Tag: current events

Who’s Clapping

I thought it would be interesting to follow up this post with a little research into who Donald Trump brought in as cheerleaders for the signing ceremony for his executive order on policing. It is actually a harder exercise than it seems. You might think that links or expanded captions would be de rigueur journalistic practice in an era of digital news and reporting, but it’s not. I first located a list of attendees from CNN, then started googling.

From left, the law enforcement officials in the photo are:

  • Sheriff Tony Childress of Livingston County, Illinois

  • Dennis Slocumb, executive director of the International Union of Police Associations

  • Chief Steven Casstevens, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police

  • Sheriff Tom Hodgson of Bristol County, Massachusetts

  • Sheriff Mark Cage of Eddy County, New Mexico

  • Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, president of the Florida Sheriffs Association

  • Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association

  • Pat Yoes, president of Fraternal Order of Police

So I find myself at the edge of a rabbit hole. Beyond names and stations, who are these people? I assume they are there for something more than optics, that there is an expectation of an exchange of influence or power. What else do they hope to gain? Who paid their way to Washington? What are they getting for their applause? A night in a suite at the J. W. Marriott and a hefty per diem? Anything more? 

And further, what does Trump expect to gain? 

We are exposed to images like this all the time, to the extent that they are normal, and normalizing. For some reason this one has caught my interest, and I want to study it and think about it a bit more critically. I want to understand the symbolic value of the photo and the reasons these men were selected for it. In the context of widespread demand for a change in policing in America, what are these people expected to bring to the conservative and reactionary counter-argument? 

This photo is by Alex Wong for Getty Images. 

I am fascinated by staged images of Donald Trump presidenting, as in this shot for Getty Images by photographer Alex Wong. Here Trump has surrounded himself with old, white law enforcement officials (exception noted) as he signs today’s executive order on policing. There are hundreds of such images. Whenever Trump does anything remotely official, hand-picked supporters assemble in carefully mounted tableaux

to offer the president unmerited applause and signal approval with their shit-eating grins. I know this is an ancient photo-op ritual, that even presidents that I liked and admired resorted to the practice, and yet with Trump it seems to have reached a low point of cynical contrivance. 

Still, Trump is as bad at propaganda as he is with everything else he puts his hand to, and there is nothing believable or authentic to be seen here. I don’t know who any of these men are in this photo. Surely they know they are being exploited. But they seem nonetheless willing, and meretricious enough to go on with the show. I wonder what is in it for them?

I think I’ll start saving these photos when I find them. I want to accumulate some evidence, keep a small documentary archive of Trump’s enablers. It takes a contingent of toadies and ass-kissers to prop up someone as weak and feckless and desperate for stroking as our president. Trump thrives on unwarranted adulation, and seems to like action shots with lots of clapping. I’m going to label the archive folder Presidential Hand Jobs. 

What we’ve seen from rioting police … is an assertion of power and impunity. In the face of mass anger over police brutality, they’ve effectively said So what? In the face of demands for change and reform — in short, in the face of accountability to the public they’re supposed to serve — they’ve bucked their more conciliatory colleagues with a firm No. In which case, if we want to understand the behavior of the past two weeks, we can’t just treat it as an explosion of wanton violence, we have to treat it as an attack on civil society and democratic accountability, one rooted in a dispute over who has the right to hold the police to account.

“The Police Are Rioting. We Need to Talk About It.” by Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times, 5 June 2020. 

In mythology, the myrmidons were a warrior race that, eventually, came to fight at Troy under the command of Achilles, who sulked in his tent but did not huddle in his bunker. Down through the millennia, the concept of the myrmidon has come to mean a mindless tool of authoritarian terror and destruction. From the start of this awful time, from the moment Derek Chauvin’s knee found George Floyd’s neck, we have seen this evolved concept of the myrmidon rise to angry life, clothed in the color of law and shielded by the badge.

Charles P. Pierce, for Esquire, in a blog post titled “All Weekend, All Over the Country, We Saw a Police Riot.“

A meme that has recently been crossing my tumblr dash has people recounting their first memories of historical events that took place in their lifetimes. One of my first memories of a nationally significant event is the distribution of Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine.

Sabin’s vaccine was provided community-wide beginning in the early 1960s. I have a vivid recollection of lining up with my family in the gymnasium at Deep Creek High School* to receive my first dose, administered as a magenta drop of medicine on a sugar cube. There are details that stick in memory, and some that I can only reconstruct. My mother attended Deep Creek High, and I know we stopped in the school hallway to pick out my mother’s face from a photo of her graduating class. I’m sure that any of the public health nurses present were wearing crisp white caps and uniforms. A detail I would not have noticed—because it would have been entirely unremarkable to me in those days—is that there were surely no African Americans present. These were still the days of Jim Crow apartheid in Virginia, and any black citizens would have received vaccines at the community’s all-black school. 

At the time I was too young to be aware of the controversy surrounding U.S. acceptance of Sabin’s attenuated live polio vaccine as an alternative to Jonas Salk’s “killed virus” inoculations. Sabin wasn’t helped by his Russian ancestry, though his successful vaccine trials in Russia eventually made the case scientifically. The fact that the controversy was settled scientifically, with patient evidence gathering and thoughtful review sets it apart from the modern methodology—popular in some circles—of relying on anecdotes or uninformed presidential hunches to make medical decisions. I was astonished today to read that almost 30 percent of Americans believe (operative word) that the current coronavirus scourge was concocted in a lab somewhere, and released on the world either deliberately or accidentally. I’m not sure of the causes of this loony credulousness, except that many people are lazy thinkers, and real leaders who embrace science and an evidence-based worldview are in short supply. I wonder how many will reject a life-saving vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 once it is available, simply because one good conspiracy theory deserves another. 

I trust science. I’m ready for my sugar cube. 

The photo above is adapted from a 1960s public health advertising campaign in Ohio, urging citizens to get a complete course of polio vaccine treatments. I obtained it from the digital collections of www.ohiomemory.org. 

*The village of Deep Creek is part of Chesapeake, Virginia, though it was still Norfolk County when I got my vaccine.