Whether it was New York Police Chief Howard Safir excusing his officers’ inaction by saying they couldn’t be everywhere or the pages of commentary and punditry that refused to confront the ethnic and cultural dimension of the incident, the orgy of dishonesty in the aftermath of Puerto Rican Day was almost as dismaying as the Central Park “wilding” itself.
It became savagely comical as more and more photographs and videos of the alleged perpetrators were published in the papers and on TV. Even as newsfolk waxed concerned about our society’s shocking tolerance of violence against women, egged on by gleeful spokespersons from organizations like NOW, everyone pretended not to notice that nearly all the guys who soaked, stripped and molested up to 50 women in the park were Puerto Rican and black.
In its patronizing, racist way, the media pretended it had just seen the manifestation of some kind of generalized social problem — a conclusion unfair both to the wider society and Puerto Ricans and black communities. Much of the behavior caught on video may be shocking stuff for New York Times writers and most of its readers, but it’s par for the course in many Manhattan neighborhoods north of Central Park.
It’s ironic that the Times, which has accused Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD of trying to impose the “values of Mayberry” on a culturally diverse city, should see it as shocking that subcultures exist in New York with very different notions both of gender equality and the kind of behavior that is appropriate in public places. (Especially ironic is the Times’ wannabe enthusiasm for gangsta rap as an authentic but harmless expression of ghetto culture.) But then this incident, which gave Central Park South a taste of life as it is lived by black and Hispanic women in many of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, is exactly the kind that illustrates the conflicts between feminism and multiculturalism.
Our dishonest refusal to deal with cultural difference — a phrase nowadays inflected with scrupulous neutrality as if some cultures were not, in some respects, much less vile than others — makes it much harder to figure out exactly what happened on that humid Saturday evening and why.
If you watch some of the amateur videos of the wilding all the way through, you see that more was going on than simply another manifestation of the beastliness of men. Several of the videos show that, before things got really nasty, scantily dressed women went through the gantlet of water-sprayers and grabbers again and again.
But then you see other women running through the same gantlet who clearly don’t want to play the game, or who realize to their horror that the game has changed — no longer playful; it’s rougher, angrier, more sexual and assaultive. And finally, there were the truly terrifying attacks on French and English tourists: brutal attacks that were rapes in all but the technical, legal sense of the word.
There are questions to be asked here. Did things get ugly when the crowd first turned its attentions on people who weren’t down with the kind of aggressive flirtation that is the norm in parts of Harlem, but beyond the pale outside Zabar’s? Was particularly violent attention paid to middle-class women or white women (or skimpily dressed women)?
Then there’s the whole issue of police inaction. All sorts of troubling questions remain not just unanswered, but unasked, because they touch on issues of ethnicity and class.
We know for certain — because so many street cops have said so to journalists in defiance of Safir and the brass — that the NYPD had implicit instructions not to be “provocative.” In other words, they knew to tolerate a certain level of criminality: littering, public drunkenness, public marijuana smoking.
This may well be a standard instruction at all of New York’s ethnic parades, although security was tightened up at the St. Patrick’s Day parade after a young man was beaten to death in a drunken brawl on 59th Street in 1997.
But it seems that a normal, prudent tolerance of minor infractions morphed into something much more disturbing: a refusal to enforce the law and protect the public safety. What we don’t know is whether the refusal was the product of cynicism, cowardice or a police culture gone awry.
What were the cops thinking? Was it class resentment: “Why should we risk our hides to protect some yuppie Rollerblader who pays $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment?” Was it a conviction that the wilders weren’t really doing anything wrong? “After all,” they might have thought, “boys will be boys, and these girls in their skimpy halter tops were asking for it.” Perhaps that was combined with a sense of “this is how these people behave.”
It wasn’t all that long ago, after all, that pre-Giuliani cops were under explicit orders to enforce the law differently with different communities: Officers were told loud boombox playing in the streets or on the subway was a legitimate expression of certain cultures, even if it was technically against the law.
Some of the officers may have been thinking along the lines of Daryl Gates’ LAPD when it withdrew from the streets at the beginning of the Rodney King riots: Let’s show white Manhattanites exactly what the Thin Blue Line is shielding them from. Let’s show them what they have to be afraid of if we’re not allowed to do things the way we want to. In other words, perhaps the city was being punished for the “anti-cop hysteria” that followed in the wake of the Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima and Patrick Dorismond attacks. (Translation: If you yell at us for shooting unarmed black “suspects,” we won’t do our jobs.)
