The Five Questions “Journalism” Forgot to Ask.
The United episode was certainly another example of American corporations’ immunity to the arcane dignity of commercial civility. Not that we expect much from an industry that has colluded to determine that providing us less space for our travels than an upright coffin would offer is too much to ask. The company-allowed behavior on United’s part was indeed reprehensible and they deserve all the outrage they get. However United’s reported behavior was light chop, as they say, compared to the genuine heavy turbulence encountered by that flight. The difference highlights another running failure for Big Media Journalism to prove they can rise above the tabloid level and escape their politicized victimhood. Here are five questions most of them missed or ignored:
Who was in charge of the security response? Some reporting vaguely implies it was local Police. Where was TSA? Was an Air Marshal involved at any point? Did all the police willingly participate or did any of them balk at this abuse of authority?
What was the justification of force? Because it looks a lot like a couple of yet unnamed cops, not some far away CEO, were the grown white men who chose to savagely abuse a passenger to protect an airline’s staff from the inability to navigate their own flight ticketing system.
Where was the TSA a few minutes later when a (falsely) identified threat to the safety of a fueled and boarded aircraft walked away from police custody and returned directly to the same aircraft with no additional security deployed?
When, by the way, was this poor man actually released from abusive restraint? Was it perhaps when a smarter or higher ranking cop-soldier arrived and instantly understood that this was such a disastrous misapplication of their authority they should simply unshackle the poor man and themselves flee the scene ?
Finally, Why does everyone involved get a pass for targeting the first non-white-male they could find on board? To be fair on this one, if you ask the cops why they beat a peacefully postured citizen with no more justification than “They asked us to” you might also ask why none of those passengers were courteous enough to give up their tiny seat for 800 dollars cash. Never mind why all of them sat politely by while a fellow human being was dragged away like a Kafka character.
A lot of weird things happened in a short time inside the confined space of United 3411. Don’t kid yourself about what real turbulence feels like though because none of them involved any of this resistance I’ve been seeing in the twitter memes. The big action was so common, everyday normal and un-weird that the entirety of the media, along with the whole seething bastard filled swamp of our opinion-and-hate obsessed American population seems to have blithely overlooked it: Say what you want about the CEO of United but he wasn’t on board when a couple of white male cops agreed to choose a citizen for special violence just because he was the least white, least wealthy and most alone person in their path.
Every retweet of the “Boycott United” slogan without a kind word for the cops who did the actual beating is just another nod of passive support for the police state that surrounds us. Stay buckled in. And
Fly for the High Country