Last night at the Hilton Hotel where a group of activists lead
by a woman named Mollie, who is a fierce and lead voice of the Anti-Police
Terror Project, tried to prevent the boarding of buses by mayors and staff was
met by the full force and numbers of the San Francisco Police
Department.
Some politicians, police officers, and
military soliders perhaps enter their fields with an idealistic sense of
purpose. Too many old Westerns with the good guys perpetually emblazoned with
the white hats to leave all doubt out of the necessity for critical thinking,
too many Frank Kapra or George Cukor movies glorifying the American Spirit, or
maybe more recently Robocop movies or any of Clint Eastwood's to further
reinforce a myth of inviolable American righteousness.
It's very easy to get seduced by movies. They can be the most
effective means of propaganda the most vile of dictators can use to rally a
nation to commit the most heinous of crimes against a made up enemy. Leni
Riefenstahl was Adolph Hitler's.
Many of us raised on such mythological narratives find it very
difficult to keep our eyes pried wide open even with building jacks when those
films confront certain realities within ourselves easily capable of depravity in
the face of those realities where we as a nation for example descend to the
depths of being the ignoble enforcers of torture, beasts not longer
human.
Not uncommonly the American response is willful denial and/or
cognitive dissonance.
No back to the movies. More GMO-ed popcorn and Coca-Cola. Make
it a jumbo sized portion.
Americans love their best angles for the camera's portrayal.
They evade their worst.
By coincidence a couple of weeks ago, I revisited "LA
Confidential", a film about Los Angeles cops and their descent into the
depravity of comprising their ideals, some more swiftly and easily than
others. It's a story reflective of politicians and military soldiers also who
may start out with a sense of noble purpose but succumb to the pressures of
money, personal career ascents, compromised entrapments.
All of this raced through my mind as I stood watching a wall
of police stare vacantly at those of us they swore an oath to protect and serve
in preventing the People of San Francisco from even speaking to or questioning
those 300 or so national mayors boarding some buses yet again for a night of a
gala dinner of opulence, gorging at the taxpayers' expense, while the People
stood outside in the streets, some of whom would spend this night sleeping on
those streets.
Occupy Veterans in camouflage fatigues with their upside down
American Flag, the symbol of a nation in distress, threatened from Inside (not
from an External enemy) would be among the street sleepers. Our American
soldiers who never leave a battlefield but are left to the streets by a nation
that prefers Images and Symbols to concrete acts and systems of
Justice.
Codepink, Veterans for Peace, Occupy San
Francisco, ANSWER, all citizen activists were there to reinforce the blocking of
those buses behind the leadership of Anti-Police Terror
Project.
But the reality encountered? While confronting those vacant
staring cops concentrating hunger-ly on being given the license to unleash their
tribal, primordial instincts, "Us against Them" brutality driven reflexes,
Mollie speaking passionately in attempting to have all of our First Amendment
Rights respected, was pushed roughly backwards where she almost fell, by an
obvious cop-thug and future candidate for another case against a police for
excessive use of force or the killing yet again of another unarmed
citizen.
Was his action noted by the higher ranking officers that stood
by as such a candidate who needed some more training and should have been
immediately pulled from the ranks and sent home? I doubt it. His remaining there
once again reinforces the credence given by police forces to ill discipline of
their own.
Close ranks. Never ever cross the Blue Line of Silence, the
criminal violators' code of ethics. The Chain of Command will always stand
behind you and lie if necessary or at the very least through their Public
Relations appartchiks and easily seduced media grovelers for the 1%, cover it
up cosmetically.
For haven't police become less those that serve and protect
the community and more those that serve and protect the system that the 1% own
and operate over the lives of the People? Aren't the police indeed owned by the
1%? Aren't they indeed, as Molie pointed out, the latest Plantation Owners'
Slave Masters?
On the streets of San Francisco, last night, Saturday, June
20, 2015, the National Conference of Mayors resembled more a military operation
meant to protect an elite group of authoritarian followers as they were whisked
away in reality-insulated, darkened out windowed buses to a Gala Dinner at the
Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park that in itself resembled the decadence
of the Court of Louis the Fourteenth before the French Revolution.
__Bob
