Politics and policy

What we’ve got here … is a failure (by police) … to communicate

June 5, 2015 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

More than two decades ago, while I was working for a newspaper in Santa Fe, I got a call from a beefy-sounding guy named George J. “Doc” Thompson, a former police officer with black belts in both Judo and Taekwondo.

Thompson, who had spent much of his police career in New Mexico, wondered if he could talk to me about something he called “verbal judo,” and his book, “Verbal Judo: The Art of Gentle Persuasion.” This was just weeks after the infamous beating of motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles police on March 3, 1991 and this guy said he had an answer to that kind of brutality, which set off rioting that killed 53 people.

Sure, I said, always looking for a “news hook” to a national event.

As it turned out, Thompson was even burlier than he sounded on the phone. Tall, chest like a beer keg, huge arms, big round head, gleaming eyes so sharp and blue you could hardly look at them. In fact, he reminded me a lot of the kind of bad, macho cop I’d met while serving on night-cop beats. A minority, to be sure, but there were always a few who seemed to relish their power to dominate and intimidate.

This should be fun, I thought. But Thompson didn’t like that kind of cop any more than I did. Oh, he understood why many officers were disgusted by punks, low-lifes and disrupters. But in his wisdom — the guy earned a Ph.D. in rhetoric and persuasion from Princeton — understood that it was all about communication.

“Usually, people aren’t at their best when confronted by an officer,” he said (I’m paraphrasing all his words from memory). “They may be hurt, intoxicated, angry or scared. What I teach is tactical communications designed to de-escalate that stress.”

Talking to me, a shaggy-haired journalist type, he emphasized how his techniques could serve to protect the public, to prevent people from getting hurt, from Rodney King-like situations. But he was also very candid that he offered a different pitch when training cops, and no, I couldn’t attend. They needed space to be honest, express their feelings about the people they saw as disrupting the community and harming people.

And so what if they had negative feelings or stereotypes about the people they encountered? You can’t force anyone to change his or her feelings, whatever they may be. But Thompson knew he could train officers to effectively communicate and de-escalate, thereby reducing the threat of physical confrontation, litigation and bad publicity.

Doc based his technique on “five universal truths”: 1) All people want to be treated with dignity and respect, 2) to be asked rather than being told to do something, 3) to be told why they are being asked to do something, 4) to be given options rather than threats, and 5) want a second chance when they make a mistake.

“Treat people well,” said Thompson, who died of cancer in 2011, “regardless of their differences.”

It was simple stuff. And, I thought as I wrote my story, it could change the world, benefiting both police and the public. In the ensuing years it has done just that where it has been taught, across the U.S., in Canada, Spain, Australia, Sweden, France and beyond, to police, the military, private security teams and businesses.

But as the past couple of years have shown, most recently in the slaying of unarmed, fleeing Walter Scott by a South Carolina police officer who seemingly preferred murder to de-escalation, we need a lot more verbal judo. Here’s what Dean Scoville wrote in the March 2, 2012 edition of Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine:

“I was speaking with a friend of mine (who had) just returned from defensive tactics training and lamented the fact that the course was all escalation driven.

“‘They don’t teach these young guys anything about de-escalating … They focus on physically taking the guy down. Which is all good and necessary a lot of the time. But there’s not a damn thing about verbal judo.'”

Another cop told Scoville, “‘Many of the young cops we’re getting don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t mean they’re belligerent; they just really don’t know how to carry on a conversation.'”

The author concludes, “The way this officer sees it, talking has become a collateral casualty of modern technology.”

I still remember the exhilaration I felt talking to Thompson, talking excitedly to friends about verbal judo (verbaljudo.com), so certain it was the way of the future. Long way to go, long way. But it heartens me to know that Doc Thompson’s legacy continues. He was one burly, scary-looking cop I learned to like a whole lot.

Ignorant Internet armies clash with science and reason

February 16, 2015 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

Though now dated, Isaac Asimov’s 1940s “Foundation” stories remain a cornerstone of golden-era science fiction. At the center of the early tales was the “Encyclopedia Galactica,” a vast compendium of all human knowledge intended to jump-start civilization in the event of a collapse of galactic civilization.

