You see, the point of shouting Ray Kelly off the dais isn’t to get rid of “stop-and-frisk,” which these students are sophisticated enough to understand as merely symptomatic of greater injustices and inequalities in American life. No, the point is to get rid of Ray Kelly, to make the point that he has nothing to say that’s deserving of public consumption, that he is a wicked fellow who ought to be drummed from public life, his opinions, like those of most of us, to be shared grumpily over beers with no one to listen but the other cranks and kooks drinking in the middle of the day. The point is to shame Brown University—admittedly, a difficult task, since the university in the form of its administration is, as noted, shameless—for inviting the weasely little fascist onto the stage in the first place.
More than ten years ago I already blogged on how the Argentinians treated some of their war criminals, those fuckers who helped torture and disappear tens of thousands of people during the military dictatorship and who had gotten largely away with it. Not that physical violence is desirable in this case, but we shouldn’t overlook the value of pure spite and grudge holding.
There are too many people who are making the world a worse place getting unjustified respect and financial rewards for doing so, whether it’s police chiefs like Kelly endorsing racist and hateful stop & search policies or the more common creep who cheerlead such policies. It’s all the little Eichmans being oh so reasonable and polite in making their case for destructive, cynical policies, like Matty Yglesias arguing that we shouldn’t worry about Bangladeshi textile workers dying when the factory collapses on top of them, because “different countries have different safety standards”. In a just world, such odious views should see him shunned by all well thinking people; instead things like this are quickly forgotten and he remains free to to write vaceous posts about the next tragedy.