[News] The State of the Union Amidst the Ashes of Extrajudicial Death - The Execution of Christopher Dorner

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Feb 13/2013
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/13/the-execution-of-christopher-dorner/


The State of the Union Amidst the Ashes of Extrajudicial Death


  The Execution of Christopher Dorner

by GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER and MIKE KING

If the murder of Oscar Grant on an Oakland transit platform marked the 
dawn of the Obama era, the cold-blooded murder of former Naval reservist 
and Los Angeles Police officer Christopher Dorner might just mark the 
end of whatever optimistic hope people can muster in his administration. 
Whether an innocent young man just trying to get home, shot in the back 
after being racially profiled and slurred, or a man driven to his 
breaking point after being fired from a similar police force that 
operates according to its own warped morality and overarching 
objectives, the state of the union is a powder keg whose wick has gotten 
shorter due to decades of looking the other way.

Just minutes before Barack Obama began his state of the union address, 
San Bernardino County Sheriffs, knowing full well what they were doing, 
burned Christopher Dorner to death. From police brutality and racism to 
political unaccountability, from lack of economic opportunities to the 
extrajudicial murder of anyone deemed an enemy of the state, Dorner's 
life and death offers us a much clearer picture of the state of this 
union than last night's speech or media commentary.

In the years between the murder of Oscar Grant and Dorner's last stand, 
March of 2009 to be specific, we were among those observing the case of 
Lovelle Mixon <http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/04/13/18588525.php> 
in Oakland, a parolee who decided he was not going to return to prison, 
opening fire on police at a traffic stop, killing two. Police went in to 
execute Mixon, not expecting that he would be holding an SKS. Two more 
cops died as a result. The logic of Dorner's desperation, and the chain 
of events that led to his ultimate death, parallels Mixon's; proud men 
without hope, cornered, deciding to go out fighting.

Neither man was a self-understood revolutionary and it would be 
inaccurate (or perhaps too accurate a reflection of the dearth of 
revolutionary activity in contemporary society) to try and declare 
otherwise. However, the material conditions that produced Dorner, as 
with Mixon, are not uncommon. The meaning and the effects of their 
actions speak volumes about the depth of racialization, criminalization 
and hopelessness in Obama's supposed "post-racial" America.

*LAPD Endgame: Street Justice on a Snow-Capped Mountain*

The scene could not be more surreal: the remains of a cabin south of Big 
Bear still smoldering, the President delivered his State of the Union 
Address. To be fair, they had yet to confirm that the person they were 
incinerating in a cabin near Big Bear actually /was /Dorner. Earlier in 
the day, San Bernardino County Sheriffs received a call reporting a 
stolen vehicle driven by someone matching a description of Dorner. If 
the experience of the past five days is any indication, this narrowed it 
down to Black men, Asian women, and skinny white men.  The $1 million 
dollar reward offered for information leading to Dorner's capture or 
death, also offered a measurable rubric for the value of the lives of 
police officers, as traditionally rewards in homicide cases are closer 
to $20,000. * ** *

In the gathering of hurried interviews some interesting truths from the 
public made it into the TV news. An MSNBC reporter asked a witness: 
"Where you worried when you learned that Christopher Dorner was so close 
to your house?" But the witness responded "Actually, I was just afraid 
of the cops." Given the unrestrained violence unleashed in recent days 
by the LAPD, this sentiment is perhaps unsurprising, but demonstrating a 
degree of hubris matched only by an utter absence of ironic intent, LAPD 
chief Charlie Beck said 
<file://localhost/ABC7/statuses/300719713221226496>, evidently with a 
straight face, "To be targeted because of what you are... that is 
absolutely terrifying." To which many nationwide responded 
<file://localhost/EBONYMag/status/301463076627165184> with an audible 
guffaw: /welcome to the club/.

An interview with the man who was allegedly carjacked by Dorner said 
that, while police had told the man not to tell the whole story, he 
reported that Dorner had simply said "I don't want to hurt, take your 
dog and go." When sheriff's deputies found the vehicle yesterday, the 
driver allegedly retreated into a cabin, at one point re-emerging amid 
the smoke of a diversionary device to exchange more than 100 rounds of 
fire with deputies. Two police were injured, with one later dying. 
Police quickly established a large perimeter, closing highways around 
Seven Oaks, south of Big Bear up to twenty miles away.

Establishing the perimeter also seemed to mean keeping the media at an 
arm's length. While press helicopters had been providing live shots of 
the cabin in which Dorner was allegedly holed-up, the SBSD quickly 
requested that media withdraw to roadblocks miles away and that news 
choppers cease to transmit live video for fear of providing strategic 
information to Dorner himself. The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department 
requested 
<http://www.scpr.org/news/2013/02/12/35924/dorner-manhunt-san-bernardino-sheriff-s-asks-media/> 
that media outlets and individuals cease and desist from even tweeting 
about the manhunt and shootout.

Even more astonishing than the request was the immediate compliance: 
press outlets abruptly ceased to tweet about the developing story, and 
duly retreating to the roadblocks, abandoned their task of reporting the 
news and waited for it to be fed to them. To paraphrase but one of many 
incredulous observers, we speak of press blackouts in China, but all the 
police had to do here was ask nicely and the press complied without 
batting an eyelash.

With a voluntary media blackout in effect, the Twittersphere, punctuated 
with a plethora of indignant and sharply worded refusals to comply with 
the police, became one of the only sources of developing news. What we 
know about what happened thereafter owes almost entirely to those who 
scoured the web for scanner feeds from the San Bernardino Sheriff's 
Department and intently followed the story these feeds told.

*"The Burn Plan"*

Shortly after 4pm Pacific Standard Time, the cabin was engulfed in 
flames, with CNN helicopters broadcasting plumes of black smoke from a 
distance of five miles. A single gunshot is reported from within the 
house. A narrative quickly emerged among the mainstream media, which we 
should recall was conspicuously absent from the scene, that police 
agencies had only deployed tear gas, and that perhaps Dorner himself had 
set the fire. Soon, what seems to be a cache of ammunition is exploding 
sporadically.

But for those of us listening to the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department 
radio frequency, there was little question what had occurred. Nearly a 
half hour prior, officers had referred to "going ahead with the plan 
with the burner," with another adding that the plan was to "back the 
Bear down and deploy the burner through the turret." (Live audio during 
the preceding shootout seems to confirm this intention 
<file://localhost/watch>). Soon, the message was straightforward and 
expected: "Seven burners have deployed and we have a fire." No surprised 
tones, no suggestion that the fire be extinguished.

In fact, there was the exact opposite: a female voice on the scanner 
repeatedly asks if the fire crews should be allowed to approach, and is 
told that it's not time yet, that we need to wait until all four corners 
are engulfed, then that we need to wait until the roof collapses. At one 
particularly repulsive point, those on the scene realize that the house 
has a basement, and an authoritative male voice indicates that the fire 
crew would not be called until the fire had "burned through the 
basement." They were going to let him die.

References to the 1993 massacre at Waco, Texas, the murderous 1985 
bombing of the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia were immediate, and 
will serve as opposing frames for Dorner's death in the days and weeks 
to come.

A murder? An assassination? A lynching? An execution.

*State of the Union: Flammable*

This is a day of a million possible metaphors, but central among these 
should be the image of the burning house. In an effort to distinguish 
what he called the "house negro" from the "field negro," Malcolm X had 
once observed that the two responded differently when the master's house 
caught fire: "But that field negro, remember, they were in the majority, 
and they hated their master. When the house caught on fire, he didn't 
try to put it out, that field negro prayed for a wind." While the 
metaphor may seem a strange one, given the fiery death of a man some 
have compared to a runaway slave. But as many Americans choose to gaze, 
mesmerized, at the glowing embers of the Dorner saga rather than 
watching the State of the Union, it's worth wondering: whose house is 
really on fire? And who is praying for wind?

The eclipsing of the State of the Union, with some networks 
<http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/state-union-vs-christopher-dorner-tv-news-channels-split-coverage-77456> 
airing a split screen of the President's speech alongside images from 
Southern California, or omitting pre- and post- speech coverage to 
report on Dorner's likely death (a speech given in the context of 
ongoing war and occupation, unending recession and social crisis and a 
heated debate about, well, gun control) speaks volumes about our 
society, the conditions which produced Dorner and has helped produced a 
surge in mass killings generally. Persistent racist policies couched in 
the language of security, and failed imperial ventures with war tactics 
re-imported into American policing, are routinely covered over by the 
trite conflicts of celebrities, whether they be Kardashians or Congressmen.

Dorner was not just a product of a racist police department, he also no 
doubt adored his 'fifteen minutes,' stealing time from the President he 
nevertheless supported during the biggest planned speech of the year. 
Although Dorner's actions were not driven by a radical consciousness, 
they are 'as American as cherry pie' in an apolitical vacuum that (at 
least on the surface) resembles Oliver Stone's /Natural Born Killers/ 
far more than the political contexts of the 1960s.

As Obama was taking to the lectern, police agencies were insisting that 
they had not set the fire that killed Christopher Dorner, and the 
compliant media were parroting this clearly implausible message. As 
members of Congress stood and sat on cue to rapturously applaud the 
Commander-in-Chief, more than 14,000 people have liked just one of the 
Facebook pages in support of Dorner, some because they know what racist 
policing is like, some because ours is a time of resisting injustice by 
any means, and some simply for the joy of backing an outlaw to the 
grisly end.

Dorner was not a radical, but his short war was not simply the story of 
broken man or of individualistic vengeance. The issues of brutality and 
racism perpetually covered up by a corrupt police department created the 
insurgent Dorner and resonated with many people who endure the reality 
of urban policing on a daily basis. The sympathy and the support Dorner 
received is a clear indicator of the very real and deep structural 
inequalities that helped forge the path of Dorner's life and his fiery 
death. The great radical historian Mike Davis concluded a recent article 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/02/11/mike-davis/exterminating-angels/> 
on Dorner with a peculiar question: "Does anyone cheer Dorner?" What is 
peculiar is that, for better or worse, there's no denying that the 
answer is "yes."

There's no telling what sort of a fire they could start tomorrow.

/*George Ciccariello-Maher* is assistant professor of political science 
at Drexel University. He is the author of We Created Chávez: A People's 
History of the Venezuelan Revolution 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0822354527/counterpunchmaga> and 
can be reached at gjcm(at)drexel.edu./

/*Mike King* is a Ph.D candidate in sociology at UC Santa Cruz, and can 
be reached at mikeking0101(at)gmail.com. Both study policing and 
counterinsurgency./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20130213/66a1f00a/attachment.htm>