Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The film opens with a small protest in a rural area in Illinois. Of immediate concern is the involvement of Illinois’s military in a domestic matter. The disproportionate heavy machinery of official force seems out of place. That the soldiers’ knives at the end of the guns are so close to the necks of the peaceful protesters also points to bad judgment. A journalist recalls police roughing up cameramen so they won’t show untriggered police brutality. The implicit conclusion is that the excessive means of force together with an aggressive mentality among soldiers and police is a dangerous cocktail.

The film moves to a scene at a rollerball game in which individual players are beating each other up even off the track. The crowd enjoys it, just as the viewers of local news like watching violence. Later in the film, we see Cassellis practicing at boxing—again illustrating the human need or penchant for violence. He explains to his girlfriend’s son, “The object is to knock the other guy’s brains out.” At one point in the film, a manager of a media company says on the phone, “We do not manufacture violence.” This is true enough, for, given the human aggressive instinctual urge, violence can be expected to be around plenty enough to fill the time-slots on the local evening news.

The propensity for violence interpersonally is made very clear as Cassillis and his sound man, Peter Bonerz, contend with hostility from several black people in an apartment in spite of the fact that the two journalists had interviewed one of the people and thus provided a mouthpiece for the racial grievances. Even though the Black woman is being verbally hostile to one of the journalists, a Black man insult to injury by angrily demanding, “You got to respect our women!” The journalists were respecting her, and, ironically, she had not been respecting them. Conflating societal phenomena and the two journalists in the apartment, the Black man insults them by calling them arrogant and exploiters. That the journalists provided a societal mouthpiece for one of the men contradicts the accusation of exploitation. But reasoning is often wan up against anger: hence the need for law enforcement.

Violence is also on the societal stage. Watching a television program on John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated, the teacher whom John is dating remarks, “It seems like no one’s life is worth anything anymore.” We hear King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which we can juxtaposition against the propensity towards violence in the apartment of the Black man whom the journalists had (thanklessly) interviewed. The ideal is one thing; extant human nature on the ground is quite another.

The documentary-like scenes of the anti-Vietnam War protests of chants of “No more war” again demonstrate the ubiquity of untriggered violence even among people who are hired to prevent violence. Against the song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” we see Mayor Daly’s “police state terror” playing out in the streets of Chicago as police attack non-violent protestors. The excessive response of Illinois’ army being present just renders the danger all the more of hiring people with criminal mentalities to enforce the law. On the radio, we hear, “The policemen are beating everyone in sight.” Another reporter states that the police are targeting a specific political group—the anarchists. Appropriately, onlookers were chanting, Zeig Heil! As a reference back to the Nazi thugs in uniform. The overwhelming, excessive machinery of force, including that of a military, combined with the fact that the police mentality was criminal inflicting severe injury on innocent victims—and the fact that the criminals got away with it—is the emotional-image that the audience is left with. But there is neither remedy nor solution proffered.

The toxic American dynamic is just there, and as the Black Lives Matter movement would attest, Americans would be well justified in approaching police employees as dangerous even as they enforce the law. I contend that given the salience of the aggressive instinct in human nature, the power (discretion) enjoyed by police employees (and departments) is dangerous. Internal affairs offices within police departments suffer from an institutional conflict of interest (e.g., being part of the “brotherhood”) and thus should not be relied on, and the hands-off attitude of many city governments in favor of “citizen police commissions” is tantamount to aiding and abetting police brutality. Given this dangerous cocktail, the erroneous (and passive-aggressive) assumption/tactic that intimidation by an overwhelming, police-state, police presence should not be permitted. Simply put, there is simply too many police employees abusing their discretion for residents to have to be presented with a constant police-presence. The says that children should be seen but not heard is too charitable to police; they should not be seen or heard, but, due to the human inclination towards violence, present behind the scenes. This is the uncomfortable position that the film provides. Law enforcement is necessary, but, given the urge that some people feel to abuse power by instigating violence if given the chance, democratic, municipal accountability that does not rely at all on “internal checks” within police departments is vital.

The legitimacy of police to use force is limited to enforcing law. Hence, physically attacking people, such as in punching them with clenched fists and kicking them, which go beyond restraining people, are exogenous to the job function. Police with a penchant for attacking people may have a warped perspective justifying in their own minds, psychologically, beating someone up as a legitimate tactic. In 2023 in Ohio, for example, in an attempt to justify a police employee who kicked a man repeatedly in the ribs and hit him 30 times (and used a stun-gun), the deputy chief stated, “sometimes you do have to throw punches.” Even though his subordinates had use of a stun gun, he tried to justify their resort to street-fighting, saying “This wasn’t blows to the face or blows to the throat.”[1] This excuse fails, however, given that one police employee had straddled the victim’s legs and punched him “at least 30 times with both fists.”[2]

I contend that in going on the offence in violence rather than merely restraining and protecting oneself from violence, a police employee should be regarded as only another citizen. As Hobbes claims in Leviathan, self-preservation is a natural right that is not contingent on law. If anyone is kicking or punching a person, one has the natural right to defend oneself. Although this does not depend on law, city governments should encase this natural right because of the extent of discretion given to police employees by cities—an extent that is easily hyperextended. By no means should resisting getting kicked and hit be considered a criminal offence; rather, the “off duty” city employee should be charged criminally.

