The Drug War and Police Brutality, Part Two: Mister Nixon's War

President Richard M. Nixon was a man with enemies. So many enemies, in fact, that he had to make several lists to keep track of them all...

President Richard M. Nixon was also a man with a plan, a man willing and able to use any means necessary to defeat those he saw as opponents, to "use the available federal machinery to screw [his] political enemies," in the words of former White House Counsel John Dean (one of the key figures in the Watergate cover-up). In the instance of the individuals on the so-called "Enemies List," Nixon sought to wield the tax audit as a weapon, making the IRS his personal Praetorian Guard. (This effort was foiled when the IRS Director refused to comply.)

On June 18, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon, the man with enemies everywhere, addressed the assembled media and declared drug abuse to be "public enemy number one."

The Drug War and Police Brutality, Part One: Prohibition

DISPATCH
JULY 2016, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:

Police are being killed by citizens. Citizens are being killed by police. The killings have become a weekly occurrence. Social media and cable news are inundated with daily tales of violence in the streets. Politicians and pundits pontificate on the causes and where the blame lies. Fingers are pointed in all directions. The people struggle to make sense of what seems like a descending cloud of chaos. Billionaire businessmen promise Law and Order and swift retribution for lawbreakers. Career politicians promise understanding and increased social justice. No one seems sure what the answers are, but all are sure that things are not as they ought to be. The words of William Butler Yeats ring in my ears like the decaying sound of a distant warning bell:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...

How did we get here? Is there some rational explanation for all of this? Is it just random chaos and entropy, or is there a definable set of historical circumstances and decisions that led us inexorably to our current predicament?

I would answer in the affirmative: There is an historical explanation for the state of our nation today, a series of events which brought us to where we are now. In my new four-part series The War on Drugs and Police Brutality, I will endeavor to unfold this tale and examine its ramifications for today. The story begins in 1919, the very year that Yeats penned his famous apocalyptic words...

Tribalism and American Decay

Tribalism: the classic paradigm of Us versus Them. My group versus your group. My clan versus your clan. Everyone within this circle is good; everyone outside this circle is bad. Everyone in this society is fully human; everyone outside this society is less than. All the people I identify with are to be respected and honored; all those we deem “other” are to be used and disregarded. This group mentality has been the beginning point for human conflict going back to the stone ages. From political polarization to racial discrimination, police shootings, gang violence, and terrorism the tribal “us-versus-them” mindset plays a key role in many of today's most horrific events.

But is tribalism all bad? And to what extent are tribalism and its negative effects escapable?

Irish proto-conservative Edmund Burke said that our attachment to our local people and traditions forms the foundation from which we develop love for greater circles of people: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” Mythologist Joseph Campbell said of the mythic individual's relation to his tribe, “From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body. If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence.” According to Campbell and Burke, our “tribal” identification forms an important part of who we are as people, and how we see ourselves.

Some tribalism may be unavoidable. Anthropologists say that early humans evolved the ability to act together in coordinated groups, and this in turn aided them in foraging, hunting, and defense. Humans are social animals; we are almost always stronger (and happier) in groups than as individuals, and the ability to coordinate our efforts is one trait that separates us from other primates. There may be a limit to our ability to form social bonds, however. A study by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar found a correlation between primate brain size and the size of their average social group. He theorized that the size of the neocortex determined the limit of stable personal relationships that can be formed; using the ratio he gleaned from studying the primates, he estimated the human limit to be about 150 relationships. Other scientists have placed the number at closer to 300, but the takeaway remains the same: Our ability to form relationships is somewhat limited. (How many Facebook friends do you have? How many of them do you actually talk to regularly?)

A-7713: Remembering Elie Wiesel and the Liberation of Buchenwald

In March of 1944, fifteen-year-old Elie Wiesel and his family were sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he was tattooed with the number A-7713. His mother and sister were killed shortly thereafter; he and his father were later sent to Buchenwald, where his father would die just weeks before the camp was liberated. In the span of barely a year, the young man had had his whole life ripped away. He would later write in his memoir, Night :

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."

Independence Day and the Second Amendment

On a crisp April morning two hundred and forty-one years ago, farmers and townsfolk of eastern Massachusetts assembled under arms and came face to face with British army regulars at a small bridge outside the town of Concord, firing the first shots of what came to be known as the American Revolution and setting into motion the events that would impel the thirteen colonies to formally announce their independence from Britain one year and seventy-six days later, an event which we celebrate today by blowing up little paper cylinders filled with gunpowder.

Why, one may ask, would these thoroughly ordinary people undertake such a compellingly extraordinary task, the task of holding the line and exchanging fire with trained soldiers of the world's most feared and respected military? What danger impelled them to risk their lives in armed combat and their fortunes in open rebellion?

The British regulars were coming to take their guns.

Obviously, it would be absurd to claim that the events of that day were not the the culmination of a decade of escalating tension between the colonists and the British government that began with the Stamp Act; but the act which finally made those “embattled farmers” cross the Rubicon of rebellion and take up arms against a government they had previously affirmed their loyalty to was the attempted confiscation of their weapons.

“But, Bruceman,” you may be asking, “what does that have to do with us now in the 21^st Century? Isn't the Right to Bear Arms an outdated notion from the 18^th Century, written by musket-carrying people who could have never foreseen the weaponry available today? Remember when Homer Simpson said, 'Lisa, if I didn't have this gun the King of England could just come in here and start pushing you around...'? Wasn't that hilarious, and didn't it thoroughly skewer this old-timey notion of gun ownership? Isn't the obsession with weaponry a uniquely American phenomenon that we would do well to be rid of in order to join the rest of the developed world?”

In inverse order, the answers to these questions are: No, Yes it was hilarious, No, and It has plenty to do with life in the 21^st Century. But before I address the relevance of the Second Amendment in today's world, let me first address the historical underpinnings of its formulation and dispel some common misconceptions thereof...