Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 179
August 20, 2014
“The Politics Of Respectability”
Coates is beyond tired of the continual “transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people”:
Don Imus profanely insults a group of black women. But the real problem is gangsta rap. Trayvon Martin is killed. This becomes a conversation about how black men are bad fathers. Jonathan Martin is bullied mercilessly. This proves that black people have an unfortunate sense of irony.
The politics of respectability are, at their root, the politics of changing the subject—the last resort for those who can not bear the agony of looking their country in the eye. The policy of America has been, for most of its history, white supremacy. The high rates of violence in black neighborhoods do not exist outside of these facts—they evidence them.
Ioffe likewise addresses the “troubling self-flagellation in Ferguson’s black community”:
Respectability, in essence, is about policing the behavior in your community to make sure people are behaving “properly,” so as to not attract unwelcome attention from whites—“with ‘properly’ being a normatively white middle class presentation,” says [political scientist Michael] Dawson. In feminist discourse, a similar phenomenon among women is described as internalizing the patriarchal gaze. That is, women see themselves as the men in charge want to see them—feminine, sexy, pliant—and then behave and dress accordingly. Respectability is the same thing, but with blacks internalizing the white gaze. …
In some ways, this is an understandable response: If you are in the minority, and are disadvantaged and exposed to danger because of it, it is natural to try to minimize the downsides by trying to live according to the laws of the ruling majority and not call attention to one’s differences from them. It also provides a modicum of comfort, a sense that one can have control over the amount of discrimination one is exposed to even when in fact it is out of your control. “There’s good empowerment and false empowerment,” says [Jelani ] Cobb. “But if you think that the problem is within us, then at least it gives you the idea that you have the capacity to change it.” It also sidesteps the issue of institutionalized racism, the real reason for the fact that, in Chicago, blacks and Latinos were four times more likely to be stopped by the police than whites. “Really, what we’re dealing with is racism that is entrenched, and that we have limited capacity to determine how much of it we’re exposed to in our lives,” says Cobb.
Reading Your Way Through Life: More Reader Reax
After asking readers about the novels, poems, and short stories that have meant the most to them, the response has been so affirming – at a time when we all wonder about the future of reading, writing, and publishing, it’s good to be reminded of why those questions matter at all. Many more of you have been in touch with us since Monday, for which I’m grateful. One reader writes:
For me, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities has been that understanding, consoling companion you wrote of. I came across it fresh out of high school, and I remember feeling like these little prose poems were systematically presenting all my own faults and shitty tendencies to me – but so beautifully and carefully articulated that I couldn’t help feeling proud of identifying with them. It followed me through university, across a couple continents, and it’s rare now that I go more than a month without opening the copy beside my bed, seeking comfort in its perfectly precise bittersweetness. The book opens (sort of) by evoking, then puncturing, the same nostalgic feeling I now often try to get out of rereading it:
The special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
And it ends with what still probably amounts to the full extent of my theology:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
Thanks for giving the good stuff space!
Another writes:
I love the idea of sharing favorite passages and poems. While I think the notion of consolation, that finding previously unknown common ground in the world with a person you have never met is an element of the encounter with literature, I have long been suspect of the healthiness of such experiences, whether they are “good for a person.” We often hear that reading literature is “good for you,” that it produces all sorts of desirable qualities, but this has never resonated with me. Indeed, I find it specious.
Literature is dangerous. I don’t consider it consolation but rather a deeply destabilizing experience in which my lens through which I interpret the world is disrupted, in which the safe world of understanding that I have constructed is broken into by another soul, intruded upon violently and the protective conceptual and interpretative structures I have fashioned fall away and I am left bare with nothing but the words of another beating throughout my head. I don’t think connecting with Hamlet has been “good for me.” It ripped my life apart and torched my understandings of the world. Far from leading to consolation, it made me distraught and vulnerable. This is what good literature does. This is what the communion you spoke of does.
