Among the few embarrassing experiences left to a person in his fifties is to be exposed as a naif. Over the years I’ve grown quite complacent, in my aging bourgeois post-9/11 whiteness, to snuggle myself under the warm comforter of a visible police presence. It’s been dismaying and alarming and frightening to see what I had come to be believe were law-enforcement professionals suddenly act like goons in the service of the Banking State. Now is the time to remind ourselves of the terrifying brilliance behind Mayor Richard Daley‘s timeless malapropism: “The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.” (Photo, by Randy L. Rasmussen of The Oregonian, showing an Occupy Portland protester the same age as my daughters being pepper-sprayed in the face by a policeman.)
