A Crime of Cowardice: The Unjust Imprisonment of Scott Molen

When he was a free man: Scott Molen (right) enjoys a snowboarding trip with a friend. Molen is presently serving a prison sentence for a crime he didn't commit -- a fact acknowledged by one of the people responsible for putting him behind bars.



"When you boil the whole thing down and look at it," comments Ken McKay regarding the conviction of Boise resident Scott Molen on charges of sexual misconduct with his step-granddaughter, "there wasn't a single shred of evidence."


Certainly, the prosecution assembled a lurid and shocking story, anecdote-rich and heavily seasoned with outrage. But examined dispassionately, trying to make the evidence support the allegations is as futile as trying to sit on a cloud.


"[T]here were kind of fantastic charges about -- for instance, there was a pair of [girl's] undergarments that had a blood stain in them," McKay recalls, but this piece of critical physical evidence was "never produced."


This was probably not the product of an oversight, but rather a deliberately deceptive partial disclosure by an opportunistic prosecutor: The bloodstained underwear were discovered when the purported victim, a pre-pubescent girl, was living in Phoenix, Arizona, nearly 1,000 miles from the man accused of molesting her.


At the time, the alleged victim's mother was effectively living with a boyfriend of exceptionally dubious character (her most recent of several paramours of that variety) who left the young girl terrified, according to people who spoke with her.


Rather than incriminating Scott Molen, the underwear should have served as a critical piece of exculpatory evidence -- assuming that the garment even existed.


There was also a significant contradiction in the prosecution's description of the location at which the supposed defilement of the child took place. The original narrative described episodes of abuse taking place in a camper. But this was impossible, as McKay recalls, because the defense was able to demonstrate that "the camper was crushed by snow" before such abhorrent acts could have taken place therein.


















Christmas past: Scott Molen flanked by his wife Connie (right) and her daughter Mandi.


McKay likewise criticizes the interviewing techniques employed by the nurse working for the Child At Risk Evaluation Services (CARES) of St. Luke's Hospital in Boise during the original examination in July, 2005.



"There was a point ... [when] the CARE interviewer made a pretty critical mistake when she was interviewing" the alleged victim, McKay insists. There was a point in the interview, easily discerned by a reasonably careful observer, at which the interviewer "actually put her words, used her own words to describe what the young woman was saying and from that point forward in the interview [the alleged victim] used the interviewer's words."



This is a critical point: From that point it was the interviewer who was effectively telling the story, rather than the supposed victim. The CARES nurse was prompting the girl, guiding her, molding the language in such a way as to fit the standard template of a sex offense charge. "I remember watching [the recorded interview] and thinking, wow that's really, that's really incorrect," McKay relates.



All of this adds up to abundant reasonable doubt, McKay insists: "[B]ased on the evidence, boy, I couldn't say the state made their case." Yet McKay, who served as foreman of the jury that convicted Molens, didn't act on that conclusion until a year after Molens was sent to prison.



McKay's comments, as quoted above, were extracted from a lengthy interview conducted by a private investigator hired by Scott Molens' wife Connie as part of an attempt to overturn the patently unjust conviction -- and, hopefully, to impose some measure of accountability on those responsible for it.



Like too many spouses and family members of unjustly convicted people, Connie has assembled and collated a huge amount of evidence regarding the official misconduct, abuse of discretion, and corruption that characterized the prosecution of her husband. Examining that material, I am struck by the fact that Molen would still be a free man (well, as free as any of us are in late imperial America) if one of his fellow citizens had thought like a citizen, rather than behaving like a dutiful collectivist drone.



Long before McKay and his colleagues were sequestered to deliberate the charges against Scott Molens, it was clear that the prosecution's case was less substantial than the reflected shadow of a boiled ghost.



Yet McKay, who could have -- and should have -- either built a coalition for acquittal or hung the jury, meekly submitted to the reflexive punitive instincts of the majority.



"I think some of the people that were [on the jury], I think they had decided that he was guilty pretty early on and there was really no reasoning with them about that," McKay recalls.



