Monthly Archives: November 2005

by | 23 November 2005 · 8:13 pm

Secular Condescension, Liturgical Mindfulness

Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers–persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions–the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them–have all treated my parents with condescension. The Church too has treated them badly when it attempted formal instruction. The homily at Sunday mass, intended to give parishioners basic religious instruction, has often been poorly prepared and aimed at a childish listener. It has been the liturgical Church that has excited my parents. In ceremonies of public worship, they have been moved, assured that their lives–all aspects of their lives, from waking to eating, from birth until death, all moments–possess great significance. Only the liturgy has encouraged them to dwell on the meaning of their lives. To think.

SOURCE: Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, by Richard Rodriguez (Bantam Books, 1982), p. 96

I’ve certainly done more than my share of condescension toward religious beliefs and believers. My only defense is that I have never done so from a position of authority–unless one grants undue authority on religious matters to those with more years of strictly secular education, which the latter all too frequently arrogate to themselves. (I should say “ourselves” for, here again, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.)

I strongly suspect that the strong resurgence of religion in the public sphere over the last few decades is a reaction to the mounting failures of resolutely secular governments–whether communist, socialist, capitalist, or Baathist–whose policies toward religion have ranged from dismissive condescension, at best, to brutal suppression, at worst. The collapse of communism, the most powerful secular religion of the 20th century, was the largest of the secular dominoes to fall.

Of course, theocracies like Iran seem, like others before them, to have managed to create a strong resurgence of secularism. But do we really need to go that far before finding a reasonable balance, with mutual respect?

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by | 22 November 2005 · 9:31 pm

Japan’s Very Effective Thought War

In last Sunday’s Japan Times, Donald Richie reviews The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, by Barak Kushner (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006).

This completely individual and very interesting account of the uses of propaganda in Japan concludes with the observation that it would be historically naive to pretend that Japan had changed overnight after its defeat in World War II. After all, Japan has had a very long history of socially mobilizing its people….

Modernization, it was thought, would put Japan on the same level as those imperialistic powers that were perceived as menacing Asia. Hence the useful concept of the Far East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a structure that envisioned a completely modern Japan shepherding the needs of a still backward Asia.

Here propaganda had new uses. For Japan, the problem of convincing China that Japan’s mission was to liberate Asia hinged on the idea of “shisosen” or “the thought war.” This was the term consistently used to describe the fight for ideological supremacy in Asia and later against the West….

Japan’s Asian adventures … had majority national support. A hapless populace in the grip of a relentless military machine is a later conception. During the war itself, popular support was strong — the population believed in its mission.

Japan, says the author, had — largely through propaganda — mobilized its population to an extent unattainable in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Franco’s Spain. Japan faced little discontent, no attempted coups, and very few intellectuals and anti-fascists fleeing the country.

Consequently, perhaps, Japanese wartime propaganda survived the war. This was because a small coterie of bureaucratic cronies did not dominate, as they did in Nazi Germany. Instead, a large body of individuals created both the wartime and the postwar propaganda.

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by | 22 November 2005 · 8:47 pm

Tokyo Teacher Punished Over War History

I’ve refused to be alarmed about reports over resurgent Japanese nationalism, especially in light of the full-throttle nationalism of Japan’s nearest neighbors, but a story in the Christian Science Monitor on 22 November 2005 really does raise my hackles.

TOKYO – Miyako Masuda is a 23-year veteran of public schools here. Like many Japanese history teachers of her generation, she dislikes new textbooks that frame Japan as the victim in World War II. It bothers her that books claiming America caused the war are now adopted by an entire city ward. In fact, Masuda disapproves of the whole nationalist direction of Tokyo public schools.

Yet until last year, Masuda, who calls herself “pretty ordinary,” rarely went out of her way to disagree. Few teachers do.

But when a Tokyo city councilman in an official meeting said “Japan never invaded Korea,” her history class sent an apology to Korean President Roh Moo-hyan [sic] – an action that sparked her removal from her classroom.

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by | 21 November 2005 · 8:17 pm

Berman on the History of French Anti-Americanism

The meatiest book reviewed in Paul Berman’s lengthy article in The New Republic entitled France’s Failures, Hatreds, and Signs of a New Look at America: The Anti-Anti-Americans (free registration required) is Philippe Roger’s The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. Roger reminds us of historic French grievances about American ingratitude during the 18th and 19th centuries, not just American grievances about French ingratitude during the 20th century.

