THE DOORS WERE SHUT AND BOLTED

Links and readings from far and wide are depressing me today -- fluke juxtapositions that come from enough different directions that I begin to feel cornered.

Brian at My.Bicycle contributes a story of senseless injustice in response to a far-away account from the Miami New Times: Law enforcement amok, cops so primed for arrests that no one is innocent, so ready for conflict and violence that they’ll provide it.

Meanwhile, New York state journalists check their access to public records and get flak, illegal questioning, outsized financial demands and even an ominous incident in which they are trailed for several blocks by a police cruiser.

There are ordinary people out there becoming police officers and public officials and turning into suspicious, power-abusing creatures, zombies who forget for whom they work, for what ideals and rights it is they’re supposed to be protecting. This is fresh in my mind from finishing Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir, “Secrets”: As watchmen, they place themselves above us, apparently destroying our rights in order to preserve them, walking a path that leads them straight to Richard Nixon’s infamous assertion that “when the president does it, it is not illegal.”

All of my fear and paranoia is best summed up, I think, in writing completed some 42 years ago, in the darkest section of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22”:

There was “an altercation on the next block between a single civilian Italian with books and a slew of civilian policemen with armlocks and clubs. The screaming, struggling civilian was a dark man with a face white as flour from fear. His eyes were pulsating in hectic desperation, flapping like bat’s wings, as the many tall policemen seized him by the arms and legs and lifted him up. His books were spilled on the ground. ‘Help!’ he shrieked shrilly in a voice strangled in its own emotion, as the policemen carried him to the open doors in the rear of the ambulance and threw him inside. ‘Police! Help! Police!’ The doors were shut and bolted, and the ambulance races away. There was a humorless irony in the ludicrous panic of the man screaming for help to the police while policemen were all around him. Yossarian smiled wryly at the futile and ridiculous cry for aid, then saw with a start that the words were ambiguous, realized with alarm that they were not, perhaps, intended as a call for police but as a heroic warning from the grave by a doomed friend to everyone who was not a policeman with a club and a gun and a mob of other policemen with clubs and guns to back him up. ‘Help! Police!’ the man had cried, and he could have been shouting of danger.”