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i find it difficult not to see in the state and local level--o how to put this---poking holes in the separation of juvenile from adult an index of much wider anxieties about control mostly. so they're symptoms of wider ideological incoherences. they make most sense to me if you move away from the situation itself and fit it into a bigger context.
let's play this game for a second then, shall we?
this nonsense from plymouth meeting groups a kid mouthing off about creating mayhem with weapons under the Big Hysteria-Management Category of the moment: "terrorism"...which is about anxiety concerning the instrusion of arbitrary violence into a "reality" understood as otherwise predictable, controllable.
school shootings more generally--instances of arbitrary violence.
sentencing guideline shifts--simple-minded responses to a percieved surging up of the arbitrary.
it's as if reality was as you see it on television--a collection of objects---as if objects were knowable because they were endowed with essences---so things are always what they are, and we operate in a relation to the world that is basically the same as sitting on a lazee-boy watching tv "news"---
so politics is the simple arrangement of objects--multiplicity of viewpoints simply a function of a voice-over, never affecting the reality of the world, which is things and their arrangement.
so *anything* that fucks with the arrangement in an unexpected manner is arbitrary in the same way all the time no matter the situation.
the funny thing is that these sentence guidline shifts are conservative-driven measures for the most part, and so operate within the logic of the conservative view of the state---support for those dimensions of state function which are about repression, opposition to state functions that involve the redistribution of wealth and everything that follows from it.
from this you can see the one-dimensionality of conservative discourse about the state--they are dependent on its repressive functions to control for arbitrariness (which is itself circular, a function of the preference for a simple world that underpins conservatism--a preference for a pretty arrangement of surfaces to thinking in any depth about much of anything...too complicated, makes you worry--conservative politics are therapeutic, but it's a petit bourgeois therapy---on the order of prayer: "O Mister State...Mister State....Please Come Kill What Freaks Us Out and Protect Us from Complexity Now and at the Hour of Our Death. Amen.")
and in order to not have to face even the complexity of their own motives, you get this bizarre-o tendency to projection--so "dependency" gets talked about in the context of transfers of wealth to the poor. THEY are dependent, while WE are these free-floating atoms...heroic individuals until a Threat comes, at which point we rally round the Flag and hope for a Pretty Spectacle of the Assertion of Control. shock and awe on the big scale, sending a 14 year old to prison for life on a smaller scale.
and since the 14 year old is always Other, always not-you, it is obvious that these sentencing guidelines are theatrical, that the trial theater, and that the effect is the reassurance of television viewers that threats to the order of Things are disappeared.
this is more about what i see this kind of phenomenon as doing than a position concerning whether i support or oppose sentence guidline shifts in themselves, btw.
i tend to see these as a bad idea, but the arguments for this run in a different direction than the above. just saying.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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