An obvious example of when a police employee should be considered a mere citizen concerns an employee who held a supervisory position in the New York City police department. Working as a private investigator for the government of China, he “threatened, harassed, surveilled and intimidated” a Chinese man “between 2016 and 2019.”[3] In 2023, he was convicted by a federal jury in New York of conspiracy and stalking charges. It made no difference that he was a police employee (and supervisor!) because his aggressive intimidation and harassment rendered him as a mere resident when he was engaged in that activity.

Even the language that a police employee uses along with unprovoked violence can indicate that the individual is no longer acting within the purview of one’s job in law enforcement. In Alabama in 2023, for instance, a state trooper felt justified in inflicting violence on a man who was not resisting arrest simply because he had joked “Oh, yeah” when she asked him if he felt tip of the stun-gun she had stuck into his back as he laid on the hood of a car. In saying, “Shut your bitch ass up,” and “Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad,” she was clearly not acting in a law-enforcement capacity. Her language is not professional, and thus it points to a state of mind that is outside of acting in her official capacity, which alone justifies the use of the stun-gun. That she ignored his pleas for her to stop using her stun-gun means that her desire to inflict pain was immune to any sense of compassion.

In his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who went on to write on competitive markets, claims that sympathy, aided by the imagination (in being in someone else’s place), is something that is normal to feel for others, especially if they are in pain. We don’t have to feel the pain in order to empathize. If someone who has been hired for a job in which deadly weapons can be used does not have compassion, then they are not the sort of psychology that should be hired for such a job. That such people have been hired suggests that the hiring processes of police departments are not yet advanced enough to be relied on, and so external accountability should receive more resources and attention.

Anger such that eviscerates natural sympathy can be immune even from the pleas of other police employees. Also in 2023, a Black man “was attacked by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering” to police employees “following a high-speed chase.”[4] That the truck driver had “refused to pull over, and was chased for about 25 minutes before spiked bars placed across the highway brought the rig to a stop” does not justify releasing an attack dog on the man when he was standing with his hands above his head, having clearly surrendered to the police.[5] Hence the police employee who released the dog was no longer acting in his capacity as an employee of the police department when he released the dog and could be charged criminally. 

The man's hands were up when the "SS (Nazi)" policeman released the attack dog. 

That the predator (i.e., the police employee) ignored his coworker’s demand, Do not “release the dog with [the black man’s] hands up. Do not release the dog with his hands up,” demonstrates just how flawed the hiring process of a police department can be, and thus how important external, municipality accountability is on police departments. The attacker shouted at the man, “Get your ass on the ground or you’re going to get bit!” which indicates not only extremely flawed judgment, which in turn likely points to underlying psychological problems, but that the guy was on a “power-trip” enabled by the discretion given to him as a police employee. That one of the police employees had aimed a machine gun on the truck driver can also be flagged in terms of flawed judgment. It is very significant that the employee had been hired for a position that includes use of a deadly weapon even though he had a penchant for violence.

The role of dysfunctional judgment is, I submit, a major problem in police departments. In 2023, two Los Angeles sheriff employees attacked an elderly Black couple in the parking lot of a grocery store because they had taken a cake (which could have been only a mistake). The employee attacking the man ignored the woman’s pleas that her husband was ill. Just for saying so, she was slammed to the ground by the other sheriff-department aggressor. Ignoring the woman’s pleas and shoving both people to the ground evinces utter disrespect, as if people deemed to be criminals by criminal police were not people. In actuality, such aggressors are not worthy of respect.

In yet another case, Los Angeles Sheriff deputies repeatedly punched a woman who was holding her 3-month-old baby simply because her maternal instinct would not allow her to release her baby to such aggressors. 

The aggressor's arm is circled as he repeatedly hits the mother as if in a street fight. There should be a special place in hell for men who slug women holding their infants. 

Interestingly, cities might consider enacting a “Good Samaritan” law protecting onlookers who stop attackers whether they happen to be city employees or not, for it is easy to tell if someone is resisting arrest or being pummeled with kicks and punches while passive. I contend that onlookers are ethically obligated to pull attackers off their passive victims, and, furthermore, that the criminal attackers should be criminally charged.

Because police hiring cannot be relied on, given the discretion with deadly force that police are given, the discretion should not include being able to turn off body-cams and cameras mounted on police cars. In 2023, internal documents showed that the police employee in Memphis, Tennessee who killed a man without cause didn’t turn on the body camera.[6] Just as Internal Affairs “internal accountability” within police departments should not be relied on, for police regard themselves in a brotherhood of sorts, so too is it a fatal flaw to presume that police employees can resist the temptation to turn off any cameras by which accountability could be aided.

