When I watched the YouTube video of Pepper-spray Lt. John Pike angrily shaking his can of Fizz in the face of peacefully protesting kids, and blasting them with his toxic orange hate as though they were lice, I though this guy couldn’t be a more wonderfully fitting parody of a fat fascist pig if he tried. He has so much of the cartoon slapstick villain in his plodding rotundity, is so thuggishly dishonourable in his loathsome conduct, the motto on his crest must surely read “Banality of Evil” or maybe some equally trite cliché of the Chief Wiggum variety.
The mentality of the UC-Davis goon squad was so malodorous of a white-trash American attitude, it was surreal to watch, and fitting to hear the University’s Chief of Police claiming right of defence - that her officers, (videoed from every angle vigorously pepper-spraying peacefully seated protesters), had in fact been surrounded by threatening students, couldn’t find an exit, and just wanted to go home.
When pursuing a car along a highway Chief Wiggum in the T.V show 'The Simpsons' was asked to describe his location, and replied "I'm on a road, looks to be asphalt--aw jeez, trees, shrubs--uh, I'm directly under the earth's Sun...now." When asked to explain her authorization of police force on UC-Davis students, Chancellor Katehi explained that she had ordered police to disperse protestors with violence if necessary, in the interests of "student safety".
In this case, life parodies 'The Simpsons' or some tweaked American horror-comedy where the disorientated and subjugated psyche of a trash T.V. culture, hopelessly lost for want of a moral compass, accidentally chooses its destroyer, (as in the Ghostbusters movie) which then takes corporeal form and lurches into action, attacking freedoms of speech, and assembly in the form of a John Pike Stay-Puft Marshmellow-Man macabre.
But the blaim for an erosion of democratic freedoms can't be foisted upon the gormless John Pike, or the cowed Chancellor, no doubt aligning herself obediently with a political climate of authoritarianism as dictated from above, but must be shared by a culture of apathy and indifference, a population of pacified individuals to ready to to relinquish their rights voluntarily, to ready to meekly acquiesce, as Rosa Luxemburg put it “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” As always it is the unsullied idealism of youth where the spirit of resistance still finds an ardent voice, calling the sleepers to awaken.
Glenn Greenwald explains the sinister mechanism of mindless police brutality in his article 'on the roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying'
Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.”
The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.
The genius of this approach is how insidious its effects are: because the rights continue to be offered on paper, the citizenry continues to believe it is free. They believe that they are free to do everything they choose to do, because they have been “persuaded” — through fear and intimidation — to passively accept the status quo. As Rosa Luxemburg so perfectly put it: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” Someone who sits at home and never protests or effectively challenges power factions will not realize that their rights of speech and assembly have been effectively eroded because they never seek to exercise those rights; it’s only when we see steadfast, courageous resistance from the likes of these UC-Davis students is this erosion of rights manifest.
The Guardian: The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy Naomi Wolf
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