Meet Your New Boss, Same As Your Old Boss

"It’s an audacious choice to pause in front of an Applebee’s restaurant on Flatbush Avenue and grant an impromptu interview to a video journalist shortly before you allegedly throw a Molotov cocktail into a police car." Or so New York magazine would have you believe. Merrian-Webster offers a couple of synonyms for "audacious": "daring", and "rash". Yet it seems obvious in retrospect that Urooj Rathman and her accomplice, Colinford Mattis, were neither daring nor rash in their choice to throw homemade bombs into police cars. The word we are looking for here? The more appropriate word? How about: Smart?

Let's start by asking a question with no obvious answer: Who is on the other side of this summer's protests?. In the past, there has always been an obvious answer to this question. The Bonus Army protestors of 1932 were opposed by Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur, who injured dozens of them and killed a 12-week-old child in the process of clearing their protest. The Civil Rights marchers were opposed by the infamous "Bull" Connor and many who felt the same way throughout the South. The protestors in Hong Kong were opposed by the Chinese mainland, while the yellow vest protestors in France were opposed by the French government in general and President Macron in particular. In all of these cases, the protestors represent a determined, but definite, minority interest: veterans against a country which couldn't afford to pay them, African-Americans whose push for equality was roundly detested by the people with whom they shared the South, and so on.

We know who is on the side of the current protests: every celebrity, every major corporation, every bank, everyone posting under their real name on social media, every city council, every mayor, every governor, most of the House, most of the Senate. If you accept the idea that these protests are about unequal treatment, prosecution, and imprisonment of African-Americans, an idea which has tremendous emotional appeal to many but which as of yet does not appear to some mathematically-minded observers to have the same rock-solid statistical backing as, say, the fact that real-estate agents tend to hold their own property for longer, and sell it for more, than that of their clients, then based on their policies both Trump and Biden are solidly in favor of the protests. President Trump has enacted more "criminal justice reform", which loosely translates as "letting habitual offenders out of prison", than any President before him.

Bank of America is donating a billion dollars to "communities of color". The Ford Foundation and George Soros have each given nine-figure sums to Black Lives Matter; wrestler John Cena has given them a million bucks. Look around your house: virtually everything you can see or touch was made by a corporation which is now eagerly contributing to as many BLM-related causes as it can manage. UberEats no longer charges for delivery on food made by Black-owned restaurants; since it still incurs expenses in the delivery of that food, this means that restaurants owned by whites, Chinese people, and everyone else are all now being forced to directly subsidize their competition. This probably wouldn't survive even a timid legal challenge --- can you imagine UberEats offering free delivery for, say, restaurants owned by Italians? --- but who would be so foolish as to put their name to such a thing?

Standing in vicious and hateful racist/supremacist solidarity against this multi-billion-dollar corporate-sponsored movement of the people, we have... a few cops, some redneck-ish rural people, and the undefined System which, it must be said, is so full of people who Hate The System that Seattle's Black and female police chief just threw up her hands and quit a $285,000-a-year-job (which, to be fair, was about to become a $185,000-a-year-job). The System, as described by its current opponents, appears to the be in the same pickle as BSD. Anyone with a lick of political or personal survival instinct here will be on the side of the protestors from here on out. In other words, it's 1968-9 all over again, only it's an alt-universe version of 1968-9 where Abbie Hoffman is the Mayor of Chicago and Joanne Chesimard is receiving billion-dollar support from Spotify and Apple Music.

So what happened to the protestors of 1968-9? Why, they went seamlessly from protesting The Establishment to becoming the next generation of The Establishment. Bill Ayers, who was involved in multiple bombings and was probably directly responsible for a couple of deaths in his own camp, became a venerated "educator" who would influence decades of progressive thought and directly inspire President Obama. He had plenty of co-conspirators: Wikipedia notes with some bland humor that "Widely known members of the Weather Underground include Kathy Boudin, Linda Sue Evans, Brian Flanagan, David Gilbert, Ted Gold, Naomi Jaffe, Jeff Jones, Joe Kelly, Diana Oughton, Eleanor Raskin, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd, Matthew Steen, Susan Stern, Laura Whitehorn, Cathy Wilkerson, and the married couple Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. Most former Weathermen have integrated into mainstream society without repudiating their violent activities."

