Police Militarization: Overkill through military technology?: A Rebuttal

A response to Kyler Smith's blog post: http://kylerwrit340.blogspot.com/2017/02/police-militarization-overkill-through.html

Kyler Smith’s argument rests largely on the claim that the 1033 program saves taxpayers money by giving away equipment that the government “would very likely just destroy” and would otherwise be bought by local police on the open market. However, the rhetoric of saving taxpayers money makes sense only if state and local municipalities would buy such combat equipment even without the 1033 Program, a very dubious assumption. A 2014 study by the director of Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research regarded the extent of the 1033 program as “alarming,” asserting that local police departments would not purchase the equipment, were it not available for free or for a minor service charge. This claim is backed by Stewart and Oliver’s (2014) findings that “the number of homeland security initiatives undertaken by police departments in Texas” was better predicted by available grants than by actual perceived risk to homeland security. Though it is certainly true that “each item [of military equipment] was added because of a specific event that went wrong where law enforcement, civilians, or both lost their lives,” this does not explain their necessity in small, rural communities with no serious threats or critical infrastructure.

In 2014, NPR published data from the Pentagon on every military item sent to local, state and federal agencies through the 1033 program from 2006 to April 2014. The data did not confirm whether public safety goals are, in fact, driving decisions about the distribution of equipment. Metropolitan areas with large populations or high crime rates aren't consistently receiving more or less than their share of the items. Nor are greater flows of equipment being shuttled to places along the U.S. borders or coasts, which are more likely to host drug trafficking hubs or terrorist targets (Rezvani et al.). They found that military weapons and equipment are frequently requested where there is no logical demand for them besides enhancing police “presence,” an abstract notion of militaristic power. For instance, there is little evidence that law enforcement in the small town of Jasper, Florida, where there has not been a murder in over a decade, would have acquired “an armored vehicle worth over a quarter of a million dollars” had they not received federal support (Bahr).

This raises further questions which remain unanswered in this argument addressing the underlying desirability of enhancing the law enforcement’s ability to resort to using force. The use of the war analogy by the police in producing and maintaining social order is ultimately grounded in an underlying ideology of militarism in which the threat or use of force to resolve social or political issues is seen as normal, unproblematic, and efficient. Under the 1033 program, the Department of Defense has donated some five billion dollars’ worth of equipment—much of it non-lethal items, like the “bandage kits” and “goggles” the author mentions—to local police departments. Currently, although the 1033 program is theoretically intended preferential treatment to counter-terrorism and counter-drug applications, a lack of oversight has led police departments to use these weapons for any purpose at their own discretion. This has precipitated demonstrations of brute force to stifle outbursts civil unrest—like those in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014—which are arguably inappropriate in a healthy democracy.

Works Cited

Bahr, Mary. "Sadie’S Tanks And The Militarization Of Small Town Police Departments". The Gainesville Iguana. N.p., 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2017.

Denbeaux, Mark et al. Costs and Consequences of Arming America's Law Enforcement with Combat Equipment. Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper No. 2492321, 5 Sept. 2014. Web.

Rezvani, Arezou et al. "MRAPs And Bayonets: What We Know About The Pentagon's 1033 Program". NPR.org. NPR, 2014. Web. 25 Feb. 2017.

Stewart, Daniel M. and Willard M. Oliver. "The Adoption Of Homeland Security Initiatives In Texas Police Departments". Criminal Justice Review (2014): 073401681455160. Web.

Should Pro Athletes Be Punished Publicly for Their Personal Mistakes?: A Rebuttal

A response to Spencer Lee's blog post: http://spencerleewrit340.blogspot.com/2017/02/athletes-are-like-any-other-employeeat.html

In Spencer Lee's argument, he repeatedly draws an analogy between professional athletes and “employees in more traditional occupations.” He argues that “athletes are like any other employee at a more traditional job in the sense that they have services to provide to their employer, and they get paid to do it,” and that the important distinction is simply the amount of “exposure in the spotlight” they get for the “mistakes” they make. However, this glides over other prominent differences between professional athletes and the average employee. According to Forbes, the average annual salary of NBA players is $6.2 million, MLB players is $4.4 million, and NFL players is $2.1 million (Forbes, "Average Player Salaries"). Compare that to the $55,775 median household income of the United States in 2015, and you can see that athletes are making 37 to 111 times the amount of the average American employee (U.S. Census Bureau). Professional athletes are clearly privileged with very high paying jobs, in addition to receiving “exposure” from their fame.

