(This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, “If You Thought It Couldn’t Happen Here: A Real-life Police State in the Real, Live U.S. of A.”)
As reported by KARK (channel 4 in Little Rock, the NBC affiliate), Helena-West Helena politicians have come up with an alternate plan, after the ACLU lambasted the mayor for imprisoning citizens—both innocent and guilty—in their own homes since last Thursday.
(I’m actually not clear on whether the whole neighborhood has been under blanket, continual curfew, or whether it’s only part of the neighborhood. What I had read last week led me to understand it was the whole neighborhood. Now, I’m seeing some reports like that of KARK, which says “Second Street and the surrounding blocks.” Others, however, still talk only about the whole neighborhood. Blog posts I’ve been able to find have been no more helpful. But I’ll keep an eye out for an eyewitness with a blog. If you know of a local with a blog posting about this story, please leave a link in the comments!)
The alternative, as KARK reports it, is what I would call the “Can I see your papers?” plan.
Anyone under 18 is still confined to quarters. But now, adults are “allowed out,” but only “if they can answer questions about their need to be outside their homes.”
How’s this for an answer? — I gotta get as far from this fucking place as I possibly can, as fast as I possibly can!
Of course, from the sound of it, anyone with the means and any sense has probably long gone. The crime that the Helena-West Helena government is so desperate to stop is due to a drug turf war. I personally would probably have been out of there after the second shooting. I have family that could put us up in a pinch, until the insanity subsided or we found a new place.
(How incompetent a crime fighter do you have to be to need a police state to “fight crime”? I guess it doesn’t occur to the Helena-West Helena city council members to prevent drug turf wars by changing the way they respond to drugs, any more than it occurs to the feds to prevent forest fires by changing the way they mismanage our forests.)
I recently watched The Hunt for Red October again. With each viewing it becomes more of a favorite of mine. As you probably remember, this film revolves around a fictional USSR submarine, the Red October, during the height of the cold war. This sub uses cutting-edge stealth technology, and as the story goes, its senior officers hatch a plan to defect to the United States, taking the sub with them. This viewing, for some reason, I remember one particular scene, a conversation between Captain Ramius (of the Red October) and his second, Captain Vasily Borodin.
“I will live in Montana,” Borodin says. “And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck, maybe even a recreational vehicle. And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?”
“I suppose,” replies Ramius.
“No papers?” he asks.
“No papers,” Ramius says, “state to state.”
“Well then, in winter I will live in Arizona.”
Fine, just stay out of Arkansas.
Meanwhile, the Pine Bluff Commercial Online Edition reports, “The Helena-West Helena City Council voted 9-0 Tuesday to allow police to expand the program into any area of the city. The council said those living in the city want random shootings and drug-fueled violence to stop, no matter what the cost.”
Uncanny. They could have ripped that right from the back-cover copy of The Conscience of Abe’s Turn: “For Baedes’s sole ambition is to ’protect’ the town of Abe’s Turn, at all costs…” (I have proof that I wrote mine first. It’s on The Conscience of Abe’s Turn “about” page, and I have revision records for changes to that page.)
Don’t tell that to a magic genie like the government. It’s like wishing for “world peace,” as Mulder did in The X-Files. His genie granted him “world peace” by disappearing every human being on Earth, and the world was finally at peace. Funny, that wasn’t what Mulder had in mind. (Well, then, what the hell did you mean by “no matter what the cost”?)
I haven’t talked about it much in Abe’s Turn, because it hasn’t come up in the story yet, but (in the back-story) Baedes and the Abe’s Turn town council have exactly this kind of sympathetic relationship. Baedes was not elected by popular vote. He was hired to his current post. And the town council has the authority to fire him and to reward him, and they consistently choose the latter. They say, people want to feel safe, and with each passing year, Baedes does more and more to make Abe’s Turn a safe place to live.
Of course, that isn’t true… But I don’t want to give away the end of the story.
-TimK
UPDATE: The story continues with statements that would make George Orwell shudder.
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