Handwriting

I don’t remember my first writing lessons. The bubble and squeak of my first letters, those wobbly circles and jerkily disproportionate lines which flowed out of my pencil onto the cheap, thick, lined paper – I can only envision them through their descendants, the degenerate scribble of my declining years, where the bubbles are less bubblicious and have been through the rat race. But I can remember the devises that went into writing – that paper, the thick lines spaced just so and the dotted line between them, the thin, bright yellow pencils with the little intaglio number near the metal band the holds the erasor, and the sharpeners. The little oblong plastic box with the hole in one end for the pencils and the two evil little blades that would bite into the cedar-y matter of the blunt end and shave off perfect little fans of thin thin wood. As well as a dusting of pencil lead, which would somehow get on my fingers.

There was a subtle competition, I remember, between the brilliant hand pencil sharpener and the noiser larger unit you would usually find at the front of the classroom, bolted to a corner of the teacher’s closet. That was crank run, which meant using your whole arm to turn it. It had a thick plastic disc with different sized holes through which to stick different thicknesses of pencil. Somehow, I associated that pencil sharpener with industry – with steel mills and tanks and such. It would make much more racket, which would draw attention, especially if you were sharpening a pencil during a test.
This, then, was the entourage, the court around the monarchical activity of calligraphy. In my case, mere graphie – I have never been a beautiful writer. In the third grade, when we started having spelling tests, I did poorly – it was my poorest subject on the report card. For one thing, I had a sovereign contempt for the homework, which bored me. Lists of words to spell seemed infinitely less interesting than lists of words, such as you would find in the dictionary. I was always a dictionary stan. I don’t remember any real problem with my handwriting as far as teachers were concerned. But it didn’t satisfy me none, as I got older. I wanted to be able to write the address on an envelope with a real piss elegance. I wanted my various scribblings to look more intense in my notebooks. I wanted some famous dead writer’s handwriting, but I only ever have had my own.

In France, I am discovering, handwriting is not dead. One of the standard thumbsucker topics in the U.S. is: Is the computer killing handwriting? The wee-est toddler in Manhattan, we are assured, knows her way around the keyboard. There are keyboards in Paris, even portable phones, but the school system is curiously centered on handwriting. I’ve been assured that Adam must practice his handwriting if he is to get anywhere in the terribly hierarchic French school system. Parents even show each other specimens of their children’s handwriting, worriedly.

I worked, as a grad student in philosophy, on Derrida – but it has only been in the last few years, experiencing the French education system, that I quite understood the social context of Derrida’s emphasis on writing and the place of logocentrism. For the French, the dictée is at the heart of the curriculum. There really is no American equivalent. Teachers in my elementary school never gave us set speeches that we were supposed to listen to and write, that I can remember. Of course, I recognize in the dicteé a genealogical kinship with the classical educational system of the Greeks and the Romans, but the American school system broke away from that family tree when Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod – or something like that. Americans have always been, they like to think, practical.

This has lead to a curious neglect of the oral-to-hand culture in the States. I am rather pleased with the ingrained habit of the dictée and how it organizes, subtly, the whole French system. The hand, here, still leaves its mark on the text. But try as I may, I can’t get too anxious about Adam’s handwriting. I’m just too American.

Jesus’ politics.and mine

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As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

There's an  odd strain in the Gospels that shows Jesus's affinity with outcast women. This has been massively understated, since of course churches are male-controlled, but once you think of the society in which Jesus existed, the uniqueness of the protagonist of the Gospels comes into focus. One must always remember not to substitute the bourgeois society of 2020 for the Eastern Mediterranean culture in which Jesus lived. The status of women in that culture was complex. An anthropological generalization about these societies is that  the mother, at a certain age, within a household that often contained grown up sons and their wives, had a large tacit power, even as their recognized political power was null. This power was often exercised massively against the  wives of their sons. Within this society, freefloating women were rare - the prostitute, the unmarried daughter, the woman who'd outlived her entire family, these were types for whom Jesus had an affinity.  It was the outcasts, those who had a position at the bottom of society - the quintessential last - to whom he was called. 