But anyway, enough of me. On to my passage. This is a passage from Swann’s Way, Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time. Very few works help one “see the world with fresh eyes” quite like Proust’s masterpiece. It sets the world aflame. There are countless passages I could choose from this work – the episode of the madeleine and the description of the hawthorns stand out immediately – however, I’m going to go for Swann’s experience of hearing the “little phrase” of the (fictional) composer Vinteuil’s music.
Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical
pleasures, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. Perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be obliterated, if we return to nothingness. But so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state in which we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has just been lit, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which even the memory of the darkness has vanished. In that way Vinteuil’s phrase, like some theme, say, in Tristan, which represents to us also a certain emotional accretion, had espoused our mortal state, had endued a vesture of humanity that was peculiarly affection. Its destiny was linked to the future, to the reality of the human soul, of which it was one of the most special and distinctive ornaments, Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable.”
This isn’t some adolescent form of death denial, of trying to make palatable the reality of the tragic circumstances of human life, nor some Malraux-esque artistic existentialism. I find in it one of the most beautiful evocations of the richness of man’s interior life and how it corresponds with the exterior, the dreams and hopes and imaginings of Swann intertwined irrevocably with a flutter of music. This is Proust at his best and what puts him up there with Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.
I should add that I wasn’t trying to contribute to the trope that literature is “good for you,” and I’m glad for this pushback about what kind of “communion” a reader can have with an author or text. Another reader:
Thanks for asking about favorite passages. This is from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory (which is better than most novels):
Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike
their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then—not in dreams—but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.
This reader revisits a favorite poem:
I too retreat into books when the world is depressing. And the world is depressing quite a bit of the time, so I am reading constantly. Recently, while working through a collection of poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, I discovered this gem:
“Heaven-Haven”
(A nun takes the veil)
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
The peace in this poem is palpable. Yes, I have desired to go there as well.
Another shares this story:
My wife died at the age of 49 three years ago, after a long illness. I chose this poem by Pablo Neruda to be read at her funeral. We loved Neruda, and I had read to her Neruda poems when we first dated in the early 1980s. It seemed fitting to close out our relationship with Neruda. Every few months I find myself rereading it, and it brings back the moment she died with me next to her, as she softly stopped breathing, her pain and suffering finally released. The poem has no title.
And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; Your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move
After, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
Here’s our first Orwell reference:
The following passage from 1984 has stayed with me, always. A reminder that there is hope in dystopian times:
Years ago – how long was it? Seven years it must be – he had dreamed that he was walking through a pitch-dark room. And someone sitting to one side of him had said as he passed: ‘We shall meet in the place where
there is no darkness.’ It was said very quietly, almost casually – a statement, not a command. He had walked on without pausing. What was curious was that at the time, in the dream, the words had not made much impression on him. It was only later and by degrees that they had seemed to take on significance. He could not now remember whether it was before or after having the dream that he had seen O’Brien for the first time, nor could he remember when he had first identified the voice as O’Brien’s. But at any rate the identification existed. It was O’Brien who had spoken to him out of the dark.
Winston had never been able to feel sure – even after this morning’s flash of the eyes it was still impossible to be sure whether O’Brien was a friend or an enemy. Nor did it even seem to matter greatly. There was a link of understanding between them, more important than affection or partisanship. ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,’ he had said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true.
Another reader writes:
The book I return to again and again is Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. Reasons: Wallace Stegner. The opening sentence. Friendship. Madison. Battell Pond. Sally’s polio. Growing old. When I’m blue, this book just makes me feel better about life.
But there is one passage that is perhaps my most favorite, one that I return to over and over. At the end of chapter 4 in Part II, Larry and Sally are talking at the end of a day spent in the Italian countryside that featured a difficult encounter with an injured laborer.
“When you remember today, what will you remember best, the spring countryside, the company of friends, or Piero’s Christ and that workman with the mangled hand?”
