"Well, Duh!" is all the answer any of them need, or needed.
Admittedly, it isn't in the mass-media - Google for "Peter Watts beaten up TSA" and see how little you get from commercial media outlets - but everybody who's taken a commercial flight within the USA knows damn' well that he or she is at the mercy of low-rent goons who can do as they please, and take great pleasure in imposing delay and petty humiliations on the cattle that the American public have become.
The people that anger me in this specific incident are the jury: aren't any of them angry? Don't they realise that they, too, can get a criminal record - and a felony, not just a misdemeanor - for the crime of being temporarily disoriented after being smashed in the face by a violent goon? A goon, they now know perfectly well to be above prosecution for assault and perjury, in part by their own decision in the jury room.
Perhaps the jurors were afraid of what the authorities might do to them, or to their dependents, if they came back with a 'not guilty' verdict; getting put onto the 'no-fly' list is the least of it.
And so, for whatever reason - stupidity or cowardice - the jury and the judge have marched deliberately into a Police State, rather than sleep-walking into it through ignorant docility.
I can't help feeling schadenfreude over this one: the pale, doughy mass of comfortable citizens throughout the USA were blithely unconcerned when black people were beaten up in the street by the authorities - their rights and liberties, their dignity and even their deaths did not matter to the vast majority of white Americans. For all I know (but not for all I care!) it's possible that they still don't: I don't believe that a belief in racial equality has ever taken root outside a narrow inelligentsia confined to the coastal cities. What's clear from Peter Watts' mistreatment is that other white people don't matter either; the average journalist in the mass-media will pass in silence when his fellow citizen is beaten up; the police and the judiciary will actively collaborate, and the average white citizen of middle-America - or any twelve of them, just and true, upright citizens selected as the peers of the accused - will not just walk on by, but acquiesce and actively collaborate.
And yes, of course it's an isolated incident. Of course it is: and how will you or I - or anybody in a country without a free press - know any different? we don't and can't know just how widespread the violence has become; but we can see from this incident that the cancer has gone deep into the institutions of a country that wad once proclaimed a beacon of democracy... For reasons that are now, from this side of the Atlantic, more than just a little bit unclear.
A rather angry rambling commment...
Date: 2010-03-22 07:52 pm (UTC)"Well, Duh!" is all the answer any of them need, or needed.
Admittedly, it isn't in the mass-media - Google for "Peter Watts beaten up TSA" and see how little you get from commercial media outlets - but everybody who's taken a commercial flight within the USA knows damn' well that he or she is at the mercy of low-rent goons who can do as they please, and take great pleasure in imposing delay and petty humiliations on the cattle that the American public have become.
The people that anger me in this specific incident are the jury: aren't any of them angry? Don't they realise that they, too, can get a criminal record - and a felony, not just a misdemeanor - for the crime of being temporarily disoriented after being smashed in the face by a violent goon? A goon, they now know perfectly well to be above prosecution for assault and perjury, in part by their own decision in the jury room.
Perhaps the jurors were afraid of what the authorities might do to them, or to their dependents, if they came back with a 'not guilty' verdict; getting put onto the 'no-fly' list is the least of it.
And so, for whatever reason - stupidity or cowardice - the jury and the judge have marched deliberately into a Police State, rather than sleep-walking into it through ignorant docility.
I can't help feeling schadenfreude over this one: the pale, doughy mass of comfortable citizens throughout the USA were blithely unconcerned when black people were beaten up in the street by the authorities - their rights and liberties, their dignity and even their deaths did not matter to the vast majority of white Americans. For all I know (but not for all I care!) it's possible that they still don't: I don't believe that a belief in racial equality has ever taken root outside a narrow inelligentsia confined to the coastal cities. What's clear from Peter Watts' mistreatment is that other white people don't matter either; the average journalist in the mass-media will pass in silence when his fellow citizen is beaten up; the police and the judiciary will actively collaborate, and the average white citizen of middle-America - or any twelve of them, just and true, upright citizens selected as the peers of the accused - will not just walk on by, but acquiesce and actively collaborate.
*A footnote: 'Police State' is a cliché, an hysterical exaggeration that we've all heard in the liberal media whenever a Policeman's conduct falls below par. Pehaps we need a better epithet to describe a territory where uniformed goons in the pay of the state can stop anybody's vehicle, swagggering across and demanding submission and immediate obedience from the citizen as of right, beating people up at whim, with impunity and the full support of the police and the courts, obtaining a criminal conviction by perjury - exposed in court and on the record, without even a rebuke from the judge, their superiors, and the authorities that govern them and conferred their legal powers - and, to cap it all, their superiors enjoy sufficient influence with the mass-media that their action will never be public. The United States does not have a free press, in any meaningful sense, when their deliberate disinterest and selective silence amounts to a 'self-censorship' that China and the Russian Federation can only look upon with awe and envy.
And yes, of course it's an isolated incident. Of course it is: and how will you or I - or anybody in a country without a free press - know any different? we don't and can't know just how widespread the violence has become; but we can see from this incident that the cancer has gone deep into the institutions of a country that wad once proclaimed a beacon of democracy... For reasons that are now, from this side of the Atlantic, more than just a little bit unclear.