We are all flawed, finite beings, human, all too human. Societies should thus be keen to check the power that is likely to be abused, and those with lawful physical power should be subject to psychological assessments that go beyond surveys and proforma interviews. Indications of “street” talk, bad (i.e., disproportional) judgment, and “street” fighting should be sufficient for terminations and criminal charges in cases involving violence, for the line between enforcing law and going on the attack is clear. Lastly, police employees should have more humility (i.e., a recognition of fallibility) in dealing with people assumed to be less, or lower, for every human being is worthy of respect as a human being. Being a city employee is conditional, rather than an entitlement. City governments should not only hold employees accountable, but also castigate police departments for policies allowing disproportionate force, such as aiming a machine gun at a truck simply because the trucker did not pull over. Retaliation is extrinsic to law enforcement. As the film demonstrates, accountability may be needed even on a mayor, such as Mayor Daly of Chicago, who astonishingly refused to stop the unprovoked violent attacks by his police even after his complicity was made public at the Democratic Convention. Even then, he evinced the Biblical pharaoh’s hardened heart. Similarly, the police predators discussed above demonstrated such stubbornness, in some cases even dismissing pleas for humanity from their fellow police employees.

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1. Dominique Mosbergen, “Police in Ohio Under Scrutiny after Video Shows Officers Punching Face-Down Man,” The Huffington Post, October 24, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Hannah Rabinowitz and Emma Tucker, “Former NYC Police Officer, 2 Others Convicted of Stalking New Jersey Family on Behalf of Chinese Government,” CNN.com, June 20, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
4. Nick Visser, “Video Shows Police Allowing Dog to Attack Black Man Surrendering After Truck Chase” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
5. Ibid.
6. Phillip Jackson, “Memphis Cop Who Fatally Shot Jaylin McKenzie Didn’t Turn On Body Camera, Internal Documents Show,” The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023.

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Diwali, or Deepavali, is one of the biggest festivals in India. More than a billion Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists in the world celebrate the festival of lights in which good triumphs over evil. “Despite its deep religious significance, Diwali today is also a cultural festival observed by people regardless of faith.”[1] In this regard, Diwali is like Christmas, which plenty of non-Christians celebrate as a day of giving complete with the secularized myth of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman. To claim that Diwali is exclusively Hindu or Christmas is only a Christian holiday—and thus in resentment to ignore either holiday—violates the spirit that both share. The “Happy holidays” greeting is an oxymoron, given its underlying motive of resentment. Yet if this were the extent of human aggression, the world would be a much better place. The Indian documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), reveals much worse than the passive aggression of dismissing a national holiday as if it did not exist. The violence unjustifiably and wantonly inflicted by university police on students at several universities who are protesting caste discrimination and the politically partisan coup at the Film and Television Institute of India, goes beyond even the harm exacted by the discrimination by caste. A Diwali celebration is shown in the film, and this raises the question of whether we can of yet even assuming our species' “progress,” celebrate the victory of good over evil as long as human beings in power abuse their discretion with impunity.

The woman narrating the film reads from her letters to her estranged boyfriend, whose family has forbidden the relationship due to her lower caste. The film opens with a protest of students at the Film and Television Institute of India. The Hindu Nationalist Party had installed a second-rate actor as the director of the school, and students objected to the partisan nature of the appointment. Since the strike began, the school’s administration has responded by rule-making, doubtlessly as a means of tightening control. Five students were arrested in a midnight siege, undercutting the administration’s rationalist approach of rule-making.

The film then moves to a non-student woman giving a speech. She reports that police at Hyderabad Central University have been raping and beating students amid protests. That university’s upper-caste administration went after a Ph.D. student for protesting how untouchables were being treated in India. Prime Minister Modi’s government labeled the student an extremist. Other students were barred from the library (which reflects an administration’s lack of academic values) and their dorms. According to the speaker, “The students are on the front line against the fascist government.”

The woman narrating the film is left wondering about the victory of good or evil being celebrated at the festival. “I’m not sure which is which,” she says, doubtlessly referring to the caste system being used as a weapon by her ex-boyfriend’s parents. This line is like that by Gandhi in which he remarked that he used to think that the Vedas were truth but came to realize that truth itself is divine so unjust customs are not divine even if they are in the scriptures. I used to think that truth was God, but came to realize that God is truth.