In the only gospel story of Jesus losing an argument, it is a Samaritan woman who rebukes him for making a typically ethno-racist comment to her when she needed healing: that wonderful phrase about how even the dogs under the table were allowed to eat the master's crumbs. That immediately went to the heart of the Jesus's hypocrisy in rejecting her, and he owned it. This is a remarkable instance in the vita, for it is unusual for the revered hero, the sage or savior, to feature in a story of loss of face. But the remarkable thing about this story is that it questions the worth of face.   I do not remember the name of the critic who remarked, about Henny Pollit in  Christina Stead's The Man who Loved Children, that this character understood the  essential "outlawery" of women - the kind of soul formed literally of being outside the law, which refused to recognize in her a sovereign person - but I like that phrase. From whatever source inside himself, Jesus recognized some essential virtue in that outlawery too. This sensitivity to the outlaw prefigures a radical doubt about the law. Paul wasn't making this up entirely.    

Donc, donc, there is that. On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about interpreting - surely he was referring to a narrow street in Jerusalem! Cause otherwise what he said is too terrible! But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Franklin Graham, are going straight to hell. (Although to be clear, I do think the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth is a metaphysical place, within the individual and collective consciousness - just as  geographical coordinates of the Kingdom of Heaven are within you). It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulchers, filthy on the inside with death. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go the inferno route.  . It is, of course, my burden that, as a non-Christian I am probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just my luck. Although God has infinite mercy, and I can't imagine him so cruel as to put me next to Billy Graham's deluded son. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the membership of the political class, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.

poem

Too late I saw I’d got the wrong end
thinking that the dough and good legs
would always be enough. I turned away from wisdom
and subscribed to 1000 cable channels.

“I will also laugh at your calamities
I will mock when your fear cometh she said,
tagging another city gate
before the heat closed in with the tasers.
No big deal, I thought, another extra gone.

Sometimes though at precisely 4 a.m.
I remember that I haven’t paid the ransom yet.
- Karen Chamisso

Balzac's World

At the beginning of Balzac’s l’envers de l’histoire contemporaine – one of the most brilliant title ever -the narrator, who is easily recognizable as the ever voluble Balzac, places his still unnamed protagonist at the “heart of Paris”:

“In 1836, on a beautiful September evening, a man of about 30 years of age leaned on the parapet of the quai from which onne can see both the Seine flowing downriver past the Jardin des Plannttes to Notre Dame and,   upriver, the vast riverine perspective as it passes by the Louvre.”

The heart of a city changes more than the heart of a mortal, according to Balzac’s contemporary, Baudelaire. But this perspective is still there – I biked past it yesterday. True, the Notre Dame is a half charred skeleton, and the Louvre is presently defaced with an enormous advertising placard for some miserable luxury object, the kind of neo-liberal graffiti we see, now, in all the world’s hotspots, from corporation named stadiums to the university buildings named for odious tax avoiding plutocrats, philanthropists all.

Yet Paris is a stubborn fact. As is Montpellier, Nimes, Arles, Aix-en-Province, Nice, etc. This stubbornness makes for some despair among the neoliberal set: doesn’t this mean the heart has stopped? Where’s the disruption? Change for its own sake, imposed by above, permits rent-seeking possibilities beyond the wildest dreams of Balzac’s most superhuman speculator, and that’s what its all about. It is not hard to see that we are living, extras all, in the season of their fever dream – from the horribly incompetent Trump to the horribly incompetent Macron, all that is solid melts into the pipeline between the central banks and the investment banks. Ghost financial instruments and watered stocks, such is the economy of the movers and the shakers. Outside, corona takes care of the disposables, while party-on is the motto of the lesser bourgeoisie, that aspirational group who haven’t made it and won’t, but who long for a simulacrum of the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.   The aspirational zombies of the apocalypse of pseudo-freedom – Balzac would have enjoyed them immensely.

Or to put it differently: it is still Balzac’s world. The sentimentality of Dickens has degenerated into greeting card slogans that are now ironic even to their purchasers and their receivers. George Sand’s socialism has disappeared. Flaubert’s contempt for stupidity has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the most flatheaded reactionaries possible. But Balzac, I thought, passing by that quai and that perspective, lives.

The police function in a system that reaches beyond the police.

Cast your mind back to every Western you have ever seen. Most of them, I’d bet, featured or included a sheriff. The sheriff “kept the peace” but, if you think about it, never stopped a single wagon, carriage or horserider for speeding. Consequently, the sheriff never examined a single wagon, carriage or saddle bag for “contrabrand” material.