Some conservatives (and cops) argue that the (mostly white) cops would have had to wade through a huge crowd (of Puerto Ricans) to stop the violence. It would have been very dangerous and probably have provoked a riot, they argue. In other words, the well-being of up to 50 women had to be sacrificed in order to prevent greater violence with a more explicit racial subtext.
It’s an argument that forgets that the maintenance of public order — ensuring that it is safe for a woman to walk safely down the street — should be the primary role of the state in a civilized society.
It’s irrelevant that such a task is dangerous: Everyone who becomes a cop knows that it can be a hazardous job. Nor should the cops have desisted from their duty just in case rescuing those women provoked the Great Central Park Riot of 2000. If it takes strong force to maintain the rule of law, or gunfire to protect even one woman being sexually assaulted in a public park, then it should be used.
If New York is too fearful of race riots to maintain order during ethnic parades, then either such parades should be banned or the ethnic composition of the NYPD should be radically changed to reflect the makeup of the community.
The week before “The Patriot” opened in the United States, the British press lit up with furious headlines. “Truth is first casualty in Hollywood’s War,” read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another story, about the historical model for Mel Gibson’s character was titled, “The Secret Shame of Mel’s New Hero.” The accompanying articles complained that the new Revolutionary War epic portrays British redcoats as “bloodthirsty and unprincipled stormtroopers” and “bloodthirsty child-killers.”
The prizewinning historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film “racist” in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films like “Titanic,” “Michael Collins” and “The Jungle Book” remake that have depicted the British as “treacherous, cowardly, evil [and] sadistic.” Roberts had a theory: “With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.”
I can only imagine how much angrier Fleet Street’s pundits will be after they have actually seen the movie. “The Patriot” will not open in England until August, but when it does, Brits will see a supposedly authentic historical epic that radically rewrites the known history of the Revolutionary War. It does so by casting George III’s redcoats as cartoonish paragons of evil who commit one monstrous — but wholly invented — atrocity after another. In one scene, the most harrowing of the film, redcoats round up a village of screaming women and children and old men, lock them in a church and set the whole chapel on fire. If you didn’t know anything about the Revolution, you might actually believe the British army in North America was made up of astonishingly cruel, even demonic, sadists who really did do this kind of thing — as if they were the 18th century equivalent of the Nazi SS. Yet no action of the sort ever happened during the war for independence, but an eerily identical war crime — one of the most notorious atrocities of World War II — was carried out by the Nazis in France in 1944.
As a film critic for the New York Post, I found “The Patriot” well made and often exciting. But I also found it disturbing in a way that many weaker, dumber films are not. It’s not just that it willfully distorts history in a manner that goes way beyond the traditional poetic license employed by Hollywood, it’s the strange, primitive politics that seem to underlie that distortion.
“The Patriot” is a movie that doesn’t “get” patriotism — in either a modern or the 18th century sense of the word. The only memorable, explicit political sentiment voiced comes when Gibson’s character makes the rather Tory comment that he sees no advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man 3,000 miles away for the tyranny of 3,000 men, one mile away. The deliberate lacuna demonstrates a total lack of understanding of, or even a kind of hostility to, the patriotic politics that motivated the founding fathers.
You could actually argue without too much exaggeration that “The Patriot” is as fascist a film (and I use the term in its literal sense, not as a synonym for “bad”) as anything made in decades. It’s even more fascist than “Fight Club,” that ode to violence, barely repressed homoeroticism and the rejection of consumer capitalism.
“The Patriot” presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, casts unusually Aryan-looking heroes and avoids any democratic or political context in its portrayal of the Revolutionary War. Instead of such context, it offers a story in which the desire for blood vengeance — for a son shot by a British officer — turns Gibson’s character into a “patriot.” Meanwhile, the imagery piles up:
In one scene towheaded preteens are armed by their father and turned into the equivalent of the Werwolf boy-soldiers that the Third Reich was thought to have recruited from the Hitler Youth to carry out guerrilla attacks against the invading Allies.
In the film’s most exciting sequence, Gibson is provoked by the foreigner into becoming one of those bloodied, ax-wielding forest supermen so beloved in Nazi folk-iconography: an 18-century equivalent of the Goth leader Arminius (aka Hermann the German) who annihilated two Roman Legions in the Teutoburger Forest.