The film then moves to New Delhi, to a student protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A speaker at a rally claims that for Lenin, democracy is necessary for socialism, and that social and political change are both needed. The presumption of egalitarianism in Soviet Communism is debatable, especially in practice, so the inclusion of socialism at an anti-caste protest may be problematic. What about the students who were against the injustices of the caste system but were not supporters of Lenin? It is perhaps not easy to keep a protest focused on its main point. The speaker is on firmer ground who argues that a low-caste person should be able to get a doctorate. Students chant, “Stop the violence against students.” The need for this slogan becomes clear when the film turns from the narrator’s empathy for the women police who are doubtlessly not wealthy. Are they really so different from the students? The narrator doesn’t think so, but then images of the police getting violent, even being joined by the military, saturate the screen as students chant, “A government of violence.” The narrator remarks that any ideology that opposes that of the Hindu nationalist government’s ideology is not allowed to exist. Campus police at JNU go on a rampage, behaving like wild animals under the cover of government. If the beatings and raping are to teach the protesting students a lesson, then what exactly is the lesson that is actually being “taught,” and how presumptuous is it for thugs to teach university students a lesson! 

The policemen on the right and left, respectively, are beating students. Actual footage!

The policeman in the foreground is about to destroy the security camera. From that act, it can be inferred that he knows that what he is doing is wrong. 

Clearly, university police are not members of a university community. I contend that the students should have shifted to protest universities having police at all. Organizations properly have security guards, who protect the property, whereas governments have police power. Indeed, the basis of a state is its monopoly of violence.

At Yale, a police state on steroids, on one corner on the night I saw the film on campus in 2023. An academic campus is no place for non-academic employees to impose passive-aggressive intimidation as a primitive and flawed deterrent through maintaining a saturated presence on campus (and even off campus!) on a routine rather than an as-needed basis. Amid such encroachments, Yale students knew that the campus had become a police state, and that the university administration was paranoid (or had succumbed to hyper-protective parents). 

Perhaps police who beat and rape students should be beaten and raped themselves; perhaps that would teach them a lesson. That goes for the government officials who give the orders in cases in which abuse of discretion by police employees does not account for all of the violence.

In the film, a student speaker claims that filmmakers should not think in black and white stark terms, but rather, in nuanced terms. Raping and beating another human being is hardly nuanced, however, and fortunately the film does not approach the heinous human beings who perpetrate such acts as such. Furthermore, given the government-sanctioning of the violence against non-violent students without the government being held accountable, can Diwali’s claim that good is victorious over evil be believed merely because it is so in myths? The violence shown in the film of police beating students and even taking out a security camera—hence evincing the arrogant presumption of being above being held accountable—makes clear that something more than protests is necessary for good to triumph over evil. It bears remembering that Thomas Hobbes asserts in his famous text, Leviathan, that a person can still act to protect one’s self-preservation even against the state. That right is not based on a state, but is inalienable because the instinct for self-preservation is for Hobbes the main human motive. In the film, the students should have had the means to protect themselves bodily, though of course Gandhi would rebuke this claim, pointing to the moral force in non-violent civic disobedience. Indeed, the moral depravity of the police (and the government) in the film, even more than the injustices of the caste system, should arguably have been the main point of the protests as they went on. The film makes this shift very well, and perhaps this is the main lesson from the film.

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1. Harmeet Kaur, “What to Know about Diwali, the Festival of Lights,” CNN.com, November 11, 2023.

The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) hinges on the root meaning of passion, which is suffering. In fact, Jesus’ body is reduced to a bloody pulp after being brutally tortured by the Roman soldiers going beyond Pontius Pilate’s order to teach Jesus a lesson but keep him alive. At least there is an order to whip Jesus; the Jewish Temple’s guards earlier took it upon themselves to repeatedly hit Jesus with fists and even with chains, and almost strangle him with a rope while arresting him. That guards, or police, especially of a religious institution, are actually garden-variety thugs might resonate with viewers who need only recall the latest news story about police brutality. The implication is that such police employees who are actually thugs are delusional if they consider themselves to be Christians. In fact, such official thugs can be understood through the prism of the film as beating Christ himself, for what you do to the least of these, you do to me. In the Gospel story, Jesus is an innocent victim, and so too are even criminals who do not warrant being attacked. As in the film, police brutality tends to occur before the victims of the abuse are convicted, and thus presumed guilty before the law. For a human being to make oneself the law incarnate or to presume oneself above the law is nothing short of impious and self-idolatrous. In short, the human nature that is on display in attacking Jesus in the story is the same as contemporary innocent victims are forced to confront in corrupt, pathological employees of police departments.

