Not actually next door. In the building though. I called the cops on a neighbor tonight, just now in fact. Anyone who wants to even think about calling me any kind of name for that, especially on some kind of political grounds can fuck off in advance and save us both the time. I got home from the liquor store to hear from the parking lot a shouting man’s voice and a wailing terrified either woman’s or child’s voice. In the building much louder. Different floor than mine, heard it through the floor, and even in my own apartment. Don’t know if it was just yelling or hitting too. Too close to my own childhood for comfort. Stomach’s still shaking inside. I sometimes get as angry as that guy, and I have been as terrified as that woman or kid. Why’d I call the cops? Wish I could voice some analysis (because when you’re a bookish leftist analysis is justification) or some expression that I thought it was a constructive thing to do. Maybe it is. I hope so. Really, though, I called in hopes it’d make it stop. And in hopes they’ll take the guy to a field somewhere and fucking bury him. Anyone who inflicts that level of fear or pain on another person and keeps going should choke on ground glass. Or just simply cease to exist. I could be that guy. I’m not though. It’s not an ‘is’, it’s a ‘does’. I could. I don’t. I work at it, not to do that. Moralizing? Sure. Not sorry. Just really fucking angry and sick inside, in general and feeling it extra strongly just now. Writing to cool down so I can take a bath and read and drink some beer and take my mind off it. Kind of worked, a little. Mixed feelings about not leaving my name. Basically, don’t want to be involved, don’t want a direct conflict, especially not in the space where I live. Not proud of that. Feel cowardly, wish I didn’t, wish I didn’t care that I feel that way. Metafeelings on top of bad feelings. Hell’s yes. Too bad I have to be up early, love to get drunk tonight to let off steam. Screeds here instead. Aces. Urgh.
January 27, 2006
… is happening next door?
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We’ve done the same thing twice. Both times the cops found it more interesting to harass us than actually investigate the complaint — including one in which I saw man hit a woman a number of times through their window while I was walking the dog. “It’s quiet there now,” the cop said as he hit slapped his hand repeatedly with his MagLite. “Did you knock on the door and speak to them?” “No,” he said, “why would we? There is no noise and the lights are off.” The other time, “He says he has a unique way of training his dogs.” “Oh, we know when he’s beating his dogs. He was beating his girlfriend tonight.” “No, it was the dogs.” Incidentally, the next week our car was broken into.
Comment by Craig — January 27, 2006 @ 6:34 am
Fuck man. I wish that shit didn’t have to go down. not tonite, not ever. that sucks.
i have, as commanded, started a blog on Mao and I’ve come up with a “first reading” too, its:
http://readingmao.blogspot.com/
Comment by Tzuchien — January 27, 2006 @ 7:06 am
Thanks Craig. Much calmer now but still nice to hear of a common experience and common response, especially from someone who I agree with on some stuff I find important. I remember the first time I ever called the cops without feeling guilty, there was a shooting in the street outside our place. It was really scary. I called anonymously then too. And like then, afterward everytime there was a pop-pop-popping noise in the neighborhood it was harder for my partner and I to look at each other and say “fireworks?” “fireworks.” With stuff like tonight everytime some kid’s crying in the building and I can hear it’s the same thing, same set of wondering and feeling tense for a minute. Tonight was clearly not fireworks, though, it was clearly really bad. Bad news stuff all around anytime calling the cops seems like the best idea at hand.
There’s some story, maybe apocryphal, about a proposed law somewhere that people convicted of partner abuse and similar stuff wouldn’t be able to own guns. The story goes that it was nixed because too many cops would have been excluded from owning guns. I don’t know if that’s true but it wouldn’t surprise me. The police chiefs association has a suggested policy on handling partner abuse by cops, which suggests it’s a big enough problem to warrant a policy. And makes one worry more about all kinds of stuff…
http://www.theiacp.org/documents/pdfs/Publications/domviolmodelpolicy.pdf
More info from Purple Berets here, which relates to the same matters. http://www.purpleberets.org/violence_police_families.html
All this reminds me of a Borges quote I half-remember, about the world being bad, and therefore both mirrors and procreating are even worse because they multiply and affirm the world. Something like that. (That in turn reminds me of a Fugazi line, “irony is the refuge of the educated, everybody wears it, it always fits”.)
Anyway, awful, fucked up stuff. Today I was reading a reprint of something Sylvia Federici wrote in the 70s, “Wages Against Housework,” about moving political issues out of an individualized setting and into a place of collective conflict. I think I’ve read something not to far off of a practice like that in piquetero/a and zapatista circles, I’ll have to do some digging. I think a “your man hitting your or your kids? call us, we’ll kick his ass (or otherwise humiliate him)” feminist hotline would be pretty fucking cool, though of course pretty dangerous. I imagine such things do exist. Some of the women I used to know through Take Back The Night in college could totally have kicked my ass if they wanted to, especially en masse. Good people.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 27, 2006 @ 7:10 am
For sure Tzuchien, not now not ever.