In Sara Seo’s Policing the Open Road, the burden of the narrative is on  the legal construction that allowed police, around the Prohibition era, more power over the car than the Customs officer had over the incoming ship – that is, police were allowed to make reasonable searches of vehicles without a warrant, and with the standard of “reasonableness” amounting to: what the policeman says.

The interesting subtheme, here, is that policing followed technological and legal changes, which intersected with an already existing hierarchy that separated the respectable (white) people and the non-respectable (working class, black, immigrant) people.

“Certainly, traffic laws, like prohibition laws, established mala prohibita—acts that were wrong only by virtue of statute. No inherent sense of morality deemed, for example, driving at the speed of twenty-two miles per hour a per se evil like murder or theft.”

Prohibition and the policing of the automobile came together in court cases that started to allow a growing police force a greatly expanded amount of power not only to regulate the traffic, but to search cars on the instinct of the police.

The addition of police union power beginning with the Civil Rights era added to this police power. Even so, the police would not have become the community’s ruler instead of their servant if the political power of the unions had not been flexed to take the power directly away from local law.

A good example of how the system works is found in Ohio.

On  August 12, 2017. 25-year-old Richard Hubbard III was pulled over on E 228th St. just before 10:30 a.m. for "a moving/traffic violation” by Michael Amiott. “Hubbard was ordered to exit the car and face away so he could be taken into custody. Police say Hubbard refused, and a violent struggle ensued. The video that was captured showed Amiott taking Hubbard to the ground, punching him multiple times.”

Thus far, a typical instance of the combo of race – Hubbard is black – the auto – Hubbard had committed a minor traffic infraction and had an expired license – and police authority – the taking into custody of a person without a licence is extraordinary. I speak from authority, having once been stopped by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction and then being told that I would get a major fine if I didn’t renew my license, which was out of date. At no point did the white policeman think that I was going to go down with him to the police station. Cause I’m white.

The video made Amiott’s action undeniable, although the police issued the standard pr piece about how Hubbard had violently resisted. It did not explain why Hubbard was taken into custody – this was, for the police, a simple norm. They get to decide who to take into custody. That power has been given to them when they were given untrammeled power over the streets.

In the next step in this drama, the town of Euclid reluctantly responded by suspending and then firing Michael Amiott. The mayor referenced further instances in Amiott’s record. Amiott’s case was then taken up by the Fraternal Order of Police, even though the Euclid police department is represented, technically, by another union. See this site for an indepth look at Euclid policing and race, including other violent incidences involving Amiott. (see all parts of Series 3)

In 1983, Ohio – like many Midwestern states with a strong union presence – instituted a  collective bargaining law that outlawed strikes in favor of arbitration. The driver, at that time, was the fear of teacher strikes. But included in that law were all public employee unions – the police unions foremost.

Ohio was once the heartland of American industry, and consequently, of the factory worker unions that allowed the working class to negotiate with Capital. Some leftist economists have pointed to the benefits accruing to public employees from these laws. At the same time, there is a difference between teachers and cops – the arbitrators and judges have myriad links with the police.

A study by Mark Iris in 1998 of arbitration results in Chicago bears out the bias:

“A total of 328 disciplinary actions were decided by binding arbitration during that period [1990-1993]. In addition, under a new process started in July 1993, 205 disciplinary actions have been reviewed by arbitrators for nonbinding advisory opinions as of July 1995. These two distinct data sets demonstrate remarkably similar patterns of outcomes; collectively, the discipline imposed upon Chicago police officers is routinely cut in half by arbitrators. This pattern recurs despite an elaborate, lengthy review process and close scrutiny before the suspension of an officer is ordered.”

This result should not surprise us, given the larger history outlined by Seo: the abdication of a large degree of sovereignty to the police. In a 2016 article by Tylor Adams,  “Factors in Police Misconduct Arbitration Outcomes: What Does It Take to Fire a Bad Cop?”, he summarizes other studies that show the same interventionist tendency. Although police chief, mayors, and the community may want Michael Amiott fired, he does not work at the will of the community: his fate depends on his union and his arbitrator.