Jenny McCarthy, former Playboy model and current anti-vaxxer wingnut.

Asimov died in 1992, before the exponential expansion of our turbocharged “Encyclopedia Galactica,” the Internet. He would have loved it. But surely he would have groaned at the irony that such a monumental achievement and storehouse of knowledge is not only a breeding ground of bad ideas, but has encouraged doubt in the validity of science and reason.

Take vaccination of children, an enormous leap forward in public health. Increasing numbers of American parents refuse to vaccinate their children, batting away the data and insisting it can cause health problems, primarily autism. They even have their own celebrity spokespeople.

Their fear is rooted in a single, 12-subject study published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 1998. Andrew Wakefield, M.D., concluded there were links between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and intestinal problems he asserted were precursors to autism. He and others suspected that thimerosol, a mercury-containing preservative in the vaccine, could be the culprit.

Seven large studies subsequently blew away Wakefield’s conclusions and The Lancet eventually retracted the paper. Demographic analyses have shown that autism rates continued to rise even after thimerosol was removed from vaccines.

But in 2007, celebrity Jenny McCarthy jump-started the “anti-vaxxer” movement when she went on Oprah and weepily pronounced that vaccines caused her son’s autism. The notion really caught fire on the Internet and is now accepted on faith by thousands of parents, whose choice not to vaccinate selfishly puts other people’s children at risk.

So it comes as no surprise that measles is making a comeback. The 644 cases reported in the U.S. in 2014 were the most since 1994; so far this year, more than 102 cases have been reported, putting 2015 on track to surpass the previous year.

But as one Boulder parent told the Daily Camera recently, she had “educated herself” and determined that vaccinating her children is too dangerous. And frankly, she’s offended that anyone doubts her expertise.

But let’s not just pick on the anti-vaxxers, who are only one example of the ignorant armies clashing with science on the Internet.

For example, 40 percent of Americans don’t “believe” in evolution, a fringe position just a decade ago. Darwin’s elegant theory has a virtually perfect scientific record, having been repeatedly confirmed, both empirically and experimentally. Yet thanks to the Internet, millions now embrace insipid — and easily refuted — arguments and strategies once deployed only by backwoods fundamentalists: “If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”; “Darwin repudiated evolution on his deathbed!”

Climate-change science is extremely well established. Yes, there are contrary views, but virtually no scientist actually engaged in climate research disputes the data, methodologies or cumulative evidence for anthropogenic warming. But true believers (prodded by cynical vested interests; read “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Orkeskes) now damn science as just another “special interest.”

So-called 9/11 “truthers” tend to come from the other end of the political spectrum. But for all their fierce certainty and obsessive sleuthing, they can never overcome one huge problem: It’s all but impossible that such a vast conspiracy could be kept quiet.

But facts, logic and methodology hardly matter to millions of people who can find “facts” of their own on the Internet and blithely claim that “other ways of knowing” — faith, wishful thinking, logical fallacies— are equal to the scientific method. But science is not a belief. It’s a system of discovery — observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, conclusion and critically, replication — whose fruits are the foundations of modern society. Unlike faith and true belief, science doesn’t reject inconvenient data. Challenging old ideas and conclusions is, in fact, the engine that drives new discoveries.

The Internet is also a great exposer of nonsense and destroyer of dogma; it’s hard to keep people in the dark any more.

Yet it’s stunning how many of us eschew skepticism and can’t be bothered to check anything out. Look no further than that vast playground of distraction and gullibility, Facebook, where millions of smart people routinely embrace and pass on absurd memes, false “statistics” and those oh-so-satisfying — and bogus — smackdowns of those with whom they disagree.

Perhaps Asimov was right when he said, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

Brian Williams’ white lie — another look

February 11, 2015 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

toony — An interesting comparison, though Cronkite was hardly the temple of purity and objectivity many believe him to have been.

NBC news anchor Brian Williams has been suspended for six months without pay, after falsely claiming that a helicopter he was riding in over Iraq on March 24, 2003 was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade.

