(Note for returning readers, Sovereign is still the next fiction issue, as promised at the end of the  short story, but these essay type issues might trickle in between releases)

I’ve tried to make the point before in this newsletter that the exercise of might of arms is not a thing that necessarily takes bravery. I think American law enforcement (and other nations, though I can’t speak to them all) has done a pretty good job demonstrating my point with only ever increasing levels of visibility. It’s been pointed out before, many times over, that they are not the most dangerous job in America. Which is true. But still, some ask? Don’t they face unusual levels of risk as part of the occupation?  

I have my doubts.

It’s the funny thing about those dangerous parts of the city where even the police are wary to go. Regular people live there. And they live live there. Get up to go to work, sleep, eat meals, that sort of thing. Dens of iniquity can sit in the middle of regular dens. The worst places can share a fenceless border with the mundanely impoverished. This fact is occasionally used as justification for taking a heavy handed approach to these bad parts of town. But the majority of people in these places are not criminals, and,  as such, they have to go on with their lives in places warriors dare not tread. Which does make me question just how brave these warriors are. They may go in for confrontational purposes, but they have backup, enumerated authority to use force, special equipment, special vehicles, they can call the city up to have services cut so they can sweat people out. They can commandeer property to put long guns on roofs or use your backyard and living room as a staging ground. They are called brave for rolling in with maximum force and authority to lock people up, but the people who navigate daily life  are not called the same, even though they are still getting by with so much less protection.

Self-defense exists as law on the books. But, in personal self-defense, the details very much matter in whether your conduct is deemed acceptable.  The police, well, they don’t even have to understand the laws they are using against you. They have a union to back them up when there are inquiries about conduct,  and ties to all the usual sources of propaganda that get lauded as fair and balanced news. When they do die on the job–and theirs is not the most dangerous job by fatality numbers, especially when you account for car crash fatalities they often cause themselves–they at least can have some confidence that law enforcement will bother following up on it. The pizza delivery man or convenience clerk has no such reassurances, but they go about their business and lives, and they’d be called a risk if they kept their hand on a sidearm whenever they interacted with a customer.

I was in a very minor siege once. A man with guns and almost quaint superstitious beliefs in things like cat’s being diabolically evil had been threatening our apartment complex for a number of months.  I never called the police, but they were called, and they took a very long time formulating a plan. So there wasn’t much to do. He open carried and made threats, but they were the sort of individual threats that were not considered immediately worrying, which is to say, the law would have frowned on us civilians treating them as lethal threats. The police said as much, despite their general belief in him being up to something. I went about my life, which was difficult as he lived directly above me and had a rich nocturnal life. I thought about staying elsewhere at times, but ultimately I decided if I was to be moved from my home, he’d have to do the work of moving me.  The police’s plan was eventually revealed to be pointing about  30 guns at him from behind as much safety as could be mustered, from every angle, with more guns around every corner. Not a bad plan for  intimidating an aspiring crusader with visions of glory into giving up, but it made me think “I’ve been dealing with him with nothing but the spring in my step and the words from my mouth. If I had bulletproof vehicles, heavy duty shields, good quality body armor,  a platoon at my disposal, and the protection of the law in using all that force, I don’t think it would have been so stressful.” Although I had an awful lot of spring in my step when I was younger, so maybe that was the difference. 

Before I hopped off my porch with my pooch,  I peeked out the window (someone had forgotten to text or call with a warning to steer clear) and, for a few brief moments, a fair number of rifles were pointed at me with no small amount of apparent agitation.  I simply walked away from the window, had the dog lie down with me in a part of the apartment with more solid things between me and bullets than glass, and prepared to wait it out. They got the right number eventually and I was able to leave. I had my usual daily tasks to do when it was over. It was a part of the day. I showed no particular bravery. I also didn’t lose my cool over an acorn falling on a car at any point in this tense affair.

The police actually caring about police dying and being given exclusive domestic powers of violence also means that they have insulation from crime, is the thing. For all the criminals that take shots, all sorts of tough customers have surrendered to the police rather than confront them like they would a regular person.. You know who else has to deal with random volatile people and public expressions of hate in a professional capacity? Anyone who’s worked in fast food or retail. Technically the cops are there to be called if things dramatically escalate, but every US reader probably knows the adage about how they always arrive after you need them, and about all the things they won’t help you with. Or that they’re not actually required to serve and protect except in limited circumstances. They generally don’t have great clearance or solve rates for major crimes. So what makes them a warrior? It would seem that they are allowed to do violence, but violence that you are allowed to do while the other side is forbidden from it is the least risky kind. There are physically courageous officers, but events like Uvalde showed us that there are also plenty that are not. If it’s a mixture like any other group of people, then, again, what is so necessary about them as they exist?