Adams remarks that the reason for overturning suspension or firing is most often categorized as a Just cause mistake. “A principal reason why arbitrators overturn police discharges is a department's failure to prove just cause. The meaning of just cause is derived from principles of fundamental fairness that evolved over time through the decisions of arbitrators.” Adams does not question the circularity of this “evolution” through time: a biased system will become more and more biased as precedent is set.

What does this mean? It means that we are depending on the “reasonableness” of cops and the precedents set by police-biased arbitrators. It means that the community needs to take back power. If we dismantle the way the police operate, we have to dismantle  and clean up the system of arbitration that is broken. A simple but effective tool is to take away the “just cause” rationality from arbitrators, and have the legislature spell out very what just cause is. I would think that process would weed out bias from racial and gender causes that might make a mayor fire a police officer;  but it would not allow police judgment about the appropriate use of force to triumph over the community.

The car and the police state - 1

Sara E. Seo bookends her book, Policing the Road: How cars transformed American Freedom (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674980860 ) between two cases. In one case, Wiley v. State (1916), a Police officer in a car – an unmarked car, as police cars weren’t “marked” until the 1940s – named Wiley called out to a car speeding by to stop. He and the police with him suspected that the car was speeding from a robbery. So, with instincts echoed by every officer related shooting since, they trained their guns on the car and shot it up, killing the passenger, a Mrs. Bates. The court decision in this case went against the police:

“In the case of Wiley v. State, which affirmed the guilt of Deputy Sheriff Johns, whose shot had killed Mrs. Bates, the Arizona Supreme Court maintained that even if the Bateses had heard the shouts and refused to stop, the officers’ manner of pursuit “was more suggestive of a holdup by highwaymen than an arrest by peace officers.”

At the other end of Seo’s history is the case of Sandra Bland, an African-American woman who was stopped because she failed to use a turn signal. From the moment the policeman pulled her over to the moment three days later when she supposedly hung herself in a cell, is the American nightmare that we see all around us.

Seo notices something crucial about Sandra Bland’s life:
The automobile appeared in nearly every significant setback in Bland’s life. Exorbitant traffic tickets that Bland paid for by “sitting out” in jail. Convictions for driving under the influence and arrest warrants for unpaid traffic fines that severely limited her employment options. Charges for possessing marijuana—her lawyer suspected that Bland was self-medicating—that the police discovered in her car.”

How did we go from Wiley v. State to Sandra Bland?
Seo’s story is not only focused on racism and the police, but more generally on how overpolicing and the automobile form a dyad in the United States. It is a topic that cries out for a Ballardian and/or Deleuzian treatment, but Seo remains a calm positivist about it all. Wondrously enough, her thesis has, I think, never really been explored in depth:

"Before cars, American police had more in common with their eighteenth-century forebears than with their twentieth-century successors. What revolutionized policing was a technological innovation that would come to define the new century. This is, therefore, a history about policing cars and, thus, about policing American society as it fast became an automotive society. It is thus also about the practical, theoretical, and legal problems of policing everybody who drove. "

To put this in a crude way that Seo herself would not countenance, the rise of the cop as overseer of traffic spelled the downfall of the 4th amendment to the constitution – the one about unreasonable searches and seizures. The one about having to have warrants. The fourth amendment never applied to slaves, whose own limited travels in the South were overseen by Slave Patrols. The Slave patrols, as Jim Crow kicked in with a vengeance at the turn of the century, were represented, mainly, by legislation degrading African-Americans on public transportation – the kind of legislation later copied by the Nazis and applied to Jews in Germany. The automobile appeared as, at first, a challenge to this.
W.E.B. Dubois, for instance, was an ardent car driver. He was proud of his cars. Since he traveled extensively in the South, being in a car kept him out of the reach of the Jim Crow laws attendant on trains and buses. Although as the history of police – and mob – interactions with black drivers shows, the Slave Patrol system was not that easy to slip.

Seo’s book – which everybody should read – overturns an old intellectual history of jurisprudence that attributes to the Warren court the new enforcement of prohibitions on police abuse – a new national standard for all states concerning the fourth amendment – by showing that the courts, in reality, were instrumental throughout the twentieth century in increasing police power, based in “reasonable” standards of policing automobiles that increasingly made the cops the judge of when and when not to search, when and when not to stop – basically giving them unlimited powers of harassment. And it is a pretty simple matter to see that in an unequal society, the people who would bear the brunt of harassment would be those who were people of color, those who were poorer, those who the respectable – the white bourgeoisie – were most afraid of.

