Oscar Grant, Riots, and Memory

The murder of Oscar Grant, and the drama which has followed, hews close to a script with many sequels in it. In the Bay Area, senseless death at the hands of the police has many faces (mostly of color) attached to it. Shelia Detoy, Mark Garcia, Idriss Stelley, Jerrold Hall, Cammerin Boyd each had their of unique stories but one thing in common: irrefutably avoidable executions.

What is different this time is that nearly every citizen also holds the means of media production in their pockets. The immediate visual impact of the murder is held up for plain view almost immediately. The Rodney King beating was captured by a video camera many times the size of the average cell phone.

The soft cage of survielance society also opened it’s own Achilles Heel. The masses are watched like almost never before in human history. Yet we can also watch, record and publicize and there’s little anyone can do short of a total shutdown of the internet to stop us.

And somehow, despite the thousands of images of violence bombarding our senses every minute, from the Green Zone and Gaza, people still were moved to outrage, to do something. Something. Some-thing. That thing ranged from peaceful rallies, militant riots, non-violent civil disobedience blocking BART stalls, internet appeals to public officials, calls for reform, for citizen’s oversight committees, for resignations, for calm, and for revolution.

That too, is a familiar script, the storm before the calm.

Hegemony Circus: Breaking Down Fox’s 24

This month, Fox’s greatest piece of propaganda, “24″ returns, and by all accounts is going to be a hurricane of yellow menace stereotypes. For this review I managed to sit through an entire season of nationalistic, racist and unintentionally hillarious episides. Where else can you watch a story unfold that actually blames a terrorist attack on Arabs, Chinese and Queers all at the same time? Guess without Russia to blame it on anymore, Hollywood has to go the extra mile in the scapegoating game. Anybody remember Red Dawn?

The television show “24,” is a fast paced roller coaster of a spy series scripted so that every screen minute is corresponds to an actual minute-and each episode represents an hour in a day. The show made its debut shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. As a melodrama, the show has held a mirror up to the mood of a nation at once deeply paranoid but also confident that it has the bad guys in the crosshairs.