According to Gajitz.com, times have changed:
Times were very different in 1938. Instead of worrying about the basic human rights of rioters and dissenters, governments were more worried about how to control crowds and put a stop to riots at any cost. That is where ideas like this riot car came in: they were meant to “control” the rioters with a variety of methods. This particular vehicle was meant to shoot streams of water, bullets or poison gas – depending on the severity of the situation – all in a bid to end uprisings.
This artist's rendering, the writer adds,
was on the cover of the May 1938 issue of Mechanics & Handicraft, showing the riot car in use. According to the brief accompanying text, the vehicle was patented earlier that year by Victorino L. Tunaya of Brooklyn, New York. As far as we know the machine was never actually built, which is a good thing considering a huge hulking vehicle with machine guns that spurts poisonous gas is bound to be used for mischief sooner or later.
If popular sentiment in 1938 was as paranoid about the principles free assembly, free expression, and the redress of grievances as these images and prose suggest, what are the attitudes now?
As imagined in 1938, domestic police forces in the United States use chemical weapons to disperse their own citizens - this wasn't a paranoid fantasy by futurists. While the use of chemical weapons may constitute war crimes internationally, that doesn't prevent our protectors from using them on their citizens without hesitation.
According to Wikipedia, vehicle-mounted water cannons serve to "augment personal weapons," as imagined in 1938. "Some water cannons let police add dye to mark rioters or tear gas to help disperse the crowds."
Given recent agendas manifested in state social studies curricula, the expectation of protection by Amendment I, which promises Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, already a faint memory for the majority, will be no more than a notalgic promise circulated among the most utopian of us.
Turns out, the technologies imagined in 1938 aren't necessary: "A growing trend in the United States has been the implementation of "free speech zones," or fenced-in areas which are often far-removed from the event which is being protested" (Wikipedia).
For many, these free speech zones are a clear violation of what we still remember of the First Amendment. Unfortunately, for many more vocal and powerful citizens - citizens immune to civil or criminal liability, it's a welcome opportunity to use what we'd decry as war crimes had they been deployed anywhere else. As it turns out, the feminist warning about castration or decapitation is a false dichotomy. It takes a phallus to have it both ways.
Image from a Tumblr collection.
