Finally Facing My Peterloo

When Trump mobilized the National Guard to L.A. in June, I compared his actions to those of the English administration in 1819, who sent troops to St. Peter's Field, in Manchester, to quell social protests. 

Indeed, with a few L.A. protesters torching some driverless vehicles, while issuing machine-wrecker statements, the context of the time was eerily reminiscent of the social upheavals of the early 1800s. 

The ghosts of Captain Swing and Ned Ludd walked abroad in Los Angeles. And Trump responded to them the same way the British authorities did in 1819—by sending in the troops to ride them down. 

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh

As Shelley wrote of the Peterloo massacre. 

In a different poem—"Peter Bell the Third"—Shelley would write: "Hell is a city much like London." To which Brecht would one day respond: 

Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,

My brother Shelley found it to be a place

Much like the city of London. I,

Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,

Find, contemplating Hell, that it

Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Which rather brings the matter full circle, don't you think? Shelley's hell has become our modern hell of Los Angeles. And Shelley's Peterloo is taking place again today—again, in Los Angeles. 

And now—this week—Trump is also deploying troops to Washington, D.C. "Tin soldiers and Trump is coming." Peterloo is coming to the East coast. It's the Peterloo traveling tour. 

The pretext in this case was to avenge the honor of "Big Balls," a DOGE employee, who was recently the victim of crime in a city where violent crime rates are otherwise generally falling. 

But Trump's larger purpose is obviously to intimidate the opposition and to push the limits even further of his executive power. 

Plus, it's yet another way to criminalize and punish the poor—just like the original Peterloo was. 

In announcing his takeover of D.C. yesterday, Trump dropped in a mention of "homeless people" to the list of dystopian horrors he planned to confront in the city. 

It appears that not being able to afford a home is equivalent now in his eyes to being a "bloodthirsty criminal," whom he also said he would clear out of the city. 

We will be "getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces from all over the city," said Trump yesterday. 

Oh the "majestic equality of the law," as Anatole France famously put it, "which forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges." 

Shelley's analysis was that ultimately, the Peterloo incident was just a vast government pretext for killing the restive poor. And so Trump's latest Peterloo appears to be as well. 

`What is Freedom? -- ye can tell

That which slavery is, too well --

For its very name has grown

To an echo of your own.

`'Tis to work and have such pay

As just keeps life from day to day

In your limbs, as in a cell

For the tyrants' use to dwell, [...]

'Tis to see your children weak

With their mothers pine and peak,

When the winter winds are bleak,--

They are dying whilst I speak.