Lt John Pike is back in the news. He’s the pepper spraying copy from the Davis protest two years ago. Yesterday, it was announced that Pike will receive $38,056 for a workers compensation claim. There is understandably much outrage in the liberal world about this. But I don’t go along with it.

According to the Davis Enterprise, “John Pike, 40, of Roseville, reportedly suffered depression and anxiety brought on by death threats he and his family received after the Nov. 18, 2011, confrontation at an Occupy UC Davis encampment.” I don’t doubt it’s true. If his claim were with regard to being a very public joke, I wouldn’t sympathize. For one thing, any harm that came to him in that regard would be totally offset with stuff like this:

But death threats and personal attacks are wrong. I understand why people do that and I am not innocent of it myself. But I don’t think that Pike is a monster. I’m sure in his mind he was just doing a job. And watching the video, I don’t get the impression that he is taking pleasure in what he’s doing. In fact, it seems almost robotic.

I find myself increasing at odds with both conservatives and liberals on these kinds of issues. Everyone wants to personalize it. Was Pike a good cop or a bad cop? To me, it is very simple: John Pike was a cop. We have a real problem with policing in this country. But it isn’t about what any particular cop does, although clearly, sociopaths show up in any line of work. The system itself is corrupt.

It is clear why a lot of cops think that they are being picked on by management and the public at large. I think there is something wrong with dumping all over one cop for stuff that they all do. Still, there is a satisfying irony of selective enforcement that is used everywhere in law enforcement coming back to bite those very same officers. But clearly, they would see it differently.

The bottom line is that focusing on Pike—regardless of his culpability—misses the point. Pike is gone from Davis. But the police still behave the same, because as a culture we seem to be all right with the idea that the police should largely be above the law. Or at very least, we don’t care.

Afterword

Here is a typical and very understandable liberal reaction from The Young Turks:

Frank commented on one of my last posts and informed me that Shirley Phelps-Roper’s brother, Nate, is now an atheist. That makes me feel better. Rational thought and escape are possible. According to the only source on the Internet:

God wants you to know that He seriously hates your guts. His self-proclaimed “evil angels” at WBC just thought you should know.

I don’t think people appreciate just want an amazing man Pat Robertson is. Because he is cloistered away at the Christian Broadcasting Network, he has been allowed to simultaneously become a national figure while having the same old crazy beliefs of a regional phenom. There is his Bible approved weight-loss shake. And his claim to be able to leg press 2,000 pounds. And his claim that all good Christians should be in favor of assassinating Hugo Chavez. He’s a colorful guy!

But the big thing with him is faith healing. I find the fiction of faith healing really interesting. It is the most bizarre form of magical thinking. It is useless for broken bones. Just ask the Christian Scientists! And there’s that whole thing about God never re-growing limbs. It seems if the ailment is obvious, God is absent. But when it comes to things like cancer which come and go, God is right on it!

Well, yesterday, Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch noted, Robertson: Mother Who Can’t Heal Son’s Deafness Must Be Doing Something Wrong. A mother named Debbie wrote to him, “My son is hearing impaired and cannot hear at all. I have prayed for his healing; it seems as if God is hearing-impaired. What am I doing wrong?” The title of the article makes it sound like Robertson shames the mother, but that clearly isn’t his intent. But it is a shaming thing to say.

As cultures advance, they tend to move from belief in magic to belief in prayer. There is a clear reason for this. If you have a shaman who can do miracles, he is either successful or he isn’t. If he dances for rain and it doesn’t rain, everyone see him for the useless pretender that he is. But praying to God provides the ultimate out. If you pray for God to heal your son and he isn’t healed, it isn’t God’s fault. God’s there; he hears you; it is just that you aren’t worthy.

But Pat Robertson had some ideas. First he said that she should “rebuke” the “spirit of deafness.” But if that didn’t work, “Try something else.” He and his co-host then laughed. To me that said, “If you try enough things, eventually something will work and you can credit God with it.” And if nothing works, maybe you aren’t worthy, or your son isn’t, but regardless, God works in mysterious ways.

What’s most interesting about this is that Robertson is going back to a very primitive approach to this kind of stuff. It seems very much like a shamanic thing. It’s very much the kind of thing that would have gotten him killed by the church a thousand years ago. Because this is not prayer. This is spell casting. And I think it is very telling of modern American evangelical Christianity. The movement is very confused theologically. And thus nothing is true and everything is permitted. As long as you claim that the power comes from Jesus.

Afterword

To go along with the article, here is the Jim Carroll Band doing “Nothing Is True”:

H/T: Crooks & Liars

BBC’s Louis Theroux had the stomach, once more, to talk with batshit crazy Shirley Phelps, her unfortunate children, and the seriously fucked up Westboro Baptist Church in his documentary, America’s Most Hated Family in Crisis.

If only Shirley Phelps could keep her crazy to herself rather than poisoning the minds of her children. Kids at risk can be removed from a physically or emotionally abusive environment, but with families like these all you can do is feel sorry for them and hope they never have children of their own.

As a sentient citizen of the U.S., I am well aware of Westboro Baptist Church and the appalling, vicious hatred of its “ministry.” In this country that they scream God hates because of gay people, they are allowed, by law, to publicly propagate their twisted version of Christianity. That’s the price we pay for having the right of free speech. So, even though the very existence of these heinous people is abhorrent, we can’t shut them up. Or kill them. And that really annoys me. If I were inclined to be a card-carrying AAA (Armed Atheist Activist), this human cancer cluster would be my first — possibly only — target.

I came across this documentary today, The Most Hated Family in America, and it is infuriating. The matriarch of this family cult could be Ann Coulter’s missing fraternal twin — they don’t look alike, but in tone, attitude, ignorance, and density of hate, they are very much the same. Coulter’s only saving grace is that she isn’t breeding. Shirley Phelps-Roper has spawned eleven children whom she vigorously indoctrinates in fanatical dogma of irrational hatred.

I became an atheist based on rational thought. The disturbing and incredibly frustrating fact is that these people think they are being rational too. People like Shirley Phelps contradict themselves without any sense of the bizarre dichotomy of their own arguments. If someone is stunned into silence by the sheer absurdity of her hate-fueled “lines of reasoning” she thinks she’s won the debate. It never is a debate though. She and her herd, for all their smiling and smug self-assuredness, have no interest in hearing someone else’s point of view. There is no room in their minds for ideas that, deep down, they must know make real sense.