Revolution Rising? On Rebels, Causes, and Clues
In the United States there are all manner of indicators known to escalate people's perceptions of a crime. The loud mouth is indicative of potentially mortal violence, but only if coupled with dark skin. The right to stand your ground includes the right to pick a fight and then shoot your victim if he defends himself, but only for white skin; a black woman cannot stand her ground as such.
This is unfair. For over a decade, the lifelong American hatred of dark skin turned into the sort of paranoia where white, male, Christian provocateurs receive at least as much explicit admiration as the average Muslim receives in offhanded, tacit insults.
This cannot be.
A crew of Muslims flying an airplane into a building to hurt Americans in protest of grievances perceived and expressed are terrorists, but a white guy flying an airplane into a building because he's pissed off about his taxes is a patriot.
And now, because these subtleties are apparently too difficult for some to grasp, Life and Death have accommodated by putting an explicit example in front of us:
So here's the simple question; or, more appropriately, the question simply expressed: Do we treat white conservatives the same way we've treated Muslims, blacks, hispanics, and every other nonwhite, nonwasp social identity through American history?
Or does this mean people are finally figuring it out?
There is an analog here to the woeful saga of canonization of the self-proclaimed spy who deliberately pursued a job that would allow him to steal secure information and endanger the United States. People who aren't white, Christian, conservative, and reasonably fanatical in their patriotism have traditionally been the targets of state espionage against its citizens. Ethnic and religious minorities, political minorities, and consensual criminals such as drug users. And all the while, this has been just fine with mainstream American society. In the context of PRISM, and presupposing what history confirms, that the United States government does, in fact, spy on its citizens, two considerations emerge, and both are anathema in the Ballad of Saint Edward of Snowden:
No, really, is it hard to see the pattern? There are plenty who want a way around it, but few among them are quite so stupid as that parent in Salem to actually come out and express that way.
But it's not exactly so hard to identitfy.
Check the Fourteenth Amendment, section 1. Review the Nineteenth Amendment. Consider the history of the federal government smacking down states that tried to extend the franchise to women under their constitutional Equal Protection obligations. The Nineteenth was necessary because women weren't people.
This is what we do. And this is how we do it.
Our society has undergone fits at every suggestion that it's time to look at other extant threats, the non-nonwhite threats. Early in the Obama administration, the president and Secretary of Homeland Security were tarred for issuing a report longer in the making than their tenures; a report suggesting disgruntled veterans and other such "patriots" might become a present danger. Depsite all the fits we pitched as a society, that outlook has proven true.
It is hardly that these are the first. The whole Bundy standoff was a clusterdiddle of injuriously mindbending magnitude; a bunch of white nationalist, anti-government agitators with rifles demanding communism. What the hell happened there? We leftists are laughing at that irony; everyone eventually comes 'round to our outlook for some reason or another, and the only real question is why they can only do so neurotically instead of rationally.
What connects so many of these events, even the Isla Vista shooting in which so many would do anything to compel us to look away from misogyny so that we can get on with Americans just being America, is the perception of a threat to privilege.
This is, of course, an American tradition. Or, as Ginny Stroud (Kim Krizan) explained, in Dazed and Confused: "This summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes."
Meanwhile, if anyone notes that the suspects allegedly left Gadsden flags and swatstikas on the bodies of dead LVPD officers, we need to remember that they're just outliers, who don't really represent the Bundy Reds, Tea Party, American conservatism, or anything else associated with a string of events that keep happening and we are expected to pretend have nothing to do with anything.
As I said, the question simply asked. Do we treat these phenomena as we have treated similar events, movements, and ideologies in the past? Or did our society magically figure out, once again, in the nick of time for those poor, beleaguered white people, what we've been doing wrong the whole time, so let us never speak of it again, and why in the world would you be so horrible and negative as to wonder at the differences or similarities over time?
I would suggest that we cannot afford such traditional deference any longer. The pedigree is emerging, the pathology concretizing, and the identity crystallizing. Cliven Bundy may have discovered where society departs from Darwin and Spencer, but there is good news there insofar as he is alive to consider the threshold. The downside, of course, is that there is no guarantee his faculties can complete the process, and, furthermore, all suggestions we have on record so far speak against that possibility.
What happens, though, if we can no longer afford to reserve from our terrornoia a special place for white conservatives? While the suggestion that certain issues could be somehow arguably controversial—e.g., why should anti-abortion be exempt from its role in fomenting, and willingness to profit from, terrorism? does the fact that someone doesn't want to pay the federal government what he owes count for merit regardless of the propriety of the claim? are taxes really a good reason to fly an airplane into a building?—often boggles the mind, the fact remains that there are plenty who, in neurotic defense of privilege, would reach for any shred of flotsam, thinking it an island in the storm.