While this argument questionably conflates Kobe Bryant’s civil suit with Adrian Peterson’s child abuse felony case and Tiger Woods’ non-criminal cheating scandal under the broad umbrella of “mistakes,” I would like primarily to address how formal charges brought under the criminal justice system can affect employment for their general public counterparts. Most high-paying jobs tend to treat criminal records, even those that are old or inconsequential to the job in question, as barriers to employment (Center for American Progress 9). A recent study found that an estimated 87 percent of employers conduct criminal background checks on their applicants, and thus formerly incarcerated men take home “40 percent less pay annually” than individuals with identical qualifications but no record (10). Under guidelines issued by the EEOC in 2012, prospective employers can consider criminal records under Title VII if “the nature and gravity of the offense” and “the time that has passed since the conviction” are assessed in addition to “the nature of the job held or sought.” Whether or not this policy is just is a matter for a broader argument. Therefore, if Lee's assertion is that athletes should receive the same treatment as the median American, then their ability to remain in their sports league should depend not only on how it “affect[s] [their] ability to play,” but also on these other considerations.

However, let us assume that we abide by the rules that Lee recommends, and punish athletes only when their infraction (regardless of criminal conviction) affects their ability to “do [their] job.” Lee defines this as their ability to perform adequately in their respective position on the team according to the rules of the game, as in the example given with the football linebacker, and add that they “shouldn’t be looked up to as role models.” This assumes that the players’ job is solely to play their sport, and that no other activities factor into their value to the team and sports league. In actuality, the profit-based nature of spectator sports places immense value on players’ public personas in order to maintain revenue streams from television broadcast and corporate sponsorship. For example, although Adrian Peterson “had proven up to that point that he wasn’t slowing down with age and could still perform his job more than adequately,” his reinstatement in 2014 led the Radisson hotel chain to suspend its sponsorship of the Minnesota Vikings in light of the firm’s stated “long-standing commitment to the protection of children” (Star Tribune). Public scrutiny over the NFL’s handling of Peterson’s child abuse case may not have affected his physical prowess, but his relations with corporate sponsors which sought to protect their company’s image restricted his money-making capacity for the team. This is not to say that professional players should be held up as role models, but rather to suggest that “working hard at their job” inevitably encompasses more than just playing the game. A professional athlete's status as a commercial commodity and figurehead cannot and should not be discounted when assessing the legitimacy of any punishment from the sports establishment or the public.

Works Cited

Badenhausen, Kurt. "Average Player Salaries In Major American Sports Leagues." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 26 Jan. 2017. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.

Kaszuba, Mike, and Rochelle Olson. "Peterson Back on Team, Says He's Not an Abuser." Star Tribune. Star Tribune, 16 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.

United States Census Bureau. "Map: Median Household Income in the United States: 2015." census.gov. 15 Sept. 2015. Web. 24 Feb. 2017.

Vallas, Rebecca, and Sharon Dietrich. One Strike and You’re Out: How We Can Eliminate Barriers to Economic Security and Mobility for People with Criminal Records. Rep. Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, 2014. Print.

The Right Reasons: The Bachelor as Feminist Camp

When Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson labeled Bachelor Juan Pablo Galavis “the most hated man in America,” perhaps he represented the feelings of the 10 million viewers of the finale. In that finale, Juan Pablo inverted the romantic premise of the show: that one handsome man will select a soul mate from a pool of 25 beautiful women who put themselves at the mercy of public humiliation in gladiatorial competition for his love. More than any scripted TV show, The Bachelor (2002) hews closely to the conservative marriage plot structure—at the end, we are promised, two people made socially dysfunctional by their singleton status will experience the relief of declared love. But by the finale, Galavis had tarnished his crown with smears of homophobia, slut-shaming, and general sleaziness. His decision to dump 32-year-old hairstylist Clare Crawley after a catastrophic final date and choose—but not propose—to 26-year-old nurse Nikki Ferrell summed up a season that wallowed in palpable cringe. After more than a decade of testing out all possible versions of hackneyed drama its romantic formula could produce, in its eighteenth season, The Bachelor had to dethrone its Prince Charming. The ensuing online backlash was spontaneous and merciless, but exemplified how the show paradoxically entices viewers to identify with the pleasures of rejecting its patently ideological fantasy. In recent seasons, the program’s increasingly self-reflexive, camp aesthetic has licensed critical viewers to watch from an ironic stance—establishing constructive forums for feminist discourse in spite of its ultimately misogynistic content. 

Certainly for some viewers, Juan’s transgressions were tantamount to sacrilege against The Bachelor’s doctrine of true love, and their ire was directed towards his blatantly misogynistic behavior. However, others—like Bustle live-blogger Henning Fog and countless Twitter-users—seized upon the opportunity to critique the discrepancy between the show’s transparently staged, sexist spectacles and its earnest claims to authenticity ("'The Bachelor: After the Final Rose’”). One lifestyle blogger hailed the episode as “the equivalent of a Super-Bowl-sized home team win a long-time coming for all the progressive feminists who watch this show like a car crash” (Em & Lo). These viewers recognize that The Bachelor offers constructs of romantic love and femininity that cannot meet any standard of authenticity.