An appropriate word to describes that attitude is "prejudice"; a better one might be "bigotry," a term describing a prejudice that has made itself entirely impervious to evidence. That is a perfectly suitable term to describe an unreasoning determination to convict a defendant irrespective of the evidence. McKay is an engineer by training; his professional credo is "In God we trust; everybody else bring your data."



As jury foreman, McKay was ethically required to make every effort to overcome the bigotry of his fellow jurors using the tools of rational thought provided to him by his academic training and innate intelligence.



Rather than distinguishing himself by standing fast in defense of an indispensable principle -- namely, that the state has to prove its case against the accused -- McKay sought refuge in the consensus of the collective: "I remember ... we had gone I think several hours in deliberation and a few of us were dug in [on behalf of acquittal] and the guilty people were adamant that he was guilty ... I was thinking, well, man, eight other people say that he's guilty so where am I, what am I missing here?"



I cannot recall ever being exposed to a more perfect specimen of collectivist thought. Here was a man sufficiently intelligent and perceptive to recognize that the prosecution had failed to prove its case, yet his faculty for rational action was preempted by the irresistible need to conform -- even at the price of an innocent man's freedom.



Confronted with a prosecution that couldn't muster a substantive case, McKay focused not on the state's missing evidence, but rather on his own supposed delinquency for failing to see things the way the State required him to.


To someone capable of exercising a modicum of critical thought, the grounds for reasonable doubt were so abundant as to suggest that the prosecution of Scott Molen was an act of deliberate, conscious malice.



The abuse of Molen's step-granddaughter supposedly began in 2004, when the child was eight years old. During a sleep-over with friends in June 2005, the girl made comments that were construed as "disclosure" of sexual abuse.



In short order she was interviewed by Boise Police Officer Tammy Kennedy, who reported that the girl had described multiple sexual contacts, including up to a dozen instances of full intercourse.



The original audiotape of that interview, however, was conveniently lost. Although Kennedy's report -- which contained adult sexual expressions not likely to have fallen from the mouth of an 8-year-old girl, however carnally precocious -- was dated June 2005, it strongly resembles the CARES interview in both tone and substance; this is significant since Kennedy's report wasn't filed until after the CARES interview.


Furthermore, during the trial the child repudiated much of what she had supposedly told Officer Kennedy, and at one point suggested that she needed Kennedy's help to "remember" certain things she had allegedly disclosed.


The initial physical examination of the child failed to turn up conclusive evidence of assault rape, which was the charge initially listed by Officer Kennedy. The CARES nurse reported that the child's genitals appeared to display injuries "suggestive of blunt force penetrating trauma often seen in sexual abuse." However, the results of a a more detailed examination using a specialized instrument called a colposcope were withheld from the defense for two years; it wasn't until well into the trial that this critical physical evidence was obtained through subpoena.



During his rebuttal testimony on behalf of the defense, Dr. Edward Friedlander, chairman of the Department of Pathology at Kansas City University College of Osteopathic Medicine, evaluated the colposcopic images. His conclusion was that they depicted the anatomy of a child who was a "perfectly intact virgin," rather than one who had been forcibly violated ten or twelve times, as the prosecution had alleged.



Scott was never put under arrest prior to his conviction, which is a curious oversight if he were the kind of bipedal predator who molests little girls. A search warrant for his home was returned to the court without being executed, an oddity that suggests, once again, that investigators didn't really consider Scott a credible suspect. Yet the prosecution -- an apparatus designed to secure convictions, not to pursue a true and just verdict -- continued its plodding, relentless assault.



As almost always happens in cases of this kind, Scott was approached by the prosecutor with a "deal": If he had been willing to admit to unspecified criminal "misconduct" with the child, he would be given a "lenient" sentence -- six months to a year behind bars -- with assurances that his life would not be ruined by having his name placed on the sex offender registry. As he was guilty of exactly nothing, Scott turned down the "deal," most likely prompting the prosecution to exert itself to make an example of him.



Convicted on a single count of "lewd and lascivious conduct with a child," Scott will not come up for parole for several more years -- and he won't be granted parole unless he not only is willing to admit to a crime he clearly didn't commit, but passes a lie detector test to demonstrate that he believes that he committed the crime.