She thought a minute. “All of it,” she said. “It wouldn’t be complete or real if you left out any part of it, would it?”
“Go to the head of the class,” I said.
It reminds me of Buechner’s line about how “in the last analysis, all moments are key moments.”
I was waiting for someone to mention the following story:
Joyce’s “The Dead,” and particularly that sublime final paragraph. Enough has been written about it, and I’ve no desire to earn a Poseur Alert. But I’ve always felt that our existence – its bleakness and its possibility – is perfectly captured in this word-painting’s layers of textured feeling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched
sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
That Joyce paints with adverbs (softly, thickly, slowly, faintly) and adjectives (dark, mutinous, lonely, crooked, little, barren, last), which contemporary writers are instructed to avoid, is all he more remarkable and humbling. The “way it feels to be” that Joyce is evoking is nearly conjured by that list of words alone.
Another poetry selection:
It may be cliche, but the last stanza of “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold always calms me (I know it by heart):
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another!
for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Sometimes cliches exist for a reason – that Arnold poem is oft-quoted for a reason, I think. This reader offers a selection from James Baldwin:
I could have chosen from any number of novels, poems, and short stories, but today I’ll go with James Baldwin’s “Sunny’s Blues.” Though a short story, its levels and layers of story and meaning are novelistic and stand up to – in fact, demand – multiple readings. This is one of my favorite passages:
“Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
That passage hits me every time.
Here’s a nod to George Eliot:
This passage at the conclusion of Middlemarch repeatedly pops into my mind and each time it does, I am moved, inspired, comforted, and convicted once again:
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
I was waiting for a Dune reference, too:
I have many favorite passages from many different books, but the following passage from Frank Herbert’s Dune has followed me since I first read the novel as a kid some 40 years ago. It has gotten me through more than one sticky situation:
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
This reader is the first to mention a play, and also points to a fitting poem with which to conclude:
These lines at the very end of the play “My Dinner With Andre” have intrigued me for 30-some years now, a reminder of how easy one can miss the person – with all his or her mystery and sacredness – by getting caught up instead with that person’s label:
[P]eople hang on to these images of father, mother, husband, wife … because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean? A wife. A husband. A son. A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?
Also, this poem by Wendell Berry, for its soulful, anarchic in-your-facedness. These days I lean on the line “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts” like a crutch:
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
More of your selections will be posted in the days ahead. Keep them coming to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Policing The Police With Cameras, Ctd
Ferguson is exploring outfitting its officers with dash and body cameras. Sara Libby points out a problem San Diego has had with its body cams:
Here in San Diego, our scandal-plagued police department has begun outfitting some officers with body cameras, and the City Council has approved a plan to roll out hundreds more. Officers wearing the cameras were present during at least two shootings earlier this year. Yet we’re still not any closer to knowing what happened in those chaotic moments—whether the perpetrators can be easily identified, what kind of interactions the officers had with those present, nothing.
That’s because the department claims the footage, which is captured by devices financed by city taxpayers and worn by officers on the public payroll, aren’t public records. Our newsroom’s request for footage from the shootings under the California Public Records Act was denied. Once footage becomes part of an investigation, the department says it doesn’t have to release them. SDPD also said during the pilot phase of the camera program that it doesn’t even have to release footage from the cameras after an investigation wraps.
Kriston Capps sees limits to what police cameras can accomplish in Ferguson:
A survey of the available research conducted by the Office of Justice Programs Diagnostic Center shows that most of the claims about police body cameras have not been fully tested, while many of the consequences for law-enforcement agencies, labor unions, and communities have not even been explored.
But city leaders have other, better, more immediate options if they truly want to “demonstrate the transparency of our city departments.” Namely, leaders in Ferguson should require officers to put their badges back on their vests and ask the Federal Aviation Administration to put the news choppers back in the air.
