Breaks

 

 

Breaks on a bus, brakes on a car  Breaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s. I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain.  One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see: then, “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.” Adam, in this example, is the gull that any hustler dreams of.

And as in a dream, Hume’ Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. The gull is fleeced – he comes, in fact, pre-fleeced.  Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

It is important that these figures were certainly not invented in the eighteenth century. Rather, they come out of a longer lineage: that of the sage and the fool. Bruno and his ass, Socrates and Diogenes the cynic, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – it is from this family that all these deprived souls in the texts of the philosophes are appropriated and turned into epistemological clockworks.  

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it. Lucretius’s clinamen is, for the philosophical hustler, the original break.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system. The problem, of course, is that the great unwashed didn’t often write down their thoughts, so that we have to depend on those thinkers that did, using them to angle backwards like surveyors do.

Still,  we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live.

 

On the death of Leonard Bast

 E.M. Foster is an admirable writer, who can be read simply for his technical perfections. Here’s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass, in Howard’s End.

“And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly.”

This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate - and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn’t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader’s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel - whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. The reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking - that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.

Which brings us to Bast. Those who’ve read Howard’s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk, the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces “We are not concerned with the very poor.” The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn’t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly.

And the lowly must be squashed. In Howard’s End, literally.

“He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.” This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man’s excess is the absence of another man’s bread.

What Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There’s a fierce defence of caste encoded in it - a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells’ characters were all about - as well as Dickens, although his poor are definitely helped by godfathers and the death of distant relatives. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for a rentier caste into a liberalism of what we would now call identity. His caste might take on a progressive role, but that role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards - between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.”

The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face, because I am much like Leonard Bat than I am at all like E.M. Forster. It is rare for a novelist to so forcefully hustle the reader out of the door because the reader doesn’t have what it takes to be the author’s friend. This, I think, is snobbism raised to a novelistic principle. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Bloomsbury set so curiously indifferent to Ullyses – when Woolf compares Joyce to an undergraduate scratching his pimples, she is Bast-ing him. She was too great an artist to let this be the final word, and in fact Woolf, like Joyce, was a genuine socialist, one of the few British writers to support the General Strike of 1926, and a pamphleteer whose pacifism is, to my mind, so much more convincing, on a moral level, than any George Orwellish bellicosities.

In my opinion, the corpse of Leonard Bast is buried under the British novel of the twentieth century, which is why it never quite adopted to modernism, save in a comic mode.

Pretend as a state doctrine is failing

 So Trump's Florida state senator, the one representing the Mar-A-Lago district that Trump won by 11 percent in 2024, just swung by 13 percentage points and elected a Democrat to the state senate. The election results on the granular level - which the DNC and Washington-centric Dems with their idiot campaign industry have neglected for years - is showing what people think of the asshole in the white house. And we all keep sailing on.

Elections are becoming the last impulse of the reality principle in the U.S., where Pretend is now state doctrine, and rules, as well, the Financial sector. Lets pretend wars, Lets pretend stock market, Lets pretend climage change aint real policies, all the lets pretend we can stuff ourselves with. Long ago the question was posed: Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? And now we have an answer on a nationwide scale - cause the Epstein class in all its glory is distributing stones and snakes to all! Are we happy?

All the little Kissingers and Trump's war with Iran

 One of the more curious tax-exempt institutions in the U.S. is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which naturally and Orwellianly embraces every beautiful war the U.S. has ever fought. It is a much more reputable org than, say, the Fifa Peace Award committee, but I prefer the latter – at least its obsequiousness is not buried under the rhetoric of a thousand “position papers”.

Naturally, Karim Sadjadpour, the Endowment’s Iran expert, has been pounding the drum for war with Iran ever since he discovered this is the kind of stuff that gets you interviewed on CNN and published in the Atlantic Monthly (a magazine that proves, every month, that it is edited by a former Israeli military prison guard).

In January of this year, Sadjadpour’s article on Trump’s opportunity in Iran was not noted enough – there is so much to note, after all!

The article took note (we note) of the riots in Iran, dubbing them, of course, a revolution (in other countries the U.S. does not like, riots are always a revolution; in the U.S., they are instances of looting by an immoral and “dark” underclass, which prove the need for an ever more militarized police!).

And then Sadjadpour pulled out the rhetoric for which peacelovin’ institutions are universally known: “Trump now confronts a fateful choice. He can make good on his promise [of hurting Iran] and face the always unpredictable consequences of military action [which is how the Carnegie Endowment for International peace describes the crushing of the bones, the deskinning of the bodies, the incineration of buildings, and the mass pain brought on by bullets, bombs, and our wondrous array of chemical devices RG] or he can face the shame of having given false encouragement to freedom fighters…”

Kudos to that last phrase. The idea that Trump has any capacity for shame whatsoever is laughable. So laughable that we can see how brilliant its use is here – our great president, embodying humanity itself, can have shame on a Mount Rushmore level! Sycophancy is a high art -in spite of the televised cabinet meetings in which Trump’s ministers routinely compete to reach their tongues ever higher up his rectum – it can be done much more subtly! And here we see a masterly touch. Trump is being given the Eisenhower presidential treatment. He is so PRESIDENTIAL that his shame, his potential shame if he doesn’t crush some bones, strip the skin off some bodies, incinerate some buildings, and in general smash faces into jelly on a large scale, will penetrate even his adorable orange hide! He'll have to talk gravely about it in his presidential library, perhaps seated on his gold toilet!

We can see where this is going. Whatever. The important thing, here, is that Sadjadpour has not shamed himself by continuing a mouselike existence as an expert, but has seized the opportunity of career advancement that will put him in the running for the next Democrat wanting to prove his hawk bonifieds! Like the Kagans and Kenneth Pollack in the Iraq war, Sadjadpour is going to be the go-to “intellectual” for the Abundance set, the liberal hawk in the liberal hawk magazine!

It is a brilliant move. However, it does not get you everything. Ask Kenneth Pollack. In fact, ask anybody below 25 who Kenneth Pollack was – you will draw a blank. At one time, though, he was the powerful anecdote to wishy washy libs who did not want to invade Iraq – the non-muscular ones.

Ah, all the little Kissingers!

I’m expecting great things from Sadjadpour.

anecdote and essay

 Mood tugs at the essay with a stronger hand than it does at other genres. Poetry has all its armored prosody to protect it; fiction has narrative, the monograph has method. But the essay absorbs proof, rhetoric and story into what is eventually, what is inevitably, whim. Which is, itself, not one thing but one thing and another. The wind bloweth where it listeth, said God in an essayistic mood.

The wind, though, is, to our human vision at least, a shapeless thing. For an essay to give shape, to shape its reason to exist, it needs technique. You don’t need a weather man to have weather, but if you are a weatherman, you need some way of depicting and even predicting the weather.

Benjamin, I think, has a certain genius for the essay, and for that moment in which the essay makes its strong play for the readers attention: I am talking about the anchoring anecdote. The essayist is most at home, is a citizen even, of literary culture – a culture of books, pictures, music and gossip. I think Benjamin learned the power of the anchoring anecdote from reading Kafka. That at least is my sense. Kafka’s anecdotes have a certain judicial quality, as though they were really decisions handed down by some supreme, invisible court. And so it is with Benjamin’s best anecdotes.

For instance, this one, from a brief essay on Robert Walser. Benjamin’s take on Walser is that even if Walser’s claim that he never changed a sentence is not, technically, true, it is a key to Walser’s manic stroller style. Manic, but quietly manic – a simple inability to stop, so that it goes past its point and into the fields, so to speak.

This inability to stop is curiously paired with the inability to start. Both moments require a decisiveness that the stroller is afraid of, shy of. Not wanting to make a fuss. And to illustrate this, Benjamin tells an anecdote:

“This story is told about Arnold Bröcklin, his son Carlo, and Gottfried Keller. One day they were sitting at their usual table at the café. Their table was famous for the way, among these comrades, they were unspeaking and closed off. So here, again, the three sat together in silence. After a certain amount of time had crawled by, the young Bröcklin said, “it’s hot.” And, after fifteen more minutes of silence, the older said: “and no wind.” Keller, for his part, sat there for a piece. Then he rose up and said: “I don’t drink with chatterboxes.” This peasant shame of talk, which is underlined by the excentric punchline, is Walser’s thing.”

That anecdote opens up, to me, a whole line of inquiry, stretching from Swiss peasants to Robert Wilson’s legendary play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a seven act, twelve hour piece in which, or so I’ve read, one of the characters advances by very slow footsteps from the wing to the center of the stage, which takes twenty minutes, stands there as though about to speak, and then, doesn’t, and then makes his way to the other wing of the stage, taking twenty minutes.

Slowness, silence, a certain terrific glue that seals in the human product: these are the anecdotal partners of Blake’s book, Proverbs of Heaven and Hell. Proverbs slowed down to the barest, syllabic beat.