The film brutally dramatizes the price that Jesus pays in the Gospels to make up for the sins of humanity so that the chasm between God the Father and mankind can be narrowed, or even eliminated at least when the son of man (i.e., Jesus) comes on clouds to redeem the living and the dead of the faithful. I include the possibility of narrowed because even if a person’s accumulated debt has been paid off by someone else, it is possible to take on new debt as time goes by. That a Christian is to ask God for forgiveness suggests that on-going sin can widen the gap between a Christian and God. As Paul writes, faith is for naught if there is not love. Sin is the absence and antithesis of love, and thus renders faith for naught. Justification and sanctification are both necessary, according to Christian theology. In the film, the question of whether one man can pay for everyone’s sins is made explicit, and the implicit answer is that this is possible provided that the one voluntarily submits to a lot of severe suffering. Gibson brings the lofty soteriological (i.e., salvific) story in the Gospels down to earth in perhaps even overdoing the violence that is inflicted on Jesus from his arrest to his death. In so doing, Gibson makes it possible for us to relate the violence in the film to that which occurs all too often, as reported in the news. I have in mind the parallel between the aggressiveness of the Jewish and Roman “police” against Jesus in the film and the problem of police brutality even in the twenty-first century, which is supposed to be so modern and advanced in large part though due to technological advances rather than any change in human nature. Primal urges are still with us, so the need still exists to hold them accountable when they lash out against other people. In short, the film is more about human nature than Jesus’ identity as the Messiah and Son of the living God, which in turn, however, is salient enough that Gibson largely omits Jesus’ teachings altogether, and thus how a person can minimize incurring new debt by getting closer to the Kingdom of God by forgiving and even helping rude people detractors (i.e., “enemies”) on a daily basis by taking on the perspective of God in viewing even such people as creatures wholly dependent existentially on God. In other words, Gibson’s focus on the most important event in the Gospel (Passion) story comes with a cost even though highlighting the violence against Jesus by the Temple guards and the Roman soldiers can give us a template by which to perceive the unjustified violence in the world in a new light. 

In the film, the Temple guards manhandle Jesus in arresting him even though he clearly shows no indication of resistance. In fact, he has just healed a soldier’s ear, which Peter had sliced off with a knife. Jesus tells Peter to drop his knife with the adage that all who live by the sword also die by it. Just after Peter drops his knife, a Temple guard hits Peter on his face. The guard slugs like a thug in a one-sided street fight, rather than being ordered by superiors to do hit the “culprit”; thus, the guard’s act cannot be justified by appealing to his official duties. Then he joins two other guards in roughly approaching Jesus as if he were resisting arrest. He is stationary, yet the guards grab him as if he were a violent criminal trying to evade capture or even attack them after healing another guard! One of the guards even puts a rope around Jesus’ neck and yanks back severely on the rope in an aggressive fit that can only stem from personal, unsanctioned anger. On the way to the Temple, besides punching Jesus, the guards even throw Jesus off a bridge on the way to the Temple. Jesus is literally hanging by a rope when he sees Judas who is near the small bridge. I submit that Gibson goes overboard with the violence here, for throwing someone off a bridge is quite a leap from violently subduing and hitting a person under arrest. Yet considering how aggressive contemporary police at least in the U.S. can be in arresting people still presumed innocent, we should not minimize by imposing our normal sense of normalcy on the pathologically violent.

On July 4, 2023, a police patrol employee in Ohio released a K-9 dog on a driver who was standing with his hands up. The man had been pulled over after an admittedly too-long chase because of a missing “dirt tag” on his truck on a highway. The employee ignored another police employee who shouted for the dog not to be released. According to NBC News, Rose, the Black truckdriver, “can be seen on video . . . standing in front of troopers with his hands in the air. A Circleville police officer who has a dog can be heard telling Rose to ‘go on the ground or you’re gonna get bit.’”[1] This sounds more like punishment than anything practically necessary in making an arrest. The police employee primped himself up as judge and jury, as well as executioner. It is then that a trooper can be heard yelling multiple times to the trooper with the dog, “Do not release the dog with his hands up!” The trooper with the dog let it go after Rose anyway.

It is interesting, therefore, that the police employee who felt the need to punish Rose for not complying on a minor point did not feel the need to comply. Clearly, releasing the dog could not be legitimated by procedure, but, rather, pointed to a psychologically pathological intolerance for being disobeyed. Anyone who is or has been a parent knows that losing one’s temper just because a child does not immediately comply is pathological. Perhaps Rose was afraid out of his mind precisely because of the sordid, well-deserved reputation that too many police departments in America have of a thirst for inflicting violence and a lack of accountability in a sort of “brotherhood” of what are actually city employees.

Also in 2023, an off-duty Chicago policeman in Illinois violently subdued and put a knee into the back of a child whom the aggressive “adult” assumed had stolen his son’s bicycle. The kid was innocent, and the policeman’s personal anger clearly motivated the attack. It is ironic that such a man would assume so infallibly that a kid walking by a bike had stolen it. God-like powers of omniscience would hardly be deposited in a thug.

In the film, once Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin (i.e., the religious council of the Jews), a Temple guard takes it upon himself to judge Jesus as arrogant and disrespectful towards the high priest, Caiaphas, and, furthermore, the guard takes it upon himself to punish Jesus by hitting him in the face. Jesus asks why the Temple policeman hit him even though Jesus had not done or said anything evil in suggesting that the council members ask people what Jesus had taught rather than ask Jesus himself. Tightening fingers into a fist to hit a person in the face is typically done in “street fighting” by thugs and bullies, rather than being indicative of any police policy that would justify the tactic, so Jesus asks the guard why he hit Jesus. Earlier, when a Temple guard tied Jesus’ hands behind his back in arresting him, Jesus did not ask why precisely because tying hands together is procedure (both in the story and in our world). Jesus could have asked why another guard almost strangled Jesus with another rope, as such an action is not procedure and thus points to personal anger and perhaps even sadism.

