The Civil Religion and the Seventh-Inning Stretch (Updated, 7/8)

"Love it! Love it! WE COMMAND YOU TO LOVE IT!!!" Jingoism rears its head at a post-9/11 Major League Baseball game.

“There is … a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles….

While [the State] can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the State anyone who does not believe them.

The Subjects … owe the Sovereign an account of their opinions only to such an extent as they matter to the community….

Whoever dares to say, `Outside the Church there is no salvation,’ ought to be driven from the State, unless the State is the Church, and the Prince is the Pontiff….

If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death; he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, excerpts from The Social Contract, Book IV, describing his totalitarian concept of the “Civil Religion.”

(See the update at the bottom of the essay.)

All that Brad Campeau-Laurion wanted was to use the bathroom.

The beer he had consumed an hour earlier had completed its tour of his digestive tract and was impatient to leave. So when the Seventh Inning Stretch arrived, and the crowd at Yankee Stadium arose to sing “God Bless America,” Campbeau-Laurion quietly excused himself to attend to this biological imperative.

He wound up being assaulted by two off-duty New York police officers and dragged from the stadium – in humiliating fashion, in full view of tens of thousands of people – for desecrating a recently minted “patriotic” tradition.

In years past, when the Seventh Inning Stretch was marked with the singing of the tune that should be our National Anthem (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame”), furtive visits to the lavatory were expected and even encouraged. But this was before The Day Everything Changed.

After the 9-11 attacks, the corporate leadership of Major League Baseball directed its franchises to replace that traditional sing-along with “God Bless America.” By the beginning of the 2002 season, MLB’s ruling junta relented somewhat, requiring the song to be played on Sundays and holidays and allowing local owners to decide whether to play it more frequently.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Yankees, a franchise that seems to embody the worst traits of the imperial culture, have a fan-base drawing heavily from a cohort of people who really enjoy compelled conformity. Lonn Trost, the team’s chief operating officer, told the New York Times in 2007 that during the month following 9-11, the team had received “hundreds of e-mails and letters” from fans complaining that others in attendance were not displaying sufficient “respect” during the mid-inning nationalist benediction.

“The fans were telling us it was a disgrace that when the song was being sung people were not observing it with a moment of silence,” Trost explained.

So George Steinbrenner, the corporatist despot who baneful influence and example have all but ruined baseball, devised what the Times called “a plan to restrict movement”: Reverent participation in the “God Bless America” ritual would be enforced by “off-duty uniformed police officers, ushers, stadium security personnel and [use of] the aisle chains….”

At least eight other teams (the Marlins, Padres, Rangers, Twins, Astros, Athletics, and Red Sox) have enacted similar, if less onerous, policies. But apparently only the Yankees combine performance of “God Bless America” at every game with a full-spectrum effort to force participation by fans.

Campeau-Laurion is an ardent baseball fan for whom the August 26, 2008 game was a special experience: It was the last game he would attend in the old Yankee Stadium. After the music began, Campeau-Laurion was stopped by an off-duty police officer en route to the bathroom.

“He informed me that I had to wait until the song was over,” recalls Mr. Campeau-Laurion, who describes himself as an atheist. “I responded that I had to use the restroom and that I did not care about `God Bless America.’ As soon as the latter came out of my mouth, my right arm was twisted violently behind my back and I was informed that I was being escorted out of the stadium. A second officer then joined in” – ah, yes: the Heroes in Blue ™ always prefer the gang-assault method – “and twisted my left arm, also in an excessively forceful manner, behind my back.”

Mr. Campeau-Laurion and a friend were sitting at the “tier level” in Yankee Stadium, which meant that he was dragged painfully by his assailants down the entire length of the stadium. When at one point he complained that he wasn’t resisting and that it wasn’t necessary to hurt him, one of the armed mouth-breathers grunted something to the effect that the victim should shut up or be hurt even more.

As the two thugs and their victim reached the exit, Campeau-Laurion was rudely thrown out, with the first officer sneering, “Get the hell out of my country if you don’t like it.” They then returned to the section where Campeau-Laurion’s friend was still sitting and began propagating falsehoods about their victim, in one instance – within earshot of the witness – telling a fan that Campeau-Laurion had said “This country sucks.”

In similar fashion, when the NYPD was queried about the matter, they did what police consistently do in such matters: They lied with sociopathic composure.

“The officers observed a male standing on his seat, cursing, using inappropriate language and acting in a disorderly manner while reeking of alcohol, and decided to eject him rather than subject others to his offensive behavior," insisted the NYPD in an official statement.

