An essay by David Sirota yesterday at Salon starts off with this:
What does a police state really look like in practice in America? Is it the cartoonish dystopia of sci-fi books? Is it like 1998′s “The Siege,” which predicted a wholesale instatement of martial law? Or in the age of the drone-wielding police department, is it something more mundane and subtle yet nonetheless pernicious? From this city in the middle of Middle America, it looks like the latter.
When people think of Denver, many think of skiing and, since the last election, marijuana. But from here in the Mile High City, things seem a bit different. In the day to day operation of the city, we aren’t as much defined by snow and pot as we are by the fact that we live under the rule of an increasingly brutal police force. It is a police force that our political leaders are more than happy to deploy to punish undesirables, and worse, that the most powerful media organ is more than happy to defend.
Sirota expands on the situation in Denver and also discusses the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk and surveillance programs in New York City. To this we could also include the abuses of the LAPD that appear to have driven Christopher Dorner to his murder spree (and are otherwise well documented), the thuggish behavior of TSA officers, and the after-the-fact justifications of the Obama administration for its policy of extrajudicial nonbattlefield assassinations of American citizens. And let’s thrown in the pervasive use of CCTV in the U.K.
Here’s the thing: While many people would likely agree that films such as 1984 and Brazil are horrifying depictions of police states — and they are — relatively few people seem bothered by the realities we’re living with today. Is it because our world doesn’t look quite as horrific as the images movies (and occasionally TV) have given us?
Has pop culture given us an unrealistic idea of what a police state looks like?
What do you think?
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
Yup. Analagous to the thing that has always bugged me most about how Hitler is portrayed in movies and TV. We forget that he was wildly popular and women swooned over the cool uniform, Hollywood moustache, and blazing air of confidence he projected. But since most people only know him from movies and WWII-in-a-soundbite newsreels, they figure all they have to do to avoid electing the next Hitler is to stay away from the ranting guy. (The only portrayal I’ve seen that hints at -why- anyone would follow him is the always-great Derek Jacobi’s. And Yay! I’ve brought us back to film criticism!)
Likewise, if we don’t see machinegun topcoat secret policemen on every corner (or, say, guarding every school), then we’re okay. RIght?
And here’s a bit of Jacobi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjh0Ukuzc3o
Filmic police states are almost always based on Nazi and Communist imagery, just like the end of Star Wars. Huge halls, huge but well-ordered crowds, huge posters of the Leader. Which means that if you don’t want your régime to be thought of as a police state, you just avoid the blatant imagery. It’s a two-way process, in other words.
Boy is it disconcerting to hear Hitler with an English accent.
If it’s only the accent that disconcerted you, you need to go back and watch again. ^_-
Now I want to hear the speech in a thick Swedish or French accent, or a cartoonish, ‘atsa-spicy-meatball Italian voice.
I think a big chunk of the US has a pretty screwed up view of totalitarianism to begin with. The NRA’s base talks about guns being used to protect us against the government, but the first suggestion they make in the wake of an armed shooting is more armed authority figures. People seem to think that bicycle helmets and workplace safety are leading us to Soviet communism, yet have no trouble with paramilitary SWAT teams and a military bigger than the rest of the world combined.
In a sense, yes, pop culture has given us an unrealistic portrayal of what a police state would look like if it were to happen in the US and other western democracies, though I would argue that we’re not there yet. I’ve often thought that in some respects, Brave New World was more applicable to western countries than 1984 in the sense that Brave New World foresaw a world in which people are too absorbed with hedonistic pursuits to change social conditions or pursue meaningful goals, whereas 1984 foresaw a world where it was accomplished through brutal repression and wisespread fear and distrust.
Further, it has to be remembered that while police states ensure obedience through repression and has rather crude propaganda, the PR and advertising firms found in liberal democracies are much more sophisticated at manipulating the public into compliance.
I think that 1984 is pretty good description of where most states are heading. Sure it looks unreal, but you can already see the infrastructure being put in place, if tomorrow, everything changed and we suddenly lived in the world of 1984, no sane person would put up with it, but we forget that these were people who were brought up to think in doublespeak, and ” extrajudicial nonbattlefield assassinations” sounds like proto-doublespeak to me. Just like “misspoke”, and “Enhanced interrogation”.
The moment we think that the world of 1984 is cartoonish and think that that means its also improbable, we miss the point.
The biggest hurdle to stopping this, the way I see it, is that no single person or corporation is consciously working toward this future, rather its a lack of forward thinking and opportunistic behavior that is inching us towards this. And if you don’t believe this then you don’t believe in global warming either.
Yes indeed, because there are not enough movies to depict the realistic possibilities.
Any form of government could look good under the right circumstances. A monarchy can be wonderful with a good monarch.
Government is a mechanism. The importance of its form is not due to what it looks like, but to the ability of people to live freely once it is entrenched.
