The Man Who Would Be King

 

May 4, 1970, the day which still lives in infamy, when the National Guard arrived on campus at Kent State and inexplicably shot dead unarmed students.

Mary Ann Vecchio with dead Jeffrey Miller, Kent State

"We should not be afraid. THEY should be afraid," Trump has told his fans. 

And this is the way you do that. 

Send in the National Guard and shoot a few people as an example to the others.

Nixon called the Kent State students "Bums."

The folks in Kent, Ohio, as James Mitchener documented in his book, "Kent State," thought the university students were worse than that. They thought those students deserved it.

What was incomprehensible to us on that day, that those guard soldiers would hate students enough to shoot them in cold blood, became more comprehensible, as you read through Mitchener's pages: There was deep seeded resentment among the blue collar folk of that town, and their sons, who were in uniform with guns exercised that resentment toward the rich, privileged, pampered students. 

Those who would today be called leftist, elitist DEI advocates at universities Trump is trying to transform at best, and destroy at worst.

And so they shot them down.

It was very American, as My Lai attested.

Lyndon Johnson called out the Guard to DC after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, when city blocks were actually set on fire. 

Washington, DC 1968: Real Emergency

Then the Guard appeared with fixed bayonets in dangerous, burning parts of town, during an actual true serious emergency.

Guard in DC 1968: Actual Emergency

Not like now, when they are just strutting around the monuments and the Mall with nothing to do. There is no actual emergency in DC, at least not where the Guard is.

Guard in Trump's DC Now

The Guard is running away from the nasties. They are just there for show.

And now, Mr. Trump sends National Guard to blue cities with the same intent, maybe. 

Does he really want to provoke another Kent State?

Thus far, he has behaved only comically. 

Friends from DC tell me the Guard patrols only the safest parts of town. They are nowhere to be seen in the actual dangerous parts of DC. 

Georgie Porgie

Puddin and pie.

Kissed the girls.

And made them cry.

But when the boys came out to play.

Georgie Porgie ran away.

Children Pay the Price in Minneapolis

 

Just last week, Mad Dog happened to visit the Twin Cities, staying in St. Paul, just across the street from the Children's Hospital, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is on a hill above the hospital.

Cathedral on a Hill

Today, that hospital, and its sister hospital in Minneapolis, are trying to save children who were shot at their church school.

Mad Dog climbed up that steep hill to the cathedral and sent these photos home to his co conspirator back in Hampton, who remarked, "A simple church to minister to the poor, as Jesus did." 

Well, okay, but it is a beautiful Cathedral, and in a city which is not known to be fabulously wealthy, it surprised Mad Dog--just as those cathedrals in small European cities did.

Actually, Mad Dog had to inquire if it was Catholic, as he has always associated Minnesota with the Lutherans, as anyone who listened to Garrison Keillor would. 

So now,  the report of yet another slaughter of children by a male gunman, as they attended opening ceremonies at their Catholic school.

As so many have noted, school shootings, and mass shootings in America are now so common we have lost track of when the last one was, or where. They are not common events, statistically, but they have a special currency.

Depending on how such shootings are defined and reported, the most common number on Google is 1,300 school shootings over the past 25 years, or 52 a year, or one a week, in a country of 330 million occupying an entire continent. On the other hand, googling, there have been only 14 deaths on commercial airplane flights over that same 25 year period, which might suggest it is safer flying from Boston to San Francisco, statistically, than going to school.

Crime statistics are endlessly arguable, although it's pretty clear from virtually every source, violent crime in American cities has declined precipitately, the reasons being variously ascribed to an aging population, the advent of abortion on demand, which resulted in fewer unwanted, unloved and unattended males. But, of course, now we hear from Stephen Miller that violent crime is on a rampage, which, of course, only Donald Trump and the might of the U.S. military can constrain. One wonders whether Trump will dispatch the Marines to Minneapolis. Mad Dog doubts that, as the population there is of Scandinavian origin, predominantly, so in Trumps eyes, it could not be all that bad and in need of tanks and bludgeons, George Floyd notwithstanding.

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

There are two problems Mad Dog is pretty sure he has no easy answer for: 

1. Homelessness  and 

2. Mass shootings.

In both cases, the role of insanity, mental instability, whatever you want to call it, plays at least some role.  