But what if we treated anti-abortion the same way as we treated other terrorism? Certes, territorial pissings explain why we don't drop laser-guided bombs on active threats like Cliven Bundy and his cohort, but there is still plenty of spying and crashing down of doors and shooting the wrong white person because they all look alike left to do before this deadly petulance is anything more than lethal juvenilia.
What if we crashed the tax protesters in TWAT like we do Muslims?
Or like civil rights advocates fifty years ago?
What if we start arrresting them for publishing papers in support of individual rights? You know, like Emma Goldman was arrested for advocating womens' rights to birth control? Or prosecuting soldiers for unknowingly talking to someone on a blacklist, like Pvt. Eddie Buwala?
What if we start treating white patriots like we treat every other despised group in America?
Will we suddenly wake up, say, "Yeah, we've been doing this wrong. Sorry 'bout the rest of it before, but, you know. Thanks for bein' a good sport."
Or will we continue blithely down our TWATting path, burying the WASPs alongside the blacks, commies, Muslims, queers, and others traditionally unworthy of American blessings?
More likely, we'll continue blindly down our path of reserving the empowered majorities from the scorn shown everyone else.
Still, though, it is hardly surprising that the question can only arise when the empowered majority threatens itself. We've seen this sort of thing coming, and we've even been able to project the pathology and a general etiology with reasonable accuracy. The only question remaining is what we intend to do about it.
And while "nothing" technically is a choice, it is also technically not "nothing".
The price of admission to "nothing" is twofold: Who is next to die? And how much is that worth to you?
____________________
Notes:
Nordli, Brian, Kyle Roerink and Joe Schoenmann. "Shooters identified in slaying of Metro Police officers, bystander". Las Vegas Sun. June 9, 2014. LasVegasSun.com. June 9, 2014. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2014/jun/09/neighbors-couple-suspected-las-vegas-killing-spree/
Associated Press. "Assistant sheriff: 2 suspects left swastika, 'Don't tread on me' flag on dead Vegas officers". Las Vegas Sun. June 9, 2014. LasVegasSun.com. June 9, 2014. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2014/jun/09/assistant-sheriff-2-suspects-left-swastika-dont-tr/
In the United States there are all manner of indicators known to escalate people's perceptions of a crime. The loud mouth is indicative of potentially mortal violence, but only if coupled with dark skin. The right to stand your ground includes the right to pick a fight and then shoot your victim if he defends himself, but only for white skin; a black woman cannot stand her ground as such.
This is unfair. For over a decade, the lifelong American hatred of dark skin turned into the sort of paranoia where white, male, Christian provocateurs receive at least as much explicit admiration as the average Muslim receives in offhanded, tacit insults.
This cannot be.
A crew of Muslims flying an airplane into a building to hurt Americans in protest of grievances perceived and expressed are terrorists, but a white guy flying an airplane into a building because he's pissed off about his taxes is a patriot.
And now, because these subtleties are apparently too difficult for some to grasp, Life and Death have accommodated by putting an explicit example in front of us:
Hours after a man and woman killed two police officers at an east Las Vegas pizza restaurant and then gunned down another victim at a nearby Wal-Mart before killing themselves, a picture of the shooters began to emerge.
Residents at an apartment complex where it appeared the two lived together said they had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they'd spent time at Cliven Bundy's ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents.
The Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier newspaper identified the couple this morning as Jerad and Amanda Miller.
According to one police official and a witness, one of the shooters shouted, “This is a revolution” and “We're freedom fighters.”
The duo also told people they planned to commit a mass shooting, said Brandon Moore, a resident of the complex.
"They were handing out white-power propaganda and were talking about doing the next Columbine," Moore said.
Amanda Miller, 22, and Jerad Miller, 31, did more than talk about committing violence.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie called the events that left five dead — Metro Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31; a bystander; and the two assailants — “an unprecedented day here at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as well as in the Las Vegas community.”
(Nordli, et al.)
Residents at an apartment complex where it appeared the two lived together said they had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they'd spent time at Cliven Bundy's ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents.
The Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier newspaper identified the couple this morning as Jerad and Amanda Miller.
According to one police official and a witness, one of the shooters shouted, “This is a revolution” and “We're freedom fighters.”
The duo also told people they planned to commit a mass shooting, said Brandon Moore, a resident of the complex.
"They were handing out white-power propaganda and were talking about doing the next Columbine," Moore said.
Amanda Miller, 22, and Jerad Miller, 31, did more than talk about committing violence.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie called the events that left five dead — Metro Officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31; a bystander; and the two assailants — “an unprecedented day here at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as well as in the Las Vegas community.”