I think a lot of the problem isn’t necessarily one of misrepresentation but of the general difficulty of all science/speculative fiction: As Yogi Berra put it, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Our life in 2013 doesn’t look anything at all like the societies envisioned by 2001,, Blade Runner, or even Back to the Future, Part II. Likewise, our notion of what a police state might look like was long informed mostly by the bleak, domineering imagery of the totalitarian states we were familiar with in the 20th century, as Roger pointed out. (That kind of imagery also has the benefit of looking very interesting on film, which probably explains at least part of its cultural prevalence.) Would anybody in the mid-20th century have envisioned that a police state could look like Singapore – slick, clean, prosperous, high-tech . . . but devoid of what most of us in the West consider even basic rights (like trial by jury or freedom of assembly)?
I think as far as fictional representations of police states go, Minority Report probably got as close to being right as anyone in the last 20 years. It doesn’t look all that much different from our world, and the surveillance to which everyone placidly submits is also the vehicle by which advertisers cater to everyone’s consumer desires.
As private businesses are getting more and more into surveillance – though they’ll never call it that – we’re seeing a police state evolving from the private sector outward, not necessarily imposed from the top down. I just read a report yesterday that retailers are starting to track people’s cell phone signals within their stores to map out customers’ traffic patterns. Apparently they neither ask for nor necessarily need permission to do this, so we’re letting them do it without even knowing it, simply by carrying a phone. (Ironically, it was Minority Report in some cases that gave businesses the idea to pursue such technology – yet another example of the tail of speculative fiction wagging the technological dog.)
Reading the comments to the Salon piece, I’d say the answer is no. Everyone there seems to agree that we are, in fact, living in a police state. What they can’t agree on is if it’s a leftist or rightist police state, nor who is to blame for creating the police state. At the risk of invoking a fallacy of the middle, they can’t both be correct here. Sirota himself falls into this trap in his last paragraph about the Denver Post, wherein he vilifies the Post’s editorial board for basically agreeing with him (that using drones for law enforcement and surveillance is not a good thing).
Before we try to identify what a police state looks like, it would be nice if we could get some sort of working definition of what a police state is. Preferably one that isn’t paranoid and reactionary, as most of those comments are.
Given how well documented the problems in the LAPD are and have been for decades (though the extent of the problem is debatable), I really don’t think Dorner is a particularly good poster-boy for that issue. I read about as much of his manifesto as I could stomach (about a third, but the bit about misandrist lesbians did me in) and skimmed the rest. What I came away with was the picture of a man whose relationship with reality at some point devolved to the level of passing acquaintance. His judgement is impaired well beyond any reasonable level, and so I have to question the clarity of his recollections as well. I realize that just because he’s potentially psychotic doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but blaming the actions of the LAPD for his break strikes me as a post hoc fallacy, a confusion of correlation and causation.
There are also, as I understand, severe credibility issues with Dorner’s accusations of police brutality against his colleagues, which — as I’ve seen from some sources — appear to have been falsely and maliciously motivated. Obviously the LAPD has a very deservedly poor reputation, but that make Christopher Dorner right.
Pop culture has given tacit approval to the encroaching police state, but making it obvious that extra-legal, even thuggish, behavior is perfectly fine, as long as “the guy is stone-cold guilty.” I used to enjoy shows like Bones, but am finding it difficult to watch main character Booth, an FBI agent, stomp all over everyone’s civil rights in a thuggish manner. But the show seems to be telling us he’s just hunky-dory because they always, always get the right killer. Ends justifies the means, every time.
I really want to see him pull his usual crap and get in trouble for reals for it, but the show makes it obvious that you’re not supposed to feel that way about him.
Yeah, let’s be careful here. The awfulness of the LAPD shouldn’t excuse Dorner.
But the fact that no one single person or corporation is working towards it is also a reason for why it probably won’t happen in that way. It’s all well and good to talk about people being brought up to think in doublespeak, but first you have to get to the point where it’s been firmly ground into the populace. Not saying that can’t happen–1984 was, after all, merely an exaggeration of the then-very-real Communist state in Russia. But it requires serious concerted effort, and usually massive social turmoil to boot, to install in the first place.
Call me a blinkered optimist, but I don’t think this kind of thing is likely in current western society. It could happen eventually, but it needs some kind of catastrophic X factor to kick off (sadly, the ecological devastation of global warming could very well provide such a factor). But simply assuming it’s inevitable based on current trends is always dodgy. I think America came as close as they’re going to come to true doublethink and obliteration of freedom of speech under Bush, and not only did it never totally crush dissent, it ended up becoming a millstone around the GOP’s neck, as the recent election demonstrated. The kind of rhetoric that used to silence critics is now repulsing Americans en masse. None of this is to excuse the very real abuses that ARE happening, or to say that things are hunky-dory, but a little perspective is called for.
Well, you have to be careful here. If you we don’t change direction, this is a very real possibility in my opinion, I haven’t said its inevitable, but if you don’t think its going to happen, I worry that we will let it happen.