Campeau-Laurion could not have been “reeking” of alcohol, since he had consumed a total of two beers during the entire game, a fact corroborated by credit card receipts and the testimony of his associate. The same testimony confirms that Campeau-Laurion’s conduct was not “disorderly” in any but the familiar, self-serving sense the term is usually employed by law enforcement officers – that is, to describe any statement or gesture of protest displayed by a victim of unwarranted police violence.

It’s important to dismiss right away the notion that the New York Yankees organization has a “property rights” claim that covers its Seventh Inning Jingo Devotional. It’s impossible to frame a legitimate contract in which a paying customer to a sporting event can be compelled, through the threat of violence, to participate in a religious ritual.

In this instance, the ritual is not one rooted in Christian or other monotheistic tradition, however debased, but rather in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s abominable “Civil Religion” of the State. The mandatory moment of “patriotic” conformity, and the means used to enforce it, are an amazingly precise enactment of Rousseau’s dictum that once the State prescribes the tenets of its “civil profession of faith,” it may not be able to compel belief, but has the power to banish or otherwise punish “anyone who does not believe them.”

As a lawsuit recently filed on Campeau-Laurion’s behalf by the New York Civil Liberties Union observes, the police officers who assaulted him were part of a “Paid Detail” program in which armed police in official uniform are hired out to private – or, at least, nominally private – entities in the city.

“Officers assigned to the Paid Detail are acting under color of law and are acting as agents of the private businesses that hire them,” notes the lawsuit. This is a splendidly concise description of a “public-private partnership” – which is to say, a fascist arrangement, albeit on a relatively modest scale.

The Yankees franchise itself, like most major league sports franchises, is a corporatist entity on a rather larger scale. The lawsuit doesn’t exaggerate one whit in noting that since 1970, when the City of New York bought Yankee Stadium, “the New York City government and the Yankees have been closely intertwined.”

The franchise, which oddly enough is actually a “foreign limited partnership under the jurisdiction of Ohio,” leases the Stadium from the City, and when other interests seek to rent the facility for concerts or other events, they rent it from the City, not the team.

In his book Free Lunch, David Cay Johnston points out that New York taxpayers – both city and state-wide – paid more than $119 million to refurbish the old Yankee Stadium. Building the new Stadium, which began operations this past Opening Day, cost an estimated $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

The Yankees have the largest media market in Major League Baseball. An entrepreneurial owner would be able to make do without the subsidies. But as things stand, the New York Yankees are a purely corporatist operation – one in which the risks and losses are subsidized and the profits are privatized.

But then again, the same is true of nearly every significant major league franchise in any of the “Big Four” professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey). And as Johnston observes, the profit margin for professional sports is coming not from sound management of successful teams, but through corporatist wealth redistribution.

“From 1995 through 2006, local, state and federal governments spent more than $10 billion subsidizing more than 50 new major league stadiums and countless minor league facilities,” Johnston notes. In 2006, Forbes magazine reported that the aggregate revenue of the Big Four sports was $16.7 billion; their “operating income” – which is to say, profits – were a mere $1.7 billion.

This is to say that “while some teams are profitable, overall the sports team industry does not earn any profit from the market,” Johnston contends. “Industry profits all come from taxpayers.” (Emphasis added.)

Bread and Circuses, as provided by the Imperial Roman State.

It hardly seems an exaggeration to say that the contemporary version of panem et circenses, like its ancient Roman counterpart, is a State-sponsored enterprise. Accordingly, it’s hardly a surprise to learn that – at least for those attending Yankees home games -- failure to perform the equivalent of burning a pinch of incense at the Imperial Shrine will prompt a violent response from those tasked to enforce the corporatist civil religion.

Those acquainted with the bloody history of Rousseau's cult know that the adulteration of baseball with state-worship is merely the mildest possible foretaste of horrors to come.

UPDATE, July 8:



Mr. Campeau-Laurion has extracted a $10,001 settlement from New York City -- the entity that owned the old Yankee Stadium and owns the new, taxpayer-funded version.



The settlement (.pdf), which includes a tidy $12,000 in attorney fees for the New York branch of the ACLU (which profits handsomely from cases of this kind), includes a stipulation from the city that it has "no policy prohibiting fans from moving about" while "God Bless America" plays during the Seventh Inning Stretch, or that it intends to "institute" such a policy, reports this morning's New York Times.



