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| Staking his claim: A state-authorized dispenser of violence asserts ownership of a Mundane. |
We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey. –
Veteran demon Screwtape, counseling
apprentice devil Wormwood, in C.S. Lewis’ allegory The Screwtape Letters (letter XXV).
“The President of the
United States should say to all children … here’s the rule, kids: When the cop
tells you to go, you go,” declared Rudolph Giuliani. “You say, `Yes,
sir, no sir. Yes, police officer; no, police officer. You don’t disrespect a
police officer. He’s a symbol of authority.”
The besetting problem
of our era, we are insistently told by police and their apologists, is not
widespread abuse and other misconduct by law enforcement officers, but
increasing “disrespect for authority” that is being abetted by “liberals” and
those even more dreadful people called “libertarians.”
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| Cpl. Casebolt threatens to kill teens concerned about his victim. |
Giuliani’s comments
were made during an interview with Fox News
herd-poisoner Bill O’Reilly following the host’s recital of a familiar
jeremiad.
“Young people [are]
disrespecting authority,” O’Reilly complained, pandering to the prejudices of
his superannuated and incurious audience by insisting that “young people in
America, especially teenagers, have a defiance toward authority not seen since
the Vietnam days.” So pronounced is this social affliction, according to O’Reilly’s
diagnosis, that the entire population under the age of 25 should be written off
as a “lost generation” – a proposal he made with blithe indifference to
an audience roughly three times that age.
“If you were around
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you know that history is repeating itself,”
pontificated O’Reilly. Young people subject to enslavement through conscription
grew distrustful of government – understandably so, as any reasonable person
would point out. O’Reilly, a stranger in the house of reason, laments that this
healthy distrust “led to a breakdown of authority, and the rise of the `Sex,
drugs, and rock-and-roll’ era.”
O’Reilly’s personal legal
history
powerfully suggests that he is not a martyr to
sexual self-restraint.
For his part, Giuliani’s colorful
carnal dissipations
offer an interesting
counterpoint
to his stern public moralizing, the central theme of which is the unconditional
duty for unqualified submission to “authority” as embodied by the political
class and its armed emissaries.
“Freedom is
about authority,” Giuliani explained in a
1994 speech. “Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to
cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
In
that formula – “freedom” through submission to state “authority” – we hear
echoes of Mario Palmieri, the chief ideologist of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist
Party.
“According
to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State
has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man,” wrote Palmieri in
The Philosophy of Fascism (pg. 99).
“The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, with this need of
raising the State to its rightful position.”
The
State’s “rightful position,” from this perspective, is one of ownership. As the
property of the State, the individual is free to do only that which is
permitted by those who act in its name. When a police officer, “a symbol of
authority,” addresses a Mundane, he does so from a position of ownership. This
is what the term “authority” means.
People
have authority over only that which legitimately belongs to them – beginning
with their physical selves and the content of their thoughts, and extending to
such things as the property they have acquired through legitimate commerce or
inheritance, and the performance of services that have been promised through
freely negotiated and agreed contracts.
In
his Second Treatise, John Locke pointed out
that parents have authority within their home to care for and educate their
children. However, children themselves – contrary to the Roman doctrine of patria
potestas – are not the property of their parents. The duty of parents is
to care for, protect, and instruct children in sound morality as they learn to
take ownership of their lives. Successful parenting instills in children an
understanding of, and respect for, the Golden Rule, which requires reciprocal
respect for property rights.
As
Jeffrey
Tucker of the Foundation for Economic Education recently pointed out, it is
possible to have a police system that focuses entirely on the protection of
property rights. Tucker
likes to smoke, and he doesn't like having the government tell him where and
when he can indulge that habit. In fact, as a self-described anarchist, Tucker
– a free market economic analyst – doesn't like government at all, particularly
law enforcement.
Yet when a police
officer in Atlantic Station, Georgia explained to Tucker that smoking was
prohibited, Tucker readily complied – because
Atlantic Station is, in effect, a privatized city. Tucker recognized that
property rights include the ability to enforce rules that visitors must obey.
Police in
Atlantic Station are employed by business owners and merchants and answer to
them, rather than a political clique. The rules of the enclave are strict, but
not onerous. Rather than detaining people and filing charges for trivial
misbehavior, police – acting as peace officers – encourage or, when necessary,
compel them to leave. As Tucker observes, “The right to … walk away makes all
the difference.”