In the case of the homeless, there are clearly some homeless who are homeless by choice, intractably homeless, because their own mental makeup makes them unable and/or unwilling to live indoors near or with or in close proximity to other people. Some homeless, clearly would love to live in shelters with a roof and four walls, but do not have access to that. But some, likely a small percentage, really do not want to live in a fixed address indoors. Some are simply wedded to a life of addiction which makes rent, rules, social stability simply impossible. Others are simply victims of a quasi capitalist economy with too few safety nets. Those who study homelessness seem to indicate it is a problem which might be solved by government intervention. Certainly, big corporations have shown no inclination to solve this problem as there is no profit to be made, unlike with prisoners, who can be cash cows in private prisons.

Some cities in Texas have reduced homelessness with what appears to be simple solutions: changing zoning codes so inexpensive housing can be built.

Other solutions, most notably the infamous "housing projects" for the poor in cities like Baltimore became dens of iniquity and were actually razed out of frustration, when government and citizens decided they were worse than the original problem. "The Wire" documents this story in great detail. In other cities, New York City, housing projects have been significantly more successful. There are more roofs on housing projects in NYC (>700,000) than there are roofs in all of the city of Boston. 

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

As for school shootings, the reduction in access to guns and, more likely, to bullets may be something which at least reduces the likelihood of such anathemas. There are experiments in Australia, and even in America, where efforts at gun control seemed to coincide with reductions in overall shooting deaths, but school shootings, mass shootings in general, may not follow form, inasmuch as they seem to be special cases.

Even defining what constitutes a mass shooting is controversial, but nobody has any trouble defining what constitutes a school shooting from Columbine to Sandy Hook at  Newtown, Connecticut is not in doubt. (Unless of course, you are Alex Jones, who claimed Sandy Hook never happened, and whose lawyer said, on national TV, unless you were at the morgue yourself, to see the bodies of the children, personally, you could not be sure the whole thing was any more real than the moon landing.)

Mad Dog tried to visit the Portsmouth High School not long ago, and it felt like he was entering a high security prison, with walls of bullet proof glass in panels arrayed in such a way nobody could progress rapidly through them.

Trying to ride his bicycle through the parking lot of Marston [elementary] School in Hampton, as a short cut to the beach, Mad Dog was stopped by a police officer stationed there and questioned about whether he had a child in the school and he replied, no, he was just taking a short cut to the beach. He was sent packing. 

We will likely never know what motivated the Minneapolis shooter: He ended his own life before he could be questioned.

Chris Rock has a riff about "Black crimes" and "White Crimes" and he says that when you hear someone has shot kids in a school playground, you know it's a young White male. 

Christopher Hitchens once observed that people who do unimaginably horrific things, like blowing up a bomb in a crowded market, or blowing up a school, or shooting children, are either motivated by religious fervor, which is the only thing which can justify such vile behavior in otherwise ostensibly sane people, or they are psychotic.  

Even though this most recent shooting was at a Catholic school, one suspects it was not because the kids and their teachers were Catholics, although, as has been noted, we'll never know.

All we'll know is this is primarily an American phenomenon. 

At least we perceive it as such.

Occasionally, you hear about school killings and mass kidnapping in Africa. And who knows what is happening in Asia? 

But, Mad Dog's impression is "This America, man."

From Anti-Woke to Bizarre: To Mock a Killing Bird

 "Like a tunnel that you follow

To a tunnel of its own

Down a hollow to a cavern

Where the sun has never shown."

--The Windmills of Your Mind

Alan and Marilyn Bergman

"They kill all the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? Go to a windmill someday. You'll see more birds than you've ever seen in your life."

--Trump, 2019, Florida

"If you love birds, you'd never walk under a windmill, because its a very sad, sad sight. It's like a cemetery."

--Trump 2019

"A windmill will kill many bald eagles. It's true...why is it OK for these windmills to destroy the bird population?"

--Trump 2019

-M. McCarthy

"There're made in China and they kill birds and they're horrible."

--Trump 2020

"Acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Matthew Giacona, issued a letter Friday to Orsted [the windmill project] ordering it to 'halt all ongoing activities.' In particular, BOEM is seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States," Giacona wrote without specifying any issues or detailing the concerns."

--The Boston Globe

"With the significant investments made in this project already and its obvious benefit to our economy and climate, the Trump Administration's attempt to halt it can only be characterized as bizarre."

