The Gilgo Beach Investigations
Some years ago, at a time when the Suffolk County police force was particularly corrupt (under the "governance" of a chief who would later be convicted for savagely beating a thief who stole porn from his car) a man gave an eye-witness account to the force of an encounter between his prostitute roommate and a threatening large man; she had then vanished while visiting him again the next night. He described accused Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuerman and his vehicle to the officers-- who never followed up, nor reported the lead to the FBI nor Nassau County next door. Heuerman was arrested a decade later as a result of the efforts of a different task force.
I have been thinking about this a lot. The general philosophic take-away is that, for the cops who took the informant's report and did nothing with it, being a cop was not a job involving any particular duties. It was a status. Maintaining that status might involve the acting out (a "performance") of some job responsibilities from time to time, but involved no real accountability. I have seen this exact feature of the NYPD personality, and it is evident in all entrenched forces everywhere. Cops are not public servants; they do not work for the public. They have more of the cultural markers of members of violent power-organizations, such as the Mafia or street gangs.
MAGA: being and doing
Usually the four or five headings in the Rags and Bones column are a random assortment of ideas not connecting to one another, but today I want to trace a theme. The pyschological migration from personality (being) as just a platform or starting point, redeemed or condemned by our actions (doing), to a viewpoint that only who we are matters, not what we do, is broadly present in American (and, I think, world) life today. I have spent hundreds of hours in the Pandemic and since researching and writing a history of the origins of the Trump demographic and here is what I came up with. A very prominent strand is an Eastern working or farm family, or of German immigrants, who were conned into traveling to the Great Plains to farm 320 acres of arid land in the late nineteenth century. They hung on there until the Depression or later, in some cases to the present day, failing to achieve self sufficiency on impossible land. When the efforts emphatically failed they were left with a sense of exceptionalism (they were "special" people) and of grievance (blaming everyone but the people who actually conned them) and ripe for a demagogue who could appeal to their disappointed sense of status. The slogan "Make America Great Again" literally means "Recognize my superiority and don't disappointment me again".
Double Standards
This exceptionalism leads to a very contradictory form of politics, whose proponents don't see any illogic. If you are "special" and I am a demonized "Other" trying to replace you, then there cannot be one Constitution for both of us; the same actions which are sacred and protected for you, are forbidden to me. A MAGA supporter can take a semi-automatic weapon provocatively into the middle of a Black Lives Matter demo and kill two demonstrators and is deemed just to be "standing his ground"; but in acting on their fear of him to protect themselves, they had no equivalent right to stand theirs. I have said elsewhere that two people with an equal right to stand their ground would actually reinstate nineteenth century Western gunfight morality and culture.
One a less murderous but still appalling note, Red State AG's bring lawsuits to prevent the federal government from using its "bully pulpit" to influence social media to take down hate speech or COVID lies-- then they or their governors use their own bully pulpit to bully Disney or Bud Light identically.
Duty
I used to think of the doctrine that "rights are purchased by responsibilities" as being the universally trite topic of the principal's speech at high school graduation. But the sense that Americans have any responsibilities at all-- MAGA Americans anyway-- is long gone from our political discourse. DeSantis will never tell his voters to think about what they can do for their country. Because MAGA superiority is based on status, Trump's voters have only rights.
Florida
For Fifty Bonus Points, I will tie this in the to the lead essay. Seventy or a hundred years of a philosophy that only status, not duties, are important or even exist, is sufficient to turn any state into a fetid swamp. People who are spoonfed the idea they are uniquely special don't even learn the basic duties of cleaning up around them or not fouling their nest.