I think, perhaps, nothing. They already tend to rely heavily on more specialized teams for complexly dangerous situations, which could be maintained without the overall structure.

And then there is ICE, who are less accountable, and won’t even show their faces or maintain a uniform. Which is itself a continuation of the trend towards covering badges during events like the George Floyd protests. They won’t even put faces and names to their snatchings and murder willingly. They don’t even have that shred of courage or professionalism. They are violent, and they are pathetic.  And that’s the rub with this  fascist mentality. When I say things like they will never win, I’m not talking about fulfilling strategic goals, I mean that they have multiple contradictory goals. They want the glory of violence without the threat of repercussion.  They want this great outburst of violent friction so they can have a frictionless society where nothing surprising or unfamiliar ever confronts them. They want to make war without anyone being allowed to shoot back, to be called brave as they hide behind the law, special privileges,  and firepower. Say what you will about the people who are genuinely all about the dying and killing, they at least have consistent goals. 

And I think when you see texts like “5 shots, 7 holes” from Border Patrol agents or footage of an ICE agent calling a woman he shot a “fucking bitch” it’s not hard to connect this to a current crises of patriarchy, which is that The Patriach is just another thing made obsolete by modenrity. It has always faced complications to its narrative,  like women participating in labor outside the domicile having been more common than societies might like to admit across the historical record, but it only gets more plainly farcical as time goes on. Joe Lonsdale, a Silicon Valley mogul, called for a return of public executions as part of bringing  back masculine leadership. In this, he has become one of the multitudinous men  who work world historically cushy jobs–no hard physical labor, climate controlled environments for heaven’s sake!–but want to be The Hard-Handed Patriarch Who Commands Respect, Who Demands But Provides, and so retreat into petty cruelties to try and capture what they imagine the feeling of being one to be. But the more comfortable and insulated from consequences a man is, the more preposterous  this performance becomes, and as dangerous as it is–and dangerous is not hard to be, hand a toddler a gun and they might still shoot you–it is only more ridiculous in a bloodier way. What is the height of masculinity? To make the state and its pretend warriors into a harsh pater familias of society at large, and take the credit for its work as work of your own, its mechanisms somehow increase your own stature as a man no matter how far you are from the risk. That is what manly men do, they point the full arsenal of a nation at their chosen bugbears and shriek at the triggermen to make it go away. Maybe they aren't wrong, it does seem the patriarchal view of masculinity is one of constant panic  at its own collapse. That is perhaps one of the great ironies of our current discourse, that it is the reactionary who views the masculine as more  fragile than anyone else, ever wilting and needing Daddy State to rescue it.   

As women have entered into more fields,  and advancements in labor technology make more work accessible to more kinds of people, the more infantile it becomes.  The use of drones and other technologies in the war in Ukraine has allowed that nation to make use of more irregular cadets and volunteers, even in the extreme conditions of war. In fact, World War II saw extensive use of irregular forces, civilian participation, and combat participation by those  who do not fit the typical idea of a soldier. The standard  infantryman was necessary, and will probably still have uses for some time, but there it is again. More little exceptions that raise questions about the true nature of this supposedly pure figure that exists somewhere in the past but is also somehow always diminishing. The institutional bones of Patriarchy are resilient, but the fervent acolytes are reduced to  sad boorishness in the now. There was a similar backlash post-war, where lip service to faithfulness and prudence–as hypocritical as it may have been at times– was tossed out to make way for airline advertisements about how ogleable and eager the Stewardesses were, even the married man could at least have a little looksie. The Man of the House as perpetual juvenile, but also somehow an authority. It was a sign of things to come. 

You simply cannot reasonably  expect to command the same kind of respect as someone who worked the mines when you work in an office with A/C, and your wife does too, even if the work is of similar importance. You can be respectable, but you are simply not a man breaking his back, risking death and illness daily, to bring home the bacon. But cultivating respect through pro-social works is something these modern Fauxtriarchs are allergic to. The glory must come easy, it must be conferred irrespective of individual quality to the right people, and it must be enforced harshly. The solution, then, to these unimaginative lumps, is to become more wrathful and petty, to insist that the world simply stop developing in ways that benefit anyone but them, but no matter how nasty they become, they just aren't hard-handed enough to sacrifice their own comfort, they will never not look ridiculous. It’s why some of the women in the ranks get fed up with the men, I think they want the old Patriarch back. The men don’t, they just want its benefits without any of the demands.  When they don’t get more respect, they can only think to lash out more, and of course there is the overlap with their racial, sexuality, and gender non-conforming anxieties that widens the net of threats. 

That is the paradox of these intolerable dastards in and out of uniform. They must force themselves on society so hard at this time because they don’t offer it anything worthwhile.

Subscribe now