Arkansas Police Beating: Hegemony and the Shape of Things to Come

Your friendly neighborhood Tired Blogger is gonna open the can of worms wide on this one. My birthday is tomorrow, and I figure what better way to celebrate than to bring the wrath of the Hegemony down on me. Oh, and shout out to the NSA agent monitoring this blog post. I hope you are wearing high heels today. Remember darling, my safeword is “Maralago.”

I’m not a journalist (but I play one on tv), I’m simply a tired blogger. It would be so easy to take the coward’s way out on this one. I could write about the ten best ties worn by Klaus Schwab, or the top five groups conspiracy theorists love to hate. But to me, this story, even more than all the shit show that is the Trump FBI debacle, is the ultimate symbol of what our society is devolving into.

An Orwellian dystopia of the powerful pounding a boot into the face of the powerless. Let’s dive in.

I think by now most of us who even passingly watch the news have heard of this incident. So let’s do a journalist’s job (God forbid the journalists do it). For those who didn’t take Journalism 101 (most of us), the journalist’s job is to report the news to us, answering the five famous questions for the reader/viewer. “Who, what, when, where, to what extent.” I know…I know…you thought their job was to tell you what to think.

Wrong.

Who we have here are three Arkansas police. They are Crawford County deputies Zack King and Levi White and Mulberry police officer Thell Riddle, according to Crawford County Sheriff’s Office. Who is being apprehended is Randle Ray Worcester.

What is going on here is an arrest. “The officers were responding to a report of a man making threats outside a convenience store Sunday in the small town of Mulberry, about 140 miles (220 kilometers) northwest of Little Rock, near the border with Oklahoma, authorities said.” This is according to a US News Report on the event.

Worcester reportedly spat in a convenience store clerk’s face and threatened to cut off their face with a knife. Understandably enough, the police were called.

So why did this happen? Partly this happened because someone with psychological problems was off his meds and was roaming the streets unsupervised. Partly this happened (let’s call a spade a spade) because he pissed off these cops. Let’s be grown-ups here. While it is true that “we don’t know the whole story” unless Worcester has a knife or gun in his hand and is threatening to kill someone, there is no justification for three trained uniform police to be bashing Worcester’s head into the ground. They were pissed off. He hurt one of them, and it pissed them off. Simple.

To what extent does this happen? Let’s take a look at three sources: Amnesty International, Brittanica.com, and nature.com.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/police-brutality/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/police-brutality

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z

Amnesty.org and nature.com both agree there are roughly 1000 people killed in the US every year by law enforcement. Amnesty.org goes into quite a lot of detail explaining what is going on in other countries, and points out that police brutality need not be a killing: “The term “police brutality” is sometimes used to refer to various human rights violations by police. This might include beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, torture, or indiscriminate use of riot control agents at protests.”

Honestly, as much as we complain about the police in the US, there are profoundly worse places to have police interactions. I know Tatooine can be rough, but honestly, as long as you have a powerful Jedi with you, or provide a bill of sale for your droids, there is no reason we can’t just all get along.

The definition from Brittanica is “the unwarranted or excessive and often illegal use of force against civilians by…police officers. Forms of police brutality have ranged from assault and battery (e.g., beatings) to mayhem, torture, and murder. Some broader definitions of police brutality also encompass harassment (including false arrest), intimidation, and verbal abuse, among other forms of mistreatment.” It gives no concrete numbers but does give a moderately detailed history of US police brutality, including the government war against the mafia, the Zoot Suit Riots, (here I thought it was just a great 90s tune), and quite a detailed narration of discrimination against blacks, especially after WWII.

Nature.com goes on to tell us “The data are still limited, which makes crafting policy difficult. A national data set established by the FBI in 2019, for example, contains data from only about 40% of US law-enforcement officers. Data submission by officers and agencies is voluntary, which many researchers see as part of the problem.” While the police state is busy using Orwellian methods of surveillance on the citizenry, the police don’t deem it relevant for data to be shared with anyone. I hinted in a previous post that maybe there were some gaps in the information. Doesn’t this statement more or less prove my point? Or at least it supports it.

I envision a future where we live in a police state. If we are not already there. I’m going about it very roundabout, but this is the point I meant to make in this post. To quote the last point from my last post that I saved for this one: “The Hegemony does not care about women’s rights any more than they do men’s rights. All they care about is amassing more wealth and power for themselves.”

