miss representation

Today Gawker launched a fairly unimpressive upgrade to their ‘Gawker Stalker’ feature (which is people sending in their celebrity sightings, the more salubrious details the better, which are posted same day), adding a mapping function, and encouraging people to submit information as quickly as possible (though the posting is moderated, so the timeliness may be lacking). I say unimpressive a little petulantly because, like every undermotivated, arch, aging hipster, I had a better idea for this a long time ago.

A few years back I remember coming across a report about a kidnapping threat involving Russell Crowe. This may have been big news, but I am not really abreast of the Us Weekly set. Anyhoo, it was reported that he was assigned FBI protection. I remember being somewhat indignant for two reasons: one, the danger was causally related to his professional existence, the benefits of which made him more than able to procure his own protection and, two, he was a foreign national! Let Australia send their version of the FBI out to protect their national treasure. This, of course, was well before we learned that his fighting skills were impressive even when faced with only the limited weapon choice of office equipment.

I had a plan to launch a website, Kidnap Russell Crowe! which would be a map/database affair where people could report all their sightings, so if one actually was inclined to do the deed, they could find the information quickly. Figuring I didn’t need any FBI attention myself, I stopped at making the logo (this was also the days before Busted Tees, so I lost out on my Web 1.1 millions).

I didn’t feel bad circulating the idea, because the role of the celebrity is a strange one, all signifier, consuming frightening amounts of resources, skewing notions of identity, trickling down into the truly pathetic spectacle of reality shows and dispersing the faulty notion that everyone can be a celebrity in some form. It’s an input/output problem: you make a film that needs 40 million people to pay to see it for you to succeed (and get paid), you have to take some downside, right?

I figured the site would simply be a democratic weapon in the fight against mindless hagiography. The organized effort to command the attention of the populace and focus it on someone reciting words someone else has written is substantial, it is mostly unforgiving, and lacks any sense of community.

The advent of the celebrity for its own sake — which to be sure, has been around in one guise of another for some time, but has gotten particularly fevered of late — is a logical extension of our obsession with fame. But it is not as simple as the mindless distraction of a comfortable society. It leaks into every corner, where the pursuit of fame becomes its own end, and that pursuit is undertaken with frightening ferocity, and once realized, is leveraged for putative expertise or authority on any range of subjects. The model is grafted onto every profession where there isn’t a hard and fast arbiter of value (say, home runs, but even that is fungible, it seems).

Gawker is coy about whether it stands outside, or squarely in the zone of this circle jerk, a stance that was codified when the founders of the last real satiric voice in this city went on to helm Vanity Fair and New York magazines. And since it in and of itself is a vehicle for fame with a low threshold of skill, it is sometimes hard to determine whether the jibes are only the grousing of those not yet in the club of useless celebrity.

And it’s a really poor implementation. We should have far more sophisticated tools at this stage. Then again, since they aren’t really fighting the process that much (it is quite the golden goose), it will be up to others to deploy the artillery that might tamp down the desire to be so maniacally promoted.

Am I advocating violence here? No. But there must be a point at which where the endless promotion of one’s persona becomes debilitating enough that they retreat. Felix Salmon thinks that setting off down this road sunders some fragile relationship New Yorkers have with celebrity, but he misses the point of that dialectic. New Yorkers ignore celebrities because the notion that deference to someone as superior is an anathema to their own self-involved notion of accomplishment.

The question is a little larger than whether or not it’s fair to develop a web site with an RSS feed that tells you when Paris Hilton takes a shit (really, that’s thinking a bit small when you consider GPS and mobile-to-mobile communications technologies). After all, the woman got famous by flashing her cooch at all of us.

The question is how we will define space and community, and the fact the every pseudo libertarian trust model built into the various online ‘communites’ (which are increasingly affecting how and when we interact in the ‘real world’) has been either poorly implemented or easily circumvented. When everyone is carrying around a sort of self-stalking tool like Dodgeball on their cell phone, the degradation of interaction in the city will not be manifest in the disappearance of silence or privacy when Lou Reed gets brunch, but rather in the secretive communications that will silently float from phone to phone.

