Intellectual Trickle-Down Berkeley

by Steed Dropout
March 29, 2017

PISSED-OFF PATHOS PITCHED ON BERKELEY STREET, AND THEN A FEROCIOUS FRACAS


Photo by Ted Friedman.

Cal Berkeley offers a Phd. in Rhetoric ruled by some of the best rhetors on the planet.

In the coffee houses of Berkeley the learned and the unlearned…use/misuse rhetorical strategies between espressos. You could say that the intellectual force of Cal had trickled down to the rest of us.

You just don’t expect to hear blatant, unabashed rhetoric in, what, ultimately, was a mental health case on the streets.

The entire incident was witnessed by a crowd of angry street-people/urban survivalists…and they became more and more agitated as events played out.

Cast of Characters:
The (Army) Veteran, or the Vet
The Police
The Vet’s (female) Partner
Angry Bystanders
Paramedics
the Gurney

According to all witnesses, the incident began when a street guy was cited for smoking too close to Peet’s, on Telegraph, as red-rays of sunset lit the scene, Wednesday.

Another street-guy, the Army Veteran, needed to retrieve his battery pack from the smoking violator’s gear, he said. But an exchange between the Vet and the cop apparently went awry.

When the Vet put his hands behind his back to show, the Vet’s partner said, that he was compliant—the cop took the Vet up on his offer and handcuffed him.

The reason the Vet is the Vet (as well as a rhetor) is that after he was cuffed he used pathos angrily to plead his case (the founding Greek rhetors were the trial lawyers of their times).

The Vet’s case which he pleaded in a roaring, raspy voice was his innocence of charges (“I didn’t do anything,” he pleaded; “I just wanted my battery-pack back”); he touted his Mid-East war service. To add to the pathos, he complained that he was being hurt while cuffed and held against a building.

The more the Vet roared out his complaints, the more a crowd of street people taunted police.

The Vet’s partner was shooed-off by a cop, and she took up her vigil across the street: heckling with hecklers.

The Vet derided the police for not seeing combat as he claimed he had, and the crowd called cops cowards and laggards and made derisive pornographic taunts.

After pro-longed porno-taunts, one cop advanced to respond to a taunter: “you’re coming to my attention,” the cop announced, “and you don’t want that.”

[The porno-troll could have been accused of obstructing justice; how sexy is that?]

Meanwhile, the Vet blurted out, “I’m a Schizophrenic!”


Photo by Ted Friedman.


Photo by Ted Friedman.


Photo by Ted Friedman.


Photo by Ted Friedman.


Photo by Ted Friedman.


Photo by Ted Friedman.

It’s murky whether this was part of the vet’s pathos strategy, but his proclamation brought paramedics and a gurney. The gurney became the scene of a ferocious struggle as police strained to hold down the Vet, as he seemed to resist.

A long and difficult battle to get the Vet onto the gurney ensued. At one point the Vet went limp, and once gurneyed, fought valiantly, (perhaps as he had in the field) in his private war against neglect.

The battle of the gurney ended when the Vet’s wrists were shackled to the rails of the gurney and his head hooded with a ghastly spit mask. A spit mask is a routine cop device that looks like a large food baggy, or loose condom for the head, standard cop-gear.

“What the hell is that?” the crowd gasped.

The paramedic van with the Vet then drove towards the lush East-Bay hills, drenched by rains, now reddened by sunset.

“He’ll be out in seventy-two hours, maybe sooner,” observed a heckler.


The Vet Photo-essay (scroll to Dust-Up on Dwight): https://www.facebook.com/ted.friedman.56

Berkeley Pro-Trump riot photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/berkboy/

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