November 22, 2011

What Tony Wrote.

From Tony Norman's column today:
When the late Gil Scott-Heron said that "the revolution would not be televised," he spoke too soon. There was no way that the performance poet could conceive of the era of the viral video or know that it was just around the corner.
In the event you haven't heard it, here's what Tony was writing about:



And when he wrote:
Last Friday, a cop at the University of California, Davis forgot the cardinal rule every officer should have internalized since the Rodney King debacle -- if there's a camera around, then police brutality will be televised. There are too many witnesses and too many cameras in the environment to ever give another officer the benefit of the doubt when it comes to violence on civilians. We know from painful experience that there are too many liars wearing badges to pretend otherwise.
This is what he was writing about:



(If it looks familiar to you, it's because the OPJ posted the video yesterday)

But UCDavis ain't the only place the pepper's been sprayed.  84 year old Dorli Rainey was sprayed in Seattle:

5 foot tall, 20 year old Elisabeth Nichols was sprayed in Oregon:


And that's just two.

And so when Tony wrote:
Much has been said about the militarization of the police in this country and how the "war on drugs" mentality has trickled down into society and college policing.

It also doesn't help that the Bush administration considered torture and sadism legitimate tools of coercion and social control. The cops at the bottom always take their cues from the cops at the top. When administration and military officials are amoral, then it is too much to expect men and women many levels below their pay grade to respect the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.

The police claim that they're not choosing sides in the dispute but are simply enforcing the law. Former Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu had a great response to such moral evasiveness: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
I'd always wondered whether the phrase "The revolution will not be televised" had any deeper meaning.  With the lyrics that open with:
You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.
It points to a revolution that will not be a media event.  But Scott-Heron points to something deeper:




The first change takes place in your mind, he said. He said that it'll be something that can't be captured on film you'll just realize one day you're on the wrong page - that the change has already taken place everywhere around you.

The revolution will be live.

5 comments:

  1. Context is helpful to understand what happened:

    Via the Gateway Pundit


    For the record…
    The UC Davis students who were holding the illegal protest on campus last weekend were warned that they would be pepper sprayed by the campus police. Not only that… But you can see in the video below that the students AGREED in the video to be pepper sprayed.

    For some reason this didn’t make it into any of the liberal media reports on the incident; just like the fact that the protesters were chanting “f*ck the police” never made it into any reports.

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  2. Snipit .... copy & paste

    Occupy has more than a woman problem
    Posted by William A. Jacobson    Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 9:03am

    What kind of movement calls female supporters ”white bitches”?  And what type of women take that to be a term of endearment?

    Via The Atlantic, The Occupy Movement’s Women Problem:

    “I’m called ‘that white bitch who gets everything she wants’ at the GA’s,” says Elise Whitaker, 21, adopting a bit of a defiant posture. She’s been at Occupy LA since the second week of the encampment….

    During the very first week of the Occupation in LA I noticed that the gender breakdown in its General Assembly (GA) and various committee meetings was roughly the same as the within the U.S. Congress. In other words, about one-fifth of those who were participating in the (small d) democratic part of this Occupy encampment were women. It was the same with the people who slept in the camp.

    This is pretty consistent throughout the movement in general.

    The author then goes on to excuse it all, and to blame enemies of OWS for publicizing the rapes that have taken place as part of some sort of smear campaign against OWS.

    The problems with OWS and its supporters goes far beyond a woman problem.

     
     

     

    ReplyDelete
  3. I associate myself with Mr Guy

    Fm 11/24 PG letters


    Not 99 percent

    To those liberals, progressives and socialists who support the Occupy movements: Please change your chant, "we are the 99 percent" to some lower fraction. Many of us are not in the elite, plutocratic echelons of society. However, we do not see any solidarity or commonality with your neo-Jacobin, almost Bolshevik, recreation of the radical 1960s.

    You rail against capitalism and corporations, yet you support the biggest and most greedy corporation that ever existed: a bureaucratic government. Governments inevitably grow to be almost feudal, a caste of elite lords, forever voracious for more money, more property and more power. Government agencies, bureaus and unions tend to become parasitic and then predatory upon the wealth, income, property and freedom of the productive.

    When, in the name of the people, the government owns and controls all, like the Occupy Wall Street crowd advocates, nations resemble North Korea. When governments are limited, we have freedom, suburbs and a prosperous middle class. And that is the aspiration of a vast segment of society, not the slavery that socialism creates, nor the poverty that progressivism promotes.

    Ergo, despite our lack of affluence, we support our current capitalist society and our Constitution and have nothing in common with the Occupy crowd. We are not part of your 99 percent.

    MICHAEL GUY
    Canonsburg


    Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11328/1192145-110-2.stm#ixzz1ecuzopB8

    ReplyDelete
  4. WD, instead of talking about whether the protesters have a point, you attack the protesters with *different* points. You never comment on point, instead you repeat conservative lies (without so much as the courtesy of a link) and in this case, exacerbate racial tensions instead of addressing the economic problems created and continued by Republicans.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Gateway Pundit? AKA "Dim" Jim Hoft? The stupidest man on the Internet? You're kidding, right??

    ReplyDelete