On Tasers and Free Speech

University of Florida’s Andrew Meyer was tasered by campus police for resisting arrest following his questioning of Senator John Kerry at a recent seminar.  The story is, of course, all over the internet and news—especially YouTube—in part for the questions of free speech it raises but also for his now t-shirted and coffee-mugged phrase, “Don’t tase me, bro!”

Let’s set aside the orgy of profit-seekers and bloggers who seem more interested in the circus around the story than the questions of order and proper use of force.  Is the cultural milieu around Meyer ridiculous? Even obscene? Yes. Is it bizarre that the most creative thing we can muster about the incident is a Britney Spears-style remix of the video tape?  Definitely. And is the news distracted by the possibilities that the incident was staged?  Absolutely.

The civil liberties question we might be asking is whether passionate speakers may, in a public forum, question our politicians provocatively without being forcibly subdued.  It’s certainly possible that Meyer is a bit paranoid and a conspiracy-theorist, but this does not in the least alter the question.  The campus police did not know him but could only act on what they witnessed at the scene.  It’s also possible that Meyer intentionally staged the incident, considering his history of such stunts.  Again, however, this does not change the question.  The police acted upon his behavior at the microphone, not his unknown intent.

What did Meyer do?  He is guilty of making a speech and asking three questions in a row, instead of asking one question clearly.  He also went over his allotted time at the microphone.  For this, campus police asked him to stop, then led him away.  When he then resisted, they subdued him; while they had him pinned and attempted to handcuff him, they used a taser.  All of this was filmed from multiple angles.  All the while, Senator Kerry attempted to keep the audience calm and answer Meyer’s questions which he called “important.”

They are important, not because Meyer was concerned about possible election fraud in 2004 or secret societies, but because if a political figure opens the floor to the public, then we must allow the public some liberty in its efforts to “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  Oh, that’s the First Amendment, by the way.

Meyer was sarcastic, but not violent.  Meyer was provocative, but was not inciting others (which the police initially accused him of).  The audience around him was surprisingly calm and perhaps impatient with his diatribe.

Not ironically, Meyer has written a fair amount on his own website about our media, our rights, and American culture, similar in some veins to my post last week on cultural claustrophobia:

The news is designed to keep viewers watching and sedated and not thinking bad thoughts about America, because that would be bad for the economy. Stories about a severely unbalanced budget are out, train wrecks like Paris and Anna are in. A train wreck may be senseless and pointless, but Americans sure do love to watch.  (The Andrew Meyer)

No, this doesn’t mean I agree with his conclusions, but it does mean that he either understands far too well or paradoxically not well enough what his arrest has created.

If his goal was to create a dramatic scene suitable to distract millions of YouTubers for a few days to demonstrate our twisted media, he has succeeded.  But if his goal was to raise sincere issues about political manipulation and the war in Iraq, he failed utterly. His own antics and provocations of the police assured his message would not be credible.  I worry that the latter is the case.

Which leaves us with the question.  Should he have been arrested?  I don’t blame the campus police for acting as they did, awkward as it must have been for them.  Once Meyer began to resist, they raised their level of intervention by degrees.  Nevertheless, I don’t believe they needed to intervene in the first place.

Democracy is messy.  Dissent makes it so.  We attempt to bring order by establishing rules of conduct and hope everyone abides by them, but we must also know that when informed or even uninformed citizens argue from principles, conduct may take a backseat. A moderator assigned to monitor conduct would have helped; cutting power to the microphone would likely have been sufficient once warnings had been issued.  Then Meyer could have returned to his own blog space and continued his dissent.

As it is, he has not helped Kerry’s cause, the media’s cause, or his own.