Celebrity stalking is a self-regulating process. As long as Paris Hilton is trying to get our attention, people will respond in kind (and really, how long until some down at the heel C-Lister starts sending in fabricated sightings, if it hasn’t already happened?). But we will only hear about Lou Reed’s brunch choices so many times, because not that many people care. Remember, John Hinckley didn’t need the Internet to commit a heinous act.

But how we can prevent ‘social networking software’ (a noxious misnomer if there ever was one) from degrading the happenstance, the spontaneous, the yes discomforting interactions this city often requires is an even thornier issue. In the meantime, if we can make it a little less attractive of the Lindsay Lohans of this world to be so thoroughly visible, well, I can’t really see how that is a loss for our local culture.

I saw a cockroach last night. Not an unusual occurrence, right? Well, it was on my pillow. Given that my pillow sits on a futon that sits directly on my floor, this incursion isn’t wholly unexpected. It’s New York. Cockroaches. But how do you squash one when it’s on the damn pillow?

This was worked out, in due course. I assure myself that each time I see one that it is “rare.” I guess. Someone needs to make a little javalet deal where we all log our roach sightings on a web site (a new Google Maps mashup, perhaps?) so we can aggregate some wide distribution notion of “normal” (yeah, all you suburban types chuckling at our having to calculate how many roach sightings are normal — I can go find a drunk and oily Ryan Adams slouched over an East Village bar any night of the week!). It was a little logy, as most of them are when exposed to light, my mammalian, soft, intellect rationalizing that the nonexistent spraying from my entirely absent management company is having an effect, rather than a far more primitive insect mind realizing I was just catching the very rare example of the laggard, gimped up and failing.

Because that’s what we all don’t want to be someday. It’s a fear of exposure — the light comes on, and we are cast as the fraud, the failure. The sound of the claws scurrying down the lath I excuse as gurgling pipes is another form of present mind delusion. I have a rodent problem, as we all do, here in New York (one in four homes, we are cheerfully informed!), and, as we all do in the meantime, we pretend, or live in anxious detente. I have a rodent problem — but as long as it is contained by the scurrying between the walls, I can live in denial. Even though I have been here months, I’m still expecting exposure — to turn an impossible corner of an apartment that I inhabit almost obsessively, to find myself staring into the beady eyes of an alien and dominant culture, a squadron of vermin waiting to evict me, not so much forcibly; instead, I simply turn and run in fear, not wanting to imagine the scope off the battle I am about to engage, since I doubt I can triumph.

I live in a rental, a term of derision and futility, wedged in the dense agglutination of million dollar homes, nothing I do seeming to make headway. We’re just waiting for that light, waiting to be squashed. So what is it that makes living here so unique, so special? It is the relentless pounding fear that never abates. You see it at the edges of everyone’s eyes, in the smiles that aren’t really smiles, but a fractured rictus, shadowing the gleam behind the eyes, a desperate wanting to reach out, wanting any sliver of reassurance. And we guard against that, oh, we hoard that bit of kindness, dangling it just out of reach and dance merrily away, floating on our moment of superiority, all while looking about omni-presently, grabbing every which way for the same.

This is our sport, this is our distraction. We gird ourselves with layers of irony and intellectual pabulum, tearing at every story, dissecting it and reassembling so it coordinates with our manic self-interest, wrapped in a smile and carefully deposited bon mot.

Except this city — and sure, it’s just not this city, we sit atop such a stinking mess of hatred that here we only get to see the most elegantly constructed horrors, those with Lifetime-ready narratives. We have no time for the workaday indignities; we demand more. And this city. This city teaches its children to turn on each other. This city has taught a child a lesson that thousands of years of civilizing effort and labor sought to repress, to create what we hoped was an unimaginable gap, one closed so quickly, as awfully as the effective rodents on Winston, who came so dearly to understand what betrayal was, what the absolute diminution of care is: “Do it to her.”

Do it to her. We have taught children that the means to survival is by sacrificing the weaker among us, a lesson that some smart fuck holding a bottle of Cristal at Bungalow 8 is likely rhapsodizing about this very instant, conflating his pushing of buttons on a keyboard with the acts of heroes, and entirely unawares of the distant suffering it causes, or, as we learned so thoroughly this week, what this grinding battle does to the minds less able. And what, then, happens to their children.

