Rambo Rampages In L.A.

In a case of life imitating (bad popular) art, cashiered Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cop Chris Dorner seems to be closely following the script of the original Rambo movie, in which a disgruntled, alienated military veteran of Special Forces is beset by local police and pushed over the edge. He single-handedly takes on the police and military forces of the state, who hunt for him unsuccessfully as his survival and combat skills prove his pursuers to be no match for him.

Of course, in real life this is going to end with the execution or death in combat of “Rambo.” And this real-life Rambo is the aggressor, at least in physical terms. I'm pretty sure they're going to shoot Dorner on sight, or soon thereafter. (In the movie version, the police were the instigators, and Sylvester Stallone magically kills no one in the entire movie- just a couple of dogs sicced on him- even while shooting up the town with a hand-held machine gun in the climax after which he is allowed to walk away in the company of his Special Forces mentor, unarrested. The Magic of the Movies! And that is magical in at least two ways.) There's good reason to kill Dorner, from the LAPD's perspective: 1) revenge, and 2) to silence him. For even if his complaints are wrong and irrational, they're still going to resonate with that segment of the populate it is the job of the LAPD to repress. And except in the eyes of an increasingly punitive establishment, targets of repression aren't all “criminals.” The police in southern California have already embarked on a rampage of their own.

Or if you prefer an older cultural metaphor, there's the story of Frankenstein's Monster. Dorner, in his detailed complaint/rant posted online, flaunts his specialized military and police training in threatening the LAPD and basically trash-talking them that he'll kick their butts with his superior fighting skills. (I think they'll win, and soon.)

The establishment propaganda system (aka “the media”) has virtually blacked out the specific accusations Dorner makes in his screed that he claims is the provocation for his rampage, instead concentrating on portraying him as a scary menace- a monster. (Rather odd that “news” organizations would behave so unjournalistically. You'd think his motivations would be relevant to the story.) You wouldn't find greater conformity and discipline in Chinese media. Dorner claims he was fired unjustly for “lying” about seeing a sergeant kick a mentally ill prisoner. He made the mistake of “working within the system,” as the bosses and rulers always piously tell people to do, and filing a complaint about the sergeant. As usual with whistleblowers and people who naively take the charade of Official Reality seriously (actual reality is quite different) and “work within channels,” assuming the system is trustworthy and ethical, he was the one targeted and punished. (The father of the prisoner who was assaulted confirms Dorner's accusation, for what that's worth.) More broadly, Dorner says that the LAPD is just as brutal and corrupt as it was when its last major scandal, the Ramparts precinct routine brutality and frame-up system, was exposed. His manifesto provides various specific details, which the media is at pains to ignore.(1)

Proving his point, the LAPD and other southern Californian police immediately went on rampages of their own. Two LAPD cops fired 60 rounds without any warning whatsoever at a 71 year old Hispanic woman and her daughter who were delivering newspapers in their pickup truck. (Apparently their orders were to fire on sight at any pickups they saw, I guess.) The elder woman was shot twice in the back. Luckily these ill-trained curs are apparently poor shots. [“LAPD offers new truck to women to make up for shooting atthem,” msnNOW.com, 2/10/13.] But that was just a “tragic misinterpretation” (of what?) says Chief Charles “Charlie” Beck. (See? He's just a regular guy. He's “Charlie.”) I guess they interpreted “big black man” as “two Hispanic women.” Whatever. As long as they're not white, right?

And in a show of solidarity with their LAPD colleagues, the Torrance Police shot a man in a pickup truck. [See “Wantedfor Killing 3, Christopher Dorner’s Claims of Racism, CorruptionResonate with LAPD’s Critics,” Democracy Now, 2/11/13.] (2)

LAPD Charles Beck made a smarmy attempt to lure Dorner to surrender by promising to reinvestigate his brutality charge against the sergeant. Oh yeah, I'm sure Beck wants to change the verdict on that! He reminds me of someone holding out a piece of meat to a stray dog while hiding a club behind his back that he intends to smash the dog's skull with.

Some shadowy local poohbahs have put up $1 million for a “reward” for Dorner's capture, announced by Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa. Man, they must be desperate to offer that kind of money for info. Not that they're really going to pay it all out. (A little known secret- those fat rewards the FBI or State Department, for example, offer, aren't actually paid, at least not in full. And how is some Afghani or Pakistani going to sue to get it? Hell, if their identity becomes known, they're dead meat.)

