The Taserification of America

Unless you've been living in a Waziristan cave for the last 24
years, you've heard about the unfortunate misdemeanor-breaking dude who
got Tasered at a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park last night.
My computer screen here in Center City went all a-Twitter about it even
before all the electrons had even stopped flowing through 17-year-old
suburban high school senior Steve Consalvi.

My gut instinct when I first learned of it was the same as I feel
about it a day later: That while it wasn't exactly a Rodney King
affair, clearly the officer had used excessive force. I've been
watching baseball games for more than 40 years, and the drills is
always the same. The fan isn't trying to do harm, just get attention;
it used to be that the TV cameras never even showed a field-jumper
for exactly that reason, back before ESPN needed an endless stream of
fodder for its "Top 10 Plays."

People forget that the whole justification for police to get Tasers
in the first place was to subdue potentially violent suspects in cases
in the past in which they might have been tempted to use lethal force.
But the notion that the cops would have pulled a gun and shot
17-year-old field jumper Steve Consalvi is absurd, which means the
rationale for tasing him is...what? There's something oddly funny about
zapping a fellow human for some reason, but Tasers are no joke to the loved ones of the estimated 50 people who died because of their use.

Consalvi didn't have the risk factors of most of those killed or
injured -- he is young, health, and wasn't drunk or on drugs. But he
still -- while committing a misdemeanor, let's remember -- was
subjected to the brief, intense pain of 50,000 volts of electricty. There was a simpler, quainter time when causing pain to another person was called...violence.

I guess that quaint time was America before 9/11 -- after which for
some reason we lost all sense of proportionality on how to respond to
various levels of wrongdoing. After my low-key blog suggestion
that Tasering a mildly lawbreaking fan wasn't a great idea, I got an
email from a reader. He said, in part: "Were you there last night? I
was. Idiots like that are unpredictable at best! The days of "Morgana
(sic) the kissing bandit" are gone. We live in a post 911 world." I
don't mean to be harsh to the emailer -- he actually made some decent
points about security entering Citizens Bank Park.

But I also had to wonder: Must we see every single act of
wrongdoing, even minor ones, through the prism of 9/11? Is a fan
running on a field in the same ballpark with killing nearly 3,000
people? What has happened to us in this country. Did anyone call for
stun-gunning "Morganna the kissing bandit"
in the 1970s because we lived in "a post-JFK assassination world" and
that maybe she had a concealed weapon inside of those, um. concealed weapons. Of course not. Americans have changed..and not for the better.

Make no mistake -- the 9/11 attacks were the most cowardly acts of
pure evil ever committed on U.S. soil -- but the American ideals of
civil liberties should be so sacrosanct they should not have been
unduly violated even for the people who planned and executed 9/11, but
of course they were at Guantanamo and with the John Yoo-justified
torture regime that was expanded to many people who had nothing to do
with 9/11 and eventually to people who were innocent of any crime altogether.

But even more damaging is the way that attitude -- that any kind of
lawbreaking or even potential lawbreaking requires the harshest
possible response, with no regard to more than 200 years of momentum
toward basic civil liberties and human rights -- is filtering down to
other aspects of American life. Exhibit A is what's happening in Arizona.

Let's be honest -- although there are some very bad apples scattered
in there, the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are the Steve
Consalvis of the American political debate. They've jumped over a fence
and are running around on the field of national economy, and just like
Consalvi they've broken a law but also aren't a threat to cause serious
injury (especially with studies that show undocumented migrants have a low crime rate and tend to even pay more in taxes than they get back in services).

The response from the majority of Arizonans and many Americans is no
longer to work toward a mature solution like real immigration reform
that would view these humans as what the pre-soul-dead Sen. John McCain
of the mid-2000s once called "God's children," but
to use a totalitarian-tinged "papers please" brand of racial profiling
in order to round up as many of these "illegals" (Note: actions are
"illegal," not people -- sad that that even needs to be spelled out in
2010) as possible, even separating them from their children.
The chief offender is Phoenix's "Sheriff Joe" Arpaio, who makes his
predominately Latino inmate population swelter in a brutal tent city in the pink underwear he issues them. Many of his inmates would probably prefer to be tased.

And when you voted for change in 2008, you thought you were ushering
in a presidency of Barack Obama, not the era of Draco, the Greek
lawgiver.

Which brings us to Times Square and the failed car bombing. This is
the second time in less than a year that a young man apparently
inspired by some warped brand of Islamic extremism attempted attacks
that would kill a large number of Americans. It's alarming and
upsetting that anyone is trying -- however ineptly -- to kill so many
innocent people. However, our current draconian rules of political
discourse practically prevent us from even suggesting that these
attacks be looked at as not quite exactly the same thing as 9/11, which
after all was a well-planned attack with 19 trained perpetrators.

The failed Times Square car bombing and the failed airplane
underwear bomber over Detroit were poorly planned events by young,
naive individuals that, even combined, did not harm or kill a single
individual; they were quite serious crimes nonetheless -- and they were
both handled and properly investigated with remarkable skill and speed
by the law-enforcement structures we already have in place -- that is,
police and federal law-enforcement like the FBI -- who followed normal
procedures, all applicable laws, and honored the U.S. Constitution. We
also worked cooperatively with a foreign power with whom we've
sometimes had a rocky relationship -- Pakistan -- to round up
additional suspects in the Times Square case.

And the response of some of our top political leaders today has not
congratulatory toward good police work or a criminal justice system
that at times can still be the envy of the world -- but rather anger
and disappointment...that the suspect's Constitutional rights were not
violated. Even though Faisal Shahzad is a naturalized American citizen
accused of felony crimes under U.S. law, some lawmakers were furious
that authorities followed the law and read Shahzad his Miranda rights
regarding self-incrimination (which hasn't stopped him from a
confession or providing information, by the way).

One of those critics, of course, was John McCain,
who said Mirandizing Shahzad "would be a serious mistake...at least
until we find out as much information we have." Ironically, it fell
upon right-wing media icon Glenn Beck to point out that the Times
Square case was no time to "shred the Constitution."
The main point here is a rather obvious -- when an anything-for-ratings
entertainer like Beck is the voice of reason, then democracy is rolling
seriously off the rails.

But this is increasingly who we are in 2010 -- an unforgiving nation
where you can be zapped with 50,000 volts for a minor transgression,
where you might be stopped on an Arizona street corner for having brown
skin or speaking with the wrong kind of accent, and where citizens who
are accused but not convicted of a crime are no longer all equal under
the law. It is a nation where we are suddenly all Steve Consalvi every
time we get up from our seats of conformity, never knowing where a new
shock to our system might come from.

Call it a "post 911 world" if you want, but I would call it the
slow, sad Taserification of America. At least on the green grass of
left field in South Philadelphia, it was all out in the open for a
change, for all of us to see.