What this would mean, were these words written by people in whom resided a particle of respect for the truth, is that Mr. Campeau-Laurion was assaulted by two police officers who acted on their own volition, apparently inventing a non-existent policy to justify their criminal behavior.





A quick apology --



In the comments section below, I entirely misinterpreted the remarks made by the "Anonymous" who posted at 8:17 a.m. today (July 7).



I'm slow on the uptake even on my best days, and mornings that follow very late working nights find me even more torpid and dim-witted than usual. My exasperated comments were as much a product of distraction and fatigue as anything else, and they misled several other contributors about what I'm now sure was the intent and substance of "Anonymous"'s post.



Since my offense was public, I now publicly apologize to "Anonymous" and beg his or her indulgence for what was an honest -- albeit foolish -- mistake on my part.





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A Covenant With Death

Gory, gory hallelujah: A "shock and awe" assault on Baghdad, above; below, right, a "liberated" Iraqi mourns a dead relative.


We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves. -- Isaiah 28:15 (KJV)



While the event bills itself as the "Treasure Valley God and Country Festival," it is the nation-state that plays the starring role -- albeit an officially uncredited one -- in the four-day event currently underway in Nampa, Idaho.


As will be the case at Fourth of July commemorations throughout the United State (spelling intentional)*, the God and Family Festival displays the trappings of a contemporary Christian worship service while channeling devotion toward the government ruling us, particularly its most potent instrument of lethal coercion -- the military.


Nampa's annual event was created by the actor and one-time minor league baseball player Chuck Connors (no kidding) during the Vietnam conflict as a way of honoring veterans of that exceptionally foolish and unnecessary war. This year's edition was distinguished by the signing of a Pentagon-produced document called a "Community Covenant."


Various state and local political figures affixed their signatures to the document, which will eventually be displayed in the Governor's office. The purpose of this ritual is for communities to "do a public display and acknowledge support for the military," explained an Army officer to the Idaho Statesman. Since the document was created by the Secretary of the Army in 2008, it has been publicly endorsed by the political leadership of dozens of "communities" -- both cities and states.


















Propagating the gospel of militarism: The Pentagon's official map of "covenant" communities. (Click to enlarge.)

The document refers to "America's Army" as "The Strength of the Nation," and calls upon those residing in "covenant" communities to help build "the strength, resilience, and readiness of Soldiers and their Families," and to help implement "the Army Family Covenant."


It's worth noting here that the choice of the term "covenant" -- a term with profound and even sacred connotations for those steeped in the language of Scripture -- was no accident. It was almost certainly the product of expensive and detailed opinion sampling by people adept in manipulating language and images in order to seduce unwary but otherwise decent people into suspending their capacity for critical thinking.


That second "covenant" gives some substance to the hortatory language of the first by enlisting "covenant" communities as lobbyists on behalf of military benefits -- health care, housing, educational programs, child care, and so on.


Idaho is the reddest of the Red States, populated by industrious people who are expansively skeptical of government power unless it is deployed in the cause of murdering foreigners and occupying distant countries.


Many of the people who attend this year's God and Country Festival will arrive at the event in SUVs whose stereos resound with talk radio harangues denouncing the expansion of the welfare state under Obama. Yet those same people are blind to the ironic fact that the government institution they uncritically adore, the United States Military, has been the greatest factor in the growth of the welfare state.


As Bruce D. Porter explains in his valuable book War and the Rise of the State, each American military conflict, beginning with the War for Independence, has expanded the domestic power and redistributive reach of the government through what he calls "Titmussian linkages" between veterans and their dependents on the one hand, and the central government on the other. That somewhat inelegant phrase refers to the work of socialist British academic Richard Morris Titmuss, "A vigorous advocate of social welfare reforms" and, therefore, of the militarization of society in the interest of expanding the welfare state.


In fact, as Timuss noticed and Porter points out, the very "origins" of the welfare state are found in the military. Veterans and their dependents, who are guaranteed pensions and various disability, health, and housing benefits provided the first permanent clients of the redistributionist state. Both world wars abetted the breakdown of conventional family norms, and offered valuable field experience for promoters of sexual emancipation and related social "reforms." And the WWII-era conscription of millions of men, and the recruitment of their wives into war-related industries, led to the enactment of the first federal child care legislation.


That the military would abet the growth of a huge and ever-expanding welfare state would not have surprised James Madison, who famously denounced war as "the parent of armies; and from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."