Back to 2023 in the U.S., a sheriff deputy angered because an elderly black woman was recording another deputy being rough in arresting her husband for stealing a cake from a grocery store was not following procedures when he slapped the woman’s phone out of her outstretched hand, put an arm around her neck to throw her down to the pavement, and then asked her if she wanted to be hit in the face. She was not resisting the attack; she was merely telling him not to hurt her because she had cancer. His official badge and position should not blind us to the man’s motive: In first reaching to slap the phone out of the woman’s outstretched hand, it is clear that he was angry at the woman for recording the other policeman, who was also being violent in arresting a non-violent man.

At the very least, the man who threw the elderly woman to the pavement just for recording clearly had a pathological anger problem (and thus should never have been hired). He also presumably believed that he was above being held accountable, especially by the wife of a shoplifter recording the arrest of her husband.  

The woman was smart, and justified in recording the arrest of her husband. Lest it be assumed that the cameras that police in the U.S. must wear on their chests are sufficient to keep the holders from taking advantage of their weaponized position, such footage can conveniently go missing, or be blocked by other police at a scene. In 2023, for example, a police employee's camera was conveniently blocked from showing another employee hitting a Black woman in her face while she was holding her three-weeks-old baby. Her crime? She had been a passenger in a car that had a tail-light out. The police unreasonably demanded that she give her baby to them. Given the aggressiveness of those police employees, the woman's maternal instinct was appropriate. 

The arrogance of the police is evident even in the attempt to hide their own bully from view as he hits a defenseless mother because she would not give up her baby to people shouting at her. If the bully, or the two deputies who took down the elderly Black couple, thought of themselves as Christians, such a fanciful delusion itself would be enough to furnish a glaring example of cognitive distortion and dissidence and thus psychological pathology.

The police can be viewed through the prism of Gibson’s movie as attacking Jesus because of how similar the attacks by the police are to those of the Temple guards in the film in attacking Jesus who is has, as Pontius Pilate tells the Sanhedrin, has done nothing to deserve the brutality. It is not necessary to the similitude between the actual world and the story-world of the film that only in the latter is the innocent victim the Son of God. Such an equivalence is not necessary for the point that I’m making.  The dynamic of the respective brutalities is the same, crossing between screen and the world in which we live. 

The sadism of the Roman soldiers who are to whip Jesus yet do much more is on display in the film, as is the sadism of the members of the Sanhedrin who are watching. The extreme lengths to which the centurions go and the presence of supposedly pious clerics raises the question of how much punishment should be met out to someone judged by fallible human beings to be a blasphemer.

In his pontificate, Pope Francis said to journalists, “Who am I to judge” regarding gay couples. This infuriated more conservative Roman Catholic bishops and priests. Even a vicar of Christ is a human being, so any claim of infallibility can only be impious and presumptuous; the Holy Spirit works through not apart from human nature, even in the selection of a pope. Similarly, police employees are human beings, and thus not infallible in judging guilt, so doing so and then pronouncing a punishment and executing it themselves is toxic, given human nature. Such employees are not divine, and thus omniscient and omnipotent. In the film, Jesus tells Pilate that he has no power over Jesus that has not been given from above. Jesus then says that the real sinners are the members of the Sanhedrin, who sent Jesus to Pilate. These two sentences constitute an interesting idea: that the Jewish clerics went too far out in personal anger whereas Pilate is acting within a governing authority, which God establishes according to Jewish theology. It took me quite a while to understand how the two lines go together.

Caiaphas, the chief Jewish priest, is visibly enraged by Jesus’ admission that he is the Messiah and Son of the living God. Even in viewing Jesus as arrogant and impious—a perspective that assumes infallibility in knowing whether Jesus’s identity-statement is true or false—Caiaphas considers the Roman brutality in ripping Jesus’ skin to the point of him being covered with his own blood to be justified. Both the infallibility and judgement of the high priest belie any presumption he might have that he is worthy of being cleric, let alone the high priest. It is ironic that the sanctimonious, presumably divine chief priest is so angry at Jesus for claiming a divine nature along with human nature; perhaps Caiaphas is so angry at Jesus’ claim in part because he knows deep down that his own presumption is not only arrogant, but also impious, given that he is sordid, manipulative, and angry, blocks him even from asking Jesus what he means when he says he is the Son of God.

In the Gospels, the Pharisees similarly have a petty perspective in which they are fixated on quibbling over Jewish laws while missing the salience of the sort of love that is (in) God. People were not made for the laws; rather, the latter were instituted for us, Jesus says. Is helping someone, especially someone who is weak or an enemy, so bad just because the action is done on the Sabbath? In fact, such helping even on the Sabbath brings one closer to God, (by metaphor to the Kingdom of God). Similarly, does the law against blasphemy, assuming Jesus is blasphemous in claiming to be the Son of God as Caiaphas (omnisciently) concludes, justify such cruelty as is depicted in the film? In not believing that Jesus is divine, Caiaphas may think that Jesus is delusional in thinking he is the Son of God, will come on clouds to judge the living and the dead, and will sit at the right hand of the Father. Watching, and perhaps even getting satisfaction out of someone with delusions (even religious ones) being tortured can be deemed to be not only petty and vengeful, but also sadistic.

In the film, Pilate does not consider Jesus to be a threat even as a king, for the Kingdom about which Jesus preaches is not of this world. Perhaps Pilate views Jesus as a harmless dreamer, and maybe even delusional. Pilate is displeased that his soldiers have tortured Jesus so much, and pleads with the Jews that Jesus has not deserved to suffer so much. Caiaphas’ attempt to manipulate Pilate by presenting Jesus’ offense as a claim to being a king (rather than the Son of God) not having worked, the hardened heart the chief priest insists that Pilate have Jesus crucified anyway; Jesus’ suffering has not been enough!

So too, witnesses to the savage beatings of black men by police in the U.S. might say, how much suffering is enough to satisfy your lust for blood? How many bullets are needed in the body of a man who did not resist arrest? Such beatings demonstrate the endurance of primitive human nature, which, I submit, is inconsistent and incompatible with the legal power that governments at least in the U.S. give to their police employees. Only a delusional city executive or legislator would rely on Internal Affair offices in police departments, as can be seen by how flagrant the abuses are and likely were before the advent of phone cameras. Viewing the primal acts of aggression through the prism of The Passion of the Christ demonstrates just how contrary to Jesus’ example and preaching such “modern” police employees are who take advantage of their positions and society’s indifference and even enabling. The arrogant bullies will be surprised to learn that repentant innates still in prison are closer to the Kingdom of God. Unfortunately, as Roger Ebert wrote in his review of the film, it “is superficial in terms of the surrounding message . . . we get only a few passing references to the teachings of Jesus.”[2] To be sure, a focus on the “central event in the Christian religion”[3] has benefits, including in being able to see police even in the twenty-first century as vicariously attacking Jesus. Actually entering the Kingdom of Jesus’ Father requires more, as another Christian film, Mary Magdalene (2018), makes clear in making that kingdom, rather than an event, the focus. Police who take advantage of societal slippages of accountability and the enabling pro-police ideology to inflict pain on others for petty, ego-bruising “insults” and yet are certain of being saved by having faith in Jesus should ponder Paul’s point that faith without love is for naught. Furthermore, faith with aggression can only be hypocrisy. Blindness might excuse such bullies, but they see and so their sin remains.

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[1] Mirna Alsharif and Ava Kelley, “’Do Not Release the Dog With His Hands Up!’ Black Man Mauled By Police Canine After Ohio Pursuit,” NBCNews.com, July 23. 2023 (accessed July 24, 2023)
[2] Roger Ebert, “The Passion of the Christ,” RogerEbert.com, February 24, 2004 (accessed July 24, 2023).
[3] Ibid.

I Am Cuba

The film, I Am Cuba (1964), consists of four vignettes that depict what Cuba was in its pre-revolutionary day beyond the wealthy gloss of the American-owned casinos. Sugarcane is sweet, but it is also of tears.  Furthermore, the film explains the revolutionary ground-swell in the individual lives of Cubans whom the American tourists didn’t see from their luxurious perches near the beaches. The film proffers a glimpse of the extreme poverty and oppression so raw that it could (and did) foment a revolutionary change of regime through amassed violence against the police-state. The abstract message ripe for political theory is that once regime-change is on the front burner at the macro, or societal level, strong interpersonally-directed emotions that stem from particular cases of injustice will have had a lot of time to build up. Indeed, the latter is the trigger for the former. Abstract political principles on governance and macroeconomic policy on the distribution and redistribution of wealth, and even principles of distributive justice are not divorced from the interpersonal level, especially as between citizens and individual police or military employees of the state. Indeed, those philosophical abstractions gain traction in a revolutionary context through the sweat and tears of individual people.

In the first short story, the exploitation of a Cuban prostitute is evinced not only in the act itself, but also, and more so, in the fact that the businessman takes the woman’s cherished crucifix for a few dollars without her consent as she is watching. The man’s disorientation as he leaves her hut to discover in daylight the squalid living conditions of the Black, poor Cubans suggests that exploitation of labor is likely endemic and hidden from the view of Cuba as the land of nice, Americanized hotels.