Roger recalls the history of French grievances against America, the actual hard-fact history–this history that Americans know nothing about and can hardly even imagine, though its stages are easily identified. There was the French feeling of horror and betrayal at the secret Jay Treaty of 1794, in which, despite France’s crucial aid during the American Revolution, the United States made peace with the same Great Britain that was, at that very moment, waging war against revolutionary France. It is easy to see that, on this issue, the French had a point–especially so when you recognize that, whatever France’s imperial ambitions may have been (namely, to conquer Europe and the Middle East, and to re-name these regions “France”), the French were undergoing a terrible pummeling.

Then came the struggles of the Napoleonic wars, and the French navy seized a great many American ships (a total of 558, by the American reckoning). And the United States demanded compensation afterward, and not in a small amount. President Andrew Jackson pursued this demand, and the French eventually agreed to pay, if only because Jackson threatened to seize French property in the United States. But, as Roger tells us, the argument over compensation to the United States aroused a tremendous anger in France–tremendous because the French had aided the United States in the past, and America ought to have allowed its feeling of gratitude to linger a little longer. And the resentment was owed to something more. For what was the meaning of France’s revolutionary and Napoleonic wars?

France suffered. France’s army was destroyed. France ended up under European occupation. Huge portions of the French population were killed. The defeat was spectacular and enormous. And here was the United States in the wake of these tragedies, demanding a money transfer from a somber and defeated France to the cheerful shores of a prosperous United States. The French Chamber of Deputies eventually agreed to pay, but their assent was bitter. Even the pro-Americans among them–Roger points to the poet Lamartine, a solid republican with excellent pro-American credentials–burned with resentment. An echo of this turns up, I would add, even in Tocqueville, who remarks that in the American War of Independence, the Americans endured nothing on the scale of French suffering a few years later.

And the same can be said of American vs. French sacrifices during the Great War, the war of Europe’s lost generation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become obvious that America was expanding its power all over the world, just as the European supporters of the old Confederacy had feared; and the sundry racial and cultural factors came to seem frighteningly dynamic. Woodrow Wilson seemed like a scary man, insane, imprisoned by his Christian fanaticism, and manipulated by Jewish financiers. The years that followed Wilson’s intervention in France produced, in Roger’s account, the high tide of anti-American literature. The United States was a racial horror, a machine-like menace, a disaster for the working class, a tool of the Jewish conspiracy, and so forth–all of which had a way of making America seem much more dangerous than Germany. These attitudes were upheld by people on the extreme right and by a number of independents who were neither right-wing nor left-wing, and, in the age of Pétain, these became the reigning attitudes.

Then again, Pétain’s defeat and the catastrophe of the extreme right in France merely ended up producing still another wave of anti-Americanism, this time promoted by the communists, whose left-wing feelings were just as virulent as the old right-wing version. The United States, no longer a greater danger than Nazi Germany, was now the heir to Nazi Germany. “Truman, Hitler’s authentic successor” was a communist slogan. The communists campaigned against blue jeans, Coca Cola, and Hollywood. The right-wing themes from between the wars were in these ways re-fitted for the postwar left, and the revised themes were massively disseminated….

In this fashion, a cultural tradition arose in which America was condemned for every possible reason and its opposite–condemned for being less advanced than Europe, which is to say, geographically and sociologically younger; and also for being ahead of Europe in its social development, which is to say, older. America was a country without values; and appallingly moralistic. Repulsive for being racist; and for mixing its races. America’s democracy was a failure and a sham; and America was repeatedly said to have lately fallen away from its admirable democratic past. America was governed by a dictatorship of millionaires; or by a rabble of corner grocers. Worse than Hitler; or Hitler’s heir; and either way a threat to humanism.

America was frightening because it was excessively powerful; and was repeatedly declared to be on the brink of collapse. America was bellicose; and its soldiers, cowardly. America was hopelessly Christian; and, beginning in the 1920s, America was, even so, dominated by Jews. Coldly calculating; and, at the same time, religiously insane. Talleyrand made the complaint about religious insanity at the very start of the American republic (he had fled to America in 1794 to escape the mass guillotinings that were mandated by France’s new religion of the Goddess of Reason) in his witty remark that America featured thirty-two religions and only one dish, which was inedible. The remark about food was significant in itself, and suggested, as well, a larger complaint about the unattractive thinness of America’s culture–a main theme of the anti-American accusation. And yet America’s greatest danger to the world was also said to be its culture, which, despite its lack of appeal, was dangerously appealing, and was going to crush all other cultures.