T.C. Sottek expresses more skepticism:
Body cameras would be a welcome improvement for many in Ferguson, but even dash cameras, used by other police departments across the United States, haven’t been installed there. The city’s police chief revealed last week that the department purchased two dash cameras and body cameras, but never installed them due to cost.
Scott Shackford, for his part, thinks cameras may help. He points out that Rialto, California “has made national news for making officers wear vest cameras, reducing the use of force by police and complaints against the police.” Earlier Dish on the cameras-for-cops debate here.
How Far Will Obama’s Iraq War Expand? Ctd
Saletan chronicles how the limited intervention in Iraq has already outgrown its original parameters:
In his weekly address on Aug. 9, Obama added a third mission to the military agenda: “We will protect our citizens. We will work with the international community to address this humanitarian crisis. We’ll help prevent these terrorists from having a permanent safe haven from which to attack America.” He repeated that point in a press conference: “We will continue to provide military assistance and advice to the Iraqi government and Kurdish forces as they battle these terrorists, so that the terrorists cannot establish a permanent safe haven.” That’s a huge undertaking. Any land controlled by ISIS can be construed as a safe haven. Does Obama plan to drive ISIS out of places such as Fallujah, which it held for months while the United States looked on? Does he plan to push ISIS all the way back to Syria?
Obama hasn’t forgotten all the principles that limited his commitment. He continues to insist that the solution to Iraq’s crisis is political, that Iraqis must achieve that solution themselves, and that putting U.S. troops on the ground creates a dangerous rationale for additional deployments to protect them. But 12 days into the military campaign, he’s showing signs of slippage. He’d better watch himself.
Larison stresses that mission creep is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to such interventions:
Once a president has committed to using force in a foreign conflict, all of the effective political pressure is on the side of escalation.
Having conceded that the U.S. should be involved militarily in a conflict, the president is bombarded with demands for deeper involvement in order to pursue the illusion of victory. If he doesn’t agree to these demands, he will be steadily pilloried in the media until he does, and any adverse development in the affected country will usually be attributed to insufficient American involvement. Since the initial decision to intervene was driven in part by the same sort of pressure, it is more than likely that the president will keep yielding to calls to “do more.”
Keating wonders what “mission accomplished” will mean in Iraq this time around:
The cynical answer is that the goal seems to be for Iraq to become just stable enough that we can go back to not paying attention to it. And I suspect that in the end, that may have more to do with how long the U.S. media continues to treat Iraq as a major story than with what’s actually happening there.
And Benjamin Friedman argues that “Americans, the president included, need to admit being out of Iraq potentially means letting it burn”:
The collapse of the fiction that U.S. forces stabilized Iraq before exiting forces us to confront the unpleasant contradictions in U.S. goals there. We want to avoid the tragic costs of U.S. forces trying to suppress Iraq’s violence. We want a stable Iraqi federal government and we want Iraqis to live peacefully. Each of those goals conflicts with the others. Even if the new Prime Minister is amenable to Sunni demands, U.S. bombing is unlikely to allow Iraqis to destroy ISIL and its allies. Large-scale violence will likely continue. Suppressing insurgency will likely require resumption of U.S. ground operations. And even that, we know, may not help much.
(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Grand Jury, Limited Justice?
Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, may be facing a grand jury. Jonathan Cohn explains:
Here’s how the process will work, according to criminal law experts based or practicing in Missouri. The grand jury, which consists of twelve people plucked from the local population, will sit around a table in a deliberation room somewhere in the county courthouse building. It’s the prosecutor’s show: He will present the case, starting with an overview and then bringing forward evidence. But it’s not like a trial. There will be no attorney for the other side, no judge, not even a bailiff. For most of the time, they will be alone except for the prosecutor and, on occasion, a witness who will be providing testimony.