--R.I. attorney general Peter Neronha

Giacona: Security Risk

Mad Dog has flown over the North Sea many times and he has always, with each new viewing, been impressed by the sea of windmills in those waters, and also he has seen the same along the coasts of northern Scotland. 

Europe gets 20% of its energy from wind. Denmark alone gets 60% of its energy from wind. China gets 11%.

In the dark north, wind is better than sun.

In California, sun is better--Kern County has a sea of solar panels.

In Texas and on the Great Plains both sources are plentiful and booming.

But Donald Trump hates windmills.

His stated reason for hating windmills is his love for birds.

But, like so much of what he says, we cannot take him literally, which is to say, we cannot believe a word he says.

Birds are killed by windows, predators (cats and predatory birds) and hunters in about that order. Windmills kill a small number of birds.

And what possible security risk could windmills pose? They do not melt down and cause Three Mile Island type risks. They do not explode. But perhaps they vibrate and scare whales. Or maybe submarines crash into them. Or maybe they threaten Shell Oil. 

"Bald Eagles must be protected to the fullest extent of the law from dangerous wind turbines," President Trump's Secretary of the Interior tells us. But the good Secretary does not mention that Mr. Trump's affection for bald eagles does not seem last much longer than his affection for his wives: 

 "President Trump called for gutting the very law that applies,  the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, calling it a burden to oil and gas producers."

--The New York Times

Of course, like most of Trump's grand insights and deep affections, this one derives from a desire for revenge. 

"When Trump bought the Menie estate, about eight miles north of Aberdeen, in 2006, he promised to create the 'world's greatest' golf course. But he soon became infuriated at plans to construct an offshore wind farm nearby, arguing that the windmills--as he prefers to call the structures would ruin the view...They generate enough electricity to supply up to 80,000 homes...Trump battled the plans through the Scottish courts then appealed to the UK's Supreme Court--but he was unable to stop the "monsters" from going ahead."

--The New York Times

The Orsted windmills, 15 miles south of Rhode Island (a very blue state) are "key to Rhode Islands economic development, energy security and long-term affordability for our residents," Rhode Island governor Daniel McKee said. 

So, this is Trump's chance to stick it to a blue state, to stick it to windmills and to suck up to  fossil fuel interests. It's a trifecta for Trump.

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a withering critic of Trump in the US Senate said,

"As payback to Trump's fossil fuel backers, the Trump administration is seeking to weaponize federal bureaucracy to try and kill clean energy projects that will save Americans money and reduce the carbon pollution that is driving the climate crisis."

And, of course, we all know this is true. 

Trump knows we all understand his tariffs on Canada have nothing to do with Fentanyl.

Trump knows we all understand his strangulation of hard-earned medical research funds to Harvard has nothing to do with antisemitism at that university with its Jewish president. (More likely it has something to do with Harvard rejecting his son's application.)

It's all about revenge and a new kind of Woke-ism--we are awakened to the idea that Mr. Trump has no scruples, and no law matters. Don't tell him about the law, tell him about how long the other side can last in court, and how he can get his pound of flesh. (And that phrase, in Mr. Trump's case, should be used advisedly.)

For Trump, it's all about pay back. 

First, Kill All the Lawyers

"In its campaign of 'uprooting the foot soldiers,' the Trump Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors, even as those they sent to prison walk free."

--The New York Times

So, if you break into the Capitol, smear feces on the marbled walls, swing into the chair of the speaker of the House and put your feet up on her desk, engage in what 99% of Americans would call a riot, you are pardoned and considered just an ordinary tourist.

A Day of Love and Joy

But if you do your job as a lawyer at the Department of Justice to enforce the law, you are fired.

Which means, at the very least, Trump's war is not limited to a war on science, but it is also a war on law.

Trump Warrior 

An American Patriot At Work

Trump Stamps Out Crime in DC: Big Parade with Tanks to Follow

“I’ve straightened out crime in four days in D.C., and all they do is say ‘he’s a dictator,’” Mr. Trump complained on Mr. Starnes’s show.

“People were getting mugged all over the place,” he said, adding: “People are so happy, they’re going out to restaurants again.”

The true mark of a transcendent leader is his ability o see a problem before anyone else and to take decisive action to solve it.

Of course, there has always been crime in Washington, D.C., right down to the auction blocks for slavery, but then that crime was actually legal, so, technically, it wasn't really a crime.