(Nordli, et al.)
So here's the simple question; or, more appropriately, the question simply expressed: Do we treat white conservatives the same way we've treated Muslims, blacks, hispanics, and every other nonwhite, nonwasp social identity through American history?
Or does this mean people are finally figuring it out?
There is an analog here to the woeful saga of canonization of the self-proclaimed spy who deliberately pursued a job that would allow him to steal secure information and endanger the United States. People who aren't white, Christian, conservative, and reasonably fanatical in their patriotism have traditionally been the targets of state espionage against its citizens. Ethnic and religious minorities, political minorities, and consensual criminals such as drug users. And all the while, this has been just fine with mainstream American society. In the context of PRISM, and presupposing what history confirms, that the United States government does, in fact, spy on its citizens, two considerations emerge, and both are anathema in the Ballad of Saint Edward of Snowden:
(1) In such circumstances that one is already accustomed to the idea of the United States government spying on its citizens, it would seem somewhat worrisome if the Feds weren't doing something like this. To the one, plotting a major violent action should require greater security effort than posting things to one's Gdrive; to the other, Americans should not have to rely on the marketing wonks over at Google to root out the terrorists. You know, Google? The company that isn't just tracking your metadata, but reading your data in order to refine their advertising algorithms?
(2) It would appear, to eyes already accustomed to the idea of the United States government spying on its citizens, that the threshold here is that it is now more "traditional" subcultures treading on longstanding white privilege included in the automatic suspicion justifying this espionage. It would also appear that this broader inclusion is the breaking point. As long as it was the commies and queers and stoners and darkies and wetbacks and kikes and ragheads and all that, it was just fine. Apparently the historical record of the government spying on its people doesn't count. The easiest way to make it not count is to recall the American tradition of us and them. As a white mother explained to the Salem-Keizer school board, in defense of a white honor roll student who threatened a teacher and hallway full of students with a theatrical prop gun, zero tolerance of weapons and other such rules were meant for "their kids", not "ours". Similarly, it follows that the government never spied on its own people as long as the people it was spying on weren't "ours".
(2) It would appear, to eyes already accustomed to the idea of the United States government spying on its citizens, that the threshold here is that it is now more "traditional" subcultures treading on longstanding white privilege included in the automatic suspicion justifying this espionage. It would also appear that this broader inclusion is the breaking point. As long as it was the commies and queers and stoners and darkies and wetbacks and kikes and ragheads and all that, it was just fine. Apparently the historical record of the government spying on its people doesn't count. The easiest way to make it not count is to recall the American tradition of us and them. As a white mother explained to the Salem-Keizer school board, in defense of a white honor roll student who threatened a teacher and hallway full of students with a theatrical prop gun, zero tolerance of weapons and other such rules were meant for "their kids", not "ours". Similarly, it follows that the government never spied on its own people as long as the people it was spying on weren't "ours".
No, really, is it hard to see the pattern? There are plenty who want a way around it, but few among them are quite so stupid as that parent in Salem to actually come out and express that way.
But it's not exactly so hard to identitfy.
Check the Fourteenth Amendment, section 1. Review the Nineteenth Amendment. Consider the history of the federal government smacking down states that tried to extend the franchise to women under their constitutional Equal Protection obligations. The Nineteenth was necessary because women weren't people.
This is what we do. And this is how we do it.
Our society has undergone fits at every suggestion that it's time to look at other extant threats, the non-nonwhite threats. Early in the Obama administration, the president and Secretary of Homeland Security were tarred for issuing a report longer in the making than their tenures; a report suggesting disgruntled veterans and other such "patriots" might become a present danger. Depsite all the fits we pitched as a society, that outlook has proven true.
Sara Andrea, a resident of the complex, said the Millers were known to walk around town dressed as the Batman comic book characters The Joker and Harley Quinn. A photo on Amanda Miller's Facebook page shows the two in costume.
"No one associated (with them), but everyone knew these people," Andrea said.
Residents who spoke about the Millers all mentioned the couple's relationship with Bundy.
Oak Tree resident Sue Hale said the two told her they were in Bunkerville during the standoff, which occurred in April after federal authorities began conducting a roundup of Bundy's cattle. Bundy had defied the government by grazing the cattle on public land without a permit.
"Yap, yap, yap. They were always running their mouths," Hale said.
"No one associated (with them), but everyone knew these people," Andrea said.
Residents who spoke about the Millers all mentioned the couple's relationship with Bundy.
Oak Tree resident Sue Hale said the two told her they were in Bunkerville during the standoff, which occurred in April after federal authorities began conducting a roundup of Bundy's cattle. Bundy had defied the government by grazing the cattle on public land without a permit.