The idea behind a grand jury is that it serves as the people’s voice—in effect, a democratic check on the enormous power of prosecutors to bring charges and force people into trials. A grand jury can be a truly deliberative body if it wants. Members can ask for witnesses to appear and testify—and ask those witnesses questions directly. Grand juries can also control their proceedings, deciding how much evidence to hear and when, finally, to vote on charges. In Missouri, it takes at least nine jurors to deliver an indictment, which is known as a “true bill.” Any less and the jury reaches a verdict of “no true bill,” which means no indictments.
Amanda Taub interviews former federal prosecutor Alex Little on what a grand jury will mean for this case:
The only question the grand jury must answer is whether there is probable cause to believe a crime has occurred. That’s a very low standard, and it’s almost always met when the District Attorney seeks charges.
“So when a District Attorney says, in effect, ‘we’ll present the evidence and let the grand jury decide,”‘that’s malarkey. If he takes that approach, then he’s already decided to abdicate his role in the process as an advocate for justice. At that point, there’s no longer a prosecutor in the room guiding the grand jurors, and — more importantly — no state official acting on behalf of the victim, Michael Brown.
“Then, when you add to the mix that minorities are notoriously underrepresented on grand juries, you have the potential for nullification — of a grand jury declining to bring charges even when there is sufficient probable cause. That’s the real danger to this approach.”
Joe Coscarelli points out that the same procedure is taking place in the case of Eric Garner’s killing:
In Staten Island, District Attorney Daniel Donovan said in a statement, “I have determined that it is appropriate to present evidence regarding the circumstances of [Eric Garner's] death to a Richmond County Grand Jury. Yesterday, the Court granted my application for the impaneling of an additional Grand Jury and I intend to utilize that Grand Jury sometime next month to begin presenting evidence on this matter.” In what the medical examiner ruled a homicide, Garner died after being put in what appeared to be an illegal NYPD chokehold during an arrest for selling loose cigarettes.
The move to a grand jury comes after a “careful” review of the evidence, Donovan said.
Angela J.Davis argues we should look beyond just the cops in Ferguson:
Bob McCulloch is the prosecutor for St. Louis County and has held the position for 23 years. McCulloch has stated that he will present the evidence of Michael Brown’s killing to a grand jury, but members of the African-American community have expressed concern about his ability to be fair. There is always such a concern in cases involving the investigation of police officers. Police officers don’t technically work for prosecutors, but they are definitely part of the prosecution team. They investigate the cases, gather the evidence, and testify as witnesses for the state. Without police officers, prosecutors can’t bring cases or secure convictions. So prosecutors have an inherent conflict of interest when they are considering charges against police officers.
The conflict seems particularly deep-seated in this case. Bob McCulloch’s father was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty when McCulloch was a child. And McCulloch was very critical of Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s decision to place the Missouri State Troopers in charge of security after complaints about the St. Louis police department’s violent attacks on peaceful protestors and journalists. McCulloch called the governor’s decision “shameful” and accused him of “denigrat[ing] the men and women of the county police department.”
Chris Geidner expects lawsuits all around:
“There will be lawsuits up the kazoo,” said Barbara Arnwine, the longtime president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in an interview Sunday evening. “I think you’re going to see ripple after ripple of legal matters here in response to this outrageous situation.”
The first matter will be the potential criminal and civil actions related to Brown’s death. But legal experts also predict possible litigation stemming from the actions taken by police in Ferguson, lawsuits brought by store owners against the police related to looting, and even the imposition of a curfew.
August 19, 2014
Digital Breaks, or “Breaks”
Exactly a year ago, David Roberts of Grist announced that he was taking an internet break, and would return on Labor Day of 2014. Roberts wrote at the time
I am burnt the fuck out.
I spend each day responding to an incoming torrent of tweets and emails. I file, I bookmark, I link, I forward, I snark and snark and snark. All day long. Then, at night, after my family’s gone to bed and the torrent has finally slowed to a trickle and I can think for more than 30 seconds at a stretch, I try to write longer, more considered pieces.