How, you ask, does all this tie in together?

I know most folks no longer care what the Founding Fathers thought, but they were terrified of a “standing army.” This baffles the modern mind, we think (and look, I’m a conservative, I think in most cases it is right to think) of the military (at least the American) as protectors, disciplined warriors who sacrifice their free time, their liberties, and often their very lives to protect our liberties and our lives. But IMHO, this is very much a modern thing. You study history and very rarely do standing armies live up to this standard.

Our nation has a two hundred and fifty-year history of building militaries on the ideals of freedom, liberty, bravery, and sacrifice. While there are definitely glaring examples of failure (mostly at the top), when you study US history you find a lot more of a “kinder and gentler” military than you find say, in Roman history, German history, or Russian history. As examples. My fear is that that is the very thing that is dying.

The American military has been blamed for foolish chivalry in nearly every war (we’ll try to pretend the Mexican War and the wars against the Native Americans never happened, sorry Marlon Brando, that was the last post, not this one) we ever fought in. There were honest-to-God proposals in the Civil War of arming cavalry soldiers with lances. The Communists during both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars would in one breath denounce our warmongering and terrorism, and in the next would mock us for being too weak-hearted to kill civilians. And how many of us have felt impatience with our nation rebuilding the very nations that sought to destroy us, when we all know that if the situation were reversed, we would be shown no mercy from our enemies?

Maybe I am not doing a great job with my logic here. But this is my last note on feminism, and for now on police brutality. We’ve allowed the brutal to run roughshod over us for so long. We’ve turned a blind eye to gaslighting in our personal lives and on an international scale. Do we honestly think the abusers will suddenly grow a conscience, and repent of their sins because of our meek examples?

I went off on a rant there. Here was the point I meant to make, written more cogently from Teachinghistory.org: “Americans of the 18th century took a much dimmer view of the institution of a professional army. A near-universal assumption of the founding generation was the danger posed by a standing military force. Far from being composed of honorable citizens dutifully serving the interests of the nation, armies were held to be “nurseries of vice,” “dangerous,” and “the grand engine of despotism.” Samuel Adams wrote in 1776, such a professional army was, “always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.” Soldiers were likely to consider themselves separate from the populace, to become more attached to their officers than their government, and to be conditioned to obey commands unthinkingly. The power of a standing army, Adams counseled, “should be watched with a jealous Eye.”

It goes on to state: “Experiences in the decades before the Constitutional Convention in 1787 reinforced colonists’ negative ideas about standing armies. Colonials who fought victoriously alongside British redcoats in the Seven Years’ War concluded that the ranks of British redcoats were generally filled with coarse, profane drunkards; even the successful conclusion of that conflict served to confirm colonists’ starkly negative attitudes towards the institution of a standing army. “

https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24671

You see…the Founding Fathers had personal experience of being ruled by bullies. You cannot be free if you are ruled by bullies, or if the bullies are used to enforce the laws.

For another viewpoint on it, from a more libertarian perspective, I share with you https://fee.org/articles/why-the-founding-fathers-feared-a-standing-army/

I know it is bad form to point out a problem and then suggest no solutions. I’m not suggesting violence or revolution. Even if I did, I am not made of the stuff to lead or fight in such a conflagration. The bad guys seem to have won the war. My fellow Americans, how do we turn this around?

Honestly! Please send comments. Please share this post. Please discuss how we can prevent or end the tyranny we all fear. While I propose no violence, I do believe that there needs to be action taken. If we lie passively, I don’t think the beatings will stop.

Do we comply? Do we give up our liberties? Do we decide the struggle is not worth the effort? Do we give in to the despair? Do we allow this present darkness to become the status quo? Who are we anymore, after all? Are we slaves? Are we the dead? What happened to our spirit? Did it die on 9/11? Will our children and grandchildren know even a tithe of the liberties we once took for granted?

I turned 51 writing this post. I endured the greatest insult of my life from a governing body. My struggle before was to free my son from an abusive mother. I don’t know what direction to turn my energies toward now.

If anyone would care to lift a glass, and drink a toast, to the American Dream. May she rest in peace.