And you know, those museums on the Mall where National Guardsmen from Red States now patrol--Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina--those museums all say slavery was really bad, and that's just so misleading. They are missing all the good things that happened when those slaves were busy picking cotton.

But, beyond that, there have been murders, rapes, muggings, although statistically, less often than in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina.

But statistics are just numbers and like science, all that stuff is no longer of any moment. We don't talk about science any more.

We are just into theater. So Mr. Trump tells us he is going on a ride with D.C. police and with National Guard troopers from Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina to be sure crime is suppressed in Georgetown and Dupont Circle, and on the Mall around the museums and monuments, where the major risk to citizens is getting run over by bicycles and joggers and the major risk to police is getting hit in the face by a sandwich.

Mad Dog used to work in a part of DC called Bladensberg, and in those days, the road was lined with hourly motels and prostitutes tending their children in the parking lots outside the motels, and it was the sort of strip you did not want to blow a tire and have your car breakdown, because it would be stripped to spare parts in an hour.  So that was a tough part of town, but that's not where the Guardsmen from Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina are patrolling. They are walking down the mean streets of the West End, Foggy Bottom, where the ice cream parlors and expensive boutiques live.

No reason to expose those Southern gentlemen to any real risk--like mobilizing them in their own home states. Those guardsmen from Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina are probably tickled to get out of their home States, to Washington, D.C., where it's really pretty damn safe. 

So, once again, we have a joke fantasy play from the imagination of a mind trapped in  arrested development, which never quite got by the nine year old boy's stage of just saying the world is so, and voila`, it is.

We can say we have stopped wars in Africa, and all over the world, and any moment now, in Ukraine, and we can say we don't need IVF because we now have "restorative fertility"  diets, and we can say there is no problem with job losses or an economy slapped silly by tariffs, or we can say all universities are dens of antisemitism, or at least the elite ones are, and so we should defund their cancer research funds, and we can blackmail big money law firms into making them work for the President and we can believe in Tinkerbell and Peter Pan and the crocodile with the ticking clock.

And the best part of it, is it's just such a happy feeling.

Just don't go round any of the children's hospitals, where kids are dying of infectious diseases they could have been protected from, and don't go near the cancer wards where research grants have been cut, and don't worry about the climate or the environment. 

We can make America Great again, like it was in the 1950's, when you could not dip your toe into the polluted Potomac without risking life and limb--before the industrial giants upstream were forced by the government to clean up their dumping acts--but that's when government was good ,and did a lot of science.

Hampton Select Board: Gods on Mt. Olympus

 

Select Board meetings have been hearing every week from citizens who are somewhere between concerned and outraged about the prospect of Hampton police operating in tandem with ICE agents to kidnap people around town. 

There are also those speaking out in favor of ICE deployment in Hampton, those who assert Hampton is threatened by dangerous immigrants who will steal from Hampton homes and citizens, may rape, murder or (though it hasn't yet been mentioned--you know its coming) pose a lethal threat to Hampton's pet cats and dogs.

This happens during the "Public Comment" time which begins each Select Board meeting. Members of the public are allowed to comment, are cut off at 3 minutes and under no circumstances are they allowed to ask questions of the members of the Select Board or attempt to exchange in a "back and forth" with the Board members.

Through all this, the Select Board sits silently, like carvings on Mt. Rushmore, or gods on Mt. Olympus, listening but not interacting--beyond Mr. Rusty Bridle, who has interrupted speakers who look as if they will speak for more than the 3 minutes the Board allows for each individual to comment.

The Select Board is not alone in forbidding "back and forth" between citizens who have come to speak at meetings and members of the Board. The School Board does this. The School Board also cleaves to the 3 minute rule.

The reasons for limiting speakers to 3 minutes have been variously stated as, "Well, we could be there all night. We have to place some limits," to, "Well, we don't want one guy hogging the podium so nobody else gets a chance to voice an opinion."

But, of course, at the Deliberative Sessions which are held in February for discussion of proposed warrant articles, there is no time limit per speaker and there is a Moderator, who can intervene if someone gets off topic or obstreperous enough to derail civil discussion, but somehow that does not seem to work for either Board.

