The Chain of Command and the Executioner in the Classroom

“You know what the chain of command is? It's the chain I go get and beat you with 'til ya understand who's in ruttin' command here.”

Jayne Cobb, demonstrating why he should never be left in charge of anything, from “The Train Job.”

“We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us,” purred 18^th Century arch-reactionary Joseph de Maistre in the opening lines of his essay Considerations on France. “ The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance. Freely slaves, they act at once of their own will and under necessity: they actually do what they wish without being able to disrupt general plans.”

In this scheme, each “slave” is found “at the center of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the decision of the eternal geometry, which can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature,” Maistre pontificates. But that flexibility is enjoyed only by those enlightened few who understand the “eternal geometry,” and have been appointed thereby to preside over the rest of us.

On occasion, of course, one who is “freely” enslaved decides not to remain within the compass of his or her assigned role in the “eternal geometry.” It is at that point that the “flexible chain” becomes the “chain of command” as the expression was defined by Jayne – a scourge employed to beat the uppity slave into compliant submission. This is when the “flexible” nature of that chain is made apparent: While the chains that bind the common run of humanity are unyielding, those who are supposedly nearer to “the throne of the Supreme Being” find their restraints sufficiently supple to accommodate any act of violence necessary to enforce conformity – including summary homicide.

 Maistre’s obsession with hierarchy might reflect his lengthy involvement in oath-bound secret societies, rather than his devotion to Catholicism (see pages 3-4 in this edition of “Considerations”). Be that as it may, his authoritarian perspective largely defines modern conservatism. He insisted that “all greatness, all power, all social order depends on the executioner.” The figure in whom the State’s capacity for lethal violence is made tangible is both “the terror of human society” and the “tie that holds it together,” Maistre observed. “Take away this incontrovertible force from the world, and at that very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears."

The “resource officers” who prowl the hallways of government-operated schools throughout the soyuz aren’t present to enhance the security of the inmates, but to be “authority figures” – that is, people who can inflict injury or death in order to force others to submit to their will. In principle, an SRO carries out the function of Maistre’s Executioner. That is certainly how many perceive themselves.

“You should be walking around in schools every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons,” ranted self-styled counter-terrorism “expert” John Giduck in his keynote address to the 2007 National Association of School Resources Conference. “You can no longer afford to think of yourselves as peace officers.... You must think of yourself [sic] as soldiers in a war because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers."

A more honest description would be that SROs are commissioned to act like prison guards with unlimited discretion to discipline misbehaving inmates.

When former Deputy Ben Fields placed hands on a girl who had refused a teacher’s instruction to put away her cell phone or leave the room, he was acting as Maistre’s Executioner ex officio, empowered to use any force he deemed appropriate to compel her submission. 

When the student, in a reflexive reaction to being seized by a much larger, armed aggressor, flailed pitifully at Fields, she supposedly committed an “assault upon an officer,” which – according to the disciples of Maistre – left Fields fully justified in doing anything he saw fit. Indeed, the teenager should be grateful that she was merely thrown to the floor, dragged across the room, hog-tied, and left with injuries requiring hospitalization, given that the punishment for her impudence should have been more severe.

“She was asked nicely by three different authority figures and given several chances to comply with their instructions,” lectured Matt Walsh of The Blaze. “She refused, she refused, she refused, she refused, she refused. It was at that point that the officer took her to the floor, dragged her out of the chair and across the ground….”

“Once she had brazenly disrespected the teacher’s authority and declined to comply with those instructions, she had to be removed from the room, one way or another,” Walsh continues, not ruling out the possibility that “another” could include being removed in a body bag. “A teacher cannot be backed down by a kid who says, `Nope, I won’t listen to you.’ A school cannot tolerate students who think the rules are optional.” At that “very moment order is superseded by chaos, thrones fall, society disappears” – or, in Walsh’s dumbed-down rendering of Maistre’s warning, “it would surely lead to anarchy in the classroom.”

Take away the discretionary “authority” of “a school resource officer” to inflict summary punishment on a sullen, uncooperative 16-year-old female student, and the terrorists will win, or something to that effect.

“Some might even say that Fields is the actual victim here,” contends an essay published in The New American magazine. “If you’re going to have police in schools, you have to expect police action in schools; the deputy was simply doing his job.”

This is an interesting, and entirely unintended, admission. The advertised job of school resource officers is to protect schoolchildren from serial killers and sexual predators. Their actual job, as this episode illustrates, is to impose punishment for misbehavior that does not involve criminal conduct. Witness the fact that Deputy Fields not only arrested the still-unnamed primary victim, but another student named Niya Kenny whose only “offense” was to urge her schoolmates to record the attack.

Significantly, Kenny – unlike the primary victim – faces criminal charges. The first girl was released into the custody of her foster parents. Kenny was threatened with physical harm, handcuffed, detained for several hours, released on bond, then suspended from school. Her “crime” was to undermine the officer’s “authority” by insisting that he should be held accountable for his actions.

“It should have been an adult” who intervened, Kenny told The State newspaper. “One of the adults should have said, `Whoa, whoa, whoa – that’s not how you do this.’ But instead, it had to be a student in the classroom to stand up and say, `This is not right.’” Like others sentenced to attend Spring Valley High School, Kenny was aware of Fields’ reputation, which had reportedly earned him the sobriquet “Officer Slam.” Accordingly, she urged other students to record the confrontation. More than one of the students acted on that suggestion, which suggests that their capacity for critical thinking had not yet been extirpated.

Even if we were to assume, contrary to the actual law, that classroom insolence is a criminal offense, there was nothing about Kenny’s behavior that warrants such a description. She didn’t “disrupt” an already-ruined learning environment; she was protesting the abusive behavior of a public official. Conservative media outlets routinely depict government-run schools as re-education centers devoted to subverting all that is good, true, and beautiful. Why aren’t they applauding Miss Kenny for her principled individualism, and her insistence that the rules should apply to everyone?

It is tempting, perhaps irresistibly so, to conclude that this reflects a conservative variant on identity politics. Fields, a member of the sanctified Blue Tribe, has been sacrificed to placate the apparently omnipotent Black Lives Matter movement, which has been – in all apparent seriousness – compared to ISIS. Criticizing Fields for arresting Niya Kenny without just cause would complicate the preferred narrative, and could prompt troublesome second thoughts about the propriety of the deputy’s behavior during the entire episode. 

 

Wherever an altar and an executioner are found, "civilization" exists.

Ironically, if predictably, there was no outpouring of outrage in the conservative media over the protests of Spring Valley students who walked out of class – in defiance of “rules” and authority” – as a purported gesture of solidarity with Fields. As someone not too told to remember High School I suspect that the demonstrations weren’t inspired by devotion to the deputy, but by an understandable desire to relieve the unremitting tedium of the classroom. 

None of the protesters was thrown to the floor, handcuffed, or even threatened with a suspension, despite the fact their behavior was immeasurably more disruptive than that of an individual student who refuses to put away her phone. Rule-breaking in defense of state-licensed Executioners is obviously more palatable for those who subscribe to Maistre’s doctrine.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast discusses the incident at Spring Valley High School and the "experts" who defend Deputy Fields:

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Dum spiro, pugno!