting the “suspect.”

The not guilty verdict proves that we indeed live in George Zimmerman’s America.  As the well-off retreat into gated communities, as we rely increasingly upon private security and high-tech gadgetry to safeguard our homes and property, and as paranoia envelops our culture, it’s perhaps too easy to justify the killing of a suspicious person.  It doesn’t help that our ingrained taste for gratuitous violence enables us to excuse murder, particularly when the law (and trial juries) sanction it. 

Mr. Zimmerman may be not guilty in the eyes of the law…but he is hardly innocent.  And neither are we.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar    

Lost Minds

They’ve lost their minds.  Conservatives, I mean.

There can’t be any other explanation.  Reading the headlines over the last few days it’s difficult to think otherwise: The National Rifle Association has called for armed guards in public schools following the Newtown massacre, there’s been still another mass shooting, this time in Pennsylvania, a middle aged truck driver has pled guilty to setting fire to an Ohio mosque claiming he was goaded by Fox News’ relentless vilification of Muslims, and the ragged remnants of the congressional Tea Party caucus are stubbornly blocking a compromise solution to the fiscal cliff crisis.

I’m not sure why this series of events is any more comment worthy than others of late.  The myriad permutations of madness that express themeslves so frequently in this society are like background noise by now.  It won’t be long—a few weeks at most—before the Newtown murders fade from popular memory.  More unsettlingly, it will probably be recalled only when the perpetrator of a fresh new atrocity exceeds Adam Lanza’s body count.  Because, you see, in our fascination with superlatives we are pleased even when the unthinkable occurs to set a new record.  Not overtly pleased, but the enthusiasm (if that’s the right word) is clear as the talking heads linger over the latest numbers as if recounting the score in a particularly exciting football game. 

We’ve become inured.  It’s our way.  Twenty-eight dead, and our biggest concern is that Congress is going to raise taxes and take away our guns.  A couple of days ago, I heard a story on NPR about the recent spike in nationwide gun sales and proposals to renew the federal assault weapons ban.   The memorable soundbite was from a man buying a semiautomatic rifle and several high-capacity magazines (and I wish I was making this up): “Ah was savin’ up to buy a new truck, but I figgered Ah’d better buy a new rifle ‘fore the law changes.”   (I don’t remember if this interview took place in the South.  It probably doesn’t matter.  In the same fashion that the inflectionless California dialect has become the norm among denizens of Blue State America, the manner of speech I like to call “Redneck Creole” has become the patois of Red State America.  This poor ass could have lived anywhere, really.)

Now for the obligatory disclaimer: This is not to imply all, or even most conservatives are on the loony Right.  But when one surveys the political landscape at the close of 2012 it is not difficult to infer that the quotidian conservative is at least partially influenced by the propaganda echo chamber created by Fox News and AM talk radio.  Subjected to a worldview which offers pat, self-contained answers in lieu of critical thinking, public acquiescence to the right-wing agenda can be little wonder to the minimally astute observer. 

Of course this raises the question of why so many people so willingly accept such tripe.  In a more charitable frame of mind I would chalk this up to conservatives' penchant for conflating opinion with fact (a flaw shared by more than a few on the Left), their unwillingness to consider points of view which conflict with or refute their own, and a narrow shortsightedness that leads them to support unstintingly policies that are beggaring our country.  When I’m feeling irritable (my default setting these days), I attribute our problems to the millions of brainwashed imbeciles that the U.S. produces so prodigally.

The balkanization of public opinion is, I’m told, an unfortunate byproduct of the information age.  We cherry-pick information to suit our politics.  So it matters little, in the end, what recommendations come of the Vice President’s search for solutions to the gun violence problem.  They will come to naught as Republican lawmakers and their Blue Dog Democrat colleagues alike depend upon favorable NRA endorsements at election time.  Even if Congress does succeed in enacting more restrictive gun laws those laws will inevitably be challenged in the courts, and the federal judiciary has traditionally taken a cautious approach to interpreting the Second Amendment. 

In short, expect little substantive change and more grieving communities until sanity and reason return to our political discourse.       

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar