[News] Christopher Dorner - Exterminating Angels

[Anti-Imperialist News]

    Exterminating Angels
    <http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/02/11/mike-davis/exterminating-angels/>

Mike Davis <http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/author/mike-davis/> 11 February 2013

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/02/11/mike-davis/exterminating-angels/ 
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/tag/racism/>

Racism, as readers of Richard Wright and Chester Himes know, sometimes 
drives its victims homicidally mad, as in the cases of Bigger Thomas in 
/Native Son/ or the anonymous sniper in Himes's extraordinary short 
story 'Prediction'. But then again, 'mad' may be a cowardly liberal 
euphemism for a radical defiance that would rather kill and die than 
submit to further lies and humiliation. Both stories are so unsettling 
because they leave the reader to divide justice by horror and then 
ponder the terrifying quotient.

Christopher Dorner's 'Manifesto' 
<http://www.scribd.com/doc/124401603/Dorner-Manifesto-FULL-TEXT>, the 
product, we're told, of the unendurable depression that descended on the 
author after his dismissal from the LAPD, veers between bipolar 
extremes. In one section, Dorner taunts his former comrades in sneering 
acronyms that boast his expertise: 'Your APC are defunct... My POA is 
always POI.' But the rant is followed by sentimental acknowledgments to 
friends and several pages of fan notes to eclectic heroes who include 
Hillary Clinton (his first choice for president in 2016), Chris Christie 
(his second choice), Dave Brubeck, General Petraeus and Ellen DeGeneres. 
He's also a passionate advocate of (and argument for) gun control.

Perhaps his brain synapses have been misfiring for a long time, but the 
core of Dorner's Manifesto is a coherent account of how a police 
Explorer Scout realised his life's dream as a LAPD rookie and then had 
his reputation and career destroyed for being an honest cop. He debunks 
the myth -- propagated by the /LA Times/, Mayor Villaraigosa, and most 
of the liberal establishment -- that thanks to Saint Bratton a kinder, 
gentler and more diverse LAPD now protects and serves Los Angeles.

Indeed Dorner's eye-witness account of routine sadism, racism and 
conspiracy in the department is totally in line with its historical 
institutional culture and was inadvertently fact-checked by the LAPD's 
wild shooting of two innocent women and Chief Beck's kneejerk 
exculpation of the officers involved. (Those who think that there are no 
more Rodney Kings should look carefully at the case 
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/-5-lapd-officers-probed-in-mothers-death-family-wants-answers.html> 
of the LAPD patrol woman who killed a mentally ill woman last summer by 
stomping on her genitals.)

If Dorner were standing on a skyscraper ledge or holding Rupert Murdoch 
hostage, the world might pay more attention to the injustices that he 
chronicles. But he has instead chosen, as he puts it, to make his 
enemies' homes his 'war space' and their families his targets. Thus his 
spree began not with his Barrett .50 aimed at LAPD headquarters, but 
with the murder of a cop's daughter and her fiancé.

Outlaw heroes are not this pitiless and there is no warrior honour in 
killing helpless family members. So who is Dorner? He will undoubtedly 
be buried in multiple coffins by competing theories and explanations. 
Some will fit him for serial killer lunatic, while on the AM dial he'll 
be denounced as liberalism's Timothy McVeigh. Obama will be blamed.

But I'm haunted by an eerie precedent to Dorner's story: the legend of 
Mark Essex. He was a monster in the same sense as Dorner: his rage at 
injustice and humiliation became an annihilating violence.

A young Black navy veteran with almost no formal weapons training, Essex 
boldly attacked the headquarters of the New Orleans Police Department on 
New Year's Eve, 1972. After killing a black police cadet and wounding a 
white lieutenant, Essex escaped to a nearby warehouse where he ambushed 
a K-9 unit and killed another cop. For a week he eluded a vast manhunt 
before suddenly reappearing in the Howard Johnson Hotel across the 
street from City Hall. Going floor to floor, always warning the 
housekeepers to flee, he shot down hotel managers and white guests, 
setting rooms afire as he climbed toward the roof.

The New Orleans police rushed the hotel, but Essex with uncanny accuracy 
shot cops off fire ladders, mowed them down in stairwells and killed 
them as they stepped out of elevators or got out of their cars in the 
streets below. By nightfall on 7 January 1973, Essex -- now bunkered on 
the roof of Howard Johnson -- had militarily defeated the entire New 
Orleans Police Department. He had shot ten police officers (five dead, 
including a deputy chief) and eleven white civilians (four dead) while 
withstanding thousands of rounds of police fire without a wound. 
Ultimately a marine helicopter was brought in and after taking numerous 
hits from Essex in three runs at the hotel, a police sharpshooter killed 
the one-man black liberation army. When the coroner received what 
remained of Essex he counted 200 bullet wounds.

In his superb reconstruction of this New Orleans Armageddon (/A Terrible 
Thunder: The Story of the New Orleans Sniper/) first published in 1978, 
Peter Hernon anticipates some of the key questions that may confront 
Dorner's biographer. Essex grew up in Emporia, Kansas, the child of a 
blue-collar black family in an almost all-white town. (Dorner emphasises 
that he was the only black child in his classes until middle school.) 
Hernon finds nothing traumatic or disturbed in Essex's life until he 
joins the navy in the late 1960s and trains in San Diego as a dental 
technician with the hope of someday going to dental school. The white 
navy dentist whom Essex assisted recalls him rather fondly to Hernon as 
a cheerful 19-year-old from Kansas.

But the navy in 1969 is anything but cheerful. In the white ranks 
there's seething hostility against promotion of blacks and race riots 
have erupted on the flight decks of the big carriers. Many black 
sailors, as well as a minority of whites, are alienated by the war in 
Vietnam and the Nixon backlash at home. Hernon is stationed at a small 
naval base in Imperial Beach (last exit before Tijuana and the site of 
the hugely subversive and accordingly short-lived HBO series, /John from 
Cincinnati/) where he and other black sailors are tormented by racist 
CPOs. (Hernon quotes one as loudly proclaiming: 'God, it must have been 
beautiful twenty or thirty years ago. When a nigger went to sea it was 
below the decks, in the galley.') Finally, after one slur too many, 
Essex decks a white sailor.

He's doomed. Like Bob Jones, the black shipyard worker in Himes's 
ferocious 1945 novel /If He Hollers Let Him Go/, a single misstep and 
his life spirals downward. In the face of unfair punishments and 
continuing abuse, Essex loses faith in a naval career. He goes AWOL and 
is kicked out of the service. Unlike Dorner however, Essex is able to 
place injustice in a political framework; there are plenty of radical 
cats in the navy in 1970 and he gravitates towards the Black Panthers, 
first in New York and then in New Orleans. Police attacks on the Desire 
projects and the killing of local activists convince Essex that it is 
time for war. Hernon is very clear, however, that this was a solo 
project, 'revolutionary suicide' in the terminology of the time. But 
Essex doesn't die entirely alone. As he kills cops from the rooftop of 
the Howard Johnson, young Black people in the street cheer him.

Does anyone cheer Dorner?

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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