I enjoy every part of this: I enjoy sharing zingers with Twitter all day; I enjoy writing long, wonky posts at night. But the lifestyle has its drawbacks. I don’t get enough sleep, ever. I don’t have any hobbies. I’m always at work. Other than hanging out with my family, it’s pretty much all I do — stand at a computer, immersing myself in the news cycle, taking the occasional hour out to read long PDFs. I’m never disconnected.
It’s doing things to my brain.
So he elected to take a break from internet life. He’s not the first. Disconnecting from the internet has become a little genre onto its own. The most well-known of these disconnections, and the most emblematic, is that of The Verge‘s Paul Miller. And it’s emblematic precisely because of what Miller says didn’t happen– he didn’t get wiser, he didn’t get healthier. He writes,
One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.”
It’s a been a year now since I “surfed the web” or “checked my email” or “liked” anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I’ve managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I’m internet free.
And now I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed to be enlightened. I’m supposed to be more “real,” now. More perfect.
But instead it’s 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of The New Yorker. And now I’m watching Toy Story while I glance occasionally at the blinking cursor in this text document, willing it to write itself, willing it to generate the epiphanies my life has failed to produce.
I didn’t want to meet this Paul at the tail end of my yearlong journey.
This, in my experience, is typical of people who have disconnected: they come back to report that in fact their online selves are more real and more fulfilling, and that really it was their doubts and dissatisfaction with the internet that had been misguided. Some go so far as to say that disconnecting is not actually possible. Miller cites Nathan Jurgensen, who has built a theory of pathology for those who advocate disconnecting. The message is clear: you can take your break, but there is no escape.
Miller is part of what I’ve called, in the past, the internet’s immune system. It’s a facet of online culture whereby even the mildest criticism of digital life attracts reflexive, defensive argument, even though the entire weight of capitalism pushes us to spend more and more time in that digital space. Alan Jacobs recently wrote about this weird fantasy world where Luddites are more powerful than enthusiastic technologists, saying “Where you and I live, of course, technology companies are among the largest and most powerful in the world, our media are utterly saturated with the prophetic utterances of their high priests, and people continually seek high-tech solutions to every imaginable problem, from obesity to road rage to poor reading scores in our schools.” One of my favorite bloggers, Michael Sacasas, has written at length about the odd way in which one of the most powerful economic and cultural forces in the world has come to be defended as if were a powerless underdog. Jurgensen acquits his arguments well, but I always am left wondering: where, exactly, is this perception of threat coming from? From a small handful of people who have disconnected from the internet, in comparison to the millions who spend most of their waking lives online? It’s strange.
I will 100% cop to the fact that I am one of those IRL fetishists that Jurgensen derides. Because for me– for me– the internet is fun and useful but not nearly as moving or important as real life. And I think that, for most people, meeting someone face to face, enjoying their physical presence, is not replicable digitally. But that’s just my perception, and I have no interest in spreading that Gospel. Like Alan, I would like it if online triumphalism was not rendered compulsory by its avatars. What I want to say to others is that if you want to disconnect, you need to really disconnect– you can’t spend your offline time thinking about your old online self. When I read Miller’s piece, it’s unclear to me whether he ever went all the way in his disconnection. Of course the experience will disappoint you if you go offline but keep your online state of mind.
So that’s the real question for Roberts. Were I a betting man, I’d say he comes back and says something similar to Miller– it was cool, I lost some weight, played with my kids, but it wasn’t really a big deal and I better appreciate how the internet makes us “social” now. But the deeper issue is whether he’ll come back having spent that year thinking of all the funny stuff he’d be saying or cool stuff he’d be learning if he were online. If that’s the case, I’m afraid there’s no way disconnecting could ever have satisfied him.