In the story of the sugarcane farmer, the utter precariousness of economic position is most salient. The line that there are so many tears in sugar cane even as it is so sweet reflects the arduous labor that goes into cutting the stalks. That the landowner could refuse to pay the farmer who is harvesting a crop because the landowner has presumably just made a lot of money selling the land to United Fruit company demonstrates just how unfair economic laws can be. The sheer unfairness translates into radical, emotion-laden reactions, such as the farmer immediately ceasing his work and instead burning the crop so the land owner won’t profit from the farmer’s work. The depth of the unfairness, more abstractly, is capable of triggering radical (rather than “reform”) economic and political actions, including armed revolution. That the farmer dies of smoke inhalation gives the viewer an understanding that it is possible that both interpersonal and structural or systemic power and economic dynamics may be so unbalanced, and thus unfair, that a person on the losing end may choose to end one’s life rather than go on in such a condition. Abject humiliation alone can give prompt oppressed people to risk everything to “just say no” or hit back. The attacks from Hamas against Israel on October 8, 2023 can be understood, for instance, as a people pushed against a proverbial wall with nowhere to go to the point that they were willing to take rash steps to upend the status quo. This is not to say that violence is excusable; only that it is explainable.

The indiscriminate arial bombing of another farmer’s mountainous dwelling is unfair to him and his family, especially since one of the bombs kills one of his sons. The sheer unfairness, I submit, completely changes his political position from that of non-involvement with the revolutionary army near his hut to joining up to fight. He is not fighting to improve his economic lot; he dismissed such a motive when he talks with a soldier before the bombing. He is also not fighting to avenge the loss of his son, for the tone he adopts in telling his wife that he has to go has more of a sense of duty than anger to it.

The next story naturally transitions the viewer to the macro, political level of what is based on the economic struggles and hardship of individuals such as the people living near the prostitute, the sugar-cane farmer, and the subsistence-living mountain farmer. Out of the dire economic conditions of such people, who are also part of Cuba, emanates the political conflict between a regime and a revolutionary army. By this time, as the man sings, “It’s taken you too long; I can’t forgive.” The revolutionaries will not turn back; the ferment has gone past compromise and reconciliation. The injustices have been too harsh and have been allowed to go on too long for any signs of contrition to be credible. Slaves, once having made the determination to be stars, cannot put the new wine into the old bottles. The revolutionaries are firing at the past; not to kill. But is this really so when economic injustice is so harsh that strong emotions flash quite naturally in human beings?

Enrico on the left is furious at the policeman on the right for having murdered Enrico's friend and compatriot handcuffed in police custody. The intense emotions naturally triggered by witnessing an aggressor abuse his authority are the root cause of regime change by armed rebellion. 

Enrico, a young revolutionary from university, is clearly furious at the policeman who murders a friend who is already handcuffed and in custody. The agent of the state cannot tolerate even a prisoner making political statements in public. Enrico had resisted pulling the trigger on the chief of police because the man was with his wife and kids at the time; unlike the police, Enrico has a conscience and is flexible. Although Enrico understands that the struggle is against the system, which in turn can be viewed as the past, his rage is  against a particular agent, the policeman, of the unjust and violent regime that protects the exploitation by the rich of the poor. When the policeman who shot Enrico’s compatriot shots Enrico himself, he continues on as a walking wounded not because “to die for your homeland is to live,” but, rather, out of sheer rage against the unrepentant bully-policeman. It is personal. The source of a revolution is personal.  Abstract revolutionary slogans are too abstract to motivate a person in exacting retribution, or vengeance. Enrico is finally raw rage as he walks towards the armed policeman with only a block of concrete held up in the air. Enrico's pent-up anger has finally surpassed his conscience. The audience is surely rooting for him and against the policeman. Even viewers such as myself who oppose Socialism and Communism are rooting for him, for empathy naturally sides with the victims and their allies rather than with the bullies and predators. 

In summary, I Am Cuba is not just propaganda for Socialism and Communism. All that on a human level goes on before an armed revolutionary army is formed is visualized in four short stories. So much emotional pain built up over such a long time is packed into a radical political movement that seeks to completely up-end the status quo that once such a movement has begun on the macro level, the partisan movement is very difficult to reverse. The lesson for government officials is perhaps that there is time to stave off such movements because they do not pop up overnight. Moreover, preventing agents of the state or wealthy land- or company-owners from abusing their authority and holding those who do accountable is very much in the interest of a regime, lest it eventually fall all of a sudden by armed unrest. The lesson for revolutionaries is that the shift from the particular economic/power injustices that are interpersonal to a revolutionary party or army includes adopting a broader, more abstract perspective beyond the killing to fighting against the past as represented in the ongoing status quo.

Human nature is of course an indelible part of political and economic paradigm shifts via revolutionary movements, and the abstract political platforms are rooted in interpersonal emotions from particular cases of injustice. Revolutionary politics, including abstract slogans in the film’s dialogue, such as slaves and stars, firing at the past, struggle against the system, and To die for your homeland is to live, function along with an extant revolutionary army as landing pads for individuals who, had they not been the victims of particular agents of the state or the wealthy, would have resisted joining any army and not felt the slogans, being content instead to live life as it comes in poverty.