The possible life - Karen Chamisso

Born gangster from the fist of her momma’s belly

she grew up rolling on her jams and jelly

Two loaded dice were found in her baby hands

The odds were in her favor. Everything was grand

Love money attention and all the last chances

Went up her nose in cold white prances

Cars were totaled, parents were called

Bounced from all the clubs, while police were stalled

The predictions about her in circulation

Always pictured her ODed, or in rehabilitation.

on funding the police: what is Milwaukee getting?

There should be a police union spotlight every day, to sort of show where our police funding is going. For instance, Milwaukee. Milwaukee was the proud city in which two police officers, called by two black women, roundly scolded those black women for dissing fine upstanding citizen Jeffrey Dahmer. Then the police escorted Dahmer's victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, back to Dahmer's apartment and left him to Dahmer's care - the torture, murder and cannibal session of the night. One of those policeman made howlingly funny jokes about gays after having helped Dahmer - and, of course, after threatening to take the black women downtown for interfering with the cops. Later, that policeman, John Balcerzak, suffered the indignity of being fired from the force for criminal incompetence. Such injustice couldn't stand, with a strong union behind him, and a likely judge ordered him rehired. Balcerzak went on to become the police union head of the Milwaukee police - a position that meant he essentially ran the force.

An investigation last year found the force operating at peak Blacerzakian levels: 

At least 93 Milwaukee police officers — ranking from street cop to captain — have been disciplined for violating the laws and ordinances they were sworn to uphold, a Journal Sentinel investigation found.

Their offenses range from sexual assault and domestic violence to drunken driving and shoplifting, according to internal affairs records. All still work for the Police Department, where they have the authority to make arrests, testify in court and patrol neighborhoods.

Officers who run afoul of the law often aren't fired or prosecuted, the newspaper found. Consider:

At least six officers disciplined by the department for illegal behavior suffered no legal consequences whatsoever.

Sexual assault - no problem/ Shoplifting? No problem? Drunken driving? No problem.
And so it goes. It is like a mirror image of the victims of police brutality - the POC victims. From shooting dead black people in domestic disputes to shooting dead drunk and asleep people in cars, the police are there.

By 2015-2017, the forked over 21 million in civil suit losses due to cops. 

Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget. 

That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found.  

In some cases, the costs pile up as the city continues to fight the cases for months or years, even after officers have been fired or criminally convicted in the same misconduct case. The costs far outstrip the $1.2 million the city sets aside each year for settling all of the claims it faces. 

So we know something about what the good communities of Milwaukee are getting in terms of supporting their men in blue through thick and thin. Sometimes what with returning victims to serial killers and shoplfiting, the Milwaukee police do confront rape. Luckily, the cop atmoshere definitely puts rape well below stopping black motorists. The PD discovered - or was forced to discover by pressure groups - that it had at least 6,000 untested rape kits in its storage. After "thousands" were tested, the Milwaukee cops arrested a grand total of 9 rapists from those kits in 2019. The union must have hated this: just think, that money could go to vacation homes for police officers! Which is why the department of Justice did the majority of the testing. Milwaukee's own police department apparently had other prioritiies.

So it goes with Milwaukee's crime wave situation. 

Funding the police - what, exactly, are we getting?

25 million in cop abuse suits, and 1500 untested rape kits: Minneapolis

Very Serious People are coming out with the column headline: Defunding the police is crazy!

So perhaps we should talk first about funding the police. What are we funding?

Let’s take Minneapolis, the unexpected center of our disorder. I don’t have a breakdown of how much the Minneapolis department spent on tear gas and the latest military equipment. But we do have stats on how much the city spent on civil suit claims for police abuse: from 2003-2019 the cost was  25 million dollars.

I thought about this timeline and this figure after reading Pagan Kennedy’samazing and wrenching article about the invention and history of the rape kit. 

 In 2019, the Minneapolis police announced a non-fun fact: in the police storage unit they had discovered around 1500 untested rape kits, spanning thirty years. Definitely a bad moment for the chief, who had to explain how he had previously reported that there were around 200 untested kits.

Kennedy reports that there are huge cultural problems with cops and rape investigations. One of those problems is the persistent refusal of the city to shoulder the cost of the testing of rape kits, which comes to about 1500 dollars per kit. Astonishingly, this cost is often borne by third parties – nonprofit feminist groups making money from cake sales and the like.

