Rodney King Reconsidered

Coincidences

Here I am, confused about what I want to write. Do I rant about Windows or do I ruminate on whether the Rodney King affair would have culminated in riots seven short years ago before the alternative media came of age? Perhaps I'll do both.

This all started Sunday. I'd planned to spend the day on the computer making improvements to the blog after getting our new laptop squared away. Instead, I spent most of the day wrestling with Bill Gates over ownership of the PC which I paid for because his crappy operating system, for which I also paid won't do what I paid for it to do: take my orders. I finally did succeed in getting our new Dell to dual boot Windows and Linux: the former allows my wife to use some software from school as she writes her thesis, and the latter allows me to keep from pulling my hair out when I want to get some work done. For the record, the one Linux install I had to do was easier than eitherWindows install, and everything (including a printer and a scanner) worked out of the box with Linux. Two hours later, I was just finishing installing all the drivers and scanner software for Windows. I will be diligent about keeping both Linux and Windows up-to-date, but only with Windows do I have to worry about viruses. Or crashes. Or something suddenly not working for no apparent reason. Or ....

So I decided that I'd look into Rodney King. Lo and behold, there's an interview about a book that came out in 1998 in Salon! But a link on the same page brought up a stupid quote about Windows which I couldn't let pass without comment and which, as it turn out, actually does have something to do with my thoughts on Rodney King.

Tax Money out the Windows

So the quote, a lame joke by lousy businessman Scott McNealy, is this:

Shut down some of the bullshit the government is spending money on and use it to buy all the Microsoft stock. Then put all their intellectual property in the public domain. Free Windows for everyone! If we did that, we could forget all this legal stuff and just bronze Gates, turn him into a statue and stick him in front of the Commerce Department.

Well, if by "bullshit," McNealy means "the welfare state," I could say that I agreed with the first half of his first sentence. However, given his sanction of the government's use of the antitrust cudgel against Microsoft, I somehow doubt it. I'm not going to spend too much of my writing time ranting about Microsoft, but I'll make two points at this juncture. (1) Given my employer's deal with the colossus of Redmond, I have the "opportunity" to use Microsoft products free of charge. I don't because when I sit down at a computer, I want to get something done. (2) Just because I think Windows is garbage does not mean I favor the government taking any action against Microsoft on antitrust grounds. I oppose antitrust law.

Besides, I think that Microsoft won't maintain its overwhelming monopoly for long. Just as Old Media are getting their clocks cleaned by alternative news media, so will Microsoft by open source software. It's the same sort of phenomenon. On the one hand, Dan Rather tries to foist fake memos on the American public and gets caught by experts communicating over the internet. On the other hand, Microsoft has only its own employees to fix security problems or improve its software while Linux and other open source software is being worked on by hoards of programmers around the world. Many eyes see errors more quickly than a few. Many minds mean a faster pace of innovation. Many hands make quick work.

Rodney King Re-Revisited

But the above quote was in a sidebar to an article that came up as I looked around on the web for references to Rodney King. This is an interview with one Lou Cannon, a reporter for the Washington Post who reexamined the events seven years after they occurred in his book, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD. The interview was quite a hoot, being, as it was, a mere six years after Sergeant Stacey Koon of the LAPD wrote his own compelling account, Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. Both authors agree that the news media and government officials deceived the public about the facts of the case. The most notable deception, and the one which will always be remembered, was the repeated airing on television all over the country of the most inflammatory 82 seconds of a 12-minute videotape. Even just the rest of this videotape could have provided some of the context for the beating the officers administered to this dangerous man who was high on PCP. Koon puts it best in his book.

The Simi Valley ... jury that found me and three other officers innocent of wrongdoing arrived at the only ... verdict possible, based upon the evidence. We were rightfully judged innocent despite almost universal presumption of our guilt both before and after the trial. That presumption was fed by the media.

All of which means, of course, that the public revulsion and bloody, costly Los Angeles riots that followed were a tragic, avoidable reaction. They were the response of a misguided public that had been deceived by the Los Angeles police, municipal officials, and community leaders. They were the reaction of an ill-informed public denied information by news media that had an agenda [emphasis added] in which truth and full disclosure were not factors.

I have an interesting question: might the LA riots have been prevented had the alternative media come of age sooner? Had unedited copies been available on the internet, might some enterprising news stations (or Fox News) have shown them? Might the flawed policies of the LAPD concerning the use of force have come to light? Might policemen have come forward to explain why trying to subdue a man high on PCP is so difficult and dangerous? It's an interesting question, but we'll never know the answer. Besides being partly a Rathergate of days gone by, the Rodney King affair involved a corrupt officialdom and a "civil rights" establishment more interested in rabble rousing than the niceties of giving four cops a fair trial. Our New Media will not provide absolute protection against something like this happening again, but the odds are much lower, I'd say.

So What Does it All Mean?

Earlier, I said, "But a link on the same page brought up a stupid quote about Windows which I couldn't let pass without comment and which, as it turn out, actually does have something to do with my thoughts on Rodney King." Linux and the internet-based new media both provide examples of the quantum leap in human endeavor made possible by the internet. By means of the internet, huge numbers of minds can easily -- and to the extent that they are available or want to participate -- take part in a project or examine a problem. Evasion and error are rare and short-lived. I have heard the blogosphere called "self-correcting." That is accurate because the internet makes possible massive redundancy in fact-checking. This is precisely why open-source software evolves more quickly than closed-source and why hidden agendas and sloppiness in the news media will no longer pose the enormous threat they once did.

-- CAV