futurehead

The Gates Affair

The Henry Louis Gates incident is a couple of weeks old now and a lot has been said & written about it, but I am still bothered by it.  I have been a fan of Gates since I read his excellent memoir Colored People in the mid-1990s.  But the thing that bothers me about this doesn't have anything to do with race -- it's that many of our cops seem to think they can arrest someone for disrespecting them -- and an amazing range and number of Americans seem to think either that this is correct -- that it is illegal to give a police officer a piece of your mind -- or that a cop's retaliation against such behavior is something that should just be accepted. Have Americans really become such a weak, docile, timid and authority-cowering people as that?

The woman who called the police was blameless.  I would not be surprised if America's racial context and history played a role in the initial telephone call to the police reporting a possible break-in; on the other hand the house HAD been broken into before, and what homeowner wouldn't prefer that someone in such a situation make a report rather than not, if there is any doubt.

The police were blameless for showing up at Gates's house.  I would also not be surprised if race played a role in the attitude and bearing of the police officer, James Crowley, when he challenged Gates.  Gates reports that his bearing was hostile.  However, unless you were there, this is subtle and fundamentally unknowable.  On the other hand, if Crowley just accepted that Gates was the homeowner, and Gates later turned out to in fact be a burglar, he would have become the laughingstock of the Boston Police Department.

Gates was blameless for being angry. Given our national history of which Gates as much as anyone was all too aware, as well as whatever personal animosity took place between the two men, any anger that Gates may have displayed may have been understandable (and let it be noted that Gates denies being verbally abusive, and in fact says that a throat condition prevented him from raising his voice - his most detailed account of the incident is here).  And, regardless of whether it was understandable, it was entirely within his rights as an American not only to ask for the office's badge number (which under Massachusetts law the officer was required to furnish him) but also, if he so chose, to express his anger verbally to the officer in any way he saw fit short of credible threats of violence.  It may not be prudent to shower verbal abuse upon a police officer, given the inevitable discretion that the police have in enforcing the law (in many circumstances there may just be a legitimate infraction to be found under which a police officer can legitimately charge you).  But when a man is standing in his own house, that is not a circumstance in which any self-respecting self-governing democratic citizen of our brave nation should have to cower and crimp and swallow anger before an official who has no legitimate business on your property (and from the moment Gates had established his residency by showing Crowley his Harvard ID and driver's license with address, Crowley no longer had any legitimate business on Gate's property).

Up until this point, other than the probable but ultimately unknowable role played by the overall racial history and culture in the United States, everyone was pretty much blameless in this unfortunate incident.  Then the cop arrested Gates.

Crowley had no legitimate or legal basis on which to arrest Gates.  This was implicitly recognized by the Cambridge prosecutors who dropped the charges faster than molten lead.  He abused his authority in a very serious manner, handcuffing and bringing to jail an innocent man as a retaliation for having his personal feelings hurt.  As those prosecutors surely know, "disrespecting a police officer" is not a crime and indeed is an activity protected by the First Amendment as much case law around the United States makes clear.  The ACLU regularly takes and wins cases of people arrested for "flipping the bird" at officers of the law who are not professional enough to handle it without abusing their power in retaliation.  Overbroad "disturbing the peace" statutes are the most common vehicles for such abuses of authority.

This incident prompted a lot of discussion about race in America, and that is as it should be, but the nation should have risen up and recognized as one that the arrest constituted an abuse of power, and should have been used as a teaching moment not only to the public, but also to many police officers, who apparently need it, that disrespecting a police officer may be justified or it may not be, but it is every American's right.  Instead Crowley was allowed to continue defending his abuse of power, seeming or perhaps worse genuinely unaware that Gates did not break any law, as in this appalling piece.

Five factors behind the Town Hall Crazies

Everywhere I go everyone seems to be talking about the recent health care town hall meetings and how the country feels like it is going a little bit crazy right now.  My take is that there are five factors behind this:

1. We have a serious situation in this country: a pretty crazy right-wing media machine that pumps out lies and disinformation to a receptive slice of the population. For years a lot of people have talked about the fragmentation of media, and now it has come to pass.  The fact is, we must share our country with a lot of fellow citizens who get their information from liars and crazy people, and whose reality is defined by those broadcasters.  Many smart philosophers have concluded that reality is socially constructed; we all live in a complicated world - much more complicated than we can directly observe ourselves - and most of our understanding of our world comes not from direct observation but from imaginative construction based on the reporting of others.  However, as I have discussed before, this is a highly unreliable process, and when people hear that Obama was not born in the United States, or that he is threatening to take away everybody's health care, and do not access any sources of information that refute that claim, they in all earnestness believe it.  The anecdote cited by Paul Krugman just sums it all up: the guy who stood up at a meeting and demanded, "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
2. The country has always had a foaming right wing fringe.  Before the Birthers, there were Birchers (members of the loony John Birch society) and other wild-eyed far-right conservatives driven crazy by civil rights and socialism.  And a history of "respectable" business interests making use of that fringe from time to time for political and/or economic purposes (such as in the McCarthy and civil rights periods). In many ways what we are seeing is not new, it is just more apparent because it is being pumped up and turned out by the right-wing media machine, as well as by certain for-profit organizing groups that are being paid by the health care lobby in order to turn out the crazies. 
3. It looks like there is a racist element here as well - that many of these people feel alienated from their government because someone who is irrevocably "other" to them has taken over leadership of the country.
4. The media is overdramatizing individual interactions because they make good television and making the lunatic fringe look like a significant political force.  (The reform forces need to make the media's inability to convey abstractions work in their own favor by finding and dramatizing individual victims of our barbaric health care system.)
5. The economic situation may, in some diffuse way, be creating a pool of free-floating angst and anger that is finding a (perverse and counter-productive) outlet in these incidents.  The Great Depression sparked grassroots movements and leaders such as the Townsendites, Huey Long, and Father Coughlin.  Whenever the nation experiences such turmoil, people will cast about for answers, and that process of defining blame and solutions is highly unreliable; it can lead to genuine reform that actually solves problems and makes people's lives better, as happened during the New Deal, or it can swing right and turn nasty, as happened for example in the 1930s in Germany, or in the U.S. South, where poor whites, oppressed by a wealthy aristocracy, occasionally banded together with poor blacks to push for unions and other economic reforms, but more often were led into lashing out against their black brethren in a long-term conflict that set poor man against poor man and increased misery and unhappiness for all instead of addressing its causes. 

All of this insanity raises an obvious question: if Obama's mild, gradualist health care proposals have sparked all of this right-wing gnashing and bashing, why shouldn't he have gone ahead and proposed a health-care fix more far-reaching and direct?  It's not as if the opposition could be any less vociferous. Then at least it would give progressives like me something to get excited about to counterbalance these misinformed loonies. 

So far Obama is looking like just another weak, spineless début du siècle Democrat - all reconciliation, no ferocity.  But reconciliation with crazy and utterly misinformed people does not make sense; there's no percentage in it, and people who are dying because of our health system deserve a little ferocity on their behalf for once.  This fight will test Obama's meddle; if he loses this round, will he cave and never bring up health care again, as Clinton did, or will he pick himself up, propose something even tougher, and get right back into the fight again?

This is the "hope" we all heard about, time to produce.