A historiette of the police-lineup

 

“There is no available records of when line-ups were first introduced for police work.” – Historical Dictionary of American Criminal Justice

1. At first, at first the line-up was something different than what you think of, now, when you think of police lineup.

2. The first mention of a police lineup in the New York Times is on February 6, 1914. Headline: Police Line-Up Plan is resumed.” However, the referent here doesn’t look like our police line-up.

“The original line-up was born of the days when the Central Office Squad was a big squad and where the cells at headquarters were always full. Prioners arrested for everything from burglary to assault, who were still behind bars at break of day, were taken to the platform in the big basement room and there to be exhibited to the assembled detectives.”

The line up here is related to “calling the roll”, a procedure I remember from elementary school, and that existed and exists in many forms in many places. One of the memories of concentration camp survivors is the dangerous and eliminationist roll calls in the camps: inventory merged with murder.

As the police in the cities had more and more cases to process, the inventory of the arrested or simply taken in was a way of exerting control. But notice – notice the “exhibition” function. This was the future.

3. The NYT story states that the police line-up was only of those on hand in the Station. It was, then, independent of the fact that a mug was taken in. But it soon became joined with it. In the 20s and 30s, the police line-up was composed not only of perps or suspects at hand, but of those with records, those released from jail, those who were not particularly charged with anything. It was the exhibition that counted.

4. In an early talkie from 1930, For the Defence, starring William Powell, we have a movie capture of what the lineup was like. We know that the movie was realistic in as much as other reports – for instance, a story in Colliers in 1933 – tells essentially the same tale. In the Collliers story, which was about the NYC police department, were are told that the lineups had a master of ceremonies, assistant police inspector John J. Sullivan. Much like the inspector in the Powell flic, Sullivan’s voice was that of an auctioneer. On a stage with a stark white background upon which lines were printed (to represent height), a group of suspects or convicts would be assembled. The one to the right of the inspector would move forward, away from the group, and the inspector would read the name, identifying characteristics, and crime sheet of the given individual. As in the movie, this would provoke banter from the livelier cons. This drama was too good to confine to the detective world – it was a spectacle that many journalists, and those who were connected to the police and could acquire a ticket, also watched. What seems, in the movie, to be the kind of dialogue that was spewed out by screenwriters of the Ben Hecht variety – snappy comebacks, urban snarls, tough guy in jokes – was the word of the street, in all actuality.

5. These lineups lasted a long time. One catches glimpses of them even in the fifties. It was, penologists lamented, a tough thing for a guy trying to go straight to go to a new town and find himself herded down to the station and having his record read out. It made it hard to go straight, to find a sweetheart and a job, to make a stake, to put down roots.

6. This first kind of lineup was paralleled, in the 1930s, by the line-up as we vaguely think of it. In a story in Harper’s monthly in 1935 by Joseph F. Dinneen (Murder in Massachussetts), the lineup is described as a “modern police institution”. “It is considered good evidence to have a victim pick out of a line of average men the person suspected of the crime. The line-up is usually made up of plain clothes men, inspectors, the janitor, salesmen trying to interest the department in traffic devices, telephone repairmen, any person in the corridor who does not mind devoting ten or twenty minutes to an interesting experience in the public interest… As a reporter I have been pressed into service a number of times.”

The persons who are not suspect are called fillers or foils. The hunt for foils becomes itself a matter of urban policing. In 1985, the NYT reported that the police would often pick up “black youth”, scaring them with the idea that they were suspects in some crime, but really only interested in filling out the foils at the station.

7. Foucault, in Surveiller et punir, took the panopticon, described by Bentham, as a sort of Platonic ideal come to earth – an assemblage for creating transparency to allow subordinates to be watched, even as the watchers were in an opaque position – one in which they would not be watched. A new hierarchy: the unwatchables and the watched – was being time released in France, in Great Britain, in the United States, etc. The police lineup participates, in part, in the panopticon. But it participates, as well, in theatre – the very kind of live theatre that was dying out there on the Great White Ways.

8. The line up in this form was, of course, a very attractive proposition for movies and television. In The Lineup, a CBS show that ran from 1954 to 1960, the crime and its investigation all crystalized in the lineup. The people in the lineup were shown walking down from the podium in the opening credits – with the familiar background, white with rays marking heights, creating the background screen. The show ran in France, and introduced the French to the “parade d’identification”.

In Parade Magazine in 1952, a feature ran with twelve photos, six of crooks, six of straights. I challenged the reader to identify the crooks. “There’s always a lingering suspicion – and hope – that you could tell a convict from somebody’s uncle.”