"Scott spends his time in prison in the company of people who really did vile, disgusting things like the ones he was falsely accused of," his wife Connie told Pro Libertate. "Among themselves, they're completely open in admitting what they did. Some of them even brag about how all they have to do is to admit their offenses and they can be paroled and go out and commit the same crimes all over again. And Scott will stay in prison just as long as the system can hold him, because he never did those awful things and will never tell the lies the system demands of him."


Ken McKay, the jury foreman who now admits Molen's evidence, was entirely willing to endorse and sustain the lies of the system that stole Molen's freedom. Despite knowing that the case assembled by Prosecutor Justin Whatcott was entirely spurious, McKay was willing to stand in the jury box and read a guilty verdict he knew to be unjust while looking his victim in the eye.


There are crimes of passion, of calculation, of opportunity. The imprisonment of Scott Molen reflects the professional depravity of Whatcott and his comrades, to be sure, but it was made possible by a crime of cowardice committed in the jury room.

QUICK UPDATE:

Please forgive the delay in posting your valued comments. I'm in the hospital, and will probably be here until at least tomorrow (Thursday) with a really nasty GI infection. I'm learning it's difficult to type while plugged into an IV stand....

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Hotlined

The center of our universe (from upper left): Isaiah Athanasius, William Wallace, Katrina Antigone, Sophia Faith, and Jefferson Leonidas.


"Grab some clothes and get into the van, now."


For an instant, that directive, and the tone in which it was issued, had the opposite of its intended effect: Korrin and our five older children, momentarily paralyzed by shock, looked at me in alarm. There was something in both the tone of my voice, and the expression on my face, that was new and a little frightening. None of them had seen my "game face" before. They were seeing it now.


Just seconds earlier, Korrin and I had been confronted on our doorstep by two very nice, well-dressed women who informed us that an anonymous "child endangerment" complaint had been filed with the Child Protective Services.


One of the visitors was a social worker we've known for several years, and consider a friend. The other was a stranger who introduced herself as a CPS investigator. She intended to inspect our home and speak with our children.


After being summoned to the doorstep, I had ushered our children into our house and closed the door behind me. Short of being removed by force, there was no way I was going to permit a CPS investigator to have access to our home as long as our children were vulnerable to government abduction.


"You seem like a conscientious and well-intentioned person," I quietly told the investigator, "but this is an adversarial situation, and I can't allow you to have access to my home in the absence of a warrant, and until I've consulted with legal counsel."


Although this clearly wasn't the response she had expected or desired, the investigator retained her professional composure.


"Well, that is your right," she replied. "I must advise you that I will consult with law enforcement and return later today."


"I understand," I said, shooting a quick glance at the slender silver digital recorder the investigator wasn't successfully concealing in her left hand. "I also want the record to reflect the fact that I didn't consent for our conversation to be recorded."


The investigator nodded in assent, her brows pulling together ever-so-slightly as if in puzzlement. She and her associate returned to their car and drove away. As they turned the corner I turned to Korrin and our children and ordered -- yes, it was an order, not a request -- them to get in the van.


"Don't bother packing," I told them in syllables drawn taut with urgency. "Just grab a couple of things and get in the van." The kids, suddenly understanding that we were at Def-Con One, quietly and quickly did as they were told.


Minutes later we were headed out of Payette County, beyond the jurisdiction of the local police and Sheriff, en route to a pre-designated safe house.



There's at least a little Justus in the world, after all: Newborn Justus Samuel Grigg rests under the watchful eyes of his sister, Sophia Faith.




Yes, we had -- as Foghorn Leghorn might put it -- made plans to deal with just such an emergency.


Earlier this year, I met with a handful of close and trusted friends to discuss various crisis scenarios -- from the systemic breakdown of the commercial food distribution network to the possibility that one of us might find his family targeted by the CPS. Those meetings were the idea of a good friend who is a very well-informed and astute survivalist. Relatively little was accomplished at those meetings, but as recent events testify, what little was done proved to be indispensable.


One of the participants at those gatherings (we chose a local club whose owner is defying an asinine local smoking ban; we refractory individualists need to support each other) very generously offered his home as a temporary refuge for my children in the event that the CPS came after my family. From there, working through communications cut-outs, we could make arrangements for Korrin and our children to stay in the homes of other reliable people who share our convictions.


