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.

They were in the produce section, picking mushrooms.
She was younger than him--maybe by twenty years--
     and I thought of them as father and daughter
     until I followed them to the aisle with red wine.
The way she stood close behind him, offset, staring at labels
gave her solemn dedication to his largess away
and I was certain he had cracked open a clam over in seafood,
then she emerged fully clothed with eyes so sparkled and empty
they closed the symbolic circle of nakedness.

She didn't seem to mind the cocktail sauce, to know what it was for
but even the second-rate night-clerk who hardly speaks English
     could call the bluff.
He asked her ID for the wine and was surprised that her driver's license
     didn't smell like the sea; still--
     there was something off about how she asked for paper bags
     while the man trailed away.
He was going to devour her. She paid for the butter, sauces, lemons,
     and complimentary wine without flinching.
I almost thought she was accustomed, new shells blooming her all the time.

I followed them to their car,
an opulent black affair that he pressed her gentle bones against to kiss her.
She stood with one hand on the cart, her head tilted like she was listening
to something underground while he loaded the groceries into the trunk.
When he finished she pushed the cart to the corral, soft-stepping
     and she caught me staring, defenseless, fascinated by her vacancy
     until I watched something stir deep in the tidepool that said "leave us alone."
I retreated hastily, embarrassed, knowing that the next time I bought a clam...

(c) Dorothy J Burk 2008

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

In the low rushes where the grouse was caught
it has a name they do not know that speaks
to the sage and the juniper berries,
to the breeze and the mother of the wind;
un nom de guerre to suppress the sort of attention
that has gotten him taken.

To think that a whole long parade of breaths,
a seamless string of organic interactions has totally ceased
in these few moments is absolutely absurd
but it is well known in these parts
that invested effort can come to nothing
in the long-shot moment of fate.

In the low rushes where the grouse was caught
silence prevails in the evenings where once
names were chittered in the foliage with affection
between this and that mortal little bird;
someday things will swing back to the unspoken language
of the sage and juniper berries, of the breeze and mother of the wind.

(c) 2007 Dorothy J. Burk

One night,
after the shadows have fallen,
we will sit with our hands in our laps
and laugh at this small tragedy;
when we kiss,
the world will be still for a moment
and our sorrows will ride into the horizon
like Clint Eastwood.

Until that night:
You be my Lightfoot,
I will be your Thunderbolt,
and we will ride into the sunset
anyhow.

(c) 2007 Dorothy J. Burk

I remember riding your indigo
to the train station, that you
tasted like sea-salt on fresh snow
between my teeth and that you manuevered
the publicity so well no one knew
what you were about.

I must have been magenta, I must have
tasted like curry and gin
with my hands wedged into the folds
of the cushions; keeping company with strangers
for a half-smile and whisky.

I devoured my discomfort
with corned-beef hash. I spooned you from an egg cup
against my eager tongue and you were too wet
but I kept going and your shell gave you up
to my longing.

I got pinned against the long grey of the platform
getting off the train and you let me go
like that; just like that, right there and the smoke
as it lifted from the stack to the sky
was frozen in suggestion and it watched you depart
with practiced omniscience.

And I laid on the platform,
and I stared at the stars.

 (c) 2007 Dorothy J. Burk