Grammar Shy

You sound a bit jaded to me–perhaps this is mostly because I very much dislike blanket statements, but also because there are many young folks in this country doing great humanitarian and political work (you might recall many young folks were driving forces in grass-roots Obama, Nader, and Ron Paul campaign groups).

I work in K-12 schools and am fairly scared by the behavior of many students and their lack of desire to learn. However, there are many intelligent individuals in my age range (the 20-40 you speak of), who wonder how so many of our elders could be stupid enough to believe conservative radio show talking heads about the future of the health care; this strikes many of us as especially salient given that this same demographic is reaping record Medicare benefits.
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How shameful that the White House is willing to declare Ahmadinejad the “elected” leader of Iran. Would it have pained them greatly to choose to say “appointed” instead of insinuating that the protesters in Iran and out have no valid argument or concern?

How silly the President and his advisers must be if they really think this pandering will fool Ahmadinejad into coming to the table for Nuclear talks.
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Agreed on all points, especially that the officer asked him to step outside so that he could arrest him.

It’s unfortunate that what we’ve seen from so many police makes Gates’ story so very plausible. I would have been yelling, too.
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Those of you who know me well also know that this blog is a bit overdue.  For those of you who don’t know me all that well, let’s cover a few important bases:

1. I am not one of those intellectuals who is overly proud of not having a television, as though this somehow makes me more important than everyone else. I mean, to each their own, but I have a television. And I watch it.

2. If I must defend this stance, of having a TV and watching it, I will tell you this: in case you didn’t already know (and many of you do), my primary concern in life is how policing power and penological discourse have come to be located in the central, ugly, powerful position they occupy today. I find that media, especially fictional TV shows, have been quite crucial in building this policing monopoly. More on that below.

Briefly: TV discourse on policing has been politically loaded since the first cop shows surfaced, in the 1950s. Jack Webb, that ever-so-square creator of Dragnet, took this to whole new heights in the 1960s, with targeted representations of criminals and a privileging of the police voice on TV which has held since (think soliloquy; think the disembodied voice; think Freud’s undead object).

Anyhow. Just in time for me to start a program in media studies, the networks have obliged and provided some new cop show fodder. Love it! I’ve been keeping my eye on three new shows in particular: Southland, Lie to Me, and The Mentalist. The latter two are particularly interesting because they’re not directly about police, but then again, they are, very much, about policing. Southland is pretty brilliant, for a variety of reasons. (Note: by brilliant I don’t mean this is changing the landscape, but it’s shaking it up, halfway doing something to the cop show that Homicide achieved a decade ago.)

Let’s get Lie to Me and The Mentalist out of the way first. I enjoy these shows, because I think they’re entertaining. They’re fun to watch. However, I’m disgusted by these shows, which point to an important shift in understanding criminality on the larger social stage. Historically, there have been four major social ‘camps’ of understanding why criminals are so: 1) criminality is physically located (Becarria, Hitler, early criminologists) 2) criminality is romantic, taking place in the area of social/class struggle (Jesse James, older Westerns) 3) criminality is a psychological problem (the popularity of profiling, asylums, rehabilitation in prisons) and 4) criminality is the result of people who are bad seeds (a more current model). As you can imagine, I’m a big fan of the romantic explanation, as it is most akin to critical theory which points to the social causes of crime.

Unfortunately, Lie to Me and The Mentalist are not so into the romantic thing. No, they’re into the physical thing: in both of these shows, the locus of truth is physical. So what, you say. The problem is, locating criminality in the body has always had awful consequences. It means profiling based on physical identity, it means epic prejudice, it means state control of the way the body looks. Ahhhhhh! I can’t help but really, really worry that these ideas are gaining credence in society (again). The last time they were really full-blown accepted was in post-Weimar Germany, where homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, etc. could be identified (and imprisoned, and killed, and dehumanized) because of their appearance. You can see why this is a problem.

Southland is something else altogether. There’s a part of me that really wants to like this show, because they do try to tackle some interesting issues. I was impressed, then scared, then impressed, then worried by a recent representation of a transwoman on the show–but I give the writers/producers props for including somebody trans at all, and for making sure that they weren’t some degenerate criminal, but actually a victim. At first I thought the representation was a little stereotypical in terms of setting, but then again…it is L.A. There are queens and transwomen running boutiques, so I guess I can’t complain that much.

The problem is (and the problem in the good shows is always this) that the criminal has no voice; we are actively involved in the lives of police, we hear their thoughts, we see their families. We get no such window into the lives of criminals, which both Others them and steals their subjecthood.

And yes, believe it or not, criminals are people. Ha!

The only show that really lets a criminal speak for himself is Dexter, and then the issue is that he only gets to speak because he’s also a moralizing force. If he were just some criminal degenerate…well. Not worthy of a voice, for sure.

When the pale had come down
I found you in my bedroom
counting sheep.

You sit on the edges
of my skirt. The seems
ripped open,
you fail me
at evolution.

It was a good try,
you even made me think
you would stop counting sheep.

And there you were,
with your invisible-abacus invisible-numbers
in the darkness
waiting–
but not for me.

It was the same when the sun come up,
like you hadn’t closed your eyes
at all in the darkness,
like my glow back-lit
the dissatisfaction
a little more.

(c) 2008 Dorothy J Burk