When the balloon went up, we knew what to do. I spirited our family to my friend's house, casting frequent glances in the rear-view mirror.


"This reminds me of that movie `Not Without My Daughter,'" commented my genius son William Wallace, our family's resident cineaste. There was no undertone of eagerness or excitement in his voice; William was scared. So was Isaiah, who quietly explained that in cases of this kind children are often taken from their parents.


That was a hard thing to say, but it needed to be said. Not surprisingly, this terrified our girls, six-year-old Katrina and four-year-old Sophia. Although he has the reflexive aversion to girls of any kind that typifies an eight-year-old boy, Jefferson wrapped his arms around Katrina and comforted her as she cried.


Once we crossed the county border, I relaxed a little bit and gave some instructions to Korrin and the kids. I told Korrin that it was important not to call our home, since caller ID would reveal the location of the safe house. I would contact them through an intermediary, and if she needed anything she was to call that person. I told the kids that they would be safe with our friends until I came to get them, but that if people from the government arrived they were to be courteously uncooperative.


The plan was for me to return to our house, tidy it up, and deal with the CPS and the police. This might mean I could face obstruction charges if they insisted on seeing Korrin and the children, I explained, so there was a possibility I would be in jail by day's end. They had to be prepared for that possibility, because I would not give the CPS an opportunity to seize our children.


Once at the safe house I called a friend who agreed to be my cut-out. Then we gathered for prayer and I went back home by a different route.


Please, Dear Lord, I prayed silently as I neared our house, don't let it be a crime scene already. To my relief, nobody was there.


About forty minutes later, following a minimal investment of effort, the house was tidied up. We're messy, but not unclean; no parent would be surprised to see the clutter we deal with, given that we have six small children, and no honest person would consider our unremarkable untidiness to be a threat to our children's health or well-being. But I'm well aware of CPS enforcement actions that have resulted in charges being filed against parents whose homes aren't as antiseptic as a NASA white room.


Roughly a half-hour later, while speaking on the phone to my mother, I saw a city police car drive slowly by our house, turn around, and park in front of our walkway. From it emerged a young man, clean-cut and squared away, who strode up to our front door.


Well, here we go, I thought. I was wrong -- and the day took an even stranger turn.


"Who owns the vacant lot?" the young police officer politely inquired.


"Do you mean the lot next to our house?" I asked.


"No, the one behind it," he persisted.


"That's not a `lot,' it's our back yard," I pointed out, gesturing for him to come with me to look through a nearby gate.


"Who owns this property?" asked the officer. I explained that we were renters, not owners.


"Well, there are some weeds in the backyard that apparently need to be taken care of," the officer began, his tone suggesting that he had expected to see a much bigger problem than the one confronting him. Sure, there is a row of weeds along the rear fence line of our yard (which occupies a significant fraction of an acre), but it wasn't the Amazonian jungle he had anticipated.


"I suppose the weeds along the fence line need to be cut down," the officer observed, "but that's really the responsibility of the property owner." I assured him that I intended to attend to the weeds, whether or not that was my legal "responsibility," simply in the interest of living in a presentable home. The officer took down my publicly available contact information, gave me a polite nod, and departed, leaving me to contemplate an unsettling question:


Why would a police officer visit me with a complaint about overgrown weeds that are not visible from any of the streets that run by our house? He couldn't have seen them from the street. Clearly, he was responding to a complaint from someone who had recently been in our backyard.


That fact may prove to be the critical clue in identifying the person who also hot-lined our family to CPS to report that our children were "endangered" by the untidiness of our living space.


Less than a half hour after the first police visit ended, an unmarked police car arrived and decanted the CPS investigator and the largest officer on the roster of the Payette City Police force -- a genial man-mountain with a tonsured head, Van Dyke beard, and a ready smile. Seeing him, I simply had to chuckle: Yes, of course they'd send him.


The plainclothes officer identified himself. I replied that I had met him a couple of years earlier when he, along with practically the entire population of Payette, helped us find then-five-year-old Jefferson when he went missing. (Jefferson was found sleeping peacefully in his fortress of solitude, a secret space he created behind the headboard of a hide-a-bed.)