The public has been savage in practically demanding the newsman’s crucifixion for telling a “white lie” — for that’s what it was — particularly considering that pretty much — even Geraldo Rivera to Hillary Clinton — has told such lies about themselves, if not necessarily about combat. And isn’t it odd that nobody called for the head of Fox News host and dedicated chickenhawk Bill O’Reilly when he told incredible whoppers about his “combat” experience? He doesn’t actually have any, even as a journalist, and his lies about “my unit” seem to imply that he served in the military (he didn’t).

I don’t believe Williams, 55, succumbed to the “fog of war”; he lied. Journalists should be held to high ethical standards, but his transgression wasn’t really material to his job. And really, I’m touched by a nation that so despises and distrusts journalists now seems to think they should be immune to the near-universal human trait of telling white lies. And I think his savage excoriation is a reflection of America’s extremely unhealthy, even dangerous, adulation of all things military.

So I don’t defend Williams. But I do think I can explain him.

In research for a book over the past five years, I’ve interviewed scores of active-duty military and veterans. I’ve also spoken to many men around my age and younger (down to perhaps mid-30s) whose internal conflicts mirror what I think was going on with Williams.

Williams came of age, as I did, in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, when military service was anathema to the vast majority of young American men (this phenomenon does not seem to apply to women). This was, despite the criticism of men from the earlier draft era, a pretty sensible judgment at the time.

Yet as we grew older, things changed. Starting with Ronald Reagan’s efforts to restore the reputation of a military tarnished by losing a brutal war, accelerating with bogus “interventions” like Grenada, exploding with the “successful” (if not politically) Gulf war — with its gratuitous slaughter of some 100,000 retreating Iraqi troops — and reaching the stratosphere after 9/11 and two more disastrous, dubious wars in the George W. Bush era — good for neither the troops nor the nation — millions of us who did not serve witnessed the rise of not just respect, but overweening, unexamined worship of the troops. The guilt, the inadequacy … perhaps those not in our situation can’t understand.

Through interviews and experience working on military-related projects, I have come to believe that the vast majority of “us” seek, unconsciously or otherwise, to soften the blow by touting whatever faint “connection” to things military we can muster. It manifests in countless ways: rich financiers boasting to a soldier how they “almost” joined after 9/11; men who fetishize military hardware and weapons; extreme “chickenhawk” belligerence and blind, furious support for any and all military action; grown men playing “Vietnam R&R” overseas — I’ve seen this — getting drunk and hiring third-world prostitutes; participating in boot-camp style competitions like the Muddy Buddy; playing soldier by donning a casual Marine outfit (floppy bush hat, olive-green t-shirt, khakis tucked into unlaced boots); offensive (and embarrassing) incidents of “stolen valor,” in which men pretend they served, dress the part, even claim medals they found online; or in my case, mentioning the fact that I have a war hero grandfather a little too often, hoping it somehow buys me a little cred. For Williams, it was an exaggeration of the personal danger he faced while in the field.

I believe most of this is unconscious. Military prowess is too much a measure of “manhood” in our culture; veterans abused by the military and forgotten by the government naturally band together and attack the hapless strategies of millions of us who cannot reconcile that we will never face this supposed “ultimate test” of manhood. But however foolish, it is more deserving of understanding than approbation.

But hierarchical competition is rampant within the military as well. World War II veterans trash Vietnam vets for “losing their war”; Vietnam vets trash modern troops that do not have to face brutal, up-close combat; there is a totem pole of “legitimacy” — Did you see combat? Were you special forces, a Ranger, a SEAL? Special forces trump Marines, which trump Army, trump Navy, trump Air Force and so on, true or not.

We need soldiers. But we also need a new kind of support for the troops: A more responsible citizenry willing to examine our violent, war-loving — yes — culture and question politicians and generals who count on our support to wage perpetual war. We need definitions of “masculine” that include not just the war hero or firefighter, but moral and compassionate heroes who stand up for the weak, for justice, for what’s right.

Enjoy your vacation, Brian Williams. I, for one, understand.

Bowing down to the Hollywood war machine

January 25, 2015 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

At the end of 2014, American movie screens lit up with soaring tales of mythical heroes. No, not “The Hobbit” or “Exodus,” but two “true stories,” Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-nominated “American Sniper” and Angelina Jolie’s thudding adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s gazillion-selling book, “Unbroken.”

american-sniper-shot-for-web — Chris Kyle, subject of the new film “American Sniper,” described killing as “fun.”

