Trump Acts All Tough: Playing at Martial Law

 Mad Dog had to laugh at the sight of Trump declaiming from his podium that Washington, D.C. is out of control mayhem and needs more police, and soldiers to restore order so that the criminals will be afraid, not the citizens.

Tough Guys

There he was, flanked by two of his cabinet officers, right out of Central Casting, the three of them not able to muster enough neurons for a synapse, but they looked really Hollywood. So much theater. So much glitzy Hollywood.

Washington, D.C. is actually Mad Dog's home town. There are more police, per capita,  in Washington, D.C. than any other American city. There are the DC Metro police, Park Police, White House police, embassy police, METRO transit police, in uniform;  and  there are FBI, ATF, DEA, in their parkas with their letters emblazoned, and Mad Dog forgets what else. You cannot drive a block in Washington, D.C. without seeing, or being passed by a policeman or some sort of law enforcement guy. One the the things Mad Dog really did not like about DC was all the police, everywhere, all the time. And they did not do community policing, walking beats, getting to know people. They were just mini dictators driving around in patrol cars, or roaring around on loud motorcycles, or stepping out on to  the street, doing their authoritarian thing. 

At least that was true in White Washington. Parts of Southwest and Northeast DC were, at times, more like Roxbury, MA, but even those parts have been "gentrified" and now parts of town, which were once cut and slash areas, have turned upscale and nobody can afford them--like the area around the Washington Hospital Center and Catholic University and along U Street.

As for soldiers: there are so many military guys in DC that many of them are ordered not to wear their uniforms for fear the town would like like a military camp.

Ordering the National Guard to the streets is actually not new with Trump. When Mad Dog was young and even stupider than he is now, in 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, riots erupted in DC.

"Hey, they're burning down downtown!" Mad Dog's towhead friend said.  "There's soldiers on the streets! Let's go see! We may never see anything like this again!"

                         An actual emergency in DC 1968

Sounded like a terrific idea to Mad Dog, and so hopping into his friend's open MG, two white guys, one looking like a blonde Hitler youth, they drove down to see the sights.

And it was a sight Mad Dog will never forget. Sights and smells. You could smell ash and fires burning. And on street corners Mad Dog knew, 24th and M, Constitution Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, you saw soldiers shouldering their M-1 Garand rifles, standing on every street corner, and they looked at us zip by them with some attention, but they did not stop us. We made it home unscathed, but we did realize that was not a smart thing to do. It wasn't that the local outraged citizenry was an evident threat: It was the soldiers on the corners who got Mad Dog's attention. The local citizens were nowhere to be seen, but the soldiers had their fingers on their triggers. Washington, D.C. was an occupied town, like Berlin after the Wehrmacht surrendered. Actually, maybe it was Mad Dog and his mad blond buddy who were a threat to public safety, joy riding down a potential riot zone. 

In any case, Washington, DC did not look like the home of the free land of the brave that day. It looked like the land of the twitchy. 

Something similar happened after 9/11 attacks. In fact, then there were warplanes flying low over the city and its suburbs. People asked each other, "What are they supposed to be doing?" We all assumed it was just for show. It's not like those planes were going to strafe a bunch of terrorists running down Wisconsin Avenue. 

During the London Blitz, when Londoners took refuge in the London tube (subway system), the British Army set up anti aircraft artillery outside the tube stations, and when the planes flew over they opened up with tremendous thundering fire into the black sky. Emerging from the tube, after the all clear was given, a citizen asked one of the artillery officers why they were shooting into the sky when there wasn't a chance they'd hit anything, most especially any enemy aircraft. The Brits didn't  have more than a few searchlights at that stage, so they were just firing blindly into the dark night sky.

"So why shoot?" the citizen asked. "You can't hit anything."

"But, it made you lot feel a bit better down below, didn't it then?" the officer replied.

So the show of force was just theater in London that night. The show of force in Washington, D.C. now is more of the same. Theater. Strutting power. No goose stepping columns of troops--just a lot of masked men in body armor holding lethal looking weapons, but the same effect: "Look at us! See how tough we are!"

Of course nothing happened in DC like what happened at Kent State in Ohio, when the National Guard arrived on the scene there.

There is a wonderful scene in "The Wire," where the policeman Carver and his team embark on a wild chase through streets and alleyways,  after a twelve year old boy fleeing a drug bust with a bag of heroin, and the boy artfully dodges through the streets like a rabbit pursued by hawks, and he goes to ground and disappears. 

Carver hops up on the roof of a police car, and shouts out to the empty windows and walls of the surrounding ghetto buildings: "You do not get to win! We do!"

But, of course, the joke is, it is clearly the kid who wins. The police do not get to win. Not when the population in occupied territory refuses to lose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsF5x6eQR9s