"I told her" -- the officer began, gesturing to the CPS investigator -- "that I've been in your home, and it seemed perfectly OK to me. But we have to clear up this complaint."


Since Korrin and the kids were safe, I had no objection. I invited them in an busied myself paying bills.


"Are Korrin and the children not here?" asked the CPS investigator. I told her, quite truthfully, that they had been invited to spend the afternoon at a friend's house.


About two minutes later the CPS worker and policeman were done. They explained as they left that the matter was closed but that I should contact Health and Welfare in the event that we "need any services."


"When we spoke this morning, you were very respectful," the CPS worker commented. "You did hold out for your rights, which is appropriate, but you treated me well, and I appreciated that." I smiled and said something to the effect that I try to treat people well.


This episode turned out much better than it could have.


What if I hadn't been working at home, and Korrin -- who suffers from a chronic condition that leaves her exhausted and bed-ridden most of the time -- hadn't been able to stave off the CPS before the house had been tidied up?


What if the CPS investigator had seen something -- anything -- "aberrant" in the behavior or appearance of our children, and decided that prudence required a more detailed examination?


What if we had been dealing with the kind of CPS investigator hard-wired to find evidence of abuse or neglect? Granted, we were blessed on this occasion to deal with someone who was sincere, polite, reasonable, and professional. That generally isn't the case in situations of this kind.


What if some combination of circumstances had resulted in a judicial order to appear at a "show cause" hearing, a procedure that almost always leads to some kind of catastrophic government intervention?


Once again, none of those things -- or dozens of others, many of them worse -- happened. This time. To us. But all of those terrible things have happened to families just like ours, because someone, for reasons only that person will know, filed an anonymous complaint with the child "protection" bureaucracy.


It's been said that one can't be a credible sportswriter unless he's actually played the games he covers, or a music critic without knowing how to play an instrument or carry a tune.


After more than two decades of writing about the disruption, or outright destruction, of families by the child welfare bureaucracy, I can finally consider myself qualified, albeit in a limited sense, to pronounce upon that subject. That's a credential I could have done without.


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The Plague of Punitive Populism

"Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."

-- Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath


In Virginia, police officers raid a baptismal party for two small boys. Without cause or provocation they assault the grandfather who owns the home, tasering him three times while children and other guests look on in horror.



When the pregnant daughter-in-law of the victim intervenes, she, too, is forced to perform the "electron dance." The grandfather is charged with disorderly conduct and public intoxication, despite the fact that Virginia state statutes specify that such offenses cannot be committed on one's own property.


The woman who came to the aid of the first victim was charged with "assaulting an officer," since her brave effort to protect the grandfather from a criminal assault involved placing her unhallowed hands on the sanctified personage of a "law enforcement officer." Such presumption simply cannot be tolerated.



A few weeks earlier in Webster, Texas, a pastor is tasered after a member of his congregation was pulled over by police in the church parking lot. Once "backup" arrives -- the boldness of police, like that of feral wolves and droopy-drawered gang-bangers, is a function of operating in packs -- the officers charge the church sanctuary, assaulting Pastor Jose Moran and pepper-spraying the worshipers who objected to the treatment of their pastor. Once again, the victim, rather than the assailants, finds himself charged with assault.


Pastor Jose Elias Moran recovers in a Texas hospital after being attacked by a Taser-wielding state bureaucrat.




In Alabama, police pepper-spray and then taser a deaf, mentally handicapped adult man who couldn't hear their orders to leave the bathroom of a discount store.


Once the confusion was cleared up, they arrested him anyway on various charges, including -- no extra points for guessing correctly -- "assaulting" the officers who attacked him. The police department issues a statement claiming that the attack with chemical and electro-shock weapons was justified because the confused man-child (a term I use with sympathy, not in derision) was "armed" with an umbrella.

Victim of police abuse Antonio Love (left, with his mother).



In Boise, Idaho, police swarm, gang-tackle, and handcuff a man involved in a domestic dispute.


