Anarchy in the USA

Sacco & Vanzetti
When I was still more boy than man I had an infatuation with anarchy. I had just outgrown traditional American poetry—I Hear America Singing, The Gift Outright, etc. …and was getting intoxicated on the Beats. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who I would one day get to meet and interview, was one of my favorites, and his poem I Am Waiting was one of my favorites, and this verse from I Am Waiting was my absolute favorite:

I am waiting for my case to come up   and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting   for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier   and I am waiting   for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder
What is it about anarchy that is so appealing to the young, especially the young and male? My man Norman O. Brown, drawing as he does from Freud, believes it’s less about a dangerous political philosophy and more about the psychological need of the young to overthrow the authority of the parents, especially the male parent. My father was far less authoritarian than most, which is why I suppose my “Up with Anarchy” stage was brief. I eventually grew into a more mature understanding of anarchy as a civic tantrum, thrown by those with no patience for the imperfect, plodding, frustrating, often unjust course of human events. Anarchism is the political equivalent of tossing over the board when you look around and see everyone else in the game seems to own the railroads, the utilities, and hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk and all you have is shitty little Baltic Avenue. The romance of anarchy is that it will, as Ferlinghetti writes, yield a "rebirth of wonder." The reality is, as history has shown, it leads to rule by lawless gangs...a Hobbesian landscape where bullies prevail. 
Lots of talk in the air these days about anarchy in the streets of America. Last week--with more reckless cop shootings of black men and the retaliatory murderous ambush of white police by a deranged black man--injected the talk with a near-lethal dose of blood and tears. It wasn’t exactly anarchy, but did seem like a prelude to it…or rather a sequel to America’s danse macbre with anarchy from the early decades of the 20th century. Back then it wasn’t black lives that didn’t seem to matter, but Italian lives. The Nob holds a special affection for most things Italian, and it’s hard not to feel sympathetic to the anarchism that was widespread throughout the immigrant Italian communities of the Northeast through the pre- and post-World I period. The anarchists, many of them among the most literate of the immigrants, were reacting radically to the disillusionment they experienced in their encounter with the reality of life in this somewhat over-promised land—the job discrimination, the impoverishment, the prejudice, the brutality of the established order as manifest in the thuggish behavior of the police. There was neither ambiguity nor moderation in their reaction. They openly called themselves anarchists, printed leaflets calling for anarchy, manufactured bombs in their homes and exploded them in and around public buildings, and shot cops and other officials dead. They openly dedicated themselves to an incessant violent assault on what they believed to be a corrupt and oppressive system.
Out of that period emerged one of the most famous murder trials in American history…the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists accused of killing two innocent men during a payroll robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. After a controversial trial filled with dubious evidence, contradictory testimony and presided over by an openly prejudiced judge, Sacco and Vanzetti were convicted of first-degree murder on July 14, 1921…95 years from this posting. Their convictions aroused worldwide street protests and ringing condemnations from some of the most famous names of the time. Among them, this from H.G. Wells:

The guilt or innocence of these two Italians is not the issue that has excited the opinion of the world. Possibly they were actual murderers, and still more possibly they knew more than they would admit about the crime.... Europe is not "retrying" Sacco and Vanzetti or anything of the sort. It is saying what it thinks of Judge Thayer. Executing political opponents as political opponents after the fashion of Mussolini and Moscow we can understand, or bandits as bandits; but this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to be a new and very frightening line for the courts of a State in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.

Like Wells, my concern is not with the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti…that issue has been chewed over much of the past 100 years. Also, like Wells, I’m more concerned with the broader issue raised when he writes, “this business of trying and executing murderers as Reds, or Reds as murderers, seems to be a new and very frightening line for the courts of a State in the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.” To bring this statement more in line with our current paroxysm of injustice, allow me to rewrite Wells thusly: this business of trying and executing on the street illegal cigarette vendors; people possibly guilty of robbing cigarillos and walking wrongways on a city street; people walking around with toy guns; people walking around with real, but legal guns; people playing music too loud; people you don’t like walking through your neighborhood, people stopped for routine traffic violations; people not showing proper submissiveness or respect…it all seems to be a new and very frightening turn for the courts, the legislatures, and the citizens of the most powerful and civilized Union on earth to pursue.

Italian immigrants, barely recognized as white, protest injustice.Due to my heritage, I guess, I have a wide circle of friends and relatives of both Irish and Italian descent. I must repeat that it fills me with shame and embarrassment when I see so many of them jump on the redneck bandwagon to condemn black protestors, be they Black Lives Matter or not. Those of us descended from Italians and Irish… people who took to the streets both peacefully and violently to fight oppression…should empathize better than most that the struggle is often neither easy nor orderly (I'm looking at you, Rudy Efffin Giuliani).

And here’s the struggle…it’s against a de facto, insidious anarchy that hides beneath the veneer of law and order. It's a law and order that allows gangs of lobbyists and elites to roam over a Hobbesian landscape of their own design. It's a law and order that says these are the rules for everybody, but some can break them and some can’t...and we decide. These covert anarchists look at the game board and the only thing that matters to them is the “Get Out of Jail Free” card because for them controlling crime and punishment is what matters most. And they'll tip over the game board, too, if they see anyone they view as underserving getting their dark and dirty hands on that card.