- Thirty-three student groups at Harvard put out a statement that mass murder, rape, torture, abduction of hundreds of children, the elderly, women are all justified by Israel being a settler colonial nation. Two days later the President of Harvard, a black woman (I don't mean to make really a racist/sexist identification, you'll see) released a statement that Harvard University is not responsible for the behavior of its students.
- Harvard is not in the business of educating its students.
- Harvard is not in the business of educating its students.
- Apparently not. The Democratic Socialist Party, which has a handful of representatives in the U.S. Congress, with gleeful smiles and dancing in the streets in New York City declared that any action any atrocities done by Palestinians is justified. The founder of Europe's Diem Party Yanis Varoufakis has said he will not condemn the action of the terrorists, because that would imply he was on board with Palestinians going back to their 'open-air prison.' It was out of the question for him, apparently, that the Palestinians make peace with Israel. One of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement issued a statement, from one might guess one the mansions these leaders bought themselves from donations, that Israel was an experiment now shown to be a failure and should therefore be ended immediately.
- Wow.
- The first story I want to tell begins with the Black Lives Matter riots and protest in Los Angeles in 2020. A few months afterwards the new district attorney in Los Angeles issued a memo stating that his office would no longer prosecute misdemeanors, with misdemeanors expanded to include property crime less than $950. He said that these crimes were committed by people for the most part were drug addicts and insane and should get treatment, not jail time. That there were no facilities with any ability to deal with the city's mentally ill and addicted was not mentioned. The resulting massive crime wave was predicted by everyone but him. I personally have had 2 bicycles, 3 bookbags, one rare book, and five computers, and more stolen since then. The latest computer theft is what I want to tell you about. Does this interest you?
- A bit on the sordid side, but ok. Tell your story.
- On the outskirts of Westwood village is Denny's Coffee Shop. Westwood has become the place to go if you are among the insane and drug addicted issued a get out of jail free card by our district attorney. They buy and sell each other drugs and rob each other when exhausted by their demented shouting they lay themselves down to sleep in the middle of the sidewalk, enjoying the slight breeze created by pedestrians walking over their bare foot bodies. (They particularly like to steal each other's shoes.) It was no surprise then, as I sat one night a few days ago on Denny's terrace drinking coffee and reading on my computer that I hear a man shouting Secret Service? Are you Secret Service? He is going from person to person with this same question, which he follows up with the charge, Illegal Surveillance! He comes over to stand on the other side of the railing separating the terrace from the sidewalk. He orders me: Get out of Westwood! I live here! You don't! I'm in charge of Westwood! Get out, Get out! He doesn't leave, keeps shouting at me, Get out! You're Secret Service. Finally, I break my silence, ask him, What makes you think I am Secret Service? He responds by reaching down and taking hold of my computer's screen and lifting the computer from the table. I was quick enough to grab the keyboard but after a struggle he was able to pull the computer from my hands. You said you were Secret Service, he explains. He gives me a broad smile and takes off across the street. After a few moments of shocked immobility, I followed him, going home I guess, keeping a safe distance: Westwood's drug addicts and crazies warn me when they try to sell me drugs that they all carry knives.
- You didn't try to take your computer back?
- You mean like the Ralphs supermarket down the street? You don't know what's happening there? After years of an all day and all-night stream of shoplifters Ralphs hired new teams of Balaclava masked guards armed with pistols, stun guns, night stick, pepper spray, bullet proof vests and combat boots. They follow the obviously homeless, crazy and addicted through the store and when they leave block their way, shout at them to empty their bags. They refuse, knowing they can't be charged, and have always previously been left untouched. Not anymore. The guard using a wrestling move will tackle the shoplifter to the ground, pull the bags from their shoulders and hands and empty the bags contents on the pavement, taking back all that was being stolen. Resistance is met with shoves, and if that doesn't work, pepper spray to the eyes.
- You've seen all this yourself?
- Many times. Do you understand? Ralphs realized that if the addicts and crazy couldn't be prosecuted, neither would their guards be prosecuted, even if technically the violence they were using would not be a misdemeanor, they knew the police would not be eager to be involved in defense of people given free pass at criminality.
- Is this still going on?
- As far as I know. Anyway, if I tried, without combat boots and bulletproof vests and guns and sprays to take back my computer, it was likely, not backed by the clout of one of the biggest supermarket chains in the world, I would be charged with felony assault, which is prosecuted in LA, and arrested!