So we have at least one metric for what police funding is about, and its priorities. Evidently, testing those kits would have cost 2,250,00 dollars. Apparently, the city’s thinking was: we can either check these kits and catch rapists, or for ten times that amount, we can pay for abusive cops.

They chose the latter path. And that made all the difference.

Law and order in the U.S. is not only racist and oppressive, but it doesn’t even keep law and order. It stores the evidence in the storage facility and goes out there and fights the real crime – falling asleep in a car at Wendy’s, passing, perhaps, a phony twenty dollar bill, selling cigs on the sidewalk without a license.

Perhaps policing in the U.S. isn’t very good? A question from a friend.

Police and the "whitening" of Americans

There is an important, but under-discussed part of police history is that is also the history of the "whitening" of immigrant groups that came to the United States.

In the early 19th century, American cities didn't have police departments. Boston was one of the first. At the same time that Boston was constructing a police department specifically to control the less well off or immigrant areas in town, New England and America in general was receiving an enormous influx of Catholic Irish, fleeing the famine and oppression. Famously, what they met on the white Protestant shores of the New World was, at first, No Irish need apply signs. The Irish were considered sub-English - in England especially, but as well in the U.S. Although Germans were also migrating, on the whole, they were protestant. The combination of religious prejudice plus the aura of prejudice against the Irish in England put them into the class of the "not-quite white".

In the U.S., the rituals of becoming white have been explored for the last twenty years by many scholars. Here's an overview of the field.

What interests me is the way police work acted as a vector into whiteness, partly because police work allowed for the direct targeting of black subjects. To become white in the white settler state, a common strategy was to distance oneself from, and stigmatize, black people.
I'm not aware of any borrowing in this field from Rene Girard's theory of negative mimesis. In simple terms, Girard hypothesizes that the social order is built around a fundamental violence: the targeting and expulsion of a scapegoat. In order to not be the scapegoat, one engages in negative mimeses - trying to become the scapegoat's Other.

I have many criticisms of Girard's total explanation of the social order, but the scapegoating and negative mimesis process does work well with the becoming-white of various ethnic groups - the Irish and the Italian-Americans in particular - and the way that policing played a symbolically central role. One that carries over today. The police enact the neurosis of whiteness, to put it in sharp and exaggerated terms.

The meatmarkets I have seen

The meatmarkets I have seen

- Karen Chamisso

Birdsong pulled a labyrinth from my ear.

The birds have their nests, the foxes their holes

who will live with me

in the maze?

Wind and unwind, turn and turn back.

The heroes were netted and dispatched.

I stepped on a crack and a dynasty died.

Their ghosts follow me to this address.

A centerfold is at the center of it all.

O land of cockayne, free drinks and pussy!

To every sailor and peasant, tonight:

Tenderloin, tenderloin, the sirens sing.

‘The gates and yssues of this town are kept with watch and wards.”

Ariadne’s blues echo in the common pissoir.

My tears, my tears flow riverwards.

Jack comes to my  bed to bone ce soir.

The Flaubert-Sand letters: part one

George Sand came in for a pummeling from several of the leading lights of modernism. Proust, for instance, told his friends that he disliked Sand, and that Flaubert, who he revered, must have been “insincere” when he praised her in his letters. Baudelaire was much more venomous. Sand was the perfect opposite of Baudelaire: liberal when he was illiberal, a lover of nature when nature, to him, was irradiated with symbols of its fallen state, and in no way an adherent of his own peculiar Sadian Christianity. In the wake of the controversy raised, in 1862, by her anti-clerical novel, Mademoiselle la Quintinie, he wrote a series of notes comparing her to a latrine (because she fucked who she wanted to and didn’t make any bones about it) and compared her to a concierge and a kept woman. He found her the very type of positivist bourgeois he couldn’t stand: why, in her novel, she even dismissed hell! Hell was as necessary to Baudelaire as it was to Dante. Nietzsche, who read the version of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence edited by Maupassant, attacked her in his usual oblique way in Twilight of the Idols:

George Sand. - I read the first Lettres d’un voyageur: like everything deriving from Rousseau, false, artificial, gassy, exaggerated. I cannot endure this multicolored wallpaper style; as little as I can the plebian-ambition for generous feelings. The worst is the womanly coquettishness with masculinity, with the manners of an undeveloped youth – how cold must she have been by all of this, this insufferable artist! She winds herself up like a clock – and writes. Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics, as soon as they begin to compose. And how self-pleased she must have been, this fruitful writing-cow, who had something German about her in the worst sense of the word, like Rousseau himself, her master, becoming possible only because of the decline of French taste! – But Renan adores her…”

As always with Nietzsche, there are catches and turns in the vituperation that make it seem unconsciously respectful. One could imagine this inverted. When I first read this, I thought the 'writing – cow' crack was typical Fritz misogyny. But later, reading her letters, I see that Sand uses that phrase about herself, or rather, often compares herself to a cow.

Nietzsche was as well a critic of Flaubert and his theory of impersonality ( behind his visceral dismissal of Sand is that he shares her criticism of that theory - nothing disturbs Nietzsche like the touch of an unwanted ally), and this is why he wants to speak of her coldness, and the coldness of the romantics, whose cult of the self was not, Nietzsche hoped, similar to the beyond-human of his own invention.

Proust, though, admired Flaubert, as did almost all the modernists. This made it puzzling to them that Flaubert clearly thinks of Sand, who from one point of view was the very opposite of the modernists, as a great figure. He even praises her writing and – more than that – has the discernment to mention the novels that, according to today’s Sand-ians, are the height of her art: Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.

I’ve been reading the correspondence with a lot of admiration, and want to say a few things about it. So I’m going to amuse myself this week, taking a break from the protests, by saying them.

the dystopia of police unions

The question of the police and policing is confused at the outset by the terminology of the tool, the instrument. Even those criticizing the police – such as myself – have a tendency to portray them as the tool of the upper class. In a sense, the tool image is ingrained deeply into the discourse the police have woven about themselves, the discourse of serving the public, or protecting the public.

This misses the crucial political agency and power of the police. It is not simply the selectivity of enforcing the law, the choice made to, say, arrest the black consumers and sellers of illicit drugs and to let white prosperous neighborhoods slide, although it is easy to imagine the police pulling no knock searches on penthouses and mansions in Beverly Hills or NYC’s West side and finding hella cocaine to rock those people to pleas in court. It is also the pressure put by police and their unions to pass certain laws, to create certain immunities, to imagine the community according to police interests. In Minneapolis, a midsized Midwestern town, one can trace a history from Charles Stenvig in the sixties to  Rich Stanek in 2018 to Bob Kroll, the current head of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.

This is Bob Kroll:

IN AN INTERVIEW in April, Lt. Bob Kroll, head of Minneapolis’s police union, said that he and a majority of the Minneapolis Police Officers’ Federation’s board have been involved in police shootings. Kroll said that he and the officers on the union’s board were not bothered by the shootings, comparing themselves favorably to other officers.

“There’s been a big influx of PTSD,” Kroll said. “But I’ve been involved in three shootings myself, and not one of them has bothered me. Maybe I’m different.” 

 Or in Philadelphia, from Frank Rizzo to John McNesby, the current head of the Fraternal order of the Police in Philadelphia, who made headlines in 2017:

“… local protesters had employed a new tactic, turning up atthe home of a Philly cop who in June had fatally shot a fleeing black man inthe back.

There had been just 10 or so protesters, one wielding a megaphone, but it was enough to disrupt an otherwise quiet Bustleton neighborhood and rattle police, who’d never been confronted at their homes before. Now McNesby was getting his turn at the podium. A measured approach could have smothered the smoldering tension in the room; instead, McNesby doused it with gasoline. “When you go work each day,” he spat into the microphone, “you shouldn’t have to worry that a pack of rabid animals will suddenly show up at your home. … ” 

The Phillymag article is one of the rare ones that actually focus on the driver of police activity and politics, instead of on the windowdressing of police commissions. Here’s another graf:

“Some greatest hits here locally: In June 2010, McNesby declared stringent new rules regarding police misconduct “would be at the bottom of a litter box pretty soon,” then successfully challenged them before the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board. In 2012, McNesby mocked the civilian-run Police Advisory Commission, stating: “No one pays any attention to them.” And in 2015, McNesby declared the mayoral candidacy of former DA Lynne Abraham — a longtime tough-on-crime, pro-cop politician — to be over after she spoke to FOP members about pension changes and progressive reforms.”

