The Sanctity of the Individual

For some reason, as a result of the transition from dreaming to the incoherent first moments of waking thought, I was gripped with thinking about what a stupid waste it was when Patrick Dorismond was killed as a result of police racism. It's actually a pretty stupid story:

Undercover Detective Anderson Moran approached Mr. Dorismond as part of a "buy and bust" marijuana operation, part of NYC's "Operation Condor." While eyewitness accounts of the incident are differing and incomplete, what is known is that Detective Moran asked Dorismond, who had just emerged from a bar with a friend, if he would sell him some marijuana.

Dorismond had no marijuana; nor is there any evidence he was selling or had ever sold marijuana. Dorismond apparently took exception to Moran's insistence, and a scuffle ensued. At this time two back-up plain-clothes officers approached. There was gunfire.

I'll admit that this morning I couldn't remember Dorismond's name. I just recalled the story from Z Magazine years ago and it struck me how tragic and pointless it must have been to feel yourself dying as the result of systemic racism.

That led me to think about systemic stupidity. Dorismond was a victim of official racist stupidity. Robert Dziekanski was a victim of the laziness, stupidity, callousness and cowardice of four dumb-ass RCMP officers and their tasers and their murderous indifference to his well-being (when they refused the first-responders' requests to remove his handcuffs among other things that might have still saved his life from their brutality).

It occurred to me that I tend to think that deaths like that are a needless tragedy. And that the involvement of the forces of the state makes this worse. Well, not so much that it's someone in the employ of the state, but that these state actors tend to act in concert with official or unofficial policies (such as racism) and due to the fact that they often get to kill with impunity. The policies and the impunity are things that you would expect could be controlled in a free and democratic society. The fact that they were not and will not be in the near future (witness the complete lack of penalties for those RCMP goons for killing Dziekanski and then blatantly lying about it in their reports and subsequent testimony).

But do you remember what the response of the "libertarian" champions of the individual of the Canadian right-wing was? Hey. It was just one guy! Get a grip! He deserved it! Besides, people die all the time from other causes.

It's astonishing. They're civil libertarians when they don't want to pay for other people's health care or when they want to insult Muslims. But when it comes to symbols of authority smashing people's heads in or tasering people, ... they get a vicarious thrill out of it. That is, until any of those raging state-paid goons randomly choose to swing their batons at them.

This isn't timely or anything, but sometimes one has to share.