If you want to know what Occupy Wall Street has in store for the spring and summer months, a good place to look is the case of Cecily McMillan.
Look out Saint Patrick. The Occupy movement's praying in pious overdrive to beatify a new saint for the 17th of March. McMillan, a 23 year old Northeast regional organizer for the Young Democratic Socialists and a graduate student at the New School in NYC, this last week has enjoyed the sympathy and celebrity that police misconduct affords the victimized. Arrested on felony charges of assaulting a police officer and obstruction of governmental administration, the very white girl clad in colors befitting the holiday was captured on video suffering either a seizure or a panic attack while police passively looked on, refusing to immediately remove her handcuffs or provide prompt medical care. The incident is the latest in a series of police brutality cases since the movement's birth last September. However, unlike the others, there's a blemish in what otherwise appears a perfect complexion of documented police misconduct: the "Other Video," which plainly shows McMillan delivering a whooping spur-of-the-moment elbow blast to the face of her arresting officer.
In an exclusive interview Friday with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, McMillan, accompanied by her lawyer, described her injuries. Bruises spot her body, including a yellowish blue handprint above her right breast, she is said to walk with a limp, she has scratches, her back is in pain, she had a concussion, and her ribs are bruised. On this last point, media outlets, including Democracy Now, have been reporting that they are broken or cracked, but McMillan repeated a couple of times they are only bruised. After she cleared this up, Goodman continued to use the word "cracked."
Aside from the bodily harm she sustained, McMillan discussed the length of time she was in police custody in a way that made her look unable to grasp the idea that when you're under arrest you're no longer the one calling the shots. She was arrested on a Saturday and arraigned on Sunday. Somehow, however, McMillan comes up with 40 hours. This, of course, would mean the graduate student and activist was arrested around 8 AM on Saturday and released just before midnight on Sunday. In other words, 40 hours is exaggerated. During this time, McMillian was moved around from hospitals to jails in "various police cars," unable to contact a lawyer, unaware of the charges she faced.
As an interviewer, Goodman seemed to me grasping for anything solid to hold onto that would suggest Cecily McMillan was brutalized by police, like implying that staying overnight in prison following an arrest is anything out of the ordinary in even the smallest of American towns. This is uncharacteristic of Amy Goodman, whose credibility as a journalist is based on a level of commitment to the truth on authentically substantive issues virtually unseen in today's corporate media-scape. Just like the length of time McMillan was in custody wasn't out of the ordinary, neither were her injuries. Or rather, her injuries were out of the ordinary. Very out of the ordinary. Exquisitely out of the ordinary. Usually when someone assaults a police officer the way Ms. McMillan did, they don't escape the cops' treatment with mild bruises.
In the absence of anything serious to discuss, Goodman leads McMillan along to her hospital visits:
AMY GOODMAN: You went back to the hospital yesterday?
CECILY McMILLAN: Oh, I’ve been to the hospital every day.
AMY GOODMAN: And what did they say yesterday?
CECILY McMILLAN: They finally cleared me of a concussion, so that I can be prescribed sleep aids, because up until last night I had been waking up every 15 minutes to half-an-hour sweating and with night terrors. So, it was very maddening.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve also turned off the monitors, because you said you couldn’t see the footage. Why?
CECILY McMILLAN: The footage?
AMY GOODMAN: Any kind of footage, you didn’t want to see.
CECILY McMILLAN: Well, my friends had told me that I might want to refrain from watching it, because some of them had cried or even gotten sick when watching it. And my therapist has said that if I were to watch any of the footage, it might trigger further psychological damage.
McMillan's concern for her psychological health here is important to understanding this case on two levels. For one, it is clear that minus serious, tangible injury, intangibles become valuable tools in garnering sympathy from observers and the courts. Second, McMillan's focus on her psychological well being smacks of a level of privilege unknown to the lower echelons of the 99%, who often have neither the time nor the education to abstract a personalized psychological profile of themselves from the tedium and struggle of day to day living.
Saint Cecily has options that those communities of people she presumably believes she speaks for do not: she has the means to seek the aid of a therapist in times of mental distress; she can spend much of her time on the streets protesting the system instead of waiting in a line all day to have her application for food stamps approved at the Department of Social Services; when she has run-ins with the law she can have her voice heard on Democracy Now and have profiles written of her in Rolling Stone; instead of changing the diapers of the four children she never had the education nor money to abort, she can pursue a graduate degree from a prestigious university in New York; after elbowing a member of the NYPD in the face she can still walk.
At the end of the interview, Cecily McMillan had this to say:
Cecily McMillan: I have been an activist, for at least some time now. I’ve been active since my first—the first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta my senior year, with Student Political Action Club. And I’ve always had a longstanding commitment to peaceful protest. And I released a statement yesterday reiterating my commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience and affirming my innocence. And I really have cautioned people to remain nonviolent, and not only that, but for activists to undergo nonviolent trainings, such was done in the civil rights movement, not because anybody at Occupy is violent, but because I think it’s very easy to manipulate circumstances to make you seem so. And I think that it’s—if we’re going to continue to garner the strength of the public, as we saw with the Million Hoodie March—that night was, I mean, phenomenal—then we’re going to have to remain nonviolent, because that’s the only way that we have unity.
The free pass Goodman gave her guest is in no other place more glaring than it is here. McMillan violently assaulted a police officer, and Goodman knows it. For what reason, then, would Goodman fail to invoke here the footage of McMillan aggressively elbowing the cop in the face? Did she want to mitigate the psychological trauma Saint Cecily has already endured? Amy Goodman's too exceptional a journalist to worry about her guests' feelings.
My theory's that Saint Cecily's assault on the cop is inexpedient to Occupy's cause. My theory's that Democracy Now was doing a bit of politicking on Friday morning, throwing OWS a bone in its time of need. My theory's that OWS is in need of another corps of UC Davis students to non-violently hold the line while some neandrelithic cop fat on In and Out burgers sprays their faces pointblank with high-concentrate pepper juice. My theory's that OWS needs another honorable veteran like Scott Olsen to take a gas can to the skull, or another young veteran to get clubbed so severely by cops high on rage and adrenal pus that his spleen is ruptured and he nearly bleeds out waiting for medical care in a holding cell. My theory's that police brutality caught on film does more good than the back room swindles of Bank of America does in print to galvanize support and mobilize forces for this war that the 99% is losing. My theory's that OWS is in such disarray that it's confusing its target audience, which isn't the cops, but the CORPORATE STATE. My theory's that OWS saw their chance to gain much needed steam this spring in a young college student white, educated and hygienic enough to outrage huge swathes of the American public when seen convulsing on the ground at the feet of our nation's finest.
The Occupy movement sees Saint Cecily as an opportunity, a tool, and the holy crusader herself is narcissistic enough to play along. Supporting this young woman, however, will prove an EPIC FAIL for the Occupy movement. It will be a disaster. Occupy has enough legitimate cases of unprovoked police brutality in its stockpile to have to resort to using the case of Saint Cecily McMillan, which only works when you omit the video preceding her bodily fit. Furthermore, a case can probably be made for the video's uselessness even with the omission: by Rodney King standards, what happened to McMillan doesn't amount to much. And besides, most people who have ever had a speeding ticket know cops aren't always the most pleasant or fair-minded people to deal with. The great irony, of course, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn't.
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