The UC Davis Facebook Page has been an unrelenting disaster for the school since police officer John Pike choose to swagger by a line of kneeling, unresisting, passive and non-aggressive students, and spray them point blank in the face and mouth with pepper spray. Which, by the way, is classified as tear gas in the California penal code, and its use unless in self defense is a felony criminal act.
I will say this for UC Davis administrators. It must have taken some real guts for whoever owns responsibility for the Facebook page to leave it up, given that it has filled with thousands of critical comments in the past few days.
Officer Pike is not having a good day this morning on the Facebook page. He has become the subject of the latest Internet meme, photoshopped images of him using pepper spray to blast everyone from the baby Jesus to the presidents on Mount Rushmore.
This is actually a powerful example, too, of the impact that art can have on how a moment in history is perceived, interpreted, and remembered. One need only look at the impact of poster art for the past hundred plus years, which was done just today in this excellent article: Occupy poster art joins lineage of resistance messages.
I suspect Officer Pike is not enjoying the consequences of his actions at the moment. I only hope this serves as a wake up call to America that we are teetering on the verge of a police state, and I hope people are asking themselves whether this is where we want to go, or if this is what America is all about.
The following were collected from the UC Davis Facebook page this morning. They need to be archived as a part of this moment in history.
Read More