Similar
arrangements existed within mining camps, wagon trains, cattle drives, and
other pre-political arrangements in the Mountain West before the arrival of
government and what we're expected to call “civilization.” People who cherish
liberty understand that order exists where property rights are protected – and that
the protection of property is too important to be left to the State. This is best
accomplished through what conservatives often call “mediating institutions,”
such as private associations and, most importantly, the family.
Ironically,
people of O’Reilly’s cast of mind are entirely correct in lamenting the
disintegration of the family and the increasingly barbarized condition of our
culture. This is not because Americans are becoming impudently disdainful of
“authority.” Worship of “authority” – meaning armed people given State
authorization to kill – is ubiquitous in contemporary America, as is the
contempt for property rights that characterizes every collectivist society in
terminal decline. In keeping with Screwtape’s prescription, statists are
seeking to fix the public mind on the vice of which we are least in danger.
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| ...insist those belonging to the least accountable segment of American society. |
The
authoritarian formula peddled by Fascists both ancient – Palmieri and his comrades – and contemporary
– O’Reilly, Giuliani and their ilk – requires that parents indoctrinate
children in the protocols of submission to the State and its agents. This has
nothing whatsoever to do with the Golden Rule, either as a matter of public
policy or as a restraint on the private behavior of those who urge
authoritarian nostrums on the rest of us.
Public
“authority,” O’Reilly and others of his persuasion instruct us, is a uniquely
fragile thing, particularly when exercised by police officers. It appears to be
a “Clap for Tinkerbell” proposition: Unless we truly believe in the authority
of the police, they cannot protect us.
Police
have been “so demonized by zealots … that some of them have grown tentative,”
O’Reilly insists, lamenting a development that is welcomed with grateful relief
by people who have known the dubious blessing of unremitting police attention. “When the police see disrespect to them, they
say, `I’m not going to bother anymore,’ in many cases,” continues O’Reilly,
alluding to the much-circulated and entirely specious
claim
that we are witnessing a
“spike”
in violent crime as poor Officer
Tinkerbell sulks in his patrol car out of petulant spite because people
will no longer clap for him.
There is a sense in
which O’Reilly is correct that Vietnam-era history is repeating itself: In the
late 1960s and early 1970s, police unions, their media courtesans, and authoritarian
conservatives in Congress sounded the tocsin regarding a “War on
Police.” No such war occurred then, nor is one underway now. The rhetorical
barrage by the “law and order” lobby was an overture to Nixon’s decision to
declare “war” on crime – which led to the first wave of outright police
militarization.
“Is there a national
conspiracy to kill policemen?” asked the October 19, 1970 issue of U.S. News
and World Report. “Congress dug into this question in early October. One
witness after another told the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that a
pattern of attacks on police indicates a plot.”
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| Captain Honey in action. |
Among those who
offered testimony was Captain Joel Honey of the Santa Barbara, California
Sheriff’s Office. As summarized by U.S. News, Honey “told of confiscating
pamphlets giving detailed instructions on manufacture and use of weapons to
kill police. He said wires have been strung across California highways to
decapitate motorcycle policemen.”
“Police officials
keep saying it’s just the hazards of the job, but we should face it for what it
is: a conspiracy to kill policemen,” insisted Carl Parsell, director of the
Detroit Police Officers Association. Police union
commissar Edward Kiernan insisted that shootings of police officers were “part of a
cold, logical, hard-eyed revolutionary strategy.”
Fellow police union
kingpin John J. Harrington agreed that nothing less than a revolution was underway.
“The thin line between civilization and the
jungle – which is us [sic] policemen – is being shot to hell and something has
to be done about it,” Harrington harangued the crowd at a Washington rally of
“local” police. “It’s time the people of this country face up to it – there is
a revolution taking place.” A significant part of that “revolution,” Harrington
advised, was rock music, which he characterized as “a Communist plot to destroy
our youth.”
By the time Harrington
addressed that October 1970 rally, he had been an ex-cop for four years. In
1966, Harrington “marked his 26th anniversary on the force by
announcing his retirement to protest U.S. Supreme Court decisions ensuring the
rights of individuals suspected of committing crimes,” observed his 1989
obituary in the Philadelphia Daily News.