When he complains about impending suffocation -- a very acute threat, since many victims of lethal police violence die from positional asphyxiation -- he is subjected to a Taser strike in his rectum by a still-unidentified officer who threatens to strike the victim's genitals next. Subsequently one of the assailant's superiors attempts to destroy the evidence by erasing an audio taped record of the event.



In Wisconsin Dells, two callow patrolmen -- Officer Beavis and Officer Butt-Head -- stumble upon a couple of off-duty National Guardsmen and decide to have some fun. The police accuse the victims of urinating in public and then demand that they lick from the ground a substance they are told is human urine. When a third police officer materializes, the victims speak of filing a complaint.


This prompts the threat of a bogus burglary charge and the promise that "nobody will believe you" if they actually file a protest. As it happens, the complaint is believed -- most likely because it was made by two Iraq war veterans, rather than common citizens.



These are mere snapshots of the commonplace sadism that increasingly typifies contemporary American law enforcement. But this really isn't so surprising for a country in which a bare majority, according to a recent global survey, opposes state torture.


That survey found that Americans are much likelier to support government-inflicted torture than citizens of Communist China, and marginally more indulgent of the practice than the residents of Muslim Indonesia and Muslim/socialist Egypt. Support for torture is also more widespread among Americans than among Iranians.



One might think that support for torture would be restrained by the influence of America's church-going population. One would think that those Americans who worship the Man of Sorrows who was tortured to death by the occupation forces of a pagan imperial state would be among the most insistent opponents of the vile and indefensible practice.


Again, one would think this would be the case.


One would be entirely wrong, since exactly the opposite is true: A survey taken earlier this year documented that a majority (54 percent) of people who attend church at least once a week support torture.



Perhaps the most arresting discovery was that more than sixty percent of white, evangelical Protestants condone the practice. Torture advocates of this theological persuasion profess a "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ. That relationship must be, at best, a distant and superficial one.


As the United States sinks into what will be a long and dreadful depression, and partisan politics takes on the character of a literal bloodsport, speculation is rampant about a possible civil war (which would not be the same thing as peaceful secession, which may prove to be the only sensible way to address our economic and political afflictions). If such a conflict were to come, it might actually start within the church-going segment of the population, pitting nominally Christian statists against those who believe in what the Epistle of James called the "perfect law of liberty."


In dealing with the prospect of an internecine conflict among believers, it's instructive to recall the events described in the 12th chapter of the Old Testament Book of Judges, in which the Gileadites and Ephramites were at war.


After the Gileadites routed their opponents in one battle, they devised a clever method of winnowing out concealed Ephramites from their midst. As it turns out, the Ephraimites for some reason couldn't pronounce the word "shibboleth" correctly, rendering that term "sibbolet." Accordingly, each man who approached a critical checkpoint was required to say "shibboleth," with instant death being the penalty for tens of thousands who uttered malapropisms.


While I have no desire to put anyone to the sword, I suggest that liberty-minded Americans, whether or not they subscribe to the Christian faith, can learn much about themselves and those around them through what we could call the "Tom Joad Test."


I'm not a fan of Steinbeck's incurably wrong-headed economic views or his idiosyncratic collectivist politics in general, although I must admit a sneaking respect for anybody who attracts the hostile interest of the FBI solely on the strength of his published writings.



His creation Tom Joad isn't among my favorite fictional characters. But there is substantial merit in Joad's pledge to sympathize with those who are victims of Power.



Early in The Grapes of Wrath, Joad -- recently paroled after serving four years in prison for killing a man who stabbed him in a fight -- becomes re-acquainted with Jim Casy, a fallen Oklahoma Pentecostal preacher who has embraced a populist version of Emerson's "oversoul" concept: "Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of."



Thus was planted the seed that would sprout into Joad's famous soliloquy, which included the pledge that "Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there."



So here, stated briefly, is the question that serves as the shibboleth/sibbolet dividing line in the "Tom Joad Test":


When you see a cop -- or, more likely, several of them -- beating up on a prone individual, do you instinctively sympathize with the assailant(s) or the victim?


If it's the former, you're an authoritarian, irrespective of your partisan attachments or professed political philosophy.


If it's the latter, you're an instinctive libertarian, whether or not you are consistently guided by that impulse in your political decisions.