Do it to her. And now the wringing of hands, the rending of garments, breasts will be beaten on the pages of tabloids, our $84 million mayor will gravidly intone reform, some sad sack who has spent the past twenty years trying to stop something just like this but chose to pick the wrong sheet of paper to worry about while the rest of us were distracting ourselves with that useless fuck James Frey, who, had he a thousand fucking years to think about it, couldn’t actually understand what suffering is, that person will get fired, and maybe a few others who deserve it no more than any of us, who look at the strollers littering our hallways with an inward disgust that the nuisance parenthood has brought down on our drinking schedules.

We will try to excuse our ghoulish retelling of facts, wherein details are doled out, necessary to salt the story with just enough Law & Order-quality detail, so we can make certain we have the correct degree of outrage. We won’t think too hard about how quickly the person, the tiny life that we are condemned to rationalizing is finally safe, has become flattened into a useful narrative of many parts. No, we a protecting her, finally, right? After months. Months. Years. Try that. Try remembering this story tomorrow. And the day after that. And the one after that. Do that for a hundred days. Two. Then, then if the tabloid vampires were really acting because they care about people, and were willing to post the same image over and over, again and again, for two hundred days, we could get a sense of how long this city stood by. Idly? Maliciously? It’s all true.

But instead, we try to paint the image of evil on a single person. Make that the final betrayal. To declaim loudly that it wasn’t my fault. It was someone’s, to be sure. But not mine. I sure do want to take the steps necessary to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It wasn’t my fault, but I want to do what I can. How can I help? Just tell me what I need to do; the perfect phrase of the self-absorbed New Yorker who mouths fealty to humanism.

Do it to her. I saw a cockroach on my pillow last night. I will rest my head on it tonight, fortunate in ways I can’t begin to imagine.

If you find this blog too poorly edited and not illustrated enough, check out this. If you are reading this right now dance on over to WNYC and listen to the Brian Lehrer show and listen to the interview with the author Kate Ascher (also VP of the NYC Economic Development Corporation). Some sample pages of the book are on his show blog. I’m to lazy to have a wish list, so if anyone wants to send me a copy of this, I’d be much obliged. If your name is Penguin, I might even pimp the book some more.

UPDATE: Oh, and to all you Democratic apologists, Bloomberg announced the day after his election, that he is interested in reasearching the possibility of congestion pricing in Midtown. That’s about as progressive as you can get (considering the other major city mayor who is an advocate is a declared Socialist). And Kate’s not so sharp on the Q&A, so here’s some detail. The orange lights that are mounted on standards have been variously attributed to three things: one, indicating proximity of fire house, the proximity of a pharmacy (that’s what FYI says), and the highly likely answer, they indicate a fire call box is below (before the advent of telephones, call boxes were necessary to make fire calls; though the city decomissioned most of them i the 90′s, the orange lights are vestigial remnants). And the drone in Times’ Square? Art. I visited it when it was renovated, but I don’t know if it is functioning today.

Today is a distressing timely moment to pause briefly to reflect on both the principles and plans, as well as our actions, in response to tragedy. Though phrases like “things will never be the same” or “never forget”, “always remember” or other similar sentiments will be liberally deployed as a visceral, emotional salve, the painful and ugly logistics and still remaining challenges mandate a more precise accounting, to both hold accountable those who failed, and to help those still suffering. The early reports of poor communication and what seems like benign neglect is a horrifying failure on the part of the federal government. Years of highly constructed conservative attempts to fray the federal structure (the ideological impact of what such a stance does to our generally held notion of democracy I won’t go into) has laid the groundwork for much of the discussion stemming from the right about local responsibility, all of it geared towards shifting blame away, even though we have witnessed an unprecedented concentration of federal powers over the past four years, under the guide of terror preparedness.

Commentators on the left are grasping at the intertwined relationship between FEMA and Homeland Security — rightly so, since the former was essentially gutted in the service of the latter, and both seem packed with dense, incompetent frat boys that are the hallmark of the Bush administration — to argue that this cock-up exposes us to greater threats of terrorism, by demonstrating the inadequacies of the new mega-bureaucratic structures established by the Bush Administration.

