J6 Upside Down
It wasn't the cops being sprayed with chemicals and thrown down concrete stairs and beaten in May, 2024; that was 2021. In case the media coverage hasn't made that clear.
Since the genocide got rolling, ambient terror loosens restraints on law enforcement and vigilante violence alike.
It's as if the J6 insurrection succeeded in taking over Congress and is now calling the shots. This thought can only provide atmospherics, but if January 6th was seen in the halls of power as a serious attempt to overthrow the government, the scaled-up and militarized response to public protest demonstrations across the country seems like consistent behavior. In any case it comes back, as trauma always does, to haunt us.
There is a logic to it that seems worth considering. If J6 was "only a riot," campus protest encampments fall far short of a typical outdoor concert. On the other hand, if J6 was a violent invasion of the Capitol with the expressed purpose of stopping election certification, and oh yes, to "interrogate Nancy," and "hang Mike Pence," maybe it actually changed the cost-benefit analysis if not the context and meaning of public service, both for elected and appointed officeholders of public trust.
For contrast, back then it was the cops being sprayed with noxious chemicals, thrown down concrete stairs and beaten unconscious. This time around it doesn't seem to matter at all which party holds Executive sway, or which will be defeated in this election year. In fact, all the highly orchestrated repression is overwhelmingly bi-partisan, and Congress is floating all sorts innovative ways to flout the Constitution and alienate our inalienable rights. (Just how exactly would they enforce a law against wearing a mask in public, after the Covid debacle?)
The US-backed full-out genocide is now in high gear, with an enthusiastic trifecta of Executive, Legislative and Judiciary consensus. And media need not be shy at country club get-togethers anymore. The Fourth Estate is no longer out in the cold. Who is out in the cold: citizens exercising free speech and assembly, against immoral and illegal policies (and not, we should note, breaking into Congress beating down cops with flagpoles and chanting for the blood of senior elected officials); and anybody the empire managers deem insufficiently obedient, anywhere on the face of the Earth.
It had been a safe bet that most Congressional action was designed to make more heat than light since the advent of unregulated "campaign funding"; but now it's getting too hot in the kitchen even for the cooks. Their ham-handed tactics show that political leaders believe they can bully college presidents, (now generic corporate executive clones with the sensibilities of AI) into putting down traditional, nonviolent and Constitutionally legitimate protests with brutal force, painting them as violent insurrections. Obviously they can no longer tell the difference, so contemptuous and out of touch with constituents, they even pull out that old "outside agitators" trope. But they no longer need to tell the difference. Their constituents have been exhaustively spied-on by 16 or 17 federal agencies, which have discovered what the search-engines learned when they all went into reverse and started searching us: the exact percentage of people so humiliated, so bereft of dignity, they will settle for Identity.
The naked aggression of the Zionists can't even wait for Chicago now: a proposed state visit by the Israeli 1 PM (our de facto Secretary of State) seeks a violent showdown between the US government and its citizens, an international J6 this time, that will serve as media cover for at least the next six months of relentless slaughter in Palestine. If this obscene PDA ("public display of affection") happens, citizen outrage, with signs, chants, red-painted hands and inconveniently-placed bodies, all being live-streamed on whatever "social" platform is left, will be met with extraordinary brutality, with chemical, "non-lethal" and worse weapons. The bloodier the confrontation, the more repression will be enacted by Congress as they blame and shame the victims of the violence. Upholding the Zionists' claim to represent "the" Jews, criticism of anything Israel-related will be treated as "hate-crime" and the protesters branded "Anti-Semitic Terrorists"; meanwhile, America's thriving population of aggressively racist psychopaths will revel in new-found legitimacy.
History is moving fast now. In the contagion of this collective nihilistic madness, nobody's keeping track of the wanton trampling of our common values. We still don't know what happened to all those children that were taken from their mothers at the Southern border. We're still dithering about threats to Democracy as if we knew the meaning of the word. Perhaps the only certainty now is that there's no threat: you have to have Democracy before it can be threatened.
Structural Forces
Necessary as it is, parsing events to identify perpetrators is unlikely to lead to substantive change. Structural forces may account for our predicament whether or not we can assign culpability for something systemic. Opportunists don't show up until there is opportunity, as with the 45th (and likely 47th) president. Previously, any perceived sexual misbehavior ended a candidate's career, but this one was credibly accused, and even boasted of assaulting women, all the way to the White House and ever since. This was culture, not charisma.
College students, long assumed to be under the parental protection of Institutions of Higher Learning, now find themselves indentured to corporatized think-tanks with bloated munitions-industry endowments and rolling government contracts, riding the wave of genocide profiteering, while many students are suffering the loss of family, even their entire families, to Israeli use of American weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, WMD: a 2,000 lb. bomb, which turns an occupied apartment building full of families into a deep hole surrounded by rubble, is exactly that. The purported excuse for the military destruction of Iraq and so many thousands of people is now one of our major cash crops, as the administrations of the US and NATO have both offered as a selling point for the war on Ukraine.
The Academy is now completely assimilated into a sector of the global economy that includes hotels, hospitals and private prisons, the "Hospitality" industry. The business model also applies to slaughterhouses, but with the slight difference that the offal is less awful.
The hospitality industry has about as much connection to education, let alone justice or medicine, as meatpacking. But like mining, tech, insurance, law, etc., corporate Management has to be as uniform and regimented as a hive of termites. This is structural. Economies of scale dictate cookie-cutter standardization of a labor pool with a common skillset at the lowest possible pay rate. All employees, from the CEO, paid out of your grandchild's future, to the interns paid in impossible dreams, must function as identical plug-and-play components.
That means the nuanced gradient of human negotiation from conversation to violence is only considered far down the pyramid, if ever. Far cheaper to replace components when they exceed cost parameters. HR and vocational training are standardized and streamlined.
Below the management tier, operational policy for the shop floor, as it were, is standardized across profit-centers. Hotels clean the floors better than prisons, but not as well as hospitals; prisons are best at keeping track of the "guests" and enforcing the rules. As global economic pressures get harsher from climate collapse and "stockholder value," chronic understaffing maintains high ROI, and qualified workers (standardized components) are scarce anyway. For example, a hospital security guard may have to find work in a prison; or a university may hire prison guards. At that level, whether they are a "fit" depends on their personality, not the job description.
To maintain the labor pool, standardized job requirements have to match to the lowest common denominator, not the optimum scope of work. Just as the intervals2 on a piano are tuned slightly off, but equalized, compromised performance standards are evenly distributed, making the hospitals a little dirtier, the hotels less convenient, and the prisons increasingly deadly; and reliably mediocre. It's all about beds and meals and buildings, not people.
So in the end, "security" is another business decision, made far from where it takes effect, remote from any actual lived experience, unrelated to anything but some abstract cost-benefit accounting logic. All consideration, much less respect, for human autonomy, relationship, family, community, is thus filtered out. As for coercive force, hotel guests rarely see it; hospitals can keep troublesome patients sedated; it's the modus operandi and raison d'etre for private prisons; and for university administrations, raw physical violence is the first resort.
1 US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress. Mr Johnson, who leads the Republican-controlled House, told CNBC they are "trying to work out schedules".---.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68631499
2 We can hear more notes than a piano has room for, so this problem is fudged by making pure fifths a little impure. Some years ago, "Switched On Bach" was rendered with a computer that could correct this, and the difference is amazing, and a little disturbing.
1
1