(Photo by Michael Herfort)
A Better Set Of Lies
Rosie Gray flags Russia Today’s new ad campaign:
“The campaign will be comprised of several different posters, and we kicked it off with wild postings in the New York City,” RT spokesperson
Anna Belkina said in an email. “Soon it will be extended to Washington, DC, and London.” … The ads feature a picture of Colin Powell with the tagline: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs, 141,802 civilian deaths. Go to RT.com for the second opinion.” Another poster says, “In case they shut us down on TV, go to RT.com for the second opinion.”
Asked whether RT believes it is in danger of being shut down on American television, Belkina provided a statement from RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan: “Alternative voices, however rare, are often met with fear, hostility and bureaucratic obstructionism in the attempt to stifle them — because they are inconvenient to the establishment. We want the viewers to know that no matter what, RT will remain THE place to go to for that second opinion.”
That’s a well-crafted message, and it illustrates one of the many ways in which the massive missteps of the Bush era are coming back to bite us.
Lies empower lies, and the lies that underpinned the neoconservative project, helped along by a cowed press that parroted them, were inevitably going to create an opening for foreign propaganda outlets and homegrown conspiracy theorists to tell a skeptical public what was “really” going on. When the establishment’s narrative is revealed to be false, that lends credibility to “alternative” narratives, whether they are true or not, and creates a market for anything that contradicts the official line. A deceitful government and a wimpy media make us vulnerable to propaganda. The Obama administration shares some blame for this, but, well, there’s a reason it’s Colin Powell on that poster and not Hillary Clinton.
The most disquieting feature of the poster is that its headline is correct. The foreign propaganda outlets masquerading before American liberals as objective news sources (RT and al-Jazeera in particular, but Iran’s Press TV also comes to mind) are enabled by the fact that when they tell us that our government has lied to us about matters of great magnitude, that thousands have died because of those lies, and that even well-respected mainstream media outlets failed to uncover those lies until it was far too late, whatever else they may be, they’re right about that.
How Do You Fix A Police Department?
Josh Voorhees has suggestions. The feds could step in:
If Holder concludes that there has been a pattern of misconduct by the police—either in the lead-up to Brown’s death or in its aftermath—the president has the ability to force widespread reforms within the department with the help of a law passed in the wake of the Rodney King beating. The provision in question, part of what was officially known as the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, is “one of the most significant” pieces of civil rights legislation passed in the latter part of 20th century, and also one of the most “overlooked,” according to Joe Domanick, the associate director of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Center on Media, Crime, and Justice. The law gives the federal government two options: It can either formally pursue a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Ferguson Police Department by alleging a “pattern and practice” of misconduct or the administration and city officials can enter into what is known as a “consent decree” that would mandate a specific set of reforms that would then be overseen by an independent court-appointed monitor. Faced with the possibility of a costly court battle, most cities have historically taken the path of least resistance and signed on the decree’s dotted lines. Ferguson officials probably wouldn’t buck that trend.
According to Samuel Walker, the emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, such an outcome is “the best hope we have” for turning around the troubled department. The reforms that normally accompany a consent decree “really get at the critical issue here, which is the culture of the department,” Walker says. “Day in and day out, what do officers know they have to do and what do they know that they can get away with?”
He notes that this worked for the LAPD after the Rodney King beating. Cincinnati also successfully changed:
Officers are now trained in low-light situations, like confronting a suspect at night in an alley, as was the case in [Timothy] Thomas’s death. The agreement also created the Citizens Complaint Authority to investigate incidents when officers used serious force. Most importantly, it instructed officers to build relationships with the community by soliciting feedback with residents and using all available information to find solutions to problems before necessarily resorting to a law enforcement response. The ACLU of Ohio, which was one of the signatories of the agreement, hails it as “one of the most innovative plans ever devised to improve police-community relations.”
These new policies have not fixed all of the racial injustices in Cincinnati, but they have improved them.
