Debate: they’ll be after Newt. More on pepper spray. Annie McCaffrey, RIP

View 702 Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The occupy people heckled President Obama, who told them he is their leader, and he is in office for them.

I’m still catching up with things. My time was consumed by locusts yesterday, and I returned to find my bathroom – mine, the one in my office suite – has been stripped of its flooring and a huge machine has been set up in there to dehydrate the subfloor. The room is functional but just barely. Things are even more chaotic than usual at Chaos Manor.

I’m trying to catch up. Thanks for your patience, particularly to those who subscribe or renew just now.

The debate tonight will be interesting, with Newt now the leading candidate. The moderators will be after him, trying to goad him into blackguarding the other candidates and otherwise make enemies of the other Republicans. Newt is generally too smart for this, but I expect one of the press to go too far – they’re surely planning on what they can to do irritate Newt – and it will be interesting to see how he handles this. Newt is generally the smartest guy in any room he is in, and will be so tonight, and he’s used to having people gang up on him. I can remember the days when he was trying to rebuild the conservative wing of the Republican Party in the House, with those long after-session speeches. CNN used to pan the empty House chamber as Newt spoke. He said “it’s not important that the House is full or not if the speech is good,” and slowly and over time the logic of his speeches moved him to the position of Minority Whip, then Speaker. He was an effective Whip; many have forgotten that.

Pepper Spray and Public Order

One thing I am following is the problem of military control in cases of civil order. It’s relevant to the book we’re writing. If the army has to take control, what happens next?

Several of you have sent mail regarding the infamous pepper spray incident. I have selected two:

Campus Pepper

Hi,

I have been trained in the use of pepper spray and been sprayed myself many times. It is a safe way to gain compliance. Probably not fun for those getting sprayed but oh well. You need to give somebody a good blast to make sure it gets into the eyes and mucus membranes. It is not often that you get such an ideal opportunity to methodically spray somebody outside training but they were doing exactly what they should have.

The officers were methodical and pretty much emotionless about the whole deal because they’ve been sprayed (probably with the order to keep their eyes open while getting sprayed) and know that it does not harm them. The worst after effects are that you smell enchilada sauce for a couple days until it clears out of your hair and sinuses.

Thanks,

Don

BTW protesters have in the past led to the death of people in aid cars and such. I feel no sympathy for the idiots in the road.

 

Also:

Pepper spray

Dear Jerry:

First of all, all campus police officers are police officers, not security guards. I state that because a lot of people get it wrong. They are POST trained and certified. That said, these guys deserve to be fired. Pepper spray was a gross overreaction to the situation they confronted. The stuff is supposed to only be deployed in defense against a violent act or overwhelming threat. The protesters showed great discipline, did not break ranks or respond and the cops lost the battle right there. They were in the wrong even if what they did was permitted by law and custom because they were shown to be bullies and thugs rather than law enforcement officers dealing with a difficult situation. Martin Luther King used similar tactics against the police in the South during the Civil Rights marches and demonstrations. A recent poll showed that six out of ten people are indifferent to the Occupy movement and its actions. These images may change that. Nothing like a little righteous indignation to recruit people to a cause. My own response would have been to simply turn on a garden hose in a place where water would flow down the sidewalk to the protesters. Just a gentle, but cold stream. An hour or so of that would have broken their ranks. Pepper spray made martyrs. It provided images that the public will not soon forget. Cold water would not be as memorable and more effective in making people move.

Sincerely,

Francis Hamit

I certainly find Mr. Hamit’s solution to the problem more elegant than the pepper spray was. I don’t know the status of Campus Police in California. When I was a (part time; I needed a job while in graduate school) Campus Police Officer at the University of Washington in the 1950’s, we were State Police Officers, authorized and encouraged to carry weapons off duty. There wasn’t a lot of training involved, but there wasn’t a lot to do either. For amusement we might patrol lover’s lane areas, and we did have to keep watch on people visiting the campus at night in search of unlocked offices with calculators and typewriters to be stolen, but little else. We weren’t encouraged to make arrests, but in one case I had no choice, a chap who had no student ID and was carrying a burlap bag containing a typewriter and two calculators out the door of the business administration classroom. His claim that he was taking them to a student study conclave was not believable, in part because his grammar left much to be desired and he couldn’t name any of his teachers or any of the students awaiting his arrival to do their homework. The resulting paper work didn’t encourage me to make any other arrests. We did have instructions to look out for the Library Naked Guy, who wandered about in a trench coat in the library stacks (a maze and warren in which one could easily get lost) in search of young women to whom he could expose himself. Eventually he tried that on a female campus cop out of uniform, who although unarmed was able to arrest him by simply ordering him about. But I ramble.

I agree with Francis that the campus police played into the hands of the demonstrators by giving them a safe way to be heroic. I might even go so far as to require the command officer who actually ordered the pepper spraying to take a class on strategy and tactics, but really, no one there exceeded his authority. Bad judgment, perhaps, but there’s a lot of that going around.

Of course the incident will be used to take away attention from the real question, which is what the heck are we paying for at these terribly expensive universities? The students come out loaded with debt, the number of administrators rises without limit, and the notion that we are investing in our future by funding the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Department of Electrical Engineering at the same pay scales is patently absurd. This is investing in the future?

I agree that the Campus Police were out of line here, and the commanding officer needs some attention, but he didn’t give an illegal order, Firing the police who carried it out is not justified. As my first correspondent notes, the pepper spray makes you uncomfortable, but it’s not unreasonable to prefer it to the use of batons and physical force.

Me, I prefer Francis’s notion. It’s a cold day. Turn on the water upstream of the sitting students, and let them watch the water slowly come toward them. If that doesn’t work there are similar tactics. Of course you’ll be accused of brutality for turning the water on. Ah. Well.

The Mamelukes seem to be in trouble in Egypt. We will see how their resolve holds up. One alternative is a regime similar to Syria or Iraq under Saddam. Another is simply to take the money and run. After the treatment of Mubarak the Marshall and the Generals understand what their future will be if they do nothing. They have seen the fall of Qaddaffi. So has Bashar in Syria. Arab Spring has already lead to Christian Disaster. The Middle East story continues. The Cairo protestors now demand that the Marshall “Leave”, which was the demand made of Mubarak. We have seen what happened to him.

My radio is telling me that the Egyptians are people with legitimate concerns. Now they want the fruits of their victory. It doesn’t mention that one of those fruits was pillaging the Christian communities that have coexisted in Egypt for a very long time. This isn’t your Occupy Wall Street movement. It’s not clear just who it is, or what the vast majority of the Egyptians think of this. At least some have their doubts: they’ve seen what happened in Iran.

It’s lunch time and I’m still behind. There’s a lot of mail, and I’ll try to deal with some of that, but I also have fiction to work on. I’m making up the viewpoint characters.

Anne McCaffrey, RIP

Annie was an old friend, a fellow WOTF judge, and all around good to know. I’ll miss seeing her every year at the WOTF events.

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/11/anne-mccaffrey-in-remembrance

 

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion,
et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.

I have now watched the Republican debate. No one seriously injured, no clear winner. Newt as usual ‘won’ in the sense of being the best prepared. I note his references to rebuilding the armed forces according to a strategic design. A conversation we had many times when I was associated with him.