Tony Baloney, White Shirt: The Uniformed Assailant

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divided States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men, generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to put out its faults, and do better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?

-- H. D. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849

Oh, Tony Baloney.

I've not been able to watch much video since the onset of these bleeping headaches.  I more heard than saw Lawrence O'Donnell identify Anthony Bologna as the white-shirted Deputy Inspector who maced several young women at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City back in September.  Yes, right around the time my brain exploded.

Mostly, I giggled along with Jon Stewart over his silly name, and thought that maybe it was a joke.  It's embarrassing, but I did.

Finally cogent, I watched the clips of what happened, even if I could not make out exactly what Bologna was doing.  I kept looking for some sort of inciting cause, some sort of aftermath, maybe even the marks the actors were supposed to hit on this urban stage.  So, of course, with those types of expectations, I didn't see a darned thing.  


My vision was so blurry I even swore off PTZ videos of pus explosions and hyper-wipers.


Still, every couple of days, it seemed, something would make me think "Tony Baloney!" and I would laugh to myself.


Despite my apparent trivializing, I take Occupy Wall Street seriously and my guffaws over this incident died away as I listened to the Zuccotti Park protestors articulating their frustration, anger, and considered insights in ways that ought to make us all proud. As "authority," they don't cite what I expect (a growing tendency that I greatly respect!):

We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

"Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?"


These well-spoken, thoughtful, peaceful people are our children, brothers, sisters, colleagues, parents, friends, students, teachers.


My head doesn't hurt this morning, the coffee is strong and good, and I read that Inspector Bologna is no stranger to trouble when it comes to quelling demonstrators of peaceful ilk -- the most dangerous kind.  Sometime next year, he and fellow officer Tulio Camejo will stand trial over accusations of "false arrest and civil rights violations in a claim brought by a protester involved in the 2004 demonstrations at the Republican national convention."


The eyes aren't crossing of their own volition (my body is a separatist's temple) and the purple blobs at the end of what purport to be my legs are more flaccid than spastic.  It's a good day. 


I just put in an order to sell a chunk of my GOOG holdings at the limit price of $618 per share. It's doubtful whether GOOG will even cross over into the 600s, but a girl can dream.


I remember, back in high school, even, how badly I wanted the old myth of Emerson visiting Thoreau in jail to be true.  Thoreau had refused to pay a poll tax based on his opposition to the Mexican-American War, which many saw as an attempt to strengthen and expand the institution of slavery.  We'd like, however, to reduce the overnight jail stay to one saucy repartee between Thoreau and his landlord -- some slick easy surface wit.

"Henry, how is it that you are in jail?"

"How is it, Waldo, that you are not?"

But, of course, it is not true.  Time is better spent figuring the need that drives the myth and what truths are being so creatively avoided.  What recompense for being on the wrong side of the law? Does right action seek company, need the help of rumor?  Do you imagine the jail cell as cool and fragrant with bars that peep out onto a carpet of clover?  I do.  I see Thoreau in clean, comfortable clothing, wrapped in a lightweight wool blanket. He tells us that he and his cellmate each have a window at which to sit, and that when he arrived at "the walls of solid stone," "[t]he prisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and the evening air in the doorway..."


To corral targeted individuals, enclosing them in, for example, stiff, orange netting, is called "to kettle." 


One helpful first aid solution, when treating eyes that are burning, tearing, and perhaps temporarily blinded due to an application of mace, is liquid antacid.  Jeanne Mansfield received an unintentional eye-full of Deputy Inspector Bologna's odd and disjointed attack on the kettled women.  She described the experience in the Boston Review and I am taken by her description of the "medic" who comes to her assistance:

My eye is killing me and I’m crying, partially from the pain and partially from the shock of the violence displayed by these police. A shirtless young “medic” with ripped cargo shorts, matted brown hair, and two plastic bottles slung around his neck runs up to me and says, “Did you get pepper sprayed? Okay here, tilt your head to the side, this isn’t going to feel great,” at which point he squirts one of the plastic bottles of white liquid into my left eye, then tilts my head the other way and does the other eye, then repeats with water. Then he unties the white bandanna from his wrist and wipes my eyes with it saying, “You’ll be okay, this is my grandfather’s bandanna, he got through Korea with it, and if he got through that, then you’re going to get through this. Just keep blinking.” Thanks to the treatment—liquid antacid, pepper-spray antidote—the burning behind my eyes subsides.

In pre-market activity, GOOG is down .61%, to $588.07.  

Uploaded by WideAwakeNation on Sep 27, 2011:

Subscribe for updates at http://uslaw.com/occupywallstreet. Slow motion video analysis of NYPD mace deployment near Union Square on September 24, 2011. Alternate angle analysis seems to indicate retaliation for a just prior interaction between officer and some individual(s) on sidewalk. More information about this and other incidents related to Occupy Wall Street protests will be updated at http://www.uslaw.com/occupywallstreet.Original video "PEACEFUL FEMALE PROTESTORS PENNED IN THE STREET AND MACED!": http://youtu.be/moD2JnGTToA

Interestingly enough, Anthony Bologna apparently strode away from his fish-in-a-barrel mace attack with his ire intact, for just a few seconds later, he deployed his weapon again.  [I am so thankful he did not have a gun in his hand.]  In a sea of people trying to do non-violence, he is like a pillar of antimatter... he is violence.  The result of antimatter meeting matter is an explosion.

Uploaded by cjgrapski on Sep 27, 2011

DI Anthony Bologna actually engages in a second indiscriminate pepper spray assault moments after he attacked the four women.

As I sit back and try to give this thing a global think, one disparate thought dominates this morning.  Even though I know it to be a strategy, and despite its many historical strategic successes, I am sad that non-violence remains the only "diametrical" choice and option, not to the extreme opposite of violence, per se, but to self-defense.

That's right, I'd never make it.  I want too, too much to fight back.

The Occupy Wall Street folks are moving into a deadening space, the time of "demands." Those afflicted with know-how and not so much blessed with ancient Arab patience will start with the "but whaddawe want, whaddawe want?" until all anyone really wants is to bitch slap 'em.  Frustration is going to grow, and in-fighting.  Is it inevitable, dictated by the discord inherent in moving from individuals together to a notion of mass action?

I don't know.  What I look forward to, always, however, as systems close?  The reliable power and wonkiness of thermodynamic degradation.  Entropy.  Weird, strange, hot things happen, as energy degrades.  As much as one doesn't want to credit the Tony Balonies of this world with any socially relevant achievement, macing kettled women at a peaceful protest is precisely the push toward steamy, wasted heat that the system demands.

Post-script at the end of the trading day:  GOOG closed at $582.41.