9. From a philosophical perspective, the splendour and misery of the correspondence idea of truth: there is the man who robbed, raped or murdered, and there is the witness who points a finger. Court case after court case muddies and modifies this idea. Eyewitness reports go into the laboratory, and one varies the scene and the time intervals. We check on the circumstances of the initial witnessing – partial as it may be – and the circumstances of the selecting the perp at the police station. As is often the case with police culture, there is the hidden struggle between what police do (find a solution to a case to make it go off the books and through the courts), and what we think they do (find the guilty party). The latter means, to the social whole, that the person who raped or murdered or defrauded will not do so again, at least while being punished. But the former is an actual job, with a job’s pragmatism, where a miss can be as good as a mile if you tart it up a bit, lead the witnesses, supress the contradictory details. And of course in the middle of this is the witness’s impression, an impression like the vast millionfold array of them day in, day out. An impression that, even initially, seems to be wearing away, like a chalk drawing in a downpour.

It must strike the philosophically trained that the gradual development of the line up room, with its screen, its fillers, its sociological diversity or lack thereof, and its witness has a certain resemblance to Plato’s myth of the cave. Are these shadows upon the wall? In particular, ingenuity has been devoted to making the witness see what the people in the lineup can’t see. One reason is evident: crimes are often committed in neighborhoods where the perp will know the witness, and sometimes the witness will believe, often with good reason, that testifying will get the witness in trouble. Put the witness in danger. It is part of policework to try to charm the witness out of this anxiety. The police, here, are often operating not to protect the witness, but the case – and the witness becomes an object of use. The transactionality of witnessing can be used by witnesses, can become a paraprofessional activity – hence the mouchard, the fink, the informer, the snitch. But witnesses who are not aware of the transactional nature of witnessing are dealing with perps, on the one hand, who are well aware of it, and cops, on the other, who are also well aware of it. Nobody is really for the witness, not one hundred percent. Even if the witness is a victim. Even, especially, if the witness is a victim.

10. It is out of such philosophical musings, and court cases that, since Miranda at least (Miranda claimed to be a victim of a skewed lineup), have shaped the space of the lineup. In 1974, after the Warren Court was well history and the Nixon court was busy giving police back their trans-constitutional powers, the NYT reported on a state of the art police lineup room in Queens: it had a video and audio component, to record everything that was said; it was a designated room instead of a room at random in the station, measuring 13 x 11 feet; and it had a one way glass through which the witnesses “may look at suspects” without the suspects looking at the witnesses. A utopia.

Meanwhile, out there in the wilderness, cameras and computers were dispensing with the unreliable eyes of witnesses. In a sense, the lineup was going back to one of its origins, in the array of photographs of perpetrators that the police would let victims and witnesses leaf through.

11. Just as the discipline of prisoners became the discipline of factory workers, I have long thought – from my experience in grocery lines, having to time to gaze at fashion magazine covers and leaf through Vanity Fairs – that the police line has become a secret iconographic norm for fashion models and selfies. The arrangement of people by size, skin color, hair color, the grouping together in an absurdly small space, the smiles, even (expressions on cue), am I not seeing these things through a two way glass?

12. The democratic crisis - the loss of faith in the experience of the people - has many dimensions. One of them is the gradual replacement of the twentieth century police line-up with the photo line-up, or facial recognition machinery - as if we need to cut ourselves out of our experience in order to achieve maximum control over our collectivities. The cases mount up.

Woman wrongly accused of carjacking loses lawsuit against Detroit police who used facial technology - CBS News, September 4, 2025

"Police put a file photo of Woodruff in a photo lineup after a gas station video from the scene was run through facial recognition technology. The carjacking victim picked Woodruff, who was among other women in the lineup."

That last sentence meant - among the women in the photo lineup generated by facial recognition machinery. So much for circumstances and alibis. Detroit - the city to which the movie ROBOCOP refers - has, like many police department, steamlined its grabs. And so they go out, under the mechanical order, and so they bring in, tasers in hand. So much, even, for the old repartee between police and thieves. Who knew that we could start feeling nostalgic for the older versions of the panopticon?

ICE and the cops: how communities should take back power

Cast your mind back to every Western you have ever seen. Most of them, I’d bet, featured or included a sheriff. The sheriff “kept the peace” but, if you think about it, never stopped a single wagon, carriage or horserider for speeding. Consequently, the sheriff never examined a single wagon, carriage or saddle bag for “contrabrand” material.

In Sara Seo’s Policing the Open Road, the burden of the narrative is on the legal construction that allowed police, around the Prohibition era, more power over the car than the Customs officer had over the incoming ship – that is, police were allowed to make reasonable searches of vehicles without a warrant, and with the standard of “reasonableness” amounting to: what the policeman says.

