“Any act of violence is shocking to the uninitiated.”
-Rory Miller, Force Decisions: A Citizen’s Guide
“Prisons are built with the stones of law…”
-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Few things are sweeter to me than a well-timed joke.
Case in point: recently I was attending my bi-monthly yoga class, sitting in a circle comprised mostly of bourgeois white people and their affiliates, awaiting my turn to introduce myself and talk about what made me feel magical that week (or whatever). This opening ritual is sometimes fun, but often enough turns into a miniature dumping ground for people’s emotional baggage.
When I first started taking the class over a year ago, I despised this ritual; I’ve never had much patience for coerced intimacy with strangers, let alone the kind who attend yoga classes taught at a bondage studio (hashtag: BayArea). However, my attitude changed once I decided that this was an opportunity for comedy.
During this ritual, people choose who will speak after them by miming the act of passing an invisible ball. Usually, I don’t get passed the ball until near the end; for reasons that will probably become clear, I suspect that most of the folks who attend these classes can sense something about me on a deep animal level that they find intimidating.
The invisible ball finally came my way, and I hit everyone with my routine—perfectly timed, perfectly executed. Laughter all around the room, of several types: the “that’s some crazy shit to say” gut-laughs, the “there goes Malik again” chuckles, and—most satisfying to me after hearing from people whose major challenge for the week was dealing with tedious office meetings—the nervous giggles. When I passed the ball to a woman across from me, her face was twisted into a grimace that was a hilarious blend of shock, fear, and amusement.
My routine went something like this: My name is Malik. I’m stoked because this week, after years of being a rapper and DJ, I finally started making my own beats… Oh, and I didn’t have to shoot anyone at work this week.
****
I think of myself as a nice kid from the suburbs. I grew up in a nice home in a nice neighborhood, went to nice schools, then graduated and went to a nice university. If I’d followed whatever standard program that civil society has engineered for nice middle-class kids like me, I’d probably be in middle-management at some nice corporate office, or maybe a nice non-profit, or maybe teaching at a nice school. Maybe I would’ve married a nice woman and had some nice kids.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, I chose to pursue my creative callings, and I sought out employment that would leave me the most amount of time free to do so. I spent ten years working in bars and restaurants, three years running an education program at a non-profit, and three years working by contract at various schools teaching workshops on creative arts and hip hop culture. That last stint represented the most painfully broke period of my life; in my late thirties, I was living a life of functional poverty.
Then covid hit, and, like that, I was out of work. My fortieth birthday arrived less than two weeks into the initial lockdown of March 2020.
I spent several months panicking and burning through my savings before a friend of mine who was moonlighting as a security guard hooked me up. I got all my permits in order, bought a firearm, and became a thug-for-hire. I’m currently typing this while in the middle of a twelve-hour graveyard shift; I’m sitting in my car, parked in the back of an industrial lot under the spooky glow of fluorescent lights, watching the driveway ahead of me (thank god I took that keyboarding class in ninth grade and can type without looking at the keys)… and hoping no bad guys show up.
****
I’ve worked in the security field on and off since I was in high school. I’ve sat outside of fireworks booths and construction sites all night, prevented fair-goers from parking in empty lots, and checked I.D.s by the thousands at concerts. But I’ve always avoided the rougher side of security work for a simple reason: my body can’t take it.
I was born with a rare genetic disability called hemophilia. Long story short, my blood doesn’t clot the way it’s supposed to, which means any type of physical injury is many times worse for me than it is for regular people. Since I was born, everything from cuts & bruises to sprains, joint injuries, and even simple muscle soreness have been far more intense and taken much longer to heal.
For most of my life, I’ve been in constant pain. Since childhood I’ve had an acute sense of my own mortality.
Alas, that didn’t stop me from taking a passionate interest in the study of martial arts. Naturally, I had no business sparring with people in backyards and alleyways, or donning protective gear and fighting full-contact with people who outweighed me by twenty or thirty pounds. I certainly had no business free-climbing cliffs, practicing Parkour, or wearing a ninja mask and jumping across L.A. rooftops.
But I did it anyway. I’ve got the scars and aches to prove it.
****
As a result of working in the security field, being involved in martial arts for over thirty years, and participating in First Nations ceremonies, I’ve met and befriended many people who most nice folks only encounter on a bad day—law enforcement officers, combat veterans, mercenaries, bodyguards, vigilantes, street-fighters, professional bone-breakers, violent ex-cons, and former outlaw bikers. As you might imagine, I’ve heard a lot of wild and horrific stories.
In my early twenties I began to study the dynamics of violence in-depth, primarily to soak up enough wisdom from people who’d been to the other side of the anti-rainbow that I could handle violent situations in the best way possible: by avoiding them to begin with. I learned the value of diplomacy, I learned how to gain the respect of ruffians, and I learned how to prevent becoming a victim—what places and people to avoid, how to maintain an active awareness of my surroundings, and how to carry myself with an aura of sufficient menace to discourage would-be predators.