Yet, after such a well-crafted stream of ironies, Berman concludes on a note very sympathetic to France.

Anyone who visits Berlin will recognize instantly that Germany is a nation that has suffered stupendous and unbearable defeats–a nation that has been reduced to rubble repeatedly by events, even if the Germans have themselves to blame for some of those events. A visitor to France will come away with no such impression. Rubble, in France? And yet it may be that France, too, is a nation covered with scars–a wounded nation, different from Germany only in France’s gallant insistence that it is not a wounded nation. I turn the pages of Roger’s history and the other books, and I contemplate Glucksmann’s observations about the hatred that arises from a revulsion at one’s own weakness, and it occurs to me that, instead of rubble, which the Germans have aplenty, the French possess the very remarkable literature that Roger and the others describe. Not exactly rubble, but a kind of wreckage–the literature of a wounded culture, expressing more than two hundred years of conscious and unconscious injury.

Will America be any more gracious by the turn of the next century, when perhaps China will have taken over the role of colossus bestriding the world?

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by | 21 November 2005 · 5:47 pm

Berman on Rigoulot on the Spirit of Vichy

Paul Berman’s review article (free registration required) in The New Republic on several books by anti-anti-American French authors quotes a passage from Pierre Rigoulot’s L’Antiaméricanisme: Critique d’un prêt-à-penser rétrograde et chauvin that Berman characterizes as “pretty ferocious”:

Rigoulot … thinks that the French intellectual and political elite, by muttering constantly about the evils of the United States, has rendered itself numb to any of the pricks of conscience that ought to have stimulated France into playing a more responsible role in the world.

This numbing, this reticence to take action, this refusal to take risks has a name: it is the spirit of Vichy. The spirit of Vichy continues to haunt France despite the defeat of the French state and the expiatory trials conducted during these last years. Vichy is not just complicity with the genocide of the Jews: it is a pacifist and past-oriented vision of the world. And it is above all a refusal to participate in the troubles and misfortunes that are engendered by all resistance and by any pursuit of a “warrior adventure.” Vichy is the belief that one can remove oneself from history and from its necessarily tragic dimensions, the belief that one can evoke moral principles in order to avoid combat–yesterday against Nazism, today against radical Islamism. This spirit is stronger than ever.

And not just in France, of course. The normal response of most civilized people is not just to let sleeping dogs lie, but to keep rabid dogs outside the fence, beyond civilization. But fellow human beings also live out there, beyond the pale, down in the Gap. What is to be done about them?

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by | 21 November 2005 · 5:29 pm

The Satisfying Pleasures of Hatred

Paul Berman has a long and fascinating review article (free registration required) in The New Republic on several books by French authors whom he characterizes as “anti-anti-Americans.” Here’s a bit of what he has to say about André Glucksmann’s Le discours de la haine (‘the discourse of hatred’):

The wildest of hatreds do not need a cause outside of ourselves. This is Glucksmann’s point. Hatred’s causes may merely be hatred’s excuses. We hate because we choose to hate. We could equally choose not to do so. And why choose to hate? On this question, Glucksmann reveals himself as the disciple, as no one could have predicted, of Sartre. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre wrote that people who give in to the pleasures of hatred do so because they cannot abide their own frailties. Weakness and imperfection are the human condition. But weakness and imperfection leave us unsatisfied, maybe even disgusted with ourselves. Hatred, however, can make us feel strong. Hatred is thrilling. Hatred is reassuring. When we choose to hate, we discover that, by hating, we overcome our own disappointment at ourselves. We choose to hate because we want to feel the exhilarating vibrations of power instead of weakness, the perfect ideal instead of the imperfect reality. And so, in order to hate, we hold aloft a glorious vision that can never exist: the vision of a perfect mankind unstained by weakness and flaws, a vision of purity and power. And we give ourselves over to the satisfying pleasures of hating everyone who stands in the way of the perfect vision.