- Arrested for trying to take back your computer from someone who can't be arrested for stealing it from you.
- Yes. I see the robber turn the corner on Wilshire Blvd. and walk into the first residential building offering luxury apartments. I followed him in, ask the valet parking attendant if he man who just came in lives there. Yes. I ask the concierge at the reception desk the same question. Yes. I ask the guard standing in the corner. Yes, again. I explain the situation. Security boss is called. I call the police. Security boss arrives, he calls the police too. We wait an hour and a half. Two police officers arrive. Then two more. Then a sergeant. We all watch the playback video of the robber arriving home with my computer in his arms. They all keep asking me was I scared, was violence used taking the computer? Use of violence and causing fear are what raises the severity of the crime from misdemeanor to the category the felony robbery, which is still prosecuted. They obviously want me say no, I was not afraid, I didn't try to hold onto my computer. Finally, they ask me what I want them to do. Go up to his apartment and get my computer. They, now a crowd of what looks like 7 or 8 police and two building guards with keys, take the elevator up. They are down in a few minutes. The robber didn't answer his door. That's it. To enter they need a search warrant. Call the detective tomorrow and ask him to get one.
- That's it?
- I call the detective. He wants me to come down to the station to identify the robber. At the station I'm taken in to a little room and shown a "six pack", an array of six photos from which I'm to identify the culprit. His smirking face is immediately identifiable. The detective tells me he'll take the suspect into custody that day or the next.
- And?
- Nothing happens. I visit the building manager, who explains this new tenant of theirs has been arrested five times in the month since his arrival from his home in New Zealand. First arrest, for gauging out the paint of Rolls Royces and Astin Martins and Ferraris in the residence's garage, the damage adding up to tens of thousands of dollars.
- Then he was charged and prosecuted since the damage was over $950.
- The prosecutors reduced to charge to a misdemeanor.
- Why?
- Humanitarian reasons. Next the building's now favorite resident went up to the UCLA campus and was caught spraying graffiti.
- Charged and released?
- Yes. Next, he checked out one of those ride-share electric bikes and launched in into a Santa Monica bar owner's - high-priced cars again - Lamborghini.
- Charged and released?
- After spending the weekend in jail. Bar owner is supposed to have some political influence in the city.
- Next?
- Arrested in Santa Monica for graffiti.
- Next?
- The building's assistant manager told me all around Santa Monica and Brentwood someone was spraying swastikas on walls and trash receptacles. She thought it was their boy, but he wasn't caught.
- And then came you, number five.
- Yes. The detective called it a crime spree.
- A get out of jail free spree.
- Yes. More than two weeks have passed. The detective told me Friday when he asked the DA's office for an arrest warrant he was told more information was required.
- Taking the computer from your hands, video of the robber carrying your computer into the building, identifying him from array of photos, was not enough?
- No. My computer has found its new home upstairs in the luxury residence. Minimum rent, $6,000 a month, proof of income three times rent amount required for leasing consideration.
- An income of $18,000 a month. The guy is rich.
- Yes. He is stealing for its own sake like our ex-President Donald Trump has lived a lifetime of criminality, steadily losing with his failed and criminal activities the huge fortune inherited from his father. The robber's smirking confidence reminded me of Trump's confidence he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the loyalty of his supporters.
- You've told your stories. What's it all about? This crazy condoning of crime, this open, gloating approval of what until now was considered unsupportable by anyone civilized: mass murder, torture, abduction of women, children, elderly?
- The failure of democracy.
- What's the connection?
- A particular path democracy can take in failing. Before the American war of independence there was an ongoing debate among the religious leaders of the colonies whether mere tolerance of difference of opinion was enough, or an attempt must be made to find some foundational principles that could be agreed upon.
- The question was whether democracy could be practiced by people who disagreed so completely.
- In the absence of the belief that agreement could be reached democracy is, in Plato's definition, that form of government where there was no agreement on what was good or true, with the result that it was liable to descend into anarchy.
- You think that is what has happened?
- No, it's not that simple. A shift has occurred, a move from there is no agreement on what is true to there is no truth at all.
- And what difference does that make?
- If there is no truth, and there is a government with power over the people, then all government policies and laws, and all justifications of them, are unjust attempts to enslave the people. Plato's mockingly stated description of Thia form of government is one in which justice is the advantage of the stronger.