What Madison lamented -- the centralizing effect of war, particularly in propagating debt -- the execrable Alexander Hamilton frankly celebrated. Porter points out that Hamilton was delighted by the lingering debts accumulated by the colonies (and later states) during the War for Independence; he pressed for Congress "to assume the full debts, believing this would turn the debts into a potential `cement' of the Union. This, in the American case, as in the Dutch case before it, war debts helped consolidate a fractious polity by binding creditors across the nation to the fate of the central state."


The Empire Hamilton Built is racing toward the unpleasant end that awaits all imperial projects: Incurable, undisguised insolvency, the ruin of the official currency, political collapse, and -- most likely -- internal schism. At some point the Power Elite will probably call most of the troops home from their far-flung garrisons, not because our rulers will have renounced aggression, but rather for the purpose of putting down internal resistance. This, too, was foretold by Madison in the Constitutional Convention, when he warned that "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive, will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense [against] foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home."


Dr. Porter, a Harvard-educated historian and former Senate Armed Services Committee adviser, appears to believe that one major priority of U.S. foreign policy is to supply a steady stream of foreign crises that can provide a shared "national identity" for residents of our fissiparous country.


Writing in 1994, Porter suggested that growing unrest and even separatist tendencies within the American polity may inspire attempts by the ruling elite "to solve all these problems through foreign diversion; finding or inventing enemies ... against which united efforts can be directed. But unless the United States becomes embroiled in a srious war, the problem of keeping America unified in the face of profound centrifugal tensions is likely to be the political problem of the 1990s and beyond."


Of course, the approach Porter foresaw -- and which appears to have been taken by the Power Elite -- accelerates the process of economic collapse and, with it, social upheaval. Which suggests, once again, that the same military establishment being exalted as a divine entity at the "God and Country Festival" and similar events this weekend may, in the not-too-distant future, be given the task of forcibly disarming and suppressing the political desires of the same people now singing its praises.



The program for the "God and Country" event briefly describes the "Roman Road" -- a potent condensation of the salvation message found in the Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Romans.


Much of the event itself, including the ritualized signing of the blasphemous, Pentagon-composed "covenant," seems built on the assumption that the Roman Road that really matters is the Via Appia -- the main thoroughfare through which Imperial Rome dispatched its armies of conquest -- and that it is the duty of pious Christians to promote and sustain the Empire's military ambitions, whatever they may be.



As Richard Gambale documents in his indispensable study The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, the militarist heresy is of relatively recent vintage. It was an outgrowth of the WWI-era "Progressive" conceit that the Christian Church had to justify its existence by playing a "positive" role in the expansion of the meliorist state.


Rather than playing the biblically mandated role of peacemakers, the progressive clergy eagerly supported World War I "as transforming event in the life of the church," observes Gambale. Many of them applauded the Wilson administration's war aims as a form of Christian "altruism," one that promised temporal redemption "at the sacrifice, if need be, of five millions of men and billions of wealth," as an effusive Literary Digest editorial put it.



Nor would this righteous campaign to re-make the world through state coercion cease once altrusitic mass murder ceased. Writes Gambale: "The progressives longed for, and expected, the war for righteousness to continue after the guns in Europe fell silent." They would not be disappointed.


Again, one collides with an arresting irony: The most outspoken "conservative celebrations of militarism during what used to be called Independence Day a promoting a view devised by the leftist Progressives of the early 1900s, what Gambale aptly calls "the rhetorical sacralization of the nation-state."


The more pronounced our ruling elite's apostasy from America's republican origins, the more insistent became their invocations of our sacred national "mission" in the world. As Gambale notes, one particularly notable example was provided on September 11, 2002 by Bush the Lesser as he "appropriated the words of John 1:5 as if they described not just the Incarnation of Christ but the mission of the United States: `And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness will not overcome it.'"



To the extent that any radiance attends the labors of the Regime ruling us, it is the demonic nimbus of shock-and-awe, not the divine radiance of the Shekinah. The true tragedy of our time is that so many American Christians are blind to that critical distinction.

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Totalitarianism In One City: Shreveport's Gun-Grabbing Mayor

Shreveport's Big Boss Man, Cedric Glover, and unidentified flunky: According to Glover, an advocate of civilian disarmament, his police have the power to "suspend" the rights of any motorist they stop, and can seize a civilian's firearms at will. Not that long ago, bigoted white southern mayors could be heard making the same assertions about black people.



