A History of Thugs
Civilization is imperiled. Demonic dark-skinned criminals exult in seizing property and security. Only a vanguard of brave uniformed officers can take them off the streets and restore order. It is 1835, and whites are finally confronting what Mark Twain will soon call “the satanic brotherhood of the Thugs.”
Nearly two centuries later, those on the lookout for the thug find him everywhere. Toddling in a diaper in Omaha, Nebraska. Trudging along the sidewalk in a hoodie in the Orlando suburbs. Turning his music up outside a Jacksonville gas station. Peddling loosies in front of a shop on Staten. “Charging” a cop on Florissant, just down the Mighty Mississippi a piece from where Twain was born. Chanting on the street not far from a Ferguson school that today bears Twain’s name.
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Fear of the thug is a fear of the dark, literal and metaphorical. A pale colonizing soldier or constable—trained, armed, deputized to travel out of the warm confines of the civilization he serves—stares into the night of the frontier, whether in Hyderabad or the suburbs of St. Louis, and sees only shadow. Within the shadow, crimes and perils and swarthy locals all mix together. Perhaps they are all connected somehow, all serving the aims of the criminal, the subversive—whether as a street tough or a dealer or a user or simply a friend or relation who refuses to snitch. Perhaps this is bigger than we think. Perhaps the thug owns the night.
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This contemporary anti-thug movement has achieved a funny ironic resonance: Few things today more closely resemble Sleeman’s thuggee brotherhood than does a tea party rally, men’s rights convention, gun show, or armed anti-government standoff. From militias to neoconfederates to 4channing libertarians, a cultural underground has emerged of armed anti-government ideologues dreaming of redemptive violence. Hence a reactionary conservative can proudly call for the shooting of college-age protesters and their “SEIU thug” allies in Wisconsin; Fox News can trumpet a poll that calls for “armed revolution” in America, even as it pearl-clutches over “thugs” getting invites to the White House, again and again and again; and armed citizens can dig in for a “defense” against the “thuggery” of federal and state peace officers.
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We continue to see them all around us. We continue to put them down. We continue to put down the protests that grow out of their deaths, to see these events as more proof of thuggishness all around. And we won’t stop, because according to the hardening myth of the American thuggee, he never stops.
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