Reply #88: I took pictures of the CHP officer who pulled us over near Palm Springs in the late '80s [View All]

[ForrestGump]

Not sure who was driving, and I can't remember now whether we actually got a ticket (the last one I got, incredible given my tendency to be expeditious, was around 1991), but he was incredibly nice. He posed heroically for the photos -- it helped that the dude was a good looking man, in great shape, though in that Golden State it's entirely conceivable that he, too, was Really An Actor -- and they came out perfectly, golden sunlight surrounding the peace officer in a suitably hero-defining glow. Eat your heart out, Erik Estrada.

Can't remember why I wanted to take the pictures: I bet that 'bonding' to help ensure we once again got off with a warning (actually, now that I think about it, I think he did let us go) but there was probably also the confluence of his being very friendly and me feeling that the novelty of being threatened with a ticket was worthy of preserving for posterity. Besides, in those days I was still taking photos everywhere I went in this country.

My experience, and that of people close to me, suggests that California Highway Patrol officers tend to be much nicer than are members of many other police departments, on average. Still, I'm not sure that I'd pull the same thing today. The country has changed markedly since then; even when I first came to the US, during the Reagan years, it was notable how friendly and open people across this country tended to be (this was a fact that had been relayed to me many times by people who'd traveled in the US during the '60s and '70s, too). That's no longer quite as apparent, I believe, and I can be fairly certain that most of this impression is not the result of me growing more familiar with the US and living here for years. The Reagan years may have seen the rise of the Me ME ME culture, and the real beginning of the end as far as declining civility and collective 'intelligence' was concerned, but there was a lag that I think left its worst effects to manifest a decade later.

Now we're smack in the middle of the nadir of US society and cultures (well, I HOPE it's the lowest point) and one of the very obvious signs of the decline of this country is the increasing number of reports of outright fascist-enforcer behavior by police and others given similar authority. Sure, there always was corruption in some police departments, for example, and some were additionally notorious in other ways (like the LAPD in the '70s, with their lethal chokeholds...Legally Assaults People Daily, I think was the acronym's source) but when a police officer feels like he can arrest someone for taking his picture we shoudl know we're not in the proverbial Kansas (or the literal United States) any more.