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<h2 class="post-title"><a
href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/02/11/mike-davis/exterminating-angels/">Exterminating
Angels</a></h2>
<div class="post-header clearfix"> <span class="post-author"><a
href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/author/mike-davis/"
title="Posts by Mike Davis" rel="author">Mike Davis</a></span> <span
class="post-date">11 February 2013</span> </div>
<p> <span class="pmd-caption"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/02/11/mike-davis/exterminating-angels/">http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2013/02/11/mike-davis/exterminating-angels/</a></span><span
class="pmd-cats"><a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/tag/racism/"
rel="tag"></a></span> </p>
<div class="entry singlepost">
<p>Racism, as readers of Richard Wright and Chester Himes know,
sometimes drives its victims homicidally mad, as in the cases of Bigger
Thomas in <em>Native Son</em> 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.</p>
<p>Christopher Dorner’s <a
href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/124401603/Dorner-Manifesto-FULL-TEXT"
target="new">‘Manifesto’</a>, 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.<span id="more-14701"></span></p>
<p>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 <em>LA Times</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/-5-lapd-officers-probed-in-mothers-death-family-wants-answers.html"
target="new">case</a> of the LAPD patrol woman who killed a mentally
ill woman last summer by stomping on her genitals.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In his superb reconstruction of this New Orleans Armageddon (<em>A
Terrible Thunder: The Story of the New Orleans Sniper</em>) 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.</p>
<p>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, <em>John
from Cincinnati</em>) 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.</p>
<p>He’s doomed. Like Bob Jones, the black shipyard worker in Himes’s
ferocious 1945 novel <em>If He Hollers Let Him Go</em>, 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.</p>
<p>Does anyone cheer Dorner? </p>
</div>
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