I can’t top the present: Kerry Taser Incident

Originally posted to my Tripod Blog on October 7, 2007 at 2:02 EDT

On the title article for the Green Tortoise and Other Travesties. I wrote “I want to write “can you imagine our surprise … but I think that I know the answer to that question” – which you probably can if you’ve watched the news at any time in the last few years. “Don’t Taze me, bro” … right? By the way, if you haven’t witnessed that gem of an incident, a few views of it 

are worth a few million lines of spin.

By the way – notice how Kerry kept on talking in response to the questions asked, even as the man is getting tasered, as if nothing was happening. Not a word about it, not even “officers, is that really necessary”; considering what a president will have to deal with in office, wouldn’t you want one to have a little more of a presence than the robotic one we saw up on that podium? If one can’t go off one’s script and handle a situation well enough to deal with a few unruly rent-a-cops, just how well is one going to be able to handle a real crisis? Or worse, what would it say about him if he looked at what was happening before him, and saw nothing questionable about it, nothing that merited the asking of a few questions? What, for that matter, is just that reaction telling us about so many of our own people?

When somebody’s act of crying out for help is referred to as “resisting arrest” and he is electroshocked into silence in response, and the response of his countrymen is to either creatively cut the tape to make the response of the authorities look more reasonable as it was or to laugh about the man’s cries of pain as if they were the funniest thing imaginable, and keep going back to this wonderful joke over the weeks that followed, my question about the charades incident mentioned in that post on my other blog has been answered. Of course you can imagine such an incident happening, but I should consider myself extremely fortunate if more than a small handful of you can see why some of us would find it objectionable, which illustrates why one reason why petty despotism is worth opposing – because its acceptance conditions people to not resist when worse comes along.

Not that the pettiness is always so petty. In the course of the clearly unreasonable and unconstitutional search I and my classmates were subjected to, one of us was found to have an unopened beer bottle, and Chicago’s finest threatened to press charges against him for underaged drinking if any of us objected. Today, they probably would have gotten a more confrontational response out of any of us, but as used as we were to the notion that when one saw the police on duty during the night, that the sight of them was reason to feel more safe instead of less, we were too stunned to respond. Our player of charades was hauled off and we never saw him again.

That’s what life in Chicago was already getting to be about, and for many of us, in the years that followed, it certainly didn’t get any more free. If anything, maybe a lot less so, because while my class was being stepped on by those in power, at least the thought did occur to us that authority was being abused and that this wasn’t the natural order of things. Today’s freshmen, if they ever harbor such thoughts, seldom show any signs of having them. Indeed, Postmodernism being what it is, one might well wonder how they’d even conceptualize the idea of having a reasonable objection to how somebody was using his power. We are left, in such a conceptual world, with the inability to formulate an objection to a free-for-all that, with only the mildest irony, fails to provide freedom to much of anybody.

Some, when they read the words “recovering libertarian” on the side panel of my journal at Blogger, will think “oh, a former would-be corporate shill”, and while that’s certainly what Libertarianism has tended to degenerate into during the outsourcing and downsizing eras, that isn’t what it was in years past. It used to be something that came out of the recognition that far more often than not, government and other authority was nothing more than the biggest bully on the block, not motivated by anything more than the sheer joy that would come from abusing one’s power in order to prove to oneself and others than one had it, and that bullies ought not be any more empowered than necessary. If one wishes to argue, as some have, that Libertarianism has hijacked Conservatism, it is equally true that Opportunism has hijacked Libertarianism; our variety came with the recognition that there was such a thing as the individual’s duty to his fellow man. We just didn’t think that we needed the government to act as our supervisor when we carried out that duty.

Return to the Green Tortoise and Other Travesties
Return to Joseph Dunphy’s Myopic Midnight Special

~ by josephdunphy on January 28, 2008.