The vacuum (We've Been Here Before II)

Rooftop Koreans defending their businesses
during the 1992 Los Angeles riots

I've mentioned that I don't often comment on events of the day because others say it better than me. Regarding the Rittenhouse situation Ginny at Chicago Boys says it better. Below is an excerpt from her post Rittenhouse Found (Appropriately) Not Guilty but Who Was?

We can say, at least I would say, that even a well-intentioned 17-year-old should avoid riots. (As our eyes could see, whatever the networks said.)  However, for most of our past 17-year-olds were considered adults – they married, fought, supported households; forbidding alcohol  recognizes strong bodies but maturing judgement. Nonetheless, Rittenhouse’s mission appears to have been felt honestly, the desire to establish order is response to chaos. When faced with one attacker, he remained, well, I’m not sure if calm is the word.  Still he didn’t shoot a man bearing in on him until that man lowered his gun, pointed it directly at his head as he lay on the ground. Someone older might have handled all of it with fewer deaths, someone trained to be a policeman, a soldier.  Someone like that might have been careful not to be alone, too.   But, then, we might ask – where were older men?   Who made decisions that led to that night, how could they have been so terribly irresponsible?  Where were all the grown men (and womn), mayors and governors, that long summer?  Watching the previous day, Rittenhouse  understood life would never be the same for his father and his grandmother when property was treated cavalierly, violence and arson  unchecked.  A vacuum pulled him in.

People of my age have been there before.  We remember the 60’s and 70’s, then the 80’s and 90’s, we remember the destruction and vigilantes.  The gun as “peacemaker” in a lawless town is a mainstay of our culture.  The frontier might not have been as we saw it portrayed in western after western, but the human tendencies portrayed are:  we were quite aware of what happens when order breaks down, when our property (of all kinds, personal and real, familial and intellectual, our bodies themselves) is not respected and protected by an ordered society.  In a vacuum, force and violence settle disputes, access property, force servility.

A rampaging mob in St. Louis chooses rooms in a man’s house, threatening death to pets, the rape of the man’s wife.  And he is arrested for protecting that house.  A hundred cars are torched in a single lot in Kenosha.  Chaos generally leaves the weak vulnerable, as the unprincipled, the untethered strong are unrestrained.  Pop culture, reacting, glorifies vigilantes.  Sure we don’t want a country run by vigilante justice.  It simply appears the only answer:  quick and simple.  It is satisfying entertainment at such a time.

In the fifties when many had seen how thin the veneer of Western order could be, Hollywood offered Shane.  Later cities became more ragged, harsh, disordered.  Vigilante plots responded to the chaos of riots and the years of crack.  Dirty Harry movies began in 1971, ended in 1987; The A Team ran  from 1983-87.  The Equalizer ads indicate its contemporary protagonist (Queen Latifah) is a strong, competent but violent defender of the weak – as was Edward Woodward, in the series that ran from 1985-1989.

Kyle Rittenhouse felt he needed to be there, not necessarily from a grandiose vision of himself, hardly for racist reasons,  impelled by many reasons, I assume, but underlying it was the knowledge that a vacuum existed in Kenosha where law and order should have been.