The Thick Blue Line

     At the end of each year, Americans focus on New York's Times Square, a place resembling an amusement park for advertisements.  Countdown to the New Year culminates with the slow drop of a huge lit-up ball.  Spectators kiss, cheer, and grin at news cameras.  Bands play, Grammy Award-winning singers belt out their songs into the coldness.  No one from CNN or NBC mentions the problems of the world.  It's a time of hope and mostly of forgetting, the latter a brain failure many Americans regard as a strength as they "look forward," or "move forward."
     On December 29, 2017, Colleen Long of Associated Press wrote an article printed in USA Today entitled, "Tightest security ever for New Year's in New York's Times Square after deadly attacks"
     She reminds readers of that year's mayhem committed in New York by an ISIS-inspired man who drove down a bike path, killing eight people; a man setting off a bomb in the subway, "injuring only himself"; and "Times Square itself...targeted in May by a man, said by police to be high on drugs, who drove through crowds of pedestrians, killing an 18 year old tourist from Michigan."
     "Those attacks," Long remarks, "were reminders that New York City's massive security apparatus can only do so much, but city officials insisted they will be able to keep people safe on New Year's Eve."
     "'The fact is, they will absolutely be safe,' said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat."
     It's a fact!
     For the event, police would employ "vapor wake dogs...trained to sniff out trace amounts of explosive particles that trail behind someone carrying a bomb."
     The 125 parking garages in the vicinity would be sealed off, high rise hotels (in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting) would be infested with detectives.
     Police Commissioner James O'Neill: "This is going to be one of the most well-policed, best-protected events at one of the safest venues in the entire world."
     An area twenty-two blocks long and three blocks wide sealed off, a thousand security cameras, sand-filled garbage trucks blocking off the area.
     "Partygoers entering that secure zone will be screened at a dozen access points where they will encounter metal detectors, the vapor wake dogs and officers with portable radiation detectors.  Large backpacks are not allowed.  Small bags will be searched...From there, people will go through a second round of security screening when they enter spectator pens where they are essentially confined for the night (italics mine).  People who leave the pens aren't allowed to re-enter--so no bathroom breaks."
     Mariah Carey and other popular performers would then play music to a crowd composed of willing prisoners of the national security state, content to give up their freedom of movement for a night in order to participate in an annual experiment run by the New York Police Department and Homeland Security to test their crowd-monitoring equipment and population control techniques, so that when they deploy these methods against protestors they'll have much to analyze.
     Donald Trump, during his campaign and also when he speaks at rallies as president, has news media personnel confined to pens.  None of the journalists seem to think this is outrageous; they go along with it, it's their assignment to cover the man.  Similarly, when it's New Year's Eve and the ball's going to drop, musicians and singers blasting the air with feel-good vibrations, citizens willingly subject themselves to examination by the police, sniffed at by specially trained dogs, all inside of a public space turned into a panopticon in America's largest city.
     Yesterday, my area's Noon news program aired an unquestioning segment on Times Square New Year's Eve 2018, dealing with precautions and measures taken by the NYPD and whatever other agencies not exactly protecting us but actually monitoring us.  In addition to the crazy shit mentioned above in Colleen Long's article about 2017, NYPD authorities now boast of their use of drones as being one of the new technologies keeping Times Square citizen goofballs "safe."  We're being conditioned to believe that robots flying overhead, spying on us, is something to feel good about.  It's one step from armed drones flying over America being regarded as something necessary to keep us safe.
     Long's article amounts to dry reporting.  We don't know what she thinks of the batshit crazy things she's writing about.  Given Trump's victory over journalists when he first had them confined to pens and they accepted that, I'll guess that it's likely Colleen Long of the AP would step into a pen at a Trump rally and think nothing of it.  Jimmy Dore, comedian and YouTube independent news commentator, reported on a Trump rally in 2016.  Penned, he tried to get reactions to being confined from other journalists, but they ignored him.
     Submission to authoritarianism is normalized in a land providing Mariah Carey along with vapor wake dogs, police snipers, total surveillance, and full bladders in spectator pens.  Happy New Year to a Sick Fuck Society run by cops and other creatures addicted to power, profiting from an idea of security manufactured by them as a supposed need.

                                                                               Vic Neptune