Proxy Fight

One James Easton has been arrested in connection with the shootings of three young Palestinian men who were headed to one of their grandparents' home in Vermont for dinner.

According to Burlington Police Chief Jon Murad, "in this charged moment, no one can look at this incident and not suspect that it may have been a hate-motivated crime." I, however, would beg to differ. It's not particularly difficult to look at what went down, and conclude that Mr. Easton (presuming that he is, in fact, the assailant) was not motivated by hatred of Palestinians. Given the frequency with which Americans turn to violence as a means of dealing with things, the shooting can just as easily be interpreted as a show of support of Israel. After all, if Israel doesn't do a particularly good job of making the distinction between Palestinian resistance and Hamas terrorism, why should the American public necessarily be any better about it? And while vigilante action is sometimes viewed as a hate crime (especially in cases where there is a difference in race), it isn't always, and there's nothing inherently hateful about people taking the law (or their own morality) into their own hands.

As much as both Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians see themselves as the victims of hate crimes, it may be more accurate to say that this is simply how a certain subset of the American public takes sides in this conflict. It's simply another problem where violence is seen as a solution.

Storytime

Last week, I was visiting family in the rural South, and this gave me the opportunity to talk to people that I wouldn't otherwise rub shoulders with, like some of my family members' neighbors. What's interesting about conversations like that is understanding a perspective on the world that one might not otherwise be exposed to. Even short talks can give perspective.

While we were talking to one of the neighbors, the subject of a local store came up. (Judging from the number of people who'd mentioned this particular place in conversation, it must have been fairly popular.) Apparently, it had recently been sold to new owners, apparently Indian immigrants. The money for the sale had, we were told, come from "the government." And not in the form of a small business loan, or anything like that. The neighbor told us, with all of the conviction of someone who'd read the paperwork themselves, that "the government" simply gave money, no strings attached and no questions asked, to Indian immigrants, specifically so that they could purchase local businesses that were for sale, and thus displace the locals from the area business community.

The line of reasoning appeared to go something like this: Since everyone in India is poor, immigrants to the United States simply couldn't have enough money to buy a business. And people in Washington, D.C. don't care about what happens to rural Americans. 2 + 2 = 4.

I didn't bother to mention that I was dubious about the math. The neighbor clearly saw their logic as not only impeccable, but self-evident, and I hadn't spent more hours than I would have liked getting all the way down there just to argue with the locals. Besides, in the end, the logic, faulty or not, wasn't relevant. It was simply an article of faith that explained a change in the local environment that didn't make sense otherwise. It speaks to an emotional reality whose power is unconnected from a broader picture of the world.

In that reality can be seen the tripartite structure of Populism that's become associated with the American Right; there are "The People," the corrupt "Élite" and those Others who have something they shouldn't, because the Élites gave them what rightfully belonged to the People. It's an explanation of why what Is differs from what the person understands Ought to be. And it offers up villains locally and at a remove.

It's an expression of suffering and anxiety that is ignored because the story that it's attached to is too ridiculous to be paid any attention to. And so, when someone does pay attention, when they do take the time to notice how people are feeling, they earn a loyalty seems difficult to fathom.

MWWS: The Game

Not long ago, I was in a Barnes and Noble, and noticed that they had three different versions of the Unsolved Case Files game. These are games in which the players attempt to solve fictional crimes by examining the evidence given. It can be seen as a variation on How to Host a Murder and similar games; except that in this case, the players are not themselves the suspects.

The company makes a number of different cases, including one of a rabbit so that young children can try their hands at detective work, but the three games in the photo above are the only ones I've ever seen offered at physical retail outlets. The cases with male and/or non-White "victims"? Nowhere to be seen.

This creates an interesting variation on "Missing White Woman Syndrome," as it's often called. But it also raises an interesting, but not new, question: Whose preferences are driving this? There's no reason why Barnes and Noble, or Target, or a holiday pop-up store couldn't put the Buddy Edmunds or Sandra Ivey cases on sale. But I've never seen them offered in a physical store, and I've started looking to see what cases are offered when I come across these. So why are they apparently only available from online retailers? Are the retail buyers acting on their own preferences? Or are they presuming that they understand that the target audience would mainly be interested only in these three cases?

The opening to pass the buck that this creates is one of the things that stands in the way of further progress on "race relations" in the United States. No-one really has to take any responsibility for anything. Companies can blame the public at large, and the public at large can blame companies.

To be sure, this is a minor concern. Given limited shelf space, companies have to make choices as to what products they're going to sell, if there are a number of them in a line. And it's not like people are exactly clamoring to have the other cases made more widely available. It's just one of those things that caught my attention.

In A Barrel

I just came back from doing a little traveling, and flew to Seattle from Chicago O'Hare airport. And was reminded of something that first occurred to me in 2004, when I was flying out of London Heathrow. Namely that airport security is, in a lot of cases, set up to protect airplanes and, to a lesser degree, airports, more that it is to protect travelers. And, in so dong, shows that terrorism might not be the threat that it's been made out to be.

Whether it was due to the layout of the terminal, to renovation or something else, I don't know, but the lines for the security checkpoint wound up cramming a lot of people into a fairly small space.

The line continues around the corner to the right...

The point behind terrorism is to bring about some sort political change. Violence is a means to that end. Accordingly, it doesn't necessarily matter what sort of violence is used. If the goal is to protect people from acts of mass violence, packing them into a relatively enclosed space like this seems to defeat that purpose, because anyone who can show that they have a boarding pass can get to this point in the airport. The security checkpoint, the destination of these snaking lines, is out of the frame to the right. So it wouldn't be particularly difficult for someone to enter this space with the bomb or a gun.

So the fact that no-one has chosen to attack the security lines of airports can be said to demonstrate that terrorism is pretty difficult to pull off in many societies where the tools of terrorism are decently controlled, and/or that there isn't a lot of motivation for such attacks.

Because while the security apparatus of the airport would prevent a person with a gun or a bomb from getting to one of the gates or on to an aircraft, this setup does little to protect the people actually flying. This is morbid, but a person with a weapon, standing at the point where I took this picture, would be capable of doing a lot of damage, pretty quickly. A few people could coordinate even more mayhem.

And I suspect that I'm not the first person that this has occurred to. It's possible that for most airports, there simply isn't anything to be done about it; the design and layouts of spaces that pre-date the War on Terror weren't put in place with this consideration in mind. So I'm not contending that this is proof that The Powers That Be are prosecuting the War on Terror in bad faith, or that it's indicative of deliberate Security Theater. But this sort of bottleneck, one that places a lot of people into a small area, seems counterproductive if the goal is to protect those people, rather than the travel infrastructure.

6 o'clock Oracle

I've been spending time with my mother recently, and that means doing something that I haven't done in some time; watching network television news. My general gripe with the news is that it engages in what seems like a lot of fearmongering, mainly in the service of driving viewership; mildly frightening stories draw in viewers.

But it also gives at least some of those viewers the idea that the world is in terrible shape. My mother's view of the world is fairly dark, as it's beset by violent crime, warfare and ecological disasters on all sides. In short, she no longer sees the stories that are presented on the news as a curated view of local and world events, but as an accurate reflection of the current state of things. Even though, on an intellectual level, she understands that television newscasts are not capable of presenting the whole of current world events with any level of completeness or nuance.

I doubt that the news has enough of an influence on people for the generally negative tone to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, mainly because the actions that people take in response to what they learn from news media rarely rises to the level of something that would catch the interest of the news media. But it can be hard to shake the feeling that the worse people feel about the world, the less likely they are to take actions that will make it feel better to them.