Any time a motorist is stopped by a police officer, insists Shreveport, Louisiana Mayor Cedric Glover, "Your rights ... have been suspended." This includes not only the freedom of movement, but also, in the event the officer inquires as to whether the driver is carrying a weapon, "Your right to be able to hold on to your weapon and say whether [you] have a weapon or not" -- as well as the right to retain possession of that weapon, should the officer decide to confiscate it from you.


Should you choose not to answer the question, or answer it in the negative, the officer could still choose, "in the interest of officer safety, to secure you in a safe position" -- this most likely means outside the car with your hands cuffed behind your back -- "and then do an appropriate inspection of your vehicle."


The phrase "appropriate inspection" is more honestly rendered "Unconstitutional warrantless search."


Should the police officer then turn up a firearm or other weapon in the car, the driver "would be guilty or potentially guilty of even a more severe offense" than whatever he had allegedly done to precipitate the traffic stop, according to Mayor Glover. Police officers, according to Glover, are invested with "a power that the President of the United States does not have ... and that is the ability to be able to suspend your rights."


This is "one of the things that I say to each and every one of the police officers who graduates from the Shreveport Police Academy since I've been mayor." Fortunately for the public, one supposes, Mr. Glover remembers the lesson that Peter Parker learned from his kindly and sagacious uncle Ben -- that is, with great power comes great responsibility. "You have to understand there is a great deal of power that is vested within ... the law enforcement personnel of this country," Glover insists. "It's why there is a great deal of responsibility that has to go along with it."


Glover offered those remarkable observations, and many others like them, in a recorded phone call with Shreveport resident Robert Baillio.



Mr. Baillio had called to complain about a recent traffic stop in which an SPD officer, who-- before dealing with any other matter of business -- asked if Baillio had a firearm, then temporarily seized it from him.


Louisiana law recognizes the right of the state's residents to carry loaded weapons in their vehicles, and Baillio has a state-issued concealed carry permit -- that is, a piece of paper in which the state generously recognizes one facet of Baillio's innate right to bear arms.


According to Baillio's account, he was cordial and polite when he was stopped after supposedly neglecting to use a turn signal. That this was almost certainly a pretext stop is illustrated by the fact that Baillio never received a ticket. Supplemental evidence is offered by the fact that the conversation between the officer and Baillio focused entirely on the issue of gun ownership, including a question about Baillio's membership in the National Rifle Association.















This would be a heart-warming picture if it didn't feature a gun-grabber: Cedric Glover is consoled by one of his sweeter constituents after failing to win a role in "Nutty Professor II: The Klumps."


Baillio doesn't conceal his NRA membership; it's advertised by a sticker on the rear windshield of his truck, as are his very passionate views of the right to armed self-defense. "Armed We Are Citizens! Un-Armed We Are Subjects!" exclaims another bumper sticker, expressing a core truth of our republican heritage. Yet another sticker displays various kinds and grades of ammunition captioned by the directive, "Celebrate Diversity."


It's the safest of bets that what triggered the stop, as it were, was not a traffic infraction by Baillio, but rather the police officer's conditioned reflex to treat the public expression of pro-gun ownership sentiments as innately suspicious.


In brief, Baillio was a victim of political profiling of the sort being encouraged by the Department of Homeland Security and the totalitarian "watchdog" groups who have spent decades indoctrinating the police.


In his telephone chat with Glover, Baillio -- who was persistent but unfailingly polite -- pointed out that he "answered the [officer's] question honestly and he disarmed me."


"Which would be appropriate and proper action, sir," replied Glover. "The fact that you gave the correct answer -- it simply means that you did what you were supposed to do and that is to give that weapon to the police officer so he could appropriately place it in a place where it would be no threat to you, to him, or to anyone in the general public."



"Well, you know, he still had a gun," observed Baillio, hoping to underscore the fact that guns -- as objects, rather than actors -- do not pose a "threat" in and of themselves. "How is he --"



"Because he's a police officer," interjected Glover before he could finish the question. "As I've just related to you, that police officer has powers, sir, that you do not have."


Let's unpack that reply, shall we?


From Glover's perspective, it is only when firearms are in the hands of people other than the state's uniformed enforcers/oppressors that they constitute a threat, not only to the public and those in charge of exercising official violence but also to the private gun owner himself.


Glover, a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, clearly believes that any firearms in civilian hands should be considered illicit. This is, in both a cultural and constitutional sense, entirely un-American.