- In other words, there is no justice at all.
- None. And what happens then?
- What?
- One faction among the people takes power and control of the government and uses government justification to enslave the other factions. Everything said and done by the government is an act of disguised power.
- White supremacists oppress the blacks. Men oppress women. The rich and law abiding and rational oppress the poor and criminal and the crazy. The Jews oppress the Arabs.
- But making the claim that mass murder of Jews is justified because the Jews, by definition of their being in power, are victimizing the Palestinians, aren't they - the Palestinians - too attempting to extort some power from the world's governments by means of telling that story? A story which as an expression of power must be a lie?
- Of course. Republican politicians often make that accusation of democratic district attorneys like ours in LA. (Our city is not alone in criminals being assigned victim status.)
- And being called out for hypocrisy doesn't change anything?
- No, what it does is add an ironic relish to the self-righteousness of their attacks on their supposed attackers, add a play-like self-consciousness of what they are doing, a joy of performance, theatricality, spectacle implicit to their actions.
- Thus the smiles and smirks often observed on their faces, dancing in the street celebrating tortured babies, beheadings....
- Yes.
- To summarize, you see a sequence, a movement through ideas that goes from democracy of debate and agreement to democracy of tolerance, which leads to a democratic government that is believed to tyrannize over the people to a government captured by one faction and enslaving all other factions, to self-conscious taking power in the name of righteousness of the people of the victimized faction. Is that correct?
- Yes. Think about it. What good is the truth when the world lived in is said to be nothing but lies told to gain power. Lies like: The Palestinian's claim Israel is a settler colonial nation. But where then is the mother country- the metropole - from which emigration occurs? Israel? The Palestinians claim to be the sole indigenous people on the land, but they never have had a government there, and the Jews have had several, the government in Gaza puts in their founding document their intention to kill all Jews in the state of Israel together with Jews every place else in the world. They say Israel kills civilians so they can kill civilians too. But they use civilians as human shields by launching missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools and residential neighborhoods and their terrorists deliberately seek out civilians to murder, while Israel warns civilians to get out of the way of imminent attacks. The Palestinians make no serious attempt to make peace, Israel does. All this is as nothing, is outside the process of reasoning the leads to the belief that truth can be nothing other than a statement of victimization and power only to be had in the victimized's justified taking on the position of victimizer, victimizing the world with lying claims of innocence.
2.
- Are you finished with your...victimology?
- Should there be more? Being on the subject of the Middle East, shouldn't we have a savior maybe?
- Do you have one?
- You tell me. The day before the robber showed up at Denny's and took home my computer something strange happened, at the same time and the same place, strange even for Westwood. It was about 11 PM when I looked up from reading the news of the war in Ukraine and see a man, naked except for a luxurious, heavy white terrycloth bathrobe and nothing else walking across the street away from me. He was shouting about something I couldn't make out and really, in this place of literally hundreds of the addicted and insane there was nothing very remarkable here except I had the impression of good grooming and cleanliness. I went back to my reading but look up again hearing the shouting return. I see the man in the bathrobe crossing the street coming back my way. Over the next few minutes he repeats this coming and going several times. A light is out at this already dark corner of the intersection so I can't make out his face. The bathrobe appears to be completely clean, not yet recruited to double as bedding. That is what I was thinking when the man in the clean, heavy white bathrobe does just that, he lies down literally on the street, right in the middle of the street, with cars any moment now sure to be coming this way taking the short cut from Wilshire to Sunset.
- What did you do?
- Was I his savior?
- Were you?
- I really didn't want to be. Wasn't he one of those who were constantly stealing from me?
- So?
- I asked myself if I could just sit there reading the war news while he got run over. I saw at the end of the street cars were now approaching. I got up from the table, picking up my computer - another of the addicted or insane would be sure to appear and grab it in seconds if I left it - I run into the street, stretch out my hand palm out signing Stop! to the oncoming cars that have now appeared, and shout out to the man in the white bathrobe fast asleep on the pavement: Wake Up! Wake Up! Nothing happens. He doesn't move. More cars are coming. Get out of the street! I shout, louder this time, you can't sleep here! Suddenly he jumps up and takes to his heels in the opposite direction, and I get out of the street myself.
- Was it him, the man who the next day stole your computer?
- I never saw his face.