Lacking a framework for everyday conversation about the significance of federalism, hanging on the narrow issue of terrorism ignores the fundanmental threat to our notion of democracy in the form of conservative efforts to destroy a centralized government (and worse, one that doesn’t have a shred of an idea for its replacement). It begins to look like tinfoil-hatted conspiracy to argue that the pig trough that DC has descended into as a result of the current administration has cravenly exploited the terror threat simply to further an extremist agenda of permanently debilitating the federal government, but at the same time, it’s hard to find a more rational explanation. One reason it is hard to posit this argument is accepting as normal or real the mind-boggling principles that necessarily under-gird this program.

Rather than try to overtly legislate their implicit goal, we instead are besieged by inept government, in the form of the Department of Homeland Security. The long-term effects of this are clear: there will be no tax relief for the majority of workers (in sheer numbers), nor will there be any relent in the expenditures this monolith demands, even as the expenses are siphoned off to the rich and connected (Kellogg Brown & Root, having clearly demonstrated that they are willing to commit fraud that may have causal connection to the death of American soldiers, have once again received a no-bid contract, one powered with the suspension of federally-mandated minimums for worker wages but does not similarly cap what they can bill).

Perversely, here in New York, we are insulated from this to a degree. As we watch in crippling horror (eleven days after landfall of Katrina, the NOLA weblog is still posting notices daily regarding people still desperately stranded, including an entire community in Mississippi that has yet to receive any assistance whatsoever), the success of our local support services becomes more evident. Even as we commit the largest percentage of our income to tax payments to the federal government of any locality (never receiving a similar level of services), we rail most vehemently against its continued failures to help the neediest, here, and around the country. And as the events of the past two weeks make clear, on this very particular day, we — meaning the New York City area — are far better at managing catastrophe, better than other local governments, better than the federal government.

This is not simply braggadocio, though it is a intentional acknowledgment of what the rapid and well-planned response was able to do to repair our city, even as the current state of development of the site would seem to contradict this. It also underscores the hopeless state of just about everywhere else when presented with a similar challenge. It is impossible to draw direct corollaries between the two events, and, more importantly, the scale — physically — of Katrina’s devastation and our own cultural remoteness and foolish sense of imperviousness from what large scale “natural” disasters can cause, means that a finely grained comparison is an unfair and misplaced endeavor.

But there are two crucial areas where parallels should be drawn, in hopes that the eventual recovery is markedly better than the initial response. One is the ability of local politicians and cultural figures to assert leadership and inspire confidence. Even allowing his myriad failings and flaws, former mayor Guiliani is the standard bearer for effective leadership in crisis. Likewise for former president Clinton, whom no one doubts could bring the necessary mixture of empathy and gravitas to the situation, since often the Commander in Chief serves best when his symbolic actions inspire more tangible and beneficial efforts of thousands of anonymous volunteers and workers.

The second is the role of public discourse in the both the current reportage and follow-up transparency. Bringing to bear the most sophisticated and best-funded local press in the country to the WTC redevelopment process has at best only attenuated the worst aspects of bureaucratic self-interest and short-sighted scheming. What potential fraud or worse might be perpetrated throughout the Gulf Coast during the recovery is doubly horrifying because of its base immorality.

What these two conditions will hopefully conspire to achieve is a sea change back to an accepted and celebrated notion of federalism that takes pride in its role as protector and unifier of this country and its citizenry. New York is often left to its own devices, for good and for bad. Our wealth affords us myriad privilege and protects us from what now seems distressingly routine to the less fortunate elsewhere. We can’t, and don’t, expect the same self-sufficiency of smaller cities and towns that face threats as dire, and occasionally, worse. We deserve and demand a response to Katrina that clearly establishes as a mandate our national duty to repair the lives of those left exposed as a result of years of lackadaisical disregard, and more recently and tragically, far more active neglect. Hopefully this process will leave us in a place where we can proclaim proudly that “never again” will be our standard, but now is not the time for such empty proclamations. Now is the time for “Where can we help?”