The black population of South Carolina — where the film is set — is basically depicted as happy loyal slaves, or equally happy (and unlikely) freedmen. But the most disturbing thing about “The Patriot” is not just that German director Roland Emmerich (director of the jingoistic “Independence Day”) and his screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticized for excluding British and other Allied soldiers from his script for “Saving Private Ryan”) depict British troops as committing savage atrocities, but that those atrocities bear such a close resemblance to war crimes carried out by German troops — particularly the SS in World War II. It’s hard not to wonder if the filmmakers have some kind of subconscious agenda.
In one scene in “The Patriot,” the British regulars murder wounded American POWs. In another, they order the execution of an American soldier captured in uniform. Both were common occurrences on the Eastern Front of World War II, but such war crimes by regular troops “never happened” in the Revolutionary War, says American Heritage magazine editor Richard Snow. (Of course, irregular militias, terrorist bands allied to both sides and Indian proxies did do some very nasty things.) And, sure, spies and traitors, such as Nathan Hale (American) and Major John Andre (British), were hanged. But regular troops on both sides observed the law of war that distinctions should be made between the former categories and uniformed combatants. “['The Patriot'] is inventing a context of atrocities when what really happened was much more interesting,” he says.
Snow says he understands the outrage in the British press. “I think that [they] should be upset. I would be pretty sore if I saw a British production of Shaw’s ‘Devil’s Disciple’ and it had Americans bayonetting the wounded after the Battle of Bennington.”
The most outrageous of “The Patriot’s” many faults is the way Emmerich and Rodat show the British troops committing a war crime that closely resembles one of the most notorious Nazi war crimes of World War II — the massacre of 642 people (including 205 children) in the French village of Oradour sur Glane on June 10, 1944. The film mimics the horrible event with clear accuracy and turns it into just another atrocity committed by redcoats in 1780.
At Oradour, the Waffen SS “Das Reich” division punished local resistance activity by first shooting all the men and boys. Then they rounded up the women and children, locked them in the town church and set it afire. (You can see Oradour today exactly as it was just after the Nazis carried out the ghastly mass-murder — the French have left it to remain an empty memorial.)
There was one major case of British regulars burning a town during the Revolution. It was Groton, Conn., and the troops were under the command of Benedict Arnold. But the houses they burned were empty. Yet in “The Patriot” fictional British dragoons do exactly the same as the real life SS did at Oradour. They lock scores of civilians, most of them women and children, into a church and set it afire. According to both historian Thomas Fleming and Snow, no such incident took place during the Revolution. As Snow says, “Of course it never happened — if it had do you think Americans would have forgotten it? It could have kept us out of World War I.”
By transposing Oradour to South Carolina, and making 18th century Britons the first moderns to commit this particular war crime, Emmerich and Rodat — unwittingly or not — have done something unpleasantly akin to Holocaust revisionism. They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour — and implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis while making the British seem as evil as history’s worst monsters.
Of course, Emmerich and Rodat would probably counter that they’re just trying to show how nasty war can be. But the fact remains that in the real Revolutionary War the regular armies of neither side behaved in this way — even in South Carolina in 1780 — and only the Brits are shown committing unprovoked acts of bestial cruelty.
So it’s no wonder that the British press sees this film as a kind of blood libel against the British people. To understand the import, just imagine a hugely successful foreign film (French, British, Chinese) about the Vietnam War that depicted Americans using thousands of Vietnamese children for medical and scientific experiments.
If the Nazis had won the war in Europe, and their propaganda ministry had decided to make a film about the American Revolution, “The Patriot” is exactly the movie you could expect to see — minus the computer-generated effects, of course. (Doubters should take a look at Goebbels’ pre-Pearl Harbor efforts at inflaming isolationist Anglophobia.)
It’s just as well for Sony-Columbia that Emmerich, Rodat and Gibson didn’t make a film that painted the French, the Chinese or even the Arabs into ur-SS war criminals. If they had there would probably be official government protests, popular demonstrations and boycotts. But they have still told a big lie about the war that brought the United States into existence, one that feeds an even greater lie about the war and the enemy the U.S. and Britain fought half a century ago. It’s a shameful way to make money.
And it’s particularly insidious when a film that goes to such lengths to avoid anachronism in Revolutionary period clothing, weaponry and battle tactics takes such license with the nature of the war. In the past, Hollywood has played with historical details in order to make a narrative more compelling or the look of a film more appealing. But it has been an unwritten rule of the American film industry that you try to hew vaguely to the generally accepted account of how things were in the past.
It’s hard to define, but there is clearly a point where dramatic and poetic license shade into something much more sinister. If you made a film in which the slave trade was shown as two-sided with Africans shown as raiding Europe for slaves to bring to America, or one in which Jews were shown provoking pogroms by drinking the blood of gentile children, you would have passed that point, even if such films were exciting, well acted and starred Gibson.
