Forgiveness

[Michael Bailey]

Salvation and Love

Hector - DEA - some amount of idealism to start a career like that?
Cop movies like Serpico where the cop was cool.  Young DEA agent in a
leather hat (partner Fife - like Barney Fife?) - friendly cop,
community outreach.  The notion being, "this is a public service" with
the intent being to save people.  Line being drawn, territory marked,
threat unveiled: "nobody ever wants to get him out of the car", pistol
in the armpit holster,  "...and in time we grow annoyed"

Why not just accept the paradigm?
Just either stay out of the drug scene or even go ahead an snitch?

Initially it's bad-assery, isn't it?  Resistance to authority on
general principles.  Hector's outreach could win over people if all he
was competing against was a certain amount of momentum in one's
habits. But many people tend to reject forcibly imposed changes of
habit.  And I would argue that's not such a bad thing.  Although the
casualties Hector refers to are real enough, aren't they?

But to continue to be unconverted in the face of a prolonged and
vigorous anti-drug evangelism such as Zoyd had been enduring against
from 1967 to 1984, to survive and even thrive to some extent, Zoyd
seems to have developed
a) loopholes in the danger - like the safe spaces between the pilings
of the pier...substances can kill but they don't always...
b) a social support network
c) convenient rationalizations, sure
d) some kinda philosophical underpinnings - not the "when the State
withers away" he uses to nettle Hector, and certainly nothing cerebral
or Marxist, but a proletarian-appropriate recasting of archetypes such
as Tweety and Sylvester.  Eckshually, isn't that kind of a
Situationist detournement or at least bricolage?
etc etc
but in fact one wonders this Yuletide if Hector's continuing
harassment didn't in fact at least contribute to saving Zoyd from
becoming one of those blank spaces in the Yearbook of Life?

and thus Hector's flawed and imperfect working out of the love
manifested in his initial decision to become a cop bore fruit.

Now as to the form of the same question that Zoyd frames in Frenesi's
presence but as far as I know she never verbally answers...
more important maybe than the sentence itself is the look he gives
her, or the look Love grants him...
which he wants to keep, ie, preserve, ie save...

>


-- 
--
"Feliz Navidad"