Because the discussion about “ending policing” is probably not going to result in “ending policing”, I would think a better direction to take would be – curbing police unions. For instance, making sure that policemen who shoot or taser or maim and then cost the city’s thousands in civil suit damages are fired. Simply that. Why should cities be drained to support employees who wild? But even something as simple as that is not going to happen as long as police unions, interlocked with the Republican party and various rightwing organizations, have the upper hand.

It is rather amazing that the dream of a society in which the worker, through unions, has parity with Capital was only realized by… the police. But here we are, in the era in which past utopias are transformed into dystopias right before our eyes. This doesn’t have to be like this.  

another desperate spring

Broken at the waist by revolution
or vandal, a figure in excelsius deo
waits a stony resurrection flanking
the portal of the priory. The church trembles
in its long malaria of ghosts and smog.
Late spring. Already summer’s heat.

I walk up narrow Rue Gravilliers
past where a tagged mirror salutes
propped upright against a mildewed wall
waiting for collection, too.
A beggar mumbles bien bien
- this is the poetry of presque rien

channeling the oral tumult of my brain
which like yours is all worries and sex.
I pass the goddess in her natural human size
at the street crossing where the shadow
of a sparrow pursues presque rien
and its me mumbling bien, bien.

- Karen Chamisso

The birth of the police union out of the destruction of American apartheid

Robert Sobel’s biography of Calvin Coolidge contains background on the event that catapulted Coolidge into celebrity: his attempt to bust the Boston Police Union. Coolidge was the governor of Massachusetts in 1919, and Boston was a hotbed of political activity – two anarchists from the region, Sacco and Vanzetti, would later impress themselves – their trial for armed robbery and murder, their execution - on the whole decade, creating a cause that brought hundreds of thousands out into the streets throughout the globe. In 1919, the AFL had been busy unionizing police departments. ”… thirty seven cities, including Washington D.C., Los Angeles, St. Paul,  and Vicksburg had police unions, most of them affiliated with the AFL.”

Coolidge, to tell a long story short, busted the Boston police union when they staged a walkout. It was a thorough victory. The AFL stopped trying to unionize police departments. Various Senators, Democratic and Republic, indicated that the threat of imminent Bolshevism was terminated.

That wasn’t the end of the police union, however. It is generally agreed that the next step came in the sixties. As described by Charles Salerno in Police at the Bargaining Table, the civil rights era jumpstarted police unions for two reasons: a., civil disobedience and protest showed police that there was a greater space for union activity than in the past; and b., the police responded to protests on campus and the struggle for civil rights by a sort of institution-wide panic. Policing had meant enforcing the bounds of apartheid, and upholding a white bourgeois social order. As apartheid began to crumble and the student movement made the white bourgeois social order seem weak and perverted, police unionization was  forged in opposition to these things. Salerno goes into a sort of cop romantic revery about the whole thing:

“To witness the wanton destruction and disruption of the schools, not by people unable to attend them, but by those who were fortunate enoghyt to be students, showed the police that nothing was held to be sacred anymore. The police were called onto campuses to restore order and suppress unruly crowds. They witnessed acts of vandalism, disrespect for authority, a severe lack of discipline, open defamation of the American flag, total disregard for law, open profanity, widespread usage of drugs, and physical attacks upon the police.”

Salerno’s narrative is suffused with the cop self-pity and thinly disguised white nationalist sentiment, but it probably accurately reflects the feelings and recollections of the almost all white urban police force:

“All these events had a traumatic effect on the police psyche. They would no longer sit in a corner and lick their wounds. They began to strike back and to take the offensive in an attempt to salvage their dignity and their pride. The Civil Rights Movement and the gains made by minority groups through civil disobedience served as examples to the police. Since they were an occupational minority and an extremely visible one as well, they began to organize into militant or semimilitant groups.”

And thus, out of a highly politicized reaction to the threat to the white order, the police union received its jolt of life – sorta like Frankenstein’s monster, made out of a grotesque hodgepodge of sentiment and organized power. The point is that racism is not just accidental to modern policing, but the glue that held together the unionization of police forces throughout the country.

This is a small but significant footnote in the rightward drift of American society since the sixties and seventies.