Interestingly, it is in harmony with the UN's position, however, as summarized in the world body's 2000 agitprop film Armed to the Teeth: The World-Wide Plague of Small Arms. That film insists that the only "legal" weapons are those "used by armies and police forces to protect us" -- as if the word "protection" describes the uses to which weapons are put by the enforcement organs of the criminal states that compose the UN.


It is his attitudes toward civilian firearms ownership and the plenary power of police, not his ethnicity or any similar accident of birth, that would make Glover a very suitable ruler of any of the scores of squalid Third World thugocracies represented in the UN.


According to Glover, a police officer may properly disarm any civilian at any time, and the civilian's duty is to surrender his gun -- willingly, readily, cheerfully, without cavil or question. This is because police officers, as numinous beings anointed by the Holy State, exude the essence of pure goodness and would never commit acts of criminal violence against disarmed civilians.


Tell that to Angela Garbarino, a woman who was arrested by the SPD last year for DWI and wound up lying in a pool of her own blood after being "subdued" in a police holding cell.

***

***

Gaps in the security camera record of the incident occur at convenient intervals, so it's not clear exactly how Garbarino wound up bloodied on the floor. In a photograph taken later Angela displays the marks of a severe beating, including two black eyes, a broken nose, and a cut on the forehead that required stitches.


Wylie Willis, the hired thug who administered the beating, can be observed in the video checking his hands to see if there is blood on them. He was dismissed after the incident for "violating departmental policy," but faced no other sanctions.


Like any other pseudo-male who beats a defenseless woman, Willis lied that his victim "slipped and fell."


Like any other police officer who loses his job after a criminal assault on a "civilian," Willis insists that his firing was unjustified.


And like any other police union anywhere in our once-free country, the Shreveport Police Union(led by Michael Carter -- see the photo above and to the right) insists that the abusive cop should get his job back.

She was protected and served: Angela Garbarino displays the results of a beating she received while handcuffed in the custody of Shreveport police.




Obviously, Willis should at the very least be prosecuted for felonious battery. Or, better yet, he should be put into a room, unarmed, with several of Angela's male relatives and given an opportunity to demonstrate the unalloyed martial prowess that enabled him to beat an intoxicated woman half his size whose hands were cuffed behind her back. Willis appears to have been a serial abuser of women, as do several others among Shreveport's ahem, finest. \


In April, Jasmine M. Winston filed a civil rights suit against the City of Shreveport. A couple of years ago she was beaten by a baton-wielding Officer Willis outside a nightclub and then slammed face-first into the concrete by fellow SPD thug Daniel Sawyer. Oh, the undaunted courage these two armed "men" displayed in double-teaming a solitary woman.



A lawsuit filed by Darlene Atkins in 2006 claims that Willis put a gun to the head of her son Dillion Freeman following a brief pursuit and threatened to shoot Dillion if any of his family approached him. Another suit filed that year by resident Tomeka Bush claimed that after she filed a complaint in the Atkins incident, Willis retaliated by seizing her car. As in the subsequent beating of Angela Garbarino, there were anomalies in the official video record of the Atkins incident; in this case, the entire video was missing. The SPD "investigated" the matter just long enough to satisfy itself that Willis (let's say it all together, shall we?) acted in accordance with department policy. He always did -- until his officially sanctioned criminal violence was documented beyond dispute.


Loathsome as he is, Willis is not exceptional.


In 2007, eight SPD officers were arrested for various offenses, including perjury, falsification of official reports, falsifying tickets, DWI, drug charges, and maintaining an "inappropriate" on-line relationship with an underage girl.


Of those offenses, the most striking are those committed in an official capacity. Given the latitude offered to Willis, it's difficult to imagine how blatantly an SPD officer would have to perjure himself before facing punishment.



Oddly enough, Cedric Glover didn't mention the corruption roiling in the SPD when, roughly a year ago, he vetoed a police retention plan that included a pay raise. And now that the "stimulus" spigots have been thrown open, Glover is eager to build his police department into a fighting force of extraordinary magnitude.



"We're asking for 90 additional police officers ... with this stimulus package [because] there is a portion that is available for cop spending and we want to go out there and capture as much of it as we can," oinked Cerdo, er, Cedric last February as the Holy One, His Munificence Barrack the Blessed (peace be upon him) hoisted the slop bucket over the national trough.



Along with expanding the local "infrastructure," Big Cerdo's chief priority for the stimulus is to use federal funds to expand his own herd of gun-grabbing Cerditos.* The same is probably true of dozens of other mayors across the country, some of which may boast police departments even more corrupt than the one afflicting Shreveport.