I don’t blame Gibson so much; he’s only an actor and it’s no surprise when actors either willfully or ignorantly overlook historical accuracy for a good role. (Especially when they receive $25 million for their trouble, as Gibson did for “The Patriot.”) But I’d like to introduce Emmerich and Rodat to the families of those massacred at Oradour.
To Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s most obsessive critics, the latest shooting by New York police of an unarmed black man is news almost too good to be true.
The killing of Patrick Dorismond by an undercover cop — the third unjustified police homicide of a black man in 13 months — is all the “proof” they need that the city’s much-vaunted reduction of crime rates depended on brutally repressive, racist policing.
It’s not true. But this latest police killing is indeed a tragedy, one that’s been handled with stunning ineptitude by Police Commissioner Howard Safir. And that’s why it’s time for Safir to resign.
If he doesn’t, Giuliani should replace Safir just as President Truman replaced Gen. George Patton in 1945. It’s poor management, rather than a flawed policing philosophy, that’s at the root of the police department’s series of disasters: Crucial parts of the department have remained psychologically and tactically on a war footing even though the war is over. Both the police and their critics have a dangerous tendency to forget that New York is not the city it once was.
The combination of sophisticated computer analysis of local crime patterns, enforcement of “broken window” quality-of-life laws and aggressive drug and gun enforcement initiated by former Commissioner William Bratton worked wonders in the New York that he and Giuliani inherited from David Dinkins. But the NYPD is a big and cumbersome human machine that must be operated at precisely the right intensity if its functioning isn’t to erode public trust or worse, to actively undermine public safety.
The person whose delicate job it is to calibrate and control the machine must be someone who understands the peculiar culture of the police department — a culture molded by class and ethnic identity mixed with the effects of life on the street — without becoming so absorbed in the institution that he loses sight of the public interest.
Safir has failed in this regard. He has consistently struck the wrong tone by coming to the immediate defense of officers involved in controversial incidents (often in ways that are reprehensible) — as when he revealed the juvenile arrest record of Dorismond, a move made with Giuliani’s approval. But despite his knee-jerk defense of officers, he has never been popular among the rank and file.
At the same time, he shows no sign of understanding, as Bratton did, that certain effective police tactics can only be used with extreme delicacy. Bratton’s street crime unit was a small and genuinely elite force. It was composed of officers who had enough street smarts to tell if a man was carrying a gun just by the way he walked and who had sufficient experience to know how to defuse a volatile situation without the use of deadly force.
Safir, desperate to maintain a sharp drop in crime statistics, expanded the SCU to three times its original size. And the second, considerably less elite manifestation of the unit was involved in a series of problematic incidents before it was effectively disbanded in the wake of the Amadou Diallo shooting.
Safir’s Robert McNamara-like obsession with law-enforcement statistics has certainly percolated downward, with disastrous results, if the early reports about “Operation Condor” turn out to be true. Condor is the problematic anti-drug effort that prompted a cop disguised as a lowlife to approach Mr. Dorismond in Midtown and ask him where he could buy drugs, prompting a fight that led to the man’s death.
It’s also telling that Safir has acknowledged, correctly, that the habitual rudeness and disrespect that characterizes so many police encounters with the public alienates working-class and minority communities that might otherwise favor aggressive law enforcement. Safir consistently cites his laughable “CPR” (standing for courtesy, professionalism and respect) program as a great reform. But he has completely failed to convince enough of the 40,000 men and women under his command that bullying and discourtesy together undermine their effectiveness.
Even if the apparent rash of atrocities by New York’s Finest were all merely a matter of bad luck and bad timing — rather than symptoms manifested by an institution that has failed to adjust to its own success — it would be reason enough for Safir to go. (Napoleon famously demanded that his generals above all be lucky — and Safir is not only tone deaf and nasty when it comes to dealing with the public and the press, he’s also unlucky.)
The mayor has to realize that the longer his tin-eared commissioner stays at the helm of the nation’s largest police department, the more we will see policing strategies that are, on the whole, sensible and tolerable, falling into disrepute, imperiling public safety in the future.
But Giuliani’s absolutist notion of loyalty will probably ensure that Safir stays in office — even if it means crippling his own bid for a Senate seat. Just as Giuliani has excommunicated close friends who expressed the slightest criticism of his administration, so he has stayed faithful to those like Safir whose fidelity is unwavering and unquestioning.
