S/he Had it Coming: Rules, Resistance and Retribution

He had it coming, he had it coming
He only had himself to blame
If you'd have been there, if you'd have seen it
I betcha you would have done the same

From the song “Cell Block Tango” in the film Chicago

Statement #1  “She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

Statement #2 “We had asked several times, politely” for the man to relinquish his seat before force was used.” 

I am seeing a pattern here.

The first statement is a quote from Senator Mitch McConnell defending the invocation of a rarely used Senate rule to force Senator Elizabeth Warren to sit down and to bar her from any further speech during the remainder of the debate on the nomination of Jeff Sessions as United States Attorney General. 

The second statement is a quote from a United Airlines spokesperson that defended the forcible removal of a passenger that refused to give up his seat when told to do so by the airline.

Both statements offer defenses for very public, heavy-handed and rare rebukes of behaviors that are normally taken for granted—speaking on the Senate floor as a senator, and taking a seat on a plane as a passenger when you have reserved and paid for that seat.

In both cases, defenders of the rebukes call upon “rules” to support the actions. McConnell, a public actor, used a public law norm in a public law setting (Rule 19 of the United States Senate ) in order to accomplish personal and political goals and to achieve immediate retribution for what he deemed inappropriate behavior. Individual United Airlines employees ostensibly represented their private institutional employer when they relied upon private law norms (conditions of carriage ) to achieve immediate retribution for an alleged breach of the norms, and used members of a public police force to compel immediate compliance.

In both cases we see different forms of violence, the first discursive and second physical. While discursive violence of the sort to which Elizabeth Warren was subjected is sometimes dismissed as the lesser of the two forms of violence, very often discursive violence generates broader public permission for physical violence. As scholar LynneTirrell observes, when we license bad behavior in the form of egregious speech acts that threaten or silence others, we loosen the reins on social behavior more generally.  

In loosening these bonds we promote conditions in which individual actors take on and off at will the mantle of state and or non-state corporate entities, or some hybrid of the two, in the process of enacting vengeance/justice/rule compliance.  In this blurring of lines between the individual private actor, the state, and non-state private institutions, legitimacy and accountability are the first to go. The rule’s the thing, to rephrase Shakespeare; an allegedly innocent and neutral regulatory scheme that cannot on its face be challenged is used to achieve a targeted and decidedly partisan result. In these cases we often see the conflation of demands supported by rules and demands that are converted into rules. 

Even governmental entities charged with protecting citizens' rights sometimes become blithe and willing delegators of their own rules and enforcement mechanisms. Regulatory regimes such as laws and other norms are subject to being reinterpreted, reapplied, and rewritten in the service of the powerful, thereby making both discursive and physical violence less visible, mere “incidents” concerning "oversales rules" to be addressed after delegation, as this statement by the Department of Transportation suggests:

The U.S. Department of Transportation confirmed it is looking into the incident to determine “whether the airline complied with the oversales rule.”

“The Department is responsible for ensuring that airlines comply with the Department’s consumer protection regulations including its oversales rule. While it is legal for airlines to involuntary bump passengers from an oversold flight when there are not enough volunteers, it is the airline’s responsibility to determine its own fair boarding priorities”

And if not “incidents,” such acts of violence are “situations” to be dealt with via "established procedures," as per United CEO Oscar Munoz:

"Our employees followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this," Munoz told employees. "While I deeply regret this situation arose, I also emphatically stand behind all of you, and I want to commend you for continuing to go above and beyond to ensure we fly right."

 

-->Drawing on United's "fly right" slogan, CEO Munoz apparently exhorts passengers to fly right and to comply with the rules. If Munoz understood one source of the term "fly right," an old Brer Rabbit tale in which a treacherous buzzard offers rides to hapless animals, then throws them to their deaths and devours them, he might think again about using it.  In the tale, a clever monkey gets the better of the buzzard by wrapping his tail around the buzzard's neck and choking him while demanding that the buzzard "straighten up and fly right," and take the monkey safely back to the ground. United Airlines as a rapacious buzzard conquered by a resistant monkey on his back is a disquieting corporate image. Ah, but maybe what is needed here is just such a potent consumer resistance allegory.

Where discursive and physical violence become more acceptable and cloaked in rules, coercion is framed as choice, and resistance becomes more futile as summary retribution becomes a right. Resisting victims are responsible for their own harm. Indeed, in such circumstances tables are turned and perpetrators are seen as victims of the alleged rule breakers' persistence. There is no dialogue, only monological imperatives to sit down, shut up, get up, move or be moved. When these alleged rule breakers are summarily judged, found wanting, and have punishment executed upon them, they have it coming, we are told. 

We are living in troubling times indeed.