We know that the police used MK-9 ― because the citizen-journalism stills and videos of the events of November 18, 2011 at UC Davis document it. But how did these cops get their hands on military-grade pepper spray that they were not authorized to carry or trained to use, and that their department had no authority to purchase or supply to its officers? […]
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Were it not for all that still and video documentation, in the late afternoon of November 18, 2011 we’d have found ourselves in a protesters’-word-vs.-police-officers’-word situation, with the cops’ version most likely prevailing in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary. And, since the protesters would probably not have the ability to differentiate between MK-4 and MK-9, Pike and his “troops,” as he liked to militarize them semantically, would only have had to rustle up a few cans of authorized MK-4 while hiding the MK-9 in order to appear to have followed the rules. I doubt that it would have lasted more than two news cycles. […] UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi has become the last woman standing, so to speak, in the school’s pepper-spray scandal. Everyone else in any position of authority in the hierarchy either resigned or got the heave-ho. Within a year or so all the students Lt. John Pike sprayed will have graduated or left. In less than a year Katehi will become vested in the UC retirement plan. That should take some of the sting out of the fact that her eventual obit will surely replay her November 19, 2011 televised “walk of shame” along a path lined with the students whose trust she’d betrayed. […] To fully exploit his global name recognition and the free visual branding that he achieved with the help of hundreds of volunteer photo collagists (including yours truly), I suggest that John Pike should consider a career in politics. He may be a liberal goat, but he became an overnight conservative hero. The right wing loved him for unleashing their ’60s-vintage fury at college students in general. […] |
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Ring In the New: 2014
The dumbing down of our culture and its citizenry has achieved a momentum that seems inexorable and may prove irreversible. But some it happens deliberately, by choice. For example, the newly appointed editor at the website BuzzFeed, Isaac Fitzgerald, has actually banned negative book reviews. He expects contributors to “follow what he calls the ‘Bambi Rule’: ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.'” […]