It may later be demonstrated that the figure on the receiving end of the beating had committed some horrible crime. However, such a disclosure wouldn't invalidate the results of the Tom Joad Test, because that test reveals a subject's default assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the state.


Do you assume that the state is entitled to the benefit of the doubt whenever its agents inflict violence on somebody, or do you believe that the individual -- any individual -- is innocent of wrongdoing until his guilt has been proven?


This could be considered a reverse application of Lenin's famous political formula, kto kogo? -- broadly translated as "Who does what to whom?" Lenin and his followers sought and acquired the power to be the "Who" in that formula, which meant that millions of those consigned to the "whom" category were imprisoned and slaughtered.


Ironically, many law-and-order conservatives come uncomfortably close to Lenin's view of the state when they reflexively take the side of agents of state coercion -- the "who" in the typical encounter between police officer and citizen. The American view of rights, however, is overwhelmingly weighted on behalf of the latter, even when the "who" is a winsome and well-dressed policeman, and the "whom" is a scruffy and unappealing individual.


One of the easiest and least intrusive ways to conduct the Tom Joad Test is to observe an individual's reaction to the typical installment of the TV series COPS, which -- in any of its iterations -- is a kind of authoritarian pornography for the badge-licker population.


Several months ago, I took my family to a large and very nice Chinese buffet in Boise. Since the Grigg family is almost at brigade strength, we were ushered into the conference room, where we could have a long table all to ourselves. Unfortunately, the room was equipped with a television set, most likely because some secret Reversal of Freedom law dictates the presence of an infernal device of that kind in every room of a certain size. Even worse, a COPS marathon was underway.


As I grazed on sauteed bok choy and exquisitely seasoned bean sprouts (delicious vegetarian items being a specialty of this particular restaurant), my appetite began to depart as the screen conveyed an endless repetition of the familiar storyline: Police spy pathetic, socially marginalized individual; police harass said pathetic individual, who had done nothing to harm anyone else; police find some excuse to arrest said individual, often throwing him to the ground and humiliating him in the process.


Despite the delicious fare in front of me, my mood turned sour and ominous mutterings began emanating from me like premonitory tremors anticipating an eruption. Similar outrage radiated from the faces of other nearby patrons.


Near the beginning of the third consecutive installment of COPS, we were treated to the unedifying sight of a police officer approaching a woman on a sidewalk and demanding that she show identification. She had done nothing to provoke the interest of the officer, and wasn't inclined to comply with that unwarranted demand.


The officer replied in predictable fashion, beginning the familiar procedure of jacking her arm behind her to slap the cuffs on her wrists. To her considerable credit, the woman shrugged off that assault and put up a more than respectable fight, despite being roughly 50-75 lbs. smaller than her assailant.


Eventually, the cop -- who had created this altercation ex nihilo -- ended it by grabbing the small-boned woman in a headlock and slamming her face-first into the sidewalk.


That sight wrenched gasps from several people sitting at other tables. My reaction was characteristically measured and sedate.


"You malignant BASTARD!" I exclaimed in a voice that was probably heard in Winnemucca.


Shooting a quick glance around, I noticed several food-laden forks suspended in mid-transit from well-stocked plate to gaping mouth, and numerous sets of eyes distended in shocked disbelief. I suggested to my wife, the lovely and brilliant Korrin, that we should leave. She didn't resist the suggestion.


The success of COPS and its imitators, like the survey results dealing with torture, illustrates that there is a wide, deep, and resilient strain of punitive populism in American culture. I suspect that there is a smaller, but growing, sub-population of people who instinctively take the side of the person on the receiving end of the nightstick.


In light of the fact that nightsticks and various other implements of coercion will play an increasingly prominent role as the economic implosion accelerates, we'd better find each other, and radically increase our ranks -- and do this as quickly as humanly possible.

On a related note...

In the comments section of a recent essay, mention was made of the little-appreciated role played by the Marquis de Sade as a founder of the modern collectivist movement. Over at another blog I've recently posted an essay dealing with that subject; for those who are interested, please take a look and leave a comment or two.

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Dum spiro, pugno!