This is the same as with global warming, for the longest time the debate has been centered on weather its real or not, whether global warming “Will happen” or not. But crazy people have been reminding us of whats happenning for a long time, only now, is the message STARTING to sink in.
But to cut to the chase, if you think that current policies, not just in the US but worldwide are not a little bit skewed toward totalitarianism and moving ever so slightly away from making freedom a central tenet of human existence then we will not agree, see I don’t think that even today’s surveillance and deference to power is acceptable, much less tolerable, and I worry that some people are willing to continue as is or let the state lose power to corporate interests.
Because this totalitarian regime is not going to happen because of the interest of the state, its going to happen because the state has no vision of the future but transnational corporations do.
End rant. :)
Have you seen The Cube? It’s allegory for how the populace can create something unintentionally, every individual thinking they are doing something legal and worthwhile. Like the little portions of a fractal, multiplied, creating a whole that is no longer a private, specialized and individual choice, but oppression.
I like Cube a lot, but it’s, y’know, a movie. And a pretty farfetched one, viewed on purely literal level; as you say, it’s an allegory.
In that sense, maybe Brazil–which is also exaggerated, but has the ring of truth–is the closest to our current situation. There’s no mastermind in that movie either, just a calavcade of paranoia and bureaucracy.
“The absence of a mastermind” is a great way of putting it, put I wanted to describe how such oppression is probable. I live in a country with more red tape than I am used to, and boy can I tell you that the bureacracy can be maddening and life-altering in negative ways. Which is why I continue to consider something like the American concept of “what government cannot do” to be absolutely essential for good government anywhere.
Yeah, 1984 is a better book, but Brave New World is probably a better depiction of what a true dystopian mind-controlled future would look like. Not least because A) there’s no single, obvious mastermind or group of masterminds in BNW, and B) Huxley’s manipulators are far more subtle about everything. There’s also the fact that Huxley’s dystopia uses the carrot to maintain control, which is more relatable to us, as opposed to Orwell’s stick. And Huxley doesn’t try to pretend that his totalitarian state will be eternal and unchanging, which is the biggest, most obvious flaw in Orwell’s reasoning. I get the literary point he was making, but Oceana would have collapsed due to entropy and lack of resources sooner rather than later.
Yes, imagery is a big thing, and it’s hardly exclusively pop culture’s fault; plenty of people saw Hitler and Stalin’s excesses firsthand, to the point where “giant symbols and ranty guys in front of huge crowds” (not to mention rhetoric about manifest destiny and the superiority of one group or another) instantly sets off alarms to any viewer today.
I do tend to think that closet totalitarians eventually give the game away if allowed; they WANT the rallies, the crowds, the cult of personality, and they start to slip into that mode given the chance.
I think the biggest issue with pop cultural dystopias tend to come from the way they attribute everything to a single mastermind or group of masterminds, who can be conveniently defeated to restore freedom. This is in keeping with the needs of narrative convenience, but it’s simply not how these things work in real life most of the time. That’s actually something that pissed me off about the movie adaptation of V For Vendetta–the Wachowskis couldn’t resist trying to pin the precipitating event (in the movie, a viral epidemic, in the comic, a nuclear war) on the people who then seized power; the comic, more astutely, I think, had the Norsefire regime as a symptom of the anarchy that resulted. At the end of the day, totalitarian states happen because people LET them happen, which makes everyone complicit; trying to peg things on easily defined “bad guys” us a way of letting the audience off the hook, with the result being the aforementioned “well, we’re not all genuflecting before Big Brother, therefore, things are fine” attitude.
That said, we do need to be careful and measured in our language. Totalitarianism is not an either/or, it’s something that rests at the end of a scale, opposite “total anarchy”; it can be hard to identify exactly when authority has gone too far, and indeed, having an authority at all can be too totalitarian for some people. It’s one thing to decry police brutality and unchecked executive power; it’s another to start throwing around accusations of totalitarianism. Go too far down that road and you become one of those “OMG OBAMA IS HITLER” morans. Or one of those “Bush is Hitler” morans, for that matter.
No, but they can both be wrong. “Leftist” and “rightist” don’t seem to be terms that map very well on to reality nowadays, rather being terms of abuse that advocates of certain political positions hurl at their opponents.
At risk of invoking Godwin, it may be worth remembering that the National Socialists stood for both a highly controlling state and a powerful corporate sector. This seems familiar to me (I live in Japan), and doesn’t correspond to many of the popularly held notions of “leftist” and “rightist”.
I’d like you to know that I find this post to be very well stated.
Why thank you. Doubleplusgood Happythinkings to you too!
They can actually both be right, it doesn’t have to make sense, but as long as you’re chasing who is to blame, it continues to happen, so to the extent that both “left and right” are making this happen or letting it or enabling it they can be to blame. Personally, (I already said this) I think its a lack of accountability towards the future that’s making this happen.