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by | 20 November 2005 · 12:10 pm

Smithsonian Scholars at Work, 1918

I can remember sitting in Harrington‘s office typing, but I cannot remember what I typed. Surely we must have made a pretense of at least putting the Chumash material in order, since most of his vouchers had been made out for paying Chumash informants. At home we worked exclusively and almost frantically on the Tanoan material. Harrington bought a roll of butcher’s paper, which he meticulously divided into sheets that would lie nicely on our combination kitchen and dining table. On the sheets he diagrammed all the ramifications of the Taos pronoun: the various pronominal postfixes in combination with free standing forms, also with verbs and nouns. I never quite saw the sense of these oversized diagrams, for they contained nothing that could not be shown on sheets of ordinary writing paper. But Harrington enjoyed making them–it was about the nearest he ever came to having fun. Ultimately, he had a stack approximately six inches high. Before I left Washington I pulled the stuff together and wrote a paper on “The Taos Pronoun.” With amazing generosity, Harrington presented it for publication under my own name, and Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, Chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology, accepted it. I believe I was even paid something. The number “twenty-five” comes to mind, but whether I received twenty-five dollars or produced twenty-five pages of stilted and incomparable dullness, I couldn’t say. There must still be copies filed away in musty archives….

Harrington had another Indian colleague in the Bureau, a Huron (if I remember correctly), a sluggish type who had not gone into the field for years and had no desire to do so. He published, however. I seem to remember the texts of myths with dull translations which shifted into Latin whenever they promised to become interesting. His name is a blank to me.

Still another colleague whose name I do not recall was a short, red-faced, balding man who held the theory that life in America tended over the course of several generations to make the descendants of all immigrants dolicocephalic, no matter how round-headed their ancestors had been. As I was learning, this man and many others who devoted themselves to the pursuit of science tended to evolve fantasies into theories and then to find or twist facts to support them. The first question put to me by this anthropologist was how long had my people been in America? When I replied, “Five generations,” nothing would do but that he must get his calipers and measure my head immediately. To his disappointment, I was brachycephalic. In fact, he found me excessively, inordinately brachycephalic, more round-headed than any one of my ancestry had any right to be. I remembered that my father’s head looked rather long, my mother’s decidedly round, and I refrained from telling him that I had been a stubborn baby who refused to sleep in any position except on my back….

On a bitterly cold night we went to visit a group of Kiowas who were in Washington on official business for their tribe. Harrington said it was our opportunity to contact authentic Plains Indians. He was so enthusiastic that I shared his excitement. The Kiowas were housed in a hotel that had seen better days. It was now a combination of fleabag and firetrap, catering to Indians with little money to spend. We walked along the narrow, smelly, dimly lit hallway with its threadbare red carpeting, and knocked upon a certain door. Although our visit had been prearranged, the response was so slow in coming that it seemed as though we were not to be admitted. At last the door was opened. We entered a hot, musty room where three or four Indians sat draped in blankets. Harrington took out his basic questionnaire and proceeded to ask for certain words in the Kiowa language. Responses to these questions and to all attempts at conversation were so deliberate as to make it appear that the speakers lived in another time-world where a day was as a thousand years, or at the very least two seconds were as five minutes. Even the words were spaced out, with gaps between words and also between syllables. The answers, if one had the patience to listen for them, were coherent and intelligent, but always interminably drawn out. An hour of interviewing produced almost nothing. After we left, Harrington said the Indians had been under the influence of some drug, probably, he thought, peyote.

SOURCE: Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird (U. New Mexico Press, 1993), pp. 80-86

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by | 19 November 2005 · 5:02 pm

Now Where Was I?

Over Veterans Day weekend, I vowed to finish revisions to a linguistics paper provisionally accepted to a volume in memory of a departed colleague–and to stop blogging until I had done so. Well, the revisions dragged on for a week, for no particularly good reason. Generalist blogging is just so much easier than finalizing words to be printed in indelible ink on acid-free paper for the benefit of an obscure bunch of academic specialists.

The other reason for light blogging has been my reading matter lately, which has not easily lent itself to excerpting:

Here’s a short paragraph from Days of Obligation (p. 29) that captures one of my favorite things about Rodriguez. He has a keen sense of tragedy, and no desire for utopias.

I have never looked for utopia on a map. Of course I believe in human advancement. I believe in medicine, in astrophysics, in washing machines. But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy. If I respond to the metaphor of spring, I nevertheless learned, years ago, from my Mexican father, from my Irish nuns, to count on winter. The point of Eden for me, for us, is not approach, but expulsion.