****
Sometimes I get irritated with leftist perspectives on police, prison, and crime. It’s not because I don’t think those three things suck (they totally suck), but because I feel that much of the talk is either insufficiently nuanced or overly naive; there are certain ideas that are easier to maintain from a privileged and comfortable position.
For example, I’ve encountered any number of people who consider themselves “prison abolitionists,” yet few of them are able to reasonably engage what I feel is a key issue: there are a whole lot of people in prison who are exactly where they belong. My father’s wife is a former vice-warden at a federal prison; the rap sheets for many of the inmates there are nightmare fuel.
We live in a society that manufactures violent predators as a matter of course. One can see prison as a form of punishment, but I see it in a more pragmatic sense: locking up predators minimizes their pool of potential victims.
****
Here’s the thing; no aspect of industrial civilization can be separated from any other aspect. A caste-based society by definition is going to have a handful of wealthy people, a lot of poor people, and a group of people who fall somewhere in between. It’s going to have crime, criminals, law-enforcers, and violence. Much of that violence will be invisible, or unrecognized as violence; around 40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents… which is only possible because we have an economy based on the use of automobiles. Is that not violence?
Perhaps I could interest you in some Babylon abolition.
****
Many leftists like to compare the homicide rates in this country with other countries on the basis of wealth. We don’t fare well in this comparison; America is way more murderous than England, Norway, or Japan. But I think this comparison is somewhat disingenuous. America is not an Old Country™ with an ethnically homogeneous population; it’s a glorified colony created through genocide and chattel slavery.
How does the murder rate in the U.S. compare with other colonies? Say, El Salvador or Guatemala?
****
One thing that most leftists share with the most obnoxious right-wing blowhards is a belief that society should function on the basis of law—that’s liberal democracy, state socialism, and everything in between. Only the anarchist weirdos (god bless ‘em) are anti-state, and therefore anti-law.
Mass bureaucratic societies, so far as I know, are all based on law. If you’re going to have such a thing as laws, then those laws don’t mean anything unless there is a specialized class of people to enforce them—force being the key word here. Their job is to deal with all the ugly stuff so that nice people can stay nice. The “state monopoly on violence” means this class of people is authorized to use violence in service of law. For everyone else, violence is a crime.
****
I have no doubt that law enforcement officers consistently abuse their power and authority. It comes with the territory; caste societies are authoritarian by nature. But how often does abuse happen relative to the number of times when officers act, even with force, in a legally justified manner?
Note the legal part.
****
Years ago, I was walking along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica when I saw a homeless man beating another homeless man bloody with a stick, in broad daylight, just off the sidewalk where bourgeois, comfortable people were hurrying past and pretending not to notice. I was the only one on the street who stopped to assess the situation. I wisely decided it wasn’t my business and moved on.
If I was a cop, it would have been my job to intervene… though whether or not they will could be up in the air. Note: a stick is a potentially lethal weapon, and therefore could potentially justify lethal force.
Many of the people who like to provide rear-view outside perspectives on police use-of-force incidents have no direct experience whatsoever with this level of violence—they have no idea what it’s like to scramble with another person on the concrete, wondering if you’ll get stabbed or catch hepatitis. They’ve never pissed themselves from fear or sat on the curb puking after a desperate fight.
****
Adrenalization does things to you. Blood has a smell.
****
Law enforcement officers have much higher rates of domestic violence than civilians. Hmm… a specialized class of people given the authority to use violence, and they beat their wives and children more often?
Is this surprising?
Is it even possible for it to be different? I have my doubts. There is some evidence that applied psychology can reduce this sort of behavior, but that practice is new, and therefore unproven in the long run.
****
For several years now, each summer I’ve served as security chief at the Sun Dance ceremony I attend. My role mostly involves scheduling look-outs (contra los fascistas), listening to gossip, and occasionally mediating disputes. It helps that I have the ability to be detached from other people’s emotional states. I can remain calm even when everyone else panics (well-cultivated skill or mild autism? Not sure.) I’m friendly, I’m respectful… and I have zero misgivings about putting someone’s face in the dirt if necessary.
If shit goes sideways, I’m the one responsible for dealing with it… among a population that represents centuries of cumulative prison time.
****
I spent a couple of years working the door at a large concert venue in Berkeley. I was part of the “floor staff,” a weasel term for underpaid security guards. There was a young black man on staff—a friendly, good-spirited kid who was also a musician. One night, a belligerent patron started a fight with our senior security officer, a Native woman in her fifties who’d been bouncing in bars since she was fourteen. The young man jumped in to help her.
The patron slashed his neck with a razor blade. Our friendly, good-spirited kid missed his appointment with death by a distance of about a millimeter.
The venue management fought hard against paying his medical bills.
****
As long as humans have existed, there has been a certain percentage of us who ran toward the monster instead of away from it, so that the rest of the tribe could escape—warriors, protectors, guardians of the circle.
What can TechnoBabylon do with us now, other than turn us into weapons?
The Temple of DZA 