In her seminal 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag argues that camp is “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience” (10). Sontag suggests that camp therefore rests on a foundation of earnestness, which can only then be “corrupted” by self-conscious parody. Because The Bachelor’s format has hardly changed from its first season, at which time the program strove to gain legitimacy in the early 00s TV landscape, several baked-in mechanisms work to insist on the credibility of its romantic alternate reality—these form the “dead serious” kernels of camp (6). First, the program forces each competitor to invoke the importance of authenticity—those participating “for the wrong reasons” risk expulsion. Those wrong reasons include anything outside of finding the perfect soulmate: ulterior motives such as financial gain, social media fame, and sex. The program also normalizes the women’s required participation in a bizarre sexualized harem, but punishes those among them who express overt physical desire, jealousy, or seek sexual attention from the Bachelor. The contest therefore becomes who can most convincingly perform the sincerity of their feelings for the the Bachelor, but only within the stereotypical strictures of the competition. While these rules would be harmful if internalized by viewers, their explicit codification denaturalizes the women’s performance of gender, acknowledging the work required to maintain femininity.

Regarding female gender performativity, Alice Kuzniar argues that “camp is not only the excessive imitation of femininity but the awareness of the failure of imitation” (74). The Bachelor demands, mantra-like, that the women must “be themselves” and express their “true” feelings, but it is ironically the most sincere contestants whose behavior is portrayed as extreme and unacceptable. This is best illustrated in the case of Jubilee Sharpe, a contestant on season 20 with Bachelor Ben Higgins. From the get-go, Jubilee had a profile wildly divergent from that of the typical Bachelor contestant: black, the last surviving member of her Haitian family, and a military veteran. On a show that usually exploits sob stories as a shorthand for bachelor-contestant chemistry, her past actually appeared to emerge organically from her one-on-one conversation with Ben. He seemed genuinely touched by her vulnerability, later musing, “Jubilee’s willing to talk about the stuff in life most people aren’t willing to talk about,” and praising her “depth” (“Soccer Date”). Even infamous Bachelor-cynic and commentator “Reality Steve” declared the moment “honest” and “real” (Carbone). However, when two episodes later she expressed justified feelings of jealousy in a group date setting, her authenticity suddenly violated the code of the harem and earned her a swift ticket home. In abruptly rejecting Jubilee for not conforming to the show’s construct of femininity after praising her openness, Ben stumbles into campy, self-parodic territory (Shugart & Waggoner 2).

As media scholar Dana Cloud notes, this untenable contradiction between “self-disclosure and self-restraint” reveal the show’s demands for truth as cynical (422). These moments of contradiction break faith with realist frame of The Bachelor and invite viewers to enjoy the show from a detached or ironic stance. For example, Jubilee’s exit prompted Vulture journalist Ali Barthwell to name her “the only one on the show who seems like a real human rather than a robot built in a Lululemon powered by mimosas” ("The Bachelor Recap”). This approach clearly recognizes the manufactured character of the show’s reality. She draws attention to the robotic fashion in which the other contestants enact stereotypical white femininity, and opposes it to Jubilee’s “real” but out-of-bounds personality. Sowards and Renegar argue that the foundation of post-modern feminism should be irony because irony exploits the “debilitating contradictions of modernist feminisms,” a concept closely aligned with “reclaiming” harmful elements of the dominant culture (Cloud 431). Camp, a mode of reception which The Bachelor encourages through its form and content, lets audiences in on the joke—that traditional conceptions of romance and gender are incongruous and absurd. In this way, the program constitutes a virtual microcosm for feminist analysis, an alternate universe in which the often subtler mechanisms enabling the oppression of women take exaggerated form.

Works Cited

Barthwell, Ali. "The Bachelor Recap: Snatchin’ Roses". Vulture. Vulture, 2 Feb. 2017. Web. 21 Feb. 2017.

Carbone, Steve (RealitySteve). “An honest, real moment on the "Bachelor." Savor it, people. Probably won't get another one til around season 39.” 18 Jan. 2016, 6:23 PM. Tweet.

Cloud, Dana. "The Irony Bribe And Reality Television: Investment And Detachment In the Bachelor.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27.5 (2010): 413-437. Web.

Fog, Henning. "'The Bachelor: After the Final Rose': Registering my Disgust With ABC." Bustle. Bustle, 12 May 2014. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.

Kuzniar, Alice A. The Queer German Cinema. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. 

Shugart, H. A., & Waggoner, C. E. (2008). Making camp: Rhetorics of transgression in U.S. popular culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

“Soccer Date.” The Bachelor, season 20, episode 3, ABC, 18 Jan. 2010. abc.go.com, http://abc.go.com/shows/the-bachelor/episode-guide/season-20/03-week-3-soccer-date

"The Bachelor’s Big Reveal: Juan Pablo & the Fantasy Suite Charade." Em & Lo. Em & Lo, 26 Feb. 2014. Web. 21 Feb. 2017.