There are very few eight year olds who, if I tried my
hardest, I could not beat up. I am not an egotistical person and I understand my
limits, but I am confident that I can put any eight year old in the hospital if
I wanted to. And I do. Badly.
My summer job is being a Camp Counselor. I am responsible
for peoples’ children. Yet some still believe that God exists. Doesn’t really
make much sense. When I went to camp many years ago, there was one kid who was
significantly bigger than me – we’ll call him “Pituitary-problem Retarded Idiot
Kid” (PRIK). When a camper had something that PRIK wanted, such as a ball, PRIK
would grunt and swat at the kid until he dropped it (PRIK did not simply grab
the object because he had yet to evolve opposable digits). Except for the times
when I came to a fellow camper’s defense, PRIK never specifically targeted me.
However, PRIK ruined a lot for me – he obliterated my conceptions of fairness
and justice and I still hate him for it.
So, as a Camp Counselor now, I sometimes trip the kids who
are big for their age. In my eyes, they are all PRIKs who need to be
annihilated, but in a way that won’t jeopardize my tips at the end of the
session. At that age, much in life is decided by size and physical power, and I
consider it my responsibility to even up the playing field. If this means that I
have to make Little Tommy bleed during Dodge-ball, then so be it.
I realize, though, that I am doing a disservice to the
smaller, weaker kids who revel in watching me submerge their tormentors in Bug
Juice. I am merely postponing their understanding of the fact that PRIKs are
everywhere and that their entire lives are going to be entrenched in a system of
domination. Indeed, many of these small, weak kids will someday climb that
ladder and dominate those below; these are late-blooming PRIKs.
PRIK was pretty bad, but I can’t imagine how Chip
Frederick’s fellow campers felt all those years ago. Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick
is a military policeman partly responsible for those pictures you’ve seen of
tortured Iraqi prisoners. When Little Chip caught someone from the other team in
Capture the Flag, I wonder what he did to him. I wonder if he was like PRIK back
then or if that transition happened after he got hired to kill by the Army. I
wonder who in my group of Explorers (second and third grade boys) will be the
next Chip Frederick or William Calley or any number of thugs and murderers who
hide their criminality behind a uniform*.
I wonder who in my group will be the next Ken Lay or Dennis
Kozlowski, a man who I hope meets a Psycho-like fate behind his $6,000
shower curtains. I wonder who will destroy lives for his own luxuries and
excesses. I wonder whether anyone who wields power, the ability to coerce or
influence, has claim to it that is any more legitimate than PRIK’s was.
Legitimate authority is a laughable notion in an era of
imperialist wars, unilaterialism, and unelected Presidents. It is a distant
concept in a power structure that thrives on exploitation and subjugation. It is
a dangerous conception in a nation where laws target the oppressed and the
behavior of the police is often indistinguishable from that of thugs and
gang-members.
We’re not shocked by killer cops in NYC or police
corruption in LA anymore. To shock us you’d need to make up some crazy story
about a cop pepper-spraying an elderly blind woman and knocking out her
prosthetic eye with a blow to the head! Or a cop shooting and killing an unarmed
Latino man who failed to use his turn signal and then winning an award for
excellence (this, of course, all happened after said officer threw a woman with
one leg off her couch at gunpoint and then seized her electric scooter on drug
suspicions, though it turned out that she had a medical marijuana card). Both of
these stories came from just taking a brief look at the news in Portland,
Oregon. Before this, all I really knew about Oregon is what I learned from
playing the Oregon Trail computer game. Now, in addition to cholera and
fording rivers, I can add “insane thug cops” to the list of state dangers.
When I return to camp this summer, I will be the authority.
I will be the one who these children must blindly follow because their parents
enrolled them in a system in which my legitimacy as an authority figure is
automatically assumed. These kids don’t question me when I make group decisions,
when I insist on being the “kicker” in kickball at least twice per inning, or
when I sell small baggies of “talcum powder” to other counselors. Authority has
nothing to do with justice or fairness. Legitimate authority is a myth, and in a
world where I am in charge of children and George W. Bush is in charge of the
nation, non-PRIKs don’t stand a chance.