And, of course, you could solve the logistics problem by simply asking for a show of hands about who wants to speak that night, and if you've allowed 60 minutes for public discussion, and 12 people raise their hands, then everyone gets 5 minutes or if there are only 6 people, then each gets 10 minutes. There are simple solutions, if you really want to address the problem.

If you really wanted to allow people to express their opinions you could change the rules and put in safeguards, like a moderator. But more important even than hearing what citizens are thinking, we need a mechanism to hear what the elected representatives of Hampton citizens are thinking. 

We elect candidate in every election from Select Board to the Presidency, without knowing much about them. The one way we get a real insight into who these people are, what they are thinking, is at press conferences, where they have to answer (or more often evade) questions. Nothing like that happens in this small town in New Hampshire. There are no press conferences for either the Select Board or the School Board. Of course, there really is no local press in the Seacoast worthy of the name "free press."

State Rep Chris Muns

 Allowing citizens to question their government raises the prospect of anger. We've all seen raucous town meetings on TV where audiences shout down their representatives and shout at each other, so the strict limits on time and the wall between the speakers and those to whom they speak is said to be justified as a way to keep things under control.

But isn't there always the tension between free expression and order? We can have a very civil town and town government if we simply have no meetings at all, or meetings where only the Board members are present and they may or may not choose to speak about town issues. For that matter, if we had a king, things could be very civil. Supplicants before the king, kneel and beg for indulgence. Citizens of a Republic can demand a redress of grievances.

We have seen on TV those meetings of the Chinese and North Korean governments, where "representatives" of the people simply sit silently and applaud their leaders at the podium. There is no anger and no disorder and everything is very much in control.

Hampton is more like that than it is like any raucous town hall in Ohio.

There are instances of Hampton representatives speaking out publicly at the Select Board meetings--but these are not members of the Select Board. Three members of the state House of Representatives have spoken as citizens during the Public Comment session: Chris Muns, who asked the Select Board to vote a resolution of defiance against ICE cooperation; Erica DeVries who decried the violation of habeas corpus and the imposition of unfunded mandates to spend town taxpayer dollars on funding required for the protection of Hampton police should they join ICE; and Linda McGrath who Mad Dog found difficult to follow until she summarized by warning of impending invasion by tattooed gangs of illegal aliens from their home bases in Maine. 

State Rep McGrath

Here in Hampton, Mad Dog would like to see a meeting where a citizen stands up and addresses the Select Board Directly, beginning with the Chairman, Rusty Bridle: 

 "Mr. Bridle: Do you think immigrants are enough of a threat to Hampton to involve Hampton police in their arrests? What do you think of immigrants here in Hampton and beyond, Mr. Bridle? Do you think immigrants are a risk or a benefit to Hampton?"

State Representative Erica Rachel DeVries

And then, to Amy Hansen:

"Ms. Hansen: We have heard from folks who say the law is the law and the new state law says we here in Hampton have to pay for our police to cooperate with ICE.  Do you believe it's as simple as 'The law is the law?'  Are we bound to obey every law, even if we think its unconstitutional or immoral?"

And then, to Chuck Rage:

"Mr. Rage: Would you approve of Hampton police and ICE agents breaking down doors in Hampton? How about raids on work sites where landscapers, tree trimmers or construction workers are removed without arrest warrants?"

Not A Representative Government

And then, to Carleigh Beriont:

"Ms. Beriont: Do you believe Ms. McGrath, when she says there are row houses across the Piscataqua filled with murderous illegal immigrant gang members poised to invade the New Hampshire seacoast? Do you think this fear justifies masked ICE agents throwing human beings into unmarked vans at Hampton Beach and disappearing them?"

Immigrant: Can I come in? Uncle Sam: I guess you can--there's no law to keep you out

And, to Jeff Grip:

"Mr. Grip: Do you believe that Governor Ayotte and the state legislature can legally force Hampton to participate in extra judicial violation of habeas corpus and if you do not, would you be willing to have Hampton join a coalition of New Hampshire towns in resisting this law and fighting it in court and at the local town level?"

Now, if we had that sort of exchange, we may not change anything, but at least people watching on Channel 22 would have some idea of what their representatives are doing or not doing to represent them.

But until we can actually hear what our representatives think on this issue and related issues, we can do nothing to really affect the behavior of the board, or its composition.

Until then, they reside behind a veil of silence, imperious, silent, hearing prayers and admonitions but never deigning to reply.

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