By obfuscating the content of his “rambling manifesto,” “the” media erase Dorner's reasons, which I'm not implying is justified, for killing two of his victims, the daughter and paramour of the police captain who had the job of defending him in the set-up departmental proceeding that resulted in his firing, as well as one cop he's killed so far. (“Rambling” is the adjective of choice for the corporate propaganda system when it wants to discredit something without actually revealing its contents. See also the treatment of the Unabomber manifesto, a lengthy and tightly-reasoned treatise with which I disagree, among other examples. “Conspiracy theory” is another handy term of disparagement and dismissal for unwanted ideas.) They also hide the broader motivation for his one-man literal war on the LAPD. To be sure, he's obviously not behaving rationally or reasonably. And perhaps he had the misguided idea (a trope of the branch of the propaganda system that is called entertainment as opposed to news and is supposed to be understood as fictional, although its effect on people's sense of the world is probably greater than that of the news component of the propaganda system) that a violent rampage would get attention for his would-be expose of the LAPD. Of course the opposite is the case. Although feats of violence do grab media attention, it doesn't follow that the propagandists devote more than the most superficial attention to the stated grievances of the violence-performer. Dorner has guaranteed that the system will work mightily to bury his “grievances,” the opposite of his stated intent.

The same thing happened with the Unabomber and the nasty Alabama vet Jimmy Lee Dykes, who just murdered a school bus driver and kidnapped a 5 year old boy as a hostage to try and force “the authorities” to let him get his gripes into “the” media. (Which “the” media could have offered to do to try and end the standoff.) In Dykes case we were told that negotiations weren't working. Does that mean that Dykes realized they weren't going to give him media access? If they had done so perhaps the situation would be been resolved peacefully, or perhaps not. We'll never know. (3)

The interest of those in power to not allow violent desperadoes to communicate with the public is partly legitimate and partly questionable, if not illegitimate. The legitimate aspect would be to not encourage other semi- (or fully) deranged malcontents from “seizing the stage” of the public arena by committing acts of violence in order to gain a platform for their idiosyncratic (whether valid, demented, or some combination, as the case may be) obsessions. A not so savory motive is to not allow ideas critical of the system that may be partly valid to gain currency with the public. Another hidden motive is the personal and institutional inclination of the armed organizations of state power to simply crush such defiant troublemakers in a very definitive and public way. This they rationalize as “making an example of” the miscreant, to discourage copycats. The flaw in this rationalization is obvious- people so far gone in alienation, frustration and rage that they would do such extreme things in the first place are not deterred. In fact, there is evidence of the opposite effect; after the massive publicity over the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, there were several copycat mass killing events.

Dorner states that commanders in the Rodney King affair have subsequently risen higher in the LAPD hierarchy. That racism is routine and overt. (His "fellow" cops didn't even have the good grace or respect to spare him from hearing them use the epithet "nigger.") That the LAPD is worse than ever. (It is certainly fundamentally the same as it has been for decades.)

It may not be true that when reform is impossible, revolution is inevitable. But occasional eruptions of suppressed rage surely are.

1) Thank god for the Internet, which is chipping away at the hegemony of the establishment's media over mass consciousness. It's easy to see why they simultaneously hate and fear the Internet and work to control and coopt it. The Internet of course makes Dorner's statement available to most people, enabling them to bypass the media “gatekeepers” of the power structure. [As of this writing the manifesto is available at eurweb.com, “Readthe (Full) Christopher Dorner Manifesto.” A Murdoch TV news video on this page paints Dorner as a monster.]

2) Historically southern California is a center of hard right wing politics. San Diego in particular is a totally militarized city. Major naval and Marine bases and training grounds are located throughout southern California, and many of the residents of those counties are white reactionaries from the Deep South or their descendants. Orange, San Diego, and Riverside Counties for example have long been the bases of some of the most reactionary members of the U.S. House of Representatives, as have parts of Los Angeles County. (Which also has its “liberal” areas.)

