my brother is applying to be a cop. he’s already a deputy with a semi-major city’s sheriff’s department, but he wants a transfer to somewhere more suburban. my dad was formerly an FBI agent. you can listen to him here, guesting on the relentless picnic. he sucks. full disclosure, I worked for the campus PD in college. it was the best paying student job. but no thank you, never again. I lucked out that an Oedipus complex trained me to be distrustful of the police state.
unfortunately, I also better understand cop psychology than most people who put ACAB in their Twitter bios. empathizing with viewpoints I disagree with comes so easily to me because my entire psychological development is a struggle to parse through the cryptofascist background noise of my upbringing. speaking of Oedipus, I would love to hear what Freud has to say about how I was affected when my dad left me, 7 months old, for Quantico, to return as an American Gestapo agent. I have suspicions.
anyway, I’m supposed to fill out a character reference questionnaire for my brother’s new department. he’s fine, much smarter than most cops. I just don’t understand how he could want to be a cop, and not in the abstract, from my political or moral objection to policing. like, he was never someone to enjoy wielding power over others. he often threw a fit when he felt like we were asking him to make a decision that affected everyone. but he doesn’t know anything else to do. he’s lazy, he didn’t enjoy school. most of his life was devoted to playing baseball, so when that didn’t work out career-wise, where was he supposed to go? I mean my answer would be “not be a cop,” but what does my opinion matter.
and that’s just it, my opinion does not matter. not to the police department asking me for a reference, not to my brother, not to my dad, not to this fucked world where everything seems awful and doomed and I can see it so clearly and it does not matter. I have tried to push back against their blinkered worldview. during the protests last summer I threatened to stop visiting if my dad didn’t take down his “thin blue line flag.” wrote a whole letter explaining my position and why it never feels like I can be heard. they did not take down their fascist memorabilia, and I have visited them since.
my thinking is I shouldn’t be so plain spoken about this, and instead use it all as the basis for fiction, which I fear will be weakened if I pull the veil back and let you see what goes into it. but I also think it’s valuable for me to be honest and forthright about this. then, when I get accused of being a plant, an op, a spook, or otherwise complicit, at least no one can ask why I hid this stuff. while we’re at it, what my dad does now, ie provide “security consultation” for very wealthy people, is even more evil, and by association probably sullies me worse, even though I refuse his offers for work. all these moral dilemmas are brought into focus by my mere existence, and I have no idea how to deal with any of them.
part of me wants to sandbag this reference questionnaire, somehow be a minor wrench in the oppressive machine recruiting my brother. but the questions just make me sad. “How often do you have contact with the candidate?” rarely. I miss my brother always, he was the only person I really had when my parents divorced. even though we have very little, next-to-nothing in common, he and I have no problem spending time together. enjoyable time. but I barely hear from him, in part because I harbor resentment over how I was always a satellite for my dad’s and brother’s interests, following around the baseball team my brother played on and my dad coached. but that childish indignation on my part seems to have created the space that made it possible for my brother to drift into law enforcement without any input from me.
when you’re a coward, everything’s always too little, too late.
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