Popular entertainment has always reflected America’s sense of its military. Television shows such as “Sgt. Bilko,” “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and “MASH” mocked military life, and veterans laughed knowingly. After Vietnam, we turned to darker visions such as “The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home” and “Platoon.” Now virtually every American movie about war, even those praised as thoughtful, trades in blind jingoism and cynical myth-making.

The story of the late U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle arrived with the publicity tagline, “The most lethal sniper in U.S. history.” Jolie’s biography of the late World War II veteran Louis Zamperini, was pitched—with perhaps more candor than intended—as “The unbelievable true story.”

Eastwood’s movie taps both lionizes and attempts to humanize an action figure. “Unbroken” puts its hero right up there with Hercules as he is shot down over the Pacific, endures weeks on a raft and endures torture by a sadistic Japanese officer. No fanciful dragons or parting seas, but these are hardly “true” stories.

Zamperini wrote his own memoir in 1956, with more focus on his conversion to Christianity and forgiveness of the Japanese. Hillenbrand and Jolie make him into a demi-god: There goes Louis at age 2, shinnying down a drainpipe … suffering from pneumonia; dominating shark after shark despite nearly starving to death; watch him run a 4:12 mile … in sand (his previous best was 4:08, on a track; the world record in 1943 was 4:02); wince as he is savagely smashed in the face by hundreds of fellow prisoners on orders from his captors, but never falters.

Zamperini’s suffering was real, but there is no real evidence for any of these tall-tale feats, despite Hillenbrand’s claims to the contrary. But hey, she had a book to write!

Eastwood’s Kyle is an excellent marksman who experiences qualms about what he’s being asked to do and struggles upon his return. Kyle was highly skilled and used his training as intended, but he was not the conflicted man played by Bradley Cooper.

Consider a few words from the 2012 memoir upon which the movie is based: “I hate the damn savages. I couldn’t give a flying **** about the Iraqis.”; “I don’t shoot people with Korans. I’d like to, but I don’t.”; his kill count threatened, he suddenly “had every stinkin’ bad guy running across my scope”—get it?

After coming home, Kyle claimed he gunned down would-be carjackers at a remote Texas gas station. But, he said, police swept it under the rug (no evidence of the alleged incident has ever turned up) due to his famous SEAL status. He also boasted that the government sent him and another man to gun down 30 miscreants from the roof of the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina; an appalling boast, but no such deaths occurred.

Some people surmise that PTSD may explain Kyle’s erratic words and behavior. And very few are qualified to judge him for carrying out his duties and making split-second decisions to protect his comrades.

Kyle and others like former SEAL Marcus Luttrell can hardly be blamed for shooting and telling; this is, after all, the Facebook age. But thoughtful memoirs and fictional works from earlier wars, from Robert Leckie’s “Helmet for My Pillow” and Eugene Sledge’s “With the Old Breed” to Philip Caputo’s “A Rumor of War” and Karl Marlantes’ “Matterhorn” (I wish I could make his non-fiction book, “What It Is Like to Go to War” should be required reading for all Americans) reveal a soldierly humility; they killed, but they knew better than to boast about killing.

But we, the American public, are the problem. Just about every Hollywood war movie made after the Gulf War, including such allegedly “anti-war” works as “Saving Private Ryan”— James Carroll calls it “war porn”—counts on audiences to swoon before heroes and meekly accept that “we” are the “good guys,” by definition noble and heroic.

For more than a quarter of a century we have allowed cynical politicians to lead us to someone else’s slaughter, few of us making any sacrifice at all. Rather than asking whether the troops should be placed in harm’s way in the first place, we have turned them into phony saints for our popcorn passion plays and bumper sticker boot camps, all the while patting ourselves on the back for the supreme sacrifice of “supporting the troops.”

Politics and the debasement of language

December 1, 2014 by Clay Bonnyman Evans

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” — George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946

Here in the age of the 140-character missive, fabricated Facebook meme and passion-inflaming video, precise language is for pathetic has-beens. Only old people care if words are spelled “correctly” — they’ll all be dead soon, and so will all their lame, nostalgic attachment to words.

