MATHETΩN

I might wish that Prof. Gates’ harassment was racial so that I can pretend that I myself am insusceptible to being arrested in my own home.

The stark truth is that the police can abuse in a wide variety of ways anyone they choose to. In this very valley two years ago an elderly woman was beaten by two policemen, handcuffed in such a way as to dislocate her shoulder, and afterward charged with assaulting an officer (which threatens a stiff penalty including jail time) — all on her own front porch, and all because she had not watered her lawn. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed not long ago that police may search anyone’s car at anytime in any place for no reason. When a federal agent shot and killed a boy in Idaho, was fired for the offense, and subsequently tried, his trial was dismissed by the judge per “sovereign immunity”, a Medieval doctrine tied to the divine rights of kings.

In short, if one keeps an eye on the news or talks to enough of one’s fellows, one soon learns that in this land police can do nearly anything they please and be supported in it by the courts and other government. Why? Because we, the middle class, rely on them to work our iniquities for us. The viler the deeds they do, the more we sanctify them, so that we need never do these evils ourselves nor ever think of them.

The same is true, needless to say, in the case of our armies. We need never crush the skull of a child in a foreign land because we hire men to do this for us, and we need never admit what they do for us if we always shout out “The soldier is like unto a god in his purity!” And this explains the rabidity with which his neighbors will condemn a pacifist as a hater of his country. For if he is allowed to expose the evildoing of the troops, then he has — as it were — broken a vial of poison that taints everyone.

He seeks to poison the whole land, his enemies fear unconsciously — and yet in truth he would merely throw a light upon the rotted blood we in our conspiratorial darkness already swim in.