Shreveport resident Ken Krefft, president of a neighborhood association, is understandably worried that the SPD's corruption could damage the city's tourism industry: "This is not a good thing for the city [to tell tourists] -- `Come to Shreveport, we've got crooked cops.'" It used to be that Americans would have visit such destinations as Cuba to experience what it's like to deal with corrupt police who can disarm, beat, and presumably kill innocent people with impunity. Cedric Glover has thoughtfully turned his city into a totalitarian theme park we can visit without leaving the United States -- in a geographic sense, in any case.


(My emphatic thanks to "Liberranter" for tipping me to this story.)


Don't Forget ...

... to tune in to Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network from 6:00-7:00 Central Time.

___
*"Cerdo" is Spanish for "pig."



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An American "Yezhovschina"?

Maxwell Smart: Are you a psychologist, Dr. Stueben?

Dr. Stueben: I'm the president of the psychologist society for mental health and adjustment through fulfillment.

Smart: What kind of an organization is that?

Stueben: We're a hate group.

Smart (following a double-take): A hate group?

Stueben: Oh, in the sense that we cure hate and fear. We hate hate. Hate it.



From "All in the Mind," a 1965 episode offering redundant proof that Get Smart was the work of perceptive and prescient satirists.



A September 1996 American Bar Association conference on terrorism and the law in Washington, D.C. presented me with an opportunity I had long coveted.


Among the presenters at that event was former New York Times legal and political affairs columnist Anthony Lewis, long one of the most predictable journalistic voices on the left. One of his favorite tropes was the description of the American Right as "merchants of hate," an expression that seemed to serve as the title for every second or third column Lewis wrote.



If you think this is Wallace Shawn, you've fallen victim to one of the classic blunders: This is actually former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. The estimable Mr. Shawn -- character actor, vocal artist, and accomplished playwright, is seen below and to the right.


During a break in the proceedings I cornered Lewis, who looked a little less like Wallace Shawn than I had anticipated. By way of introduction, told him (in all sincerity) that I had enjoyed reading his book Gideon's Trumpet as a High School student.


"I've long wanted to ask you something about a subject you frequently address in your column," I continued. "You often make reference to `right-wing hate groups.' Do you acknowledge the existence of left-wing hate groups, as well -- and do you consider them to be a potential threat to society?"


Lewis stood in genuinely stunned silence for a good half a minute or so before tentatively saying, "Well, I suppose there could be such a thing as a left-wing hate group" -- a made with the same grudging, reluctant tone one might use when conceding the possible existence of unicorns, extra-terrestrial intelligence, or cerebral matter inside of Sean Hannity's skull.



Like many others of his political persuasion, Lewis was hard-wired in such a way that he could clearly discern "hate" only when it manifest itself among his political opponents.



He had internalized the conceit that the left, as the embodiment of progress and tolerance, was utterly devoid of hatred and similar base motivations; those impulses are monopolized by the forces of "reaction." Since, according to this ideological model, conservatives are hostage to false consciousness, they really aren't honest about their own motives and indeed cannot be.


Even if they don't consciously hate anybody, the politics of conservatives and other "right-wingers" are objectively hateful, you see, because they oppose inevitable social progress. What other motive could exist for such behavior, apart from simple, irrational belligerence or even outright hatred?


The only politically acceptable hatred, therefore, is to hate the haters -- those whose attitudes and opinions are irreconcilable with progressive prejudices. Where possible, efforts should be made to rehabilitate haters into useful members of the collective -- useful, that is, if only as informants and teaching examples. But when dealing with authentically incorrigible haters -- particularly those unwilling to confess that hatred is their genuine motivation -- sterner measures may be necessary.


This was the logic -- if that word applies -- behind the political use of psychiatry in the Soviet Union: Only someone clinically deranged could hate socialism, and since such people were a danger to themselves and society, they had to be incarcerated in the psiushka (psychiatric gulag) and forcibly cured of their anti-social(ist) tendencies. The heroic former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recounts his own experience in the Soviet psycho-gulag in his memoir, To Build a Castle.



The "Poisoned Dwarf": Nikolai Yezhov, diminutive in stature, crippled in body and morals, was the intellectual architect and, as head of the NKVD, chief enforcer of Stalin's Great Purge.


The Soviet use of psychiatry was an outgrowth of the Regime's longstanding policy of pre-emption: Threats to "stability" and "social order" had to be recognized and aborted before they reached maturity.