I wish we could sic some folks like the Nepalese Maoist women Mark posted the photos of - http://interbreeding.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_interbreeding_archive.html
Speaking of which, that’s cool about the Mao Tse Blog. I’ll print the reading tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it.
besos,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 27, 2006 @ 7:17 am
Personally, I think you did the right thing. Once, a friend of mine went to a dinner party which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the murder of one host by the other host. I am serious: there is even a book written about this. At the end of the party my friend was informed by an accomplice that the host wanted to kill herself that very night, because she was supposedly very ill. In fact, this was an attempt to create a strange alibi. My friend and his friend went home and wrestled with a tough decision: would they call the police or an ambulance to intervene? They reasoned that it was this persons right to do as she pleased, and did not call an ambulance. The next day, another dinner party was set up, only after this one, the guy was in fact killed. Moral of the story: if in doubt, call the cops. They might completely botch it, but my friend still carries around a pretty serious degree of guilt about this episode.
(…)
Rumour has it that in a certain Australian city, there was once an anarchistish collective in which one member once date raped another. They attempted to sort this out with their own methods of conflict resolution. It took years, I think, and everybody hates everybody else now. The victim doesn’t feel fairly treated; the perpetrator doesn’t feel fairly treated; the political structure of the group went into meltdown because of the load placed on it. I thought this result should have been self-evident.
(…)
A different context: in the a certain pacific Island, I was told that it was imperative that the community organize ‘law and order’ - because this would prevent the police from fucking them up. I was told, if one person kills another, that’s terrible, but if the killer is taken away to prison, the community loses two people and nobody is satisfied. Better to have traditional conflict resolution. I thought this was obvious and sensible when I heard it.
(…)
What’s the difference? In the Pacific island, there is an extremely strong community authority structure, in the process of rehabilitation and rearticulation as a kind of quasi state. The conflict between the power of the police to intervene in conflicts and the community’s power to do so is really much more like two statelike organizations fighting over turf, with the difference that one statelike organization - the community - has a hell of a better claim than the police towards being able to actually carry out a reasonable arbitration. In the case of the anarchists, they completely lacked any kind of infrastructure for dealing with something serious like a rape. It is extremely difficult to say that it was right for the guy to be sent to the pigs, but what happened was no better, and in some ways worse.
I think that the organization of justice - basically, an issue whenever there is serious conflict that you need to overcome (there being plenty of conflict you don’t need to overcome, you just need to win) - it is extremely difficult to envisage from a truly antistatist position. I basically don’t know how to do it, and therefore believe a minimal state should be maintained until someone can figure it out.
Every explanation I have ever been given about this only makes me feel more strongly that indeed I do not wish my comrades to judge me, the police is more reasonable. I say that with bitter irony; I wish there was some kind of solution. But mostly the proposals are laughable, and just entail contructing quasi-states anyway, usually terrible ones that aren’t even as good as the piece of shit we’ve got now.
Someone might say: well, when the state monopolizes justice, it infantilised people, it makes them unable to deal with hard problems like rape, or murder. I feel that this is true at one level. But at another level, having observed this stuff much closer than I would have wished, I have to concede maybe I am so infantile I can’t see how not to have some kind of monopolistic, constituted system of justice, at the very least so that people don’t have to be judged by their family, friend and enemies. It is actually a very hard problem, worth thinking about since it shows what is usually dismissed as ‘utopianism’ is in fact materially relevant right now.
Comment by TCO — January 28, 2006 @ 12:35 pm
Thanks for this Thiago. That dinner party story is fucking nuts. As for the rest… I’ve encountered (second and third hand) experiences of sexual assault and related ugliness in punk rock circles, and it never ends well (obviously) but ends worst when the “we’ll handle it ourselves” decision is made by anyone but the victim, and even then. I’ve read a bit about community approaches to stuff like this in piquetero circles and certain indigenous circles. The anti-impunity-for-torturers group HIJOS in Argentina has been described as a community production of justice. I sympathize re: monopolies on justice. To make a parallel, currently the state and capital have a monopoly on production/distribution of electricity. We eventually want that to end (presuming we’ll still have electricity), but it’s important that ‘end to monopoly’ be negotiated without a significant interruption of the needed stuff. I think it’s exactly the same w/ justice. It’s also probably a good idea that there be experiments with other forms of justice provision with, well, less important matters first. Failures can be rethought without causing irreparable harm then, and successes can then be applied on slightly harder cases, etc. All of that said, it must be noted that the courts and all that are pretty terrible for sexual assault survivors, at least in the US, as has been well noted, and that’s also a field of conflict (more control over the means of production of justice by those who have a stake in it).
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 28, 2006 @ 9:52 pm
No doubt about it, the courts are absolutely, completely awful - and the police, and DA’s, the media. Add to that a culture of ‘closure’, and it’s horrible. People often experience the process as more abuse. I don’t think there can be much apology for that, but there is one aspect of it where things could in fact be worse than they - as it is, at least the abusive process is carried out by the state. You can hate it, tell it to fuck off, escape. But what if it were your family that was in charge of such a process? Almost certainly, it would not be as abusive; but you can just as easily see it becoming a nightmare, totally unsatisfactory, draconian, unpredictable. Unpredictability is bad news for any system of conflict resolution.
As I understand it, the local anarchists who tried to brew their own restorative justice did it by consensus, on the initiative of the victim. I’m not a hundred percent about that, but suppose that’s the case. How would they know what they were in for? It is no picnic.
Comment by TCO — January 29, 2006 @ 3:12 am