Les barricadeurs sur
la police sur
la ville
(That is, if you want us, cops, you'll have to shoot at your a single phrase version of your fundamental fantasy first. In the Dresden uprising of 1849, so the story goes, Bakunin, proposed to hang Raphael's Sistine Madonna from the barricades, as he thought the Prussians were too cultured "to dare to fire on a Raphael." The French police firing on an American cop film - starring Richard Widmark, no less - is about as unthinkable.
For contemporary America: we must build movable walls composed of nothing but reruns of The Shawshank Redemption. No one will touch us.)
It is said that during the occupations at Columbia U. in 68, John Jacobs suggested barricading the building with the Ming vases found in the Univ. president's office.
ReplyDeleteFlawless. It is true that unwillingness - or rather, initial hesitancy, as marker of a period in which it seems possible to wait it out and let it die down - to damage their own property is one of the conditions that buys time.
ReplyDeleteWe can imagine a taking of commodity hostages: "anyone comes near the door and the vases get it! We are not fucking around!"