I’m still grateful that Dick Holm, an English teacher at Boulder High School, introduced me to Orwell’s remarkable essay, “Politics and the English Language.” I already believed that

Clay Bonnyman Evans - Politics and debasement of language — George Orwell

words matter, but Orwell opened my eyes to the ways they can be used to manipulate and obscure, rather than clarify. As he wrote, “What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.”

Thanks to the internet, the 24/7 “news” organizations desperately seeking clicks and a populace that often seems, in the aggregate, to be a thundering herd of startlingly ignorant, terrified and easily led dupes, language is becoming more and more meaningless. And that’s dangerous.

Consider the last few weeks of October, leading up to Election Day. The twin existential scourges of the Ebola virus and the Islamic State dominated screens and instilled terror in minds incapable of understanding rudimentary geography, math, science and probability — or, apparently, listening to anyone who was capable.

ISIS, the theatrically minded terrorist movement that knows just how to push American fear buttons, is “beyond anything we’ve seen,” said U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. Entertainer Chris Brown opined to his nearly 14 million followers on Twitter — a medium uniquely suited to idiocy — that “this Ebola epidemic is a form of population control.”

Conservative political candidates launched horror stories of Islamic terrorists teaming up with Mexican drug cartels — yeah, there’s a realistic marriage; though it would be kind of satisfying to see the two groups in a rumble-to-the-death — to smuggle Ebola across the border. U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann, always good for a laugh, declared that President Barack Obama is “letting Ebola from Africa in … as payback for slavery.”

Oddly, the day after the election, Ebola and ISIS were instantly transformed into the Incredible Shrinking Existential Threats and, despite an occasional news bump — the number of Americans infected with Ebola is now up to a shocking .00000003 percent! — are just so Nov. 3.

Obama has inspired an impressive run of taunts and insults that render the words used utterly meaningless. Never mind “communist” or “socialist” or “Kenyan anti-colonialist,” this president is “an enemy of humanity” (U.S. Rep. Trent Franks), his administration “has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they are just making wrong decisions for America” (U.S. Rep. Louis Gohmert) and Obamacare is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery” (Dr. Ben Carson).

But we, the people, have been lured into the ant-lion trap of imprecise language, too. For example, every time the U.S. enters another in a series of dubious military engagements (kids, we used to call them “wars”), we’re fed, and millions repeat, declarations of the utter inhumanity of the enemy, whose face morphs one into the next. Saddam Hussein, a nasty tin pot dictator and long-time U.S. ally, was “the most evil man the world has seen since Hitler,” declared former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; “Psychopathic jihadists (ISIS) betray an evil not seen since Hitler.” Quick, somebody notify the ghosts of Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Mao!

Hitler comparisons are notoriously overheated, but most people don’t give much thought to “evil.” Applied to every designated enemy, its purpose is to dehumanize, but it is also symptomatic of an embarrassing comic-book mentality that often prevails here in the home of the allegedly brave. Presidents, police chiefs and generals routinely talk about “killing bad guys” and blithely suggest that “we” need only destroy the mastermind, evil genius or abomination — Osama bin Laden, Saddam, Lex Luthor — and all will be well. In the early years of World War II, Americans feared and respected the Nazi war machine but widely bought into the racist notion the little “yellow” Japanese would be easily defeated

On the flipside, Americans mindlessly declare that anyone who serves in the military is a “hero” (a manifestly phony, self-serving and ridiculous idea all but universally rejected by the troops and veterans alike). Yet for all the cheap adulation, we also like to talk about “boots on the ground” when sending other people’s sons, daughters, husbands and mothers off to fight wars we cheerlead but quite literally no longer pay for — an unsubtle synecdoche that neatly distances us from the fact that we’re talking about actual human beings, not cartoon heroes. Perhaps that’s why we find it so easy to ignore them once they leave the battlefield — I mean, they’re just “boots,” right?

Yes, words matter. Orwell again:

“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain,” he wrote. And, “When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.”

Please feel free to comment below or contact Clay Bonnyman Evans.

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