There’s not much to be said here. Fury obviates eloquence. We are watching a city, along with literally thousands of its most needy residents, die in slow motion. There is no mystery, no confusion. We know where they are, we know what they need, we know where the materials and services are that can alleviate their suffering. Being far from the actual events and feeling hampered by poor information, I may be wrong in speculating, but it seems that in spite of all of this knowledge, along with the most advanced shipping and logistics network in human history, those people will still die. I know, this very minute, how I could get a bottle of water delivered overnight to a person in London or Tokyo, but I do not know to whom I could speak, beg, or shout at to do the same for a person stranded on a roof in New Orleans. The shame this brings upon our country is incalculable.

There seems to be little we can do directly, but the best alternate now seems to be survivor assistance. Houston is likely to be the key relief location, and what we have seen to date is that the city or regional governments may fail to provide assitance to the levels needed. Key will be some local support organizations. Money, for those in our areas, would be best, since shipping and logistics would be ineffective relative to the resources they already have in place:

Second Harvest website
Houston Food Bank, for regional folks (they are rerouting monetary donations to Second Harvest, but will accept hard goods).

It is a miniscule gesture, but I am not posting about anything else until the situation — I hesitate to say ‘improves’ since I honestly can’t imagine when such a descriptor would be justified — moves from being absolutely horrific. We live in a world of relative moral judgments recalculated every day, and this is a wall. So I’m stopping. I do not trust that the scale of the tragedy and response needed has been adequately determined, nor has an adequate response been formed. To this, I meekly submit that we not speak of anything else until it is apparent that something changes. If any of us who have even a nominal amount of relevance or impact in presenting information or opinion to the world stopped, and spoke only of our demand that more be done, or find some other means to intervene, it would then at least feel like my participation is scraping the bottom rungs of diginity. I have this place for these words, and they are angry and hopeless.

These are the words of police commissioner Ray Kelly, arguing for the necessity of bag searches on the New York City subway, a practice, that, by the end of the weekend will be extended to most major transit systems in the region, although no plan has been proffered to address securing the largest bus fleet in the world — not an inconsiderable gap, considering that the combined ridership of the systems in question approaches 10 million daily.

The decision to execute on the searching plan, which came two hours after a failed second attack in London (and just before a far more deadly effort in Egypt), was “over a year and a half in the making”. It’s interesting to see the decision framed in such terms, considering that just two weeks ago, we were presented with the far more distressing news that $600 million allocated to the MTA had gone nearly unspent (aside from the proverbial consultants). It seems implausible that the money that lingered unspent while the MTA went its merry way, consumed by the usual retinue of graft and accusations of corruption inhibiting any clear planning while somewhere in a corner there was lengthy and introspective process about this new strategy.

It’s not that I believe the police are executing some master plan to restrict freedom. It looks mostly like more bumbling and irrational fear. Lacking the usual dynamics of control and machismo that are the hallmark of big city policing and faced with a supposed enemy of more cunning and ability than our protectors, they respond as one would expect: by more bullying of the innocent and mostly harmless.

The failure of this attitude was evidenced in nearly simultaneous tragedy of the Metropolitan Police in London gunning down what appears to be a hapless innocent who was only trying to run and catch a train. It had all the hallmarks of bluster and force, with no insight, an unfortunate recipe that is present in most unnecessary deadly force incidents: a man inadvertently throws football on a cruiser and ends up dead; a man reaches for his wallet and his shot 41 times; another is angry after being accosted by an undercover officer who is trying to elicit a drug deal and is shot. Each case shows a striking degree of indelicacy and lack of forethought on the part of the police. The London case is especially poignant and telling, as it comes amidst an argument about arming officers. The willingness to use deadly force on ‘suspected bombers’ was shown to be exceptionally broad: the man shot (five times, mostly in head, while he was prone) had none of the characteristics of the previous attacks. He was wearing a winter coat. If wearing unseasonable clothing makes for an itchy trigger finger in London, I fear for the inevitable tragedies arising from confrontations here.

And if you do not believe that the police are unable to accurately assess risk, note that of the over 1,000 arrests made at the RNC, an event that was purportedly filled with potential leftwing terrorists, almost all the cases have been dismissed without trial, there is more than a little evidence of perjury on the on part of the police, possible collusion with the district attorney’s office, and the wrongful arrest civil suits are seeking nearly a billion dollars in combined damages.

