Breakfast All Day Podcast 6/19/20

I want to say something about thug-cops. Please hang in with me on this. It’s not going where you think it is.

Recently I was watching a movie. It doesn’t matter which movie because it was a trope. Our hero was a cop. He committed several kinds of mayhem by the time the movie was over so he can accurately be described as a thug-cop.

But he was part of a corrupt police department that was part of a corrupt power structure. Playing by the rules was going to perpetuate injustice. So he went “outside the law” and beat people up, etc., along the way in order to right a wrong.

Like I said, a trope we’ve seen in too many movies, TV shows, and books to even bother trying to count.

We root for the hero even though he’s a thug-cop because he is a do-gooder. But all this hangs by a single slender thread. Can our hero (and it’s almost always a he) instinctively knows who the good guys are and who the bad guys are? Remember, it is common for our hero to side with someone he barely knows.

And in heroic fiction our thug-cop always gets it right (except when he gets it wrong as part of a plot twist that is straightened out by the end). Perry Mason, for instance, had his clients lie, withhold critical information, and do numerous other dastardly things. But Perry instinctively knew they were innocent in spite of the initially overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But here’s the thing. What George Floyd and so much else has amply demonstrated is that people are bad at instinctively knowing who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. But I suspect that most of the cops, and others in a position to deal out violence, see themselves as behaving exactly like the hero does in these stories. They are the good guy thug-cop “going outside the law” to protect the innocent and the vulnerable. They are heroes, not villains.

Fictional heroes always get it right. In reality, all too often it turns out that these would be heroes get it wrong, sometimes horribly wrong. And it’s even worse than you are now thinking.

Consider Batman. By his behavior he is a thug. He beats people up all the time in a completely lawless manner. And he is fantastically rich. And he is tightly wired into the power structure in the person of Inspector Gordon. He fits the thug-cop trope to a tee.

Now consider Superman and other “costumed crusaders”. Superman is not wealthy but he has superpowers. A difference without a distinction. The costumed superheroes that we know and love are just thugs who instinctively know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

To what extent do the real world thug-cops we now justifiably revile owe their view of themselves, and the behavior they all too frequently engage in, through the prism of their experience with literally thousands of fictional heroes? And how much are we who consume and support this material responsible?

I have found that last question personally disturbing and unsettling. But that pretty much goes with the times. Personal discomfort is necessary if I am going to be able to change into a better version of myself.

P.S. James Garner is the exception that proves the rule. In character after character, particularly with Bret Maverick, Jim Rockford, and the sheriff in “Support your local Sheriff”, he modeled behavior in which the good guy did good without beating anybody up or engaging in any of the usual thug-cop behavior. Now, can you think of a single other actor who did this? On the other hand, I bet you can come up with a dozen successful actors who specialized in playing thug-cop parts in less than 30 seconds. You probably didn’t even have to stop to take a breath.