The harder you fought against The System in 1969, the more powerful you would eventually be within that system. Both Bernie Sanders and Bill Clinton traveled to Moscow at a time when doing so was tantamount to raising two middle fingers at the American flag; they would both go on to become multi-millionaires on the public dole. This was a new thing in our country's history: replacing our political (and academic) infrastructure with the people who had been its most bitter and devoted enemies just a few years before. Not that there wasn't a template to do so: both Hitler and Lenin were able to transition from street-level revolutionaries to custodians of government, the former through entirely legal means. But it hadn't happened here.

Viewed in this light, the actions of the two New York attorneys discussed above make perfect sense. Both of them had already to some extent been selected for greatness by The System, but in order to achieve real power in future iterations of The System they would need to rise against it. (Spoiler alert: this is the plot of the movie Snowpiercer, only the heroes of the film decline the opportunity to take over.) This is the critical part to understand: it wasn't about having power, because both Rahman and Mattis were already on the fast track. It was about having a chance to become truly important, to be Bill Clinton instead of some law professor at a third-rate school somewhere.

Thus, the interview before their discount-store Molotov spree. Like Bill Ayers, Urooj Rahman and Colinford Mattis planned on a mostly symbolic bombing. Rahman gave an appropriately charged speech before doing so:

. “This shit won’t ever stop unless we fucking take it all down,” she said. “We’re all in so much pain from how fucked up this country is toward Black lives. This has got to stop, and the only way they hear us is through violence, through the means that they use. ‘You got to use the master’s tools.’ That’s what my friend always says.”

The reader would be forgiven for asking who, precisely, "they" are, given that Urooj worked in public law and Mattis had been fast-tracked into a six-figure job with a New York law firm. How could they think of The System as something apart from themselves? Mattis is a prep school and Princeton graduate. Rahman had come to the United States as a poverty-stricken four-year-old immigrant but had then been given a cascade of splendid and tailored opportunities for advancement. You don't get more System than that. But that's part of the technique: to stand apart from The System just long enough to ensure additional power and credibility upon one's return. It's easy to see the thought process at work here. By publicly documenting their vehement opposition, Rahman and Mattis would "punch their ticket" in The Struggle. In years to come, their commitment to progressive thought and behavior would be above criticism. "Well, Urooj did just write a brief for the legality of outsourcing a defense contract to China --- but she firebombed those ACAB pigs back in '20, you know." It worked for Bill Ayers, it would work for them.

Unfortunately for them, these two trained attorneys didn't realize they had fallen afoul of some fairly non-negotiable consequences during their abortive Molotov spree. Bill Ayers had a plan for everything, including a plan to escape. These two didn't have any plan at all. Not to worry: they've immediately received succor from the most connected and powerful people out there. New York magazine admits that their defense strategy is to wait until Biden wins the Presidency, at which point they'll be pardoned. Better than that, they will have been indelibly marked as Loyal To The Cause. They're the good guys, the lawyers who firebombed the pigs.

Can you imagine how this comes off to the New York police force? No doubt all of them can imagine being in that car the moment the Molotov is thrown in. The immediate and irrational panic which sweeps through your mind like the fire surrounding it. The struggle to find a door handle which just seconds ago would have fallen easily to hand. The fight to get out and roll on the ground without being hung up and cooked alive by the dozen little mechanical accoutrements of a policeman's daily environment. Then, perhaps, the dreaded duty to go back into the car and get a partner or even a recently-arrested suspect. It's tantamount to murder. Yet the two people who could easily have created such a situation are being lionized by The System. They are being held up as heroes and future leaders:

Rahman is taking it day by day, receiving occasional calls from her Sufi spiritual adviser, praying with him, trying to stay in the present moment and focus on gratitude. Her mother keeps saying, “Focus on today, focus on today, focus on today,” according to a friend who saw them recently. Mattis, though, is thinking about what he wants to do next. “I gave him a really, really long hug,” says Iheoma of his recent visit. Mattis being Mattis, he was hashing over all his future options, this or that, given the likelihood that he will be disbarred. “And I was like, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Iheoma says, “ ‘maybe you could run for mayor one day.’

Who would be foolish enough to bet against it? The irony here is that the protestors of 2020 are, to some degree, driven by a universal truth. There really is a System out there. It swallows people whole, grinds them fine in its machinery, crushes them bloody beneath its treads. Reforming, or perhaps even destroying, that System would be a laudable thing. But it won't be done by pledging fealty to a billion-dollar corporate protest. All that gets you is the right to join the System and perpetuate its depredations. Of course, that's what you really want: to be on the right side of history. Then, eventually, you can run it. You think you'll be different when you're in charge, but you won't be. Not in any way that really matters. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.