“I’m fed up – I am
disgusted,” exclaimed Harrington. “You can’t do police work anymore.”
Rather than operating
within the restraints imposed by the Bill of Rights, Harrington suggested
during the FOP’s 1971 national convention, police should be emancipated to act
as death squads. “Unless the courts stop this permissiveness … then the feeling
of policemen is, maybe we better resort to the old Mexican deguello – a shootout in
which we take no prisoners,” Harrington told his exuberantly approving
audience.
Significantly, the
Spanish verb from which that word is derived – degollar – refers to throat-slitting. Viewed from a
contemporary perspective, Mr. Harrington – one of the most prominent and widely
respected police union officials – was saying that his troops were ready to
behave much the same way that ISIS does today.
The previously
mentioned Captain Honey was likewise obsessed with fantasies of decapitation,
albeit in his case carried out against the police. Like Harrington, Honey –
whose sober testimony before the Senate Subcommittee was dutifully reported in
the press and remains part of the official record – yearned for a restoration
of pre-modern means of asserting “authority.” This explains why he was photographed
brandishing a Spanish-style broadsword and a spiked medieval mace as he commanded riot
police and SWAT operators who dealt with a campus riot at the University of
California-Santa Barbara a few months before his testimony in Washington.
Honey’s lurid clams
of a conspiracy to murder police made national headlines. His subsequent firing
for official misconduct didn’t receive as much attention.
Sgt. Edward Piceno, who along with his partner was suspended for 10 days for seizing and destroying a reporter’s camera during the riot, later testified that Honey had ordered deputies to “go out there and beat the living hell out of anybody that was away from the crowd, get in our cars and leave.”
Sgt. Edward Piceno, who along with his partner was suspended for 10 days for seizing and destroying a reporter’s camera during the riot, later testified that Honey had ordered deputies to “go out there and beat the living hell out of anybody that was away from the crowd, get in our cars and leave.”
Other officers
testified that Honey’s unlawful orders included exhortations to commit arson
and murder, and instructions on how to cover up those crimes.
“Honey was accused of
telling an officer at the riot that `if your people go into a building and kill
all of them, have them set fire to the building, because that’s what they did
in Watts,” summarized the
January 21, 1972 San Francisco Chronicle. Another officer recalled Honey’s
suggestion that he “get some throwaway guns for your people so when you kill
one of [the rioters] you can leave a throwaway gun” as evidence to “justify”
the killing. He also told the officer to deploy his men “in teams of at least
two, to corroborate an alibi if they killed anyone.” (That accusation,
interestingly, was itself corroborated by multiple officers.)
Honey was fired in
November 1971 for “illegally dropping tear gas on rioters from a helicopter …
striking handcuffed prisoners … and telling a subordinate to frame a suspect.”
It is possible that the deranged officer would have kept his job had his psychotic demeanor and palpable sadism
not made him an operational liability. Police officers from other jurisdictions
who had responded to a call for assistance made it clear they wouldn’t do so
again if Honey were given on-scene command during future disturbances.
The role played by
Honey and his subordinates during those riots was that of asserting
“authority,”
not protecting property. The only person who
lost his life during the riots was 22-year-old UCSB economics major Kevin Moran, who had arrived on
the scene “in response to an urgent plea from the student body president “for
moderate and peaceful students to try and calm the angry mob,” recalled the April 5,
1996 Saratoga News.
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| Moran (inset photo) and riot police. |
Moran and his
roommates rushed to Isla Vista, where they
extinguished a fire at a fast food restaurant and then hurried to the local
branch of Bank of America, which had been attacked by arsonists. As they battled the
blaze, the police – indifferent to property destruction, but determined to
assert dominance – closed in and began firing tear gas. One officer discharged
his rifle, killing Moran as he performed, at considerable personal risk, the kind
of service police supposedly provide.
The police initially insisted
that Moran had been gunned down by a radical “sniper” concealed within the
crowd. A ballistics test
later confirmed that the bullet had been fired by a police officer. Since this act of
homicide was consecrated by “authority,” it was ruled “justified” and the
killer suffered no legal or professional consequences. After all, that officer
was acting from a position of ownership, and an owner has a plenary right to
destroy what belongs to him.
Dum spiro, pugno!