"Yap, yap, yap. They were always running their mouths," Hale said.
It is hardly that these are the first. The whole Bundy standoff was a clusterdiddle of injuriously mindbending magnitude; a bunch of white nationalist, anti-government agitators with rifles demanding communism. What the hell happened there? We leftists are laughing at that irony; everyone eventually comes 'round to our outlook for some reason or another, and the only real question is why they can only do so neurotically instead of rationally.
What connects so many of these events, even the Isla Vista shooting in which so many would do anything to compel us to look away from misogyny so that we can get on with Americans just being America, is the perception of a threat to privilege.
This is, of course, an American tradition. Or, as Ginny Stroud (Kim Krizan) explained, in Dazed and Confused: "This summer when you're being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don't forget what you're celebrating, and that's the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn't want to pay their taxes."
Meanwhile, if anyone notes that the suspects allegedly left Gadsden flags and swatstikas on the bodies of dead LVPD officers, we need to remember that they're just outliers, who don't really represent the Bundy Reds, Tea Party, American conservatism, or anything else associated with a string of events that keep happening and we are expected to pretend have nothing to do with anything.
As I said, the question simply asked. Do we treat these phenomena as we have treated similar events, movements, and ideologies in the past? Or did our society magically figure out, once again, in the nick of time for those poor, beleaguered white people, what we've been doing wrong the whole time, so let us never speak of it again, and why in the world would you be so horrible and negative as to wonder at the differences or similarities over time?
I would suggest that we cannot afford such traditional deference any longer. The pedigree is emerging, the pathology concretizing, and the identity crystallizing. Cliven Bundy may have discovered where society departs from Darwin and Spencer, but there is good news there insofar as he is alive to consider the threshold. The downside, of course, is that there is no guarantee his faculties can complete the process, and, furthermore, all suggestions we have on record so far speak against that possibility.
What happens, though, if we can no longer afford to reserve from our terrornoia a special place for white conservatives? While the suggestion that certain issues could be somehow arguably controversial—e.g., why should anti-abortion be exempt from its role in fomenting, and willingness to profit from, terrorism? does the fact that someone doesn't want to pay the federal government what he owes count for merit regardless of the propriety of the claim? are taxes really a good reason to fly an airplane into a building?—often boggles the mind, the fact remains that there are plenty who, in neurotic defense of privilege, would reach for any shred of flotsam, thinking it an island in the storm.
But what if we treated anti-abortion the same way as we treated other terrorism? Certes, territorial pissings explain why we don't drop laser-guided bombs on active threats like Cliven Bundy and his cohort, but there is still plenty of spying and crashing down of doors and shooting the wrong white person because they all look alike left to do before this deadly petulance is anything more than lethal juvenilia.
What if we crashed the tax protesters in TWAT like we do Muslims?
Or like civil rights advocates fifty years ago?
What if we start arrresting them for publishing papers in support of individual rights? You know, like Emma Goldman was arrested for advocating womens' rights to birth control? Or prosecuting soldiers for unknowingly talking to someone on a blacklist, like Pvt. Eddie Buwala?
What if we start treating white patriots like we treat every other despised group in America?
Will we suddenly wake up, say, "Yeah, we've been doing this wrong. Sorry 'bout the rest of it before, but, you know. Thanks for bein' a good sport."
Or will we continue blithely down our TWATting path, burying the WASPs alongside the blacks, commies, Muslims, queers, and others traditionally unworthy of American blessings?
More likely, we'll continue blindly down our path of reserving the empowered majorities from the scorn shown everyone else.
Still, though, it is hardly surprising that the question can only arise when the empowered majority threatens itself. We've seen this sort of thing coming, and we've even been able to project the pathology and a general etiology with reasonable accuracy. The only question remaining is what we intend to do about it.
And while "nothing" technically is a choice, it is also technically not "nothing".
The price of admission to "nothing" is twofold: Who is next to die? And how much is that worth to you?
____________________
Notes:
Nordli, Brian, Kyle Roerink and Joe Schoenmann. "Shooters identified in slaying of Metro Police officers, bystander". Las Vegas Sun. June 9, 2014. LasVegasSun.com. June 9, 2014. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2014/jun/09/neighbors-couple-suspected-las-vegas-killing-spree/
Associated Press. "Assistant sheriff: 2 suspects left swastika, 'Don't tread on me' flag on dead Vegas officers". Las Vegas Sun. June 9, 2014. LasVegasSun.com. June 9, 2014. http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2014/jun/09/assistant-sheriff-2-suspects-left-swastika-dont-tr/
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