In the wake of Veterans Day, that passage seemed especially appropriate.

UPDATE: While I’ve been reading about John Peabody Harrington, Impearls has posted huge chunks of Harrington’s contemporary (and my dissertation advisor’s teacher) A. L. Kroeber‘s Handbook of the Indians of California, with some great maps, too.

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by | 19 November 2005 · 4:05 pm

Death Rattle vs. Flatline

We were by then fully into the Depression. Hoover closed the banks, including a very insignificant one in Coleman, Texas. My father had helped to found this bank, and in a sense it had been a more satisfactory child to him than his flesh and blood daughter. He survived its closure by just one week, dying quite literally of a broken heart. The night he died we were all together in the home in San Diego. He lay on a hospital bed set up in the alcove off the living room that we called the “music room.” My mother sat beside him, holding his limp hand and sighing heavily at intervals, doing her duty to the very end of their life together. The children were upstairs, except the three-months-old baby, who was in her basket in the dining room, where George and I lay sleepless on a quilt. The folding doors into the living room were partially open. Soon after midnight we heard the death rattle, then the final expiration, and then, no more….

We purchased a lot for ten dollars in the unkempt old cemetery at Poway. There on a day of driving November rain we buried my father under the catalpa trees. Mother said this was appropriate, for his mother, the mother he had scarcely known, lay under the catalpa trees somewhere near Uvalde, Texas. The gloom of the brief graveside ceremony was broken for an instant when one of the Laird children piped up, “Did we forget the bananas?” To him, the trip to San Diego meant an opportunity to purchase bananas, not the loss of a grandfather.

SOURCE: Encounter with an Angry God, by Carobeth Laird (U. New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 178

How many people in developed countries these days die at home, surrounded by family, with final expiration heralded by the sound of the death rattle? Nowadays, the flatline on the EKG has replaced the death rattle, and artificial respirators have to be switched off by unrelated experts.

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by | 10 November 2005 · 8:32 am

How Not to Quell a Riot: Los Angeles, 1992

In November 2004, the Suburban Emergency Management Project issued a three-part series of biots on “The Flawed Emergency Response to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots”:

Part A

Editor’s Note: This case report is well-written and eminently valuable because it provides keen insights into how the 1992 LA riots actually got started (beyond the obvious cause of the [Rodney King] verdict). If I had to finger one cause beyond the verdict itself, it would be the abdication of civil leadership during a time of severe social stress. What is stunning about the 1992 LA riots is their uncanny resemblance to the LA Watts riots of 1965, which the civil leadership of 1992 (e.g., [LAPD Chief Daryl] Gates, [LA Mayor Thomas] Bradley, [Congresswoman Maxine] Waters) must surely have experienced as young adults. Experienced and informed leadership is at no time more important than during social stress situations when managers and line staff require effective and timely direction and support.

Part B

Editor’s Note: Absent a functioning police force, the riot spun out of control.

Part C

Editor’s Note: It is easy to be appalled at the flawed organization response to the 1992 LA riots. If one views the situation through the lens of emergent collective behaviors during disasters, it is easier to comprehend. Command and control models of organization response do not work well during times of severe civilian social stress. From the original leadership vacuum created in particular by the personality and flawed leadership of Chief Gates, the events escalated beyond anyone’s control until finally the rioters were tired and spent and there was not much else left to destroy. That is when the riots stopped, even though we may wish to believe that the massive organizational response finally brought about this desired result.

Here are some illustrations of how not to proceed.

1. Paralyze your leadership.

The conflict between Gates and Bradley in the months leading up to the verdict “had transformed [police] department dynamics, with some assistant and deputy chiefs disillusioned, others trying to win approval as possible successors, and others on their way out. Indeed, by the time of the jury’s deliberation, the leadership for the LAPD was in a state of near paralysis,” reports Rosegrant. Further, both Gates and Bradley reached the conclusion that “the LAPD should not make a public show of mobilizing” (p. 14) should violence occur. “This sense of cautiousness had already seeped throughout the department: LAPD arrests had dropped significantly during the previous year as police changed tactics and avoided problematic arrests that might lead to discipline or a charge of excessive force. The feeling that ‘I get paid the same for not making arrests, and am less apt to get in trouble,’ was almost a guiding rule,’ rued one police officer.” Bradley, Maxine Waters, and other black leaders opposed a highly mobilized LAPD both because they feared police might overreact and create another Rodney King-like incident, and because they worried that the mere sight of riot-ready police could incite a violent reaction among already tense residents.” (p. 14)

