Dance Dance American Revolution

Last Saturday night, a group of DC-area libertarians decided to celebrate Thomas Jefferson's birthday by heading up to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and having a little harmless fun, dancing on the steps of the memorial for 10 minutes or so.  