Jonah Goldberg recommends hiring minority cops:
I am as against racial quotas as anyone, but the idea that police forces shouldn’t take into account the racial or ethnic make-up of their communities when it comes to hiring has always struck me as bizarre. A Chinese-American cop will probably have an easier time in Chinatown than a Norwegian-American cop. A bilingual Hispanic cop will have similar advantages in a mostly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. When my dad was a kid in the Bronx, it was not uncommon for a cop to give a teenager a well-intentioned smack as a warning and leave it at that. But forget the smack. Today, in many neighborhoods, if a white cop even talks harshly to a black kid, it might immediately be seen as a racial thing. If a black cop said the exact same things, it might be received differently.
But historian Heather Ann Thompson notes that integrated police forces don’t always solve the problem of racist policing:
Even if police departments are integrated — certainly this has been proven in Detroit, and in other cities where you have many, many more black police officers — the problem is that police are charged with policing the community and particularly policing the poor black community. The act of policing places the police in opposition to this community. Even if the officers are black, that does not guarantee that there’s going to be smooth police-community relations. Fundamentally, the problem is that there is so much targeted policing in these neighborhoods.
Israel Has Been Singled Out By Israel’s Defenders, Ctd
Continuing the conversation about our culpability in Israel’s actions, this email sums up a lot of reader sentiment:
Your explanation is valid as far as Americans go, since they provide so much financial and more importantly, diplomatic, support to Israel. That’s not true for people in other countries. As just one example, let’s look at the civilian casualties and other atrocities in Syria, which are orders of magnitude greater than those caused by Israel. Did the Latin American countries who recalled their ambassadors from Israel to protest civilian casualties in Gaza similarly recall their ambassadors from Syria? Have there been any mass protest demonstrations at Syrian embassies in Europe? We can look at other recent atrocities and find similar absences of outrage around the world, yet consciences everywhere seem to miraculously awaken when Israel is involved.
I am a supporter of Israel as a country, but not of many of the policies of its government. Many of Israel’s actions in the West Bank are not only immoral and illegal (and illegal under Israeli law, yet they go unpunished), they are also stupid and self-defeating. Far from asking to end to criticisms of Israel, I join in many of them, provided they are based on an informed understanding of the situation. Too often they are not – people see some footage of civilian casualties, read some blog posts, and are suddenly instant experts on the Middle East. I expect people who offer an opinion to know what they are talking about. When I hear mischaracterizations (or disregard) of Hamas’ ultimate aims, ignorance of the chronology and reasons for Israel’s blockade of Gaza, wholesale swallowing of Hamas’ propaganda re civilian vs. military casualty figures, and most infuriating of all, minimization of the threat of invasion/terror tunnels and the effect of thousands of rockets used exclusively against civilian targets in Israel, I don’t see much reason to value their opinions.
Here is the fundamental question we’re considering: is Israel the same as other countries? Or is it different from other countries? The answer from my critics seems to switch depending on which would be more useful for defending Israel at that moment.
Though many have complained that I use terms like “killing children,” no credible source doubts that Israel has killed hundreds of civilians in Gaza in this most recent campaign, or that many of them have been children. Instead, we are still to defend Israel despite that fact because Israel is different, because it is the only democracy in the region and a more moral nation than the ones we identify as bad actors. And yet here we have this emailer defending Israel because it is better than Syria. That hardly seems like living up to the standard of the region’s only democracy. “Better than the Assad regime” does not strike me as a particularly enthusiastic endorsement.
So which is it? Are we required to support Israel because it is a more advanced, democratic, moral nation? Or are we expected to hold it to an identical standard as Assad’s Syria? You can’t have it both ways. If you think Israel exists on a higher moral plane than its neighbors, then you have to insist that it act morally. For all of the many ways in which Israel’s democracy has been undermined by the rise of ultra-nationalists and ethnic supremacists in the past decades, it remains subject to democratic review in a way that Syria’s regime simply doesn’t. Israel could become a freer and more just nation through loud and committed democratic engagement, but that can’t happen if we excuse all of its bad deeds in the name of defending it.
(Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
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