2. Put your own political interests first.

Chief Gates, who appeared unaware of the seriousness of the disturbance, had left at 6:30 pm for a political fundraiser outside of LA. Gates thought there were sporadic problems, but his attitude, according to one observer, was “By God, get in there and deal with it. It’s not going to take the chief of police of the city of Los Angeles to run this operation, and if it does, I’ve got the wrong people below me. There was no centralized direction.” (p. 4) In response to a flood of 9-1-1 calls, a lieutenant at headquarters finally declared a tactical alert at 6:45 pm, a step that many believed Gates should have taken much earlier. When Gates returned to headquarters after 10 pm, he “took [Hunt] absolutely apart in public,” according to one observer. (p. 8) Gates later remarked, “Since I’d been though it, I kind of though that fellow members of the top command knew what to do. They didn’t.” Fire Chief Manning said, “We all know that a plan that people don’t know about is as bad as no plan at all—in fact, it’s probably worse. In this case, I think Daryl [Gates] believed that they had a plan. He may well have believed that his people were fully trained in it. In the real world, they weren’t.” (p.8) Later when the LAPD tried to isolate the Florence-Normandie area, the effort came too late to be effective.

3. Let the media set your priorities.

During the first night of the riot on April 29, 1992, the emergency operations center (EOC), though officially activated, became “kind of an isolated island of non-information” according to the LAPD’s Commander Bayan Lewis (B, p. 6). Officers gleaned information from the television coverage of the riots and tended to dispatch resources to locations being featured on television to the detriment of other areas of the city that also had needs. The EOC communications system, which consisted of handwritten notes sent by runners to various officials in the main room or satellite rooms, rapidly became overloaded so that many requests were never delivered.

4. Allow the riot to spread.

Meanwhile, approximately 50,000 young men in South Central flooded the streets, many with new weapons looted from gun stores and pawn shops, which had remained unguarded by police officers. The riot demographics changed after the first night, which was dominated by enraged members of the African-American community, e.g., the attacks by young black males on Reginald Denny. But by the second day, people of all races, ages, gender, and income levels were looting and other illegal behavior.

The media coverage seemed to exacerbate the looting. One African-American woman, for example, told a media person that “watching television convinced her to go steal diaper, cans of food, and produce because she … ’didn’t know if there were going to be any stores standing.’” (C, p. 7) A fire department battalion commander noted, “You could almost get a game plan off television, because they would gather concerns from the local officials about where it was happening and what was happening. I think that gave a lot of direction to the rioters.” (C, p. 7)

5. Deploy unprepared Guard troops.

By 4 am on April 30, 1992, 2,000 Guard troops had reported to about ten armories in the city area. The goal of getting the troops on the streets by 4 pm, April 30, was hindered by failure to assign which agency would coordinate the Guard’s involvement, deciding what its missions would be, and estimating how many more troops ultimately might be called up. Unknown to Thrasher and Wilson, most of the troops weren’t really trained to respond to a riot. As a result, commanders at the armories trained the troops on the spot. Troops had to read and sign a copy of the Rules of Engagement, which emphasized the importance of restraint, so that soldiers “wouldn’t leave themselves open to charges, such as those that arose after the Watts riots, of having fired on rioters without adequate cause.” (C, p. 5)

6. Send in the Marines to quell domestic disturbances.

The 1992 LA riots were officially over when Mayor Bradley lifted the curfew on May 4. But city officials and residents were reluctant to see federal and Guard troops leave. General Covault wanted his troops to leave as soon as possible. For example, one incident in particular alarmed him. “Police and Marines were responding to a disturbance, which turned out to be a domestic dispute, when two shotgun rounds were fired through the door. One of the police officers shouted, ‘Cover me,’ meaning that the Marines should have their weapons ready to respond if necessary. But the Marines, understanding ‘cover me’ to mean providing cover by using firepower, shot off what was later estimate to have been more than 200 rounds.” (C, p. 21) Remarkably, no one in the apartment was injured. Finally, on May 9, federal troops began to depart. Five days later, the Guard also began to disengage. On May 27, the last solders headed home.

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