This concept was embedded in the Soviet Union's Fundamental Principles of Penal Legislation, which identified the central mission of the state's law enforcement apparatus (chiefly the Ckeha or secret police, by whatever acronym it was later known) as that of identifying, and removing the threat of, "socially dangerous persons."


This notion was encapsulated in Article 58 of the penal code, which served as the legal foundation for the Soviet regime's perpetual war of terror against dissent.


The law dealing with "socially dangerous persons," observes the authoritative Black Book of Communism, dealt with "any activity that, without directly aiming to overthrow or weaken the Soviet regime, was in itself `an attack on the political or economic achievements of the revolutionary proletariat.' The law thus not only punished intentional transgressions but also proscribed possible or unintentional acts."


And the term "socially dangerous persons" itself was based on "extremely elastic categories" that permitted the imprisonment of people in the gulag "even in the absence of guilt." This is because that the Soviet rulers were pleased to call "the law" specified that incarceration, exile, or execution could be employed as means of "social protection" against "anyone classified as a danger to society, either for a specific crime that has been committed or when, even if exonerated of a particular crime, the person is still reckoned to pose a threat to society."


Note carefully here how Soviet "law" discarded entirely with the idea of punishing overt acts, focusing instead on the supposed motivations of those deemed innately threatening to the regime. Note as well how the system was rigged to nullify exculpatory verdicts.


Of course, the Soviet government punished common criminals, at least those it didn't recruit into the ranks of its enforcement agencies. But as Paul Gregory points out in his book Lenin's Brain, most of those imprisoned in the gulag were there not because of what they had done, but because of what the state suspected they could do; they were being isolated from the rest of society "because of actual or suspected opposition to the Soviet state."


In 1935, an individual best described as five feet of feculent malice added another key element to the Soviet formula for institutionalized terror. A foul, vulgar little creature named Nikolai Yezhov, an intimate associate of Stalin, wrote a pseudo-academic paper contending that any form of political opposition should be treated as incipient terrorism.



Yezhov, who came to be known as "Stalin's Poison Dwarf," lusted to be head of the secret police. He secured that post following the assassination of Stalin's rival Sergei Kirov, an act of terrorism orchestrated by Stalin that inaugurated the campaign of official terrorism known as the Great Purge. Yezhov toppled his predecessor as head of the NKVD, Genrikh Yagoda, by accusing the old Bolshevik of being inadequately zealous in finding and eliminating Stalin's enemies. Yezhov distinguished himself by his murderous zeal until he, too, was denounced, tortured into multiple confessions, and executed.


Would-be commissarina for political correctness Bonnie Erbe, wearing red, of course.
For roughly three years, Yezhov conducted a reign of terror and persecution that came to be known as the Yezhovschina -- the "Era of Yezhov."


Viewed in the context of the Soviet regime's decades-long campaign of repression and terror, Yezhov's role in building the body count was relatively modest. The same really can't be said of his distinctive contribution to the art and practice of totalitarianism, namely the reductionist claim that all anti-statist activism will eventually beget terrorism.


Trace elements of the Poisoned Dwarf's influence -- or, at least, a toxin very similar in composition -- can be found in the Pentagon's claim that political protests are a form of "low-level terrorism."


Echoes of Yezhov's claim, and the Soviet doctrine of dealing pre-emptively with "socially dangerous persons," can also be heard in demands for federal action to imprison "haters" even in the absence of overt criminal acts.


Bonnie Erbe, who has afflicted public television for decades and now scribbes the occasional cyber-screed for CBS News, recently gave full-throated expression to the Soviet perspective on "pre-emption."

“If yesterday’s Holocaust Museum slaying … is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don’t know what is," shrilled Erbe, insisting that something must be done about ridding the Internet and the public dialogue of hate speech." But she wouldn't stop there; the purge would mean doing away with the "haters," as well.

Referring to the accused murderers of security guard Stephen Johns, abortionist George Tiller, and military recruiter William Long (whose alleged murderer was an American convert to Islam), Erbe insists: “It’s not enough to prosecute these murders as murders. They are hate-motivated crimes and each of these men had been under some sort of police surveillance prior to their actions. Isn’t it time we started rounding up promoters of hate before they kill?”

String up the barbed wire, sharpen the guillotine, fire up the crematoria: There are haters in our midst to be dealt with!

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One more thing...

Some of you might be interested in the developments I touch upon here.

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Dum spiro, pugno!