The 1981 John Carpenter classic Escape From New York debuted with an irresistible tagline: “1997. New York City is a walled maximum-security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane.”
The federal government, you see, had sealed off Manhattan and removed all law enforcement. A 50-foot wall surrounds the island. All the bridges have been mined, and all the prisoners are sentenced to life terms. Hero Snake Plissken must break in and rescue the President of the United States, whose plane went down somewhere on the island.
Welcome to Seattle – or more specifically, to CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. After riots and looting there reached a boiling point, city leaders ordered police to stand down and evacuate that roughly six block downtown area. The protesters took it over and up went the barricades.
Those who are waiting for the people in charge to do something can keep waiting.
Democratic Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan said: “Lawfully gathering and expressing First Amendment rights, demanding we do better as a society, and providing true equity for communities of color is not terrorism. It’s patriotism.”
Added Kshama Sawant, the city council member whose district encompasses the autonomous zone, in a CNN interview: “This violence against the peaceful protest movement on Capitol Hill was carried out by Mayor Jenny Durkan and that’s why it’s no surprise that tens of thousands of people in Seattle are calling for her resignation. Because they reject police violence, they reject police brutality and we want a society that’s based on equality and cooperation.”
The media doesn’t seem to mind the nation’s fabric coming apart, either. Forbes ran an interview with “The so-called ‘warlord’ of CHAZ, hip-hop artist Raz Simone, (who) has been demonized as the nefarious leader of a separatist movement that could quickly devolve into violence and mayhem. Simone has been called a terrorist, monarch and Osama Bin Raza by right-wing pundits.”
They liked him and his “thoughtful suggestions for initiating proactive and positive changes, particularly as it relates to the push to defund or abolish the police.” As for the Warlord himself? “He came across as a gregarious, open-minded, intelligent, enlightened, street-smart and business-minded person.”
The New York Times sees CHAZ this way: “What has emerged is an experiment in life without the police — part street festival, part commune. Hundreds have gathered to hear speeches, poetry and music. On Tuesday night, dozens of people sat in the middle of an intersection to watch 13th, the Ava DuVernay film about the criminal justice system’s impact on African-Americans. On Wednesday, children made chalk drawings in the middle of the street.”
What none of them seem to realize is that this is a dystopian nightmare, the further unraveling of the formerly United States of America. Already the chaos is spreading. Copycat demonstrators in Nashville, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina, “have attempted to emulate protesters in Seattle by establishing police-free ‘autonomous zones’ protected by barricades, as police union officials in Seattle warn that their city is on the verge of ‘lawlessness,’” the Daily Mail reported.
If this kind of insanity isn’t stopped, then by definition it must continue. And in a city like the Big Apple, where cops are doused with water as onlookers laugh, powerful politicians talk about defunding the police department and cops are retiring because they can read the writing on the wall, people had better pay attention – to CHAZ, to Nashville, to Asheville… and to old movies.