The LAPD has long been a fascistic and racist organization with an emphasis on brutality and secret police methods. (The Glass House Tapes, a book of interviews with a black infiltrator used by the LAPD and FBI who came in from the cold, is a good primer on the Stasi methods of the LAPD.) The Godfather of the contemporary LAPD, Chief William H. Parker, who took over in 1950, was an extreme right-wing ideologue. Most of his successors have been of like mind, such as the notorious Parker protege Daryl Gates. They ran the LAPD on a military occupation model. Gates expanded the tentacles of the LAPD political secret police unit, the so-called Public Disorder and Intelligence Division, to beyond the U.S.' national boundaries. A lawsuit by progressive movements victimized by LAPD political persecution ended up in an out of court settlement and some chump change. Naturally the infiltration and surveillance (and worse) never changed. Gates also ramped up violence against blacks and Hispanics. [The Coalition Against Police Abuse was one of two dozen plaintiffs in the suit.]

The later “reformist” chiefs who came after Gates and the Rodney King beating scandal (which was only unusual in that it was captured in a recording which got wide attention, although the police thugs were still acquitted in a trial by Simi Valley white racists, and only the riots that followed forced the Federal government to bring Federal charges on which some of the culprits were duly convicted) have actually not changed anything. This species of “reform” is properly understood as a PR exercise.

3) Here are some other thoughts on the Alabama situation. I'm putting them in a footnote because I'd hate to be accused of “rambling.” Next thing you know they'll be kicking down my door. The police claim to have slipped a surveillance camera into Dykes' underground “bunker, which was a tiny room dug about 8 feet underground. “The media” are notably incurious about the details. We can speculate that with lenses the diameter of pinheads now available, they either hid a camera and wireless transmitter in the toy they passed to the child or in some other object- although there's a question if the transmission would have been picked up above ground- or snaked a fiber optic cable with a lens at the end into the bunker, perhaps down the plastic pipe that came up from the bunker like a periscope. Making a reverse periscope, you could say.

Assuming there really was a camera, and that's not just a cover story for the police, who decided to take a risk with the child's life and burst in, guns blazing, based on something other than Dykes holding a gun, which the police claim they saw through their camera, leading them to fear for the boy's life, their attack seems reasonable. Of course, maybe Dykes was holding a gun because he realized the police were stalling him, refusing his demand to air his crazed grievances, and he anticipated an assault. Still, the boy was obviously in danger from the moment of his capture. And the police can claim “all's well that ends well” since the child was rescued physically unharmed. Whether it was reasonable to refuse to try to appease his captor by saying: “Ok, we'll hook you up with the media and you can air your grievances. But then you have to free the child. No games, no double-crosses.” But maybe they did. We can only guess, since the police and FBI are so secretive and “the” media acts as their lapdogs. It seems instead they did that ploy straight out of the training manual, trading food to buy time or for concessions by the hostage-taker. Same as they offer people they arrest a soda and burger if they'll confess to a crime that will lock them up for twenty years. And they probably find it galling to have to offer that much to get what they want.

In addition to being opaque, the story of the raid has details that don't add up. We were told that a flash bang grenade was thrown into the room, which causes a blinding light and loud noise. This would have temporarily blinded Dykes. Yet supposedly Dykes fired at the cops, who rushed down the stairs into the bunker. If he did fire at them (or not, the media's stories vary) in such a tiny room it's surprising he'd miss, even if blinded, with the police descending the staircase. Perhaps he got off a shot, or perhaps not. I suspect the plan was to shoot him on sight, gun or no gun. Which I suppose is safest from the point of view of the raiders. And of course Dykes put himself in the situation through his own vicious, violent acts.

One big underlying problem is there is no mental health care system in the U.S. There are therapists and psychiatrists who have to act as entrepreneurs and hustle for clients. Private insurers won't pay for therapy, except short term, just for drugs. Dykes as a vet presumably could have gotten care at the V.A., perhaps, but someone would have had to convince him he had a problem within himself and needed help. What to do with a radically alienated and hostile person like Dykes? We're already been through the horrors of involuntary confinement, and mass lobotomies. The actress Francis Farmer was forcibly lobotomized in the 1950s basically for cursing at a judge, then used for raping in confinement. There are innumerable other horror stories, about which many books have been written, so I needn't say more.

A dog eat dog society does not encourage creating a social support network that would try to reach out to troubles individuals in a sympathetic way and draw them in. Also there needs to be laws to permit the confiscation of guns from people like Dykes, who'd frightened some of his neighbors for years and killed one of their dogs. There were “warning signs,” in other words, but there is no system for detecting and responding to such signs. Someone has to commit a serious felony for anything to happen, and then they're either imprisoned or killed. It's an all-or-none response system.