Some of you might recognise some of this footage from Godfrey Reggio’s 1974 commercials for the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union, as I used bits for one of my Kleptones videos. I got it from a documentary about Godfrey, but good to see the full adverts at last, they are beautiful.
And they still seem timely after all these years – these people were laughed at as cranks back then, but that dystopian future of NSA, militarised police and mass surveillance with no public transparency is here, in fact ‘We’re All Criminals Now‘.
It does seem the current justice system is there not, as in previous eras to support the cuddly if rather idealistic notion ‘if you’re law-abiding you have nothing to fear’ but to catch people out even if innocent, then never let them go from the current version of poorhouses, keep you in their jaws.
Obviously other communities such as Ferguson and those who look or act differently know this already, but it does seem that it’s now free to spread elsewhere, that with ‘terrorism’ and limits on protest and mass surveilance everyone is a suspect until proven innocent – and even then. See how the case of Aysha King and the storm over parents who wanted to give their child the best care which they couldn’t get here, and the hospital threatened to take their child away if they questioned the diagnosis. And how hard it’s been to ‘stand down’ the international legal process to not only let the parents free, but let Aysha have Proton Beam treatment in Prague…all because someone in the hospital ‘pushed the button’ – one that didn’t get pushed in Rotherham, because don’t want to be call racist, because northern.
As an aside: I still get regarded with suspicion or trailed by supermarket security guards cos of the long beard. It used to really bother me but actually as someone who can’t steal a penny chew without looking immediately guilty, I’m happy if their discrimination means a distraction so someone else in true need can shoplift.
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