The interesting subtheme, here, is that policing followed technological and legal changes, which intersected with an already existing hierarchy that separated the respectable (white) people and the non-respectable (working class, black, immigrant) people.

“Certainly, traffic laws, like prohibition laws, established mala prohibita—acts that were wrong only by virtue of statute. No inherent sense of morality deemed, for example, driving at the speed of twenty-two miles per hour a per se evil like murder or theft.”

Prohibition and the policing of the automobile came together in court cases that started to allow a growing police force a greatly expanded amount of power not only to regulate the traffic, but to search cars on the instinct of the police.

The addition of police union power beginning with the Civil Rights era added to this police power. Even so, the police would not have become the community’s ruler instead of their servant if the political power of the unions had not been flexed to take the power directly away from local law.

A good example of how the system works is found in Ohio.

On August 12, 2017. 25-year-old Richard Hubbard III was pulled over on E 228th St. just before 10:30 a.m. for "a moving/traffic violation” by Michael Amiott. “Hubbard was ordered to exit the car and face away so he could be taken into custody. Police say Hubbard refused, and a violent struggle ensued. The video that was captured showed Amiott taking Hubbard to the ground, punching him multiple times.”

Thus far, a typical instance of the combo of race – Hubbard is black – the auto – Hubbard had committed a minor traffic infraction and had an expired license – and police authority – the taking into custody of a person without a licence is extraordinary. I speak from authority, having once been stopped by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction and then being told that I would get a major fine if I didn’t renew my license, which was out of date. At no point did the white policeman think that I was going to go down with him to the police station. Cause I’m white.

The video made Amiott’s action undeniable, although the police issued the standard pr piece about how Hubbard had violently resisted. It did not explain why Hubbard was taken into custody – this was, for the police, a simple norm. They get to decide who to take into custody. That power has been given to them when they were given untrammeled power over the streets.

In the next step in this drama, the town of Euclid reluctantly responded by suspending and then firing Michael Amiott. The mayor referenced further instances in Amiott’s record. Amiott’s case was then taken up by the Fraternal Order of Police, even though the Euclid police department is represented, technically, by another union. See this site for an indepth look at Euclid policing and race, including other violent incidences involving Amiott. (see all parts of Series 3)

In 1983, Ohio – like many Midwestern states with a strong union presence – instituted a collective bargaining law that outlawed strikes in favor of arbitration. The driver, at that time, was the fear of teacher strikes. But included in that law were all public employee unions – the police unions foremost.

Ohio was once the heartland of American industry, and consequently, of the factory worker unions that allowed the working class to negotiate with Capital. Some leftist economists have pointed to the benefits accruing to public employees from these laws. At the same time, there is a difference between teachers and cops – the arbitrators and judges have myriad links with the police.

A study by Mark Iris in 1998 of arbitration results in Chicago bears out the bias:

“A total of 328 disciplinary actions were decided by binding arbitration during that period [1990-1993]. In addition, under a new process started in July 1993, 205 disciplinary actions have been reviewed by arbitrators for nonbinding advisory opinions as of July 1995. These two distinct data sets demonstrate remarkably similar patterns of outcomes; collectively, the discipline imposed upon Chicago police officers is routinely cut in half by arbitrators. This pattern recurs despite an elaborate, lengthy review process and close scrutiny before the suspension of an officer is ordered.”

This result should not surprise us, given the larger history outlined by Seo: the abdication of a large degree of sovereignty to the police. In a 2016 article by Tylor Adams, “Factors in Police Misconduct Arbitration Outcomes: What Does It Take to Fire a Bad Cop?”, he summarizes other studies that show the same interventionist tendency. Although police chief, mayors, and the community may want Michael Amiott fired, he does not work at the will of the community: his fate depends on his union and his arbitrator.

Adams remarks that the reason for overturning suspension or firing is most often categorized as a Just cause mistake. “A principal reason why arbitrators overturn police discharges is a department's failure to prove just cause. The meaning of just cause is derived from principles of fundamental fairness that evolved over time through the decisions of arbitrators.” Adams does not question the circularity of this “evolution” through time: a biased system will become more and more biased as precedent is set.

What does this mean? It means that we are depending on the “reasonableness” of cops and the precedents set by police-biased arbitrators. It means that the community needs to take back power. If we dismantle the way the police operate, we have to dismantle and clean up the system of arbitration that is broken. A simple but effective tool is to take away the “just cause” rationality from arbitrators, and have the legislature spell out very what just cause is. I would think that process would weed out bias from racial and gender causes that might make a mayor fire a police officer; but it would not allow police judgment about the appropriate use of force to triumph over the community.