How to oppose this wrongheaded policy? Well, you can walk in the sweltering heat. I wouldn’t recommend challenging the legality of the order, since we have seen that it takes only one day for a tragic overreaction to occur. So I am recommending that most tiresome of civil action: tee shirts. Messing with a number ideas, I settled on one, which I think carries the appropriate amount of challenge with both rather wry and bleak humor, along with a more metaphoric message, which unfortunately is already outdated. The inevitability of both real attacks and mistaken identity have occurred, and I hope we are not counting down against another, but with ten million harried and hurried commuters standing in sweltering lines every day, I don’t see how it can be avoided. Some may argue that a slight imposition — or even the extreme tragedy of this past week — is a valid trade-off, but such a calculus is precisely what the attacks in London are intended to induce, and anyone who thinks they can speak with bluster and pragmatism about such a trade would likely cower were they asked to trade their father, brother, or son in such a senseless way.

Images from the Flickr pool. The Guardian news blog (they have a forum for posting updates to family, but access is spotty). The BBC was reporting serious server load, but is currently up (9:00AM EST).

This is absolutely stunning. I especially like that they haven’t updated projects under construction, so I can fly around town in a simpler time, before the Sculpture for Living(tm) besmirched our fair town.

Only pennies a day from each household in New Jersey to provide temporary housing for 22 men? That’s a good deal. The same amount for working families that can’t find affordable housing? That’s socialism. Fortunately, we got promises of both this week, to assuage our redness and blueness. As is apropos to the metaphoric interpretation of the latter, the blue promise is only a promise to fulfill a promise made fifteen years ago (yes, that’s a lot of promises), even as there’s still some talk that perhaps that money should go to another 22 semi-homeless millionaries.

The Times ran a piece today detailing the finer points of the Giants stadium deal. Or not, since no one can seem to get their mitts on it. Well, the Times couldn’t. And if they can’t, it can’t be got. But the talking points today are that the $6.3 million in yearly income wasn’t net maintenance (estimated currently to be $3 million), lowering the projected direct income to $120 million over the 40 years of the agreement. Meanwhile, the current estimated expenses are $190 million (if retiring the current debt is part of the state nut). Or not, because there are things like the $720 million in lost income (the current tenants pay, you know, rent), but also the potential of $612 million in projected tax revenue. So you can see how it gets murky. But who’s counting? Asks Mark S. Rosentraub, an economist at Cleveland State University — let us note here that Cleveland is the most segregated large city in the country and has more people living in poverty than Detroit, so they know from good planning — pointing out that the $10-20 million a year the state might lose is ‘neglible’ when spread over the millions of NJ households. Hmmm. Maybe we could tack on a little more negligence and give everyone in Jersey a decent home?

Meanwhile, over here, our own bit of reclaimed trash heap is helping out the needy as well, and Mike-Mike is trying to get you to love him the only way he knows how: buying you (me? one-bedroom, south of 14th Street, southern exposure preferred). Well, not you, but a bunch of people who look like you (and me), except they are less white and more poor. That’s right: after 15 years, the city is going to make good on the promise to use excess revenue from Battery Park City — excess defined as the money left over after the BPCA gets done paying the poshest park staff in the western world — to fund affordable housing.

I’d go dig up the details, but affordable housing is simply the promise of love in the morning from a man trying to get you into bed tonight. Mike-Mike had four years to get this program off the ground. Guiliani had eight. Dinkins had four. Koch had a couple. You get the picture. Between subsidizing the tapis vert at Rockefeller Park (and providing play space for kids named things like ‘Tristan’) and shoring up the general fund, it’s been a lot big talk with no action regarding that money over the years.

Complicating Mike-Mike’s CYA action is that as recently as last year it was being suggested that those very same funds be redirected at the Hudson Yards project — which you should all read to mean ‘Jets Stadium’. This may have been a dream of Dan ‘the Visgoth’ Doctoroff, or simply some wonky underling looking for ways to pad the till back when the Jets were offering two tickets to The Lion King in exchange for the entire West Side. So it’s like 4,500 units or something, and a big ‘ole pile of money — big ‘ole being a fairly specific unit of measure, equivalent to roughly 5% of what the city will need to spend in bond service and infrastucture improvements to get the stadium built. But that’s some 8,000 votes Mike-Mike couldn’t count on yesterday (maybe: as of this week, it looks like the Democrats are planning to back a tape recording of the MLK ‘I Have a Dream’ speech for mayor). We’ll get all old-school and advise to not believe the hype. Put some shovels in the proverbial ground, Mike-Mike. About 4,500 of them. Then we’ll talk about making a difference and a real housing policy.

“Interesting” information is coming out of the current spate of cases against protestors from the Republican National Convention — if by “interesting”, one means perjury, a term the Times assiduously avoids. It’s an odd, postmodern read because it seems like the script to every over-baked Norman Jewison film, until you realize that there will be no moment where Al Pacino delivers a withering diatribe and we will all be uplifted at the end. Even as they present what seems to be incontrovertible evidence that testimony was manufactured, the Times hesitates to characterize this as a developing scandal, and doesn’t press prosecutors, who may well have been complicit in the process.

The story is at the nexus of several important issues of civic experience: what many characterize as an increasingly intolerant attitude on the part of the police regarding public assembly, particularly the ongoing fight between the city and Critical Mass (most of the video evidence pertains to gatherings in Union Square, where the Critical Mass rides originate each month), the narrative power of video in providing very hard to refute evidence of the belief that police are arrogant and domineering their exchanges with those they are charged with serving (and protecting), and the conflicted role pervasive video plays in civic life (just as this scandal unfolds, police are using security video in hopes of solving a hit-and-run case on 45th Street).

The worst aspect of this is the unyielding attitude of the police in these situations — why would the police not disavow one of their own who quite clearly breaks the law? It creates the sense that the significant issue for them is solidarity, not respect for the law, and it starts to make our ‘finest’ look like a goon squad in Brazil. My own opinions are formed by a couple direct experiences, including being loosely part of an ACT UP demonstration at the AIDS rally at the 1992 Convention, back when the use of cages and forcing marching groups to side wind over blocks were being deployed for the first time, and watching the response to a squatter revolt a couple years after that. Before I moved to the city, I remember watching Do the Right Thing, and, even as a I sympathized in good white, liberal fashion, with the overall message, I also remember thinking the police invasion in the third act was presented in such a heavy handed and histrionic way that it made the film much less accessible to those even predisposed to think favorably of Lee’s thesis. Watching police tear the door off the front of my building (and then denying to my face), the next time I saw it, I was appalled when I realized that the scene was actually rather restrained compared to what I witnessed first-hand.

Lacking the ‘objective’ eye of a video camera, my comments could be dismissed as only an excited recollection of what was, to be sure, a dangerous situation — this was back in the day when East Village residents still thought throwing bricks at cops would lead to the anarchist paradise. Yet, the minute police arrived, they staked out an us and them situation, intensified by the presumption that they were under siege, even as they possessed all the weaponry and far outnumbered residents on the block. The result was that for many, every cop is like the prototypical football player on steroids at a party — you never know when he’s going to go off, and he has a clear physical advantage.

Now we have video — here, I’m not speaking specifically of arrest techniques last August, but of other more notable examples — of the worst aspects of what can result from disproportionately empowering one segment of your populace. Even as the examples are few and far between, there will reach a point where it will become entirely irrational to allow someone to speak of the violent protestors when the images stand in contradistinction. It’s a strange affirmation of the proverbial Orwellian dystopia: his figured on control entirely divested from the people. Such was the fear of pervasive video cameras. But with some rather powerful and seemingly independent resources for aggregating and disseminating information, and the means to collect evidence — limited, granted, to the affluent digerati, who, nonetheless, look an awful lot like the enlightened bourgeois — it may well be that this makes no difference. Look, here is evidence that police fabricate testimony. And nothing changes. Protestors continue to be painted as somehow lesser citizens, when in fact they are proved to be upholding what were seen as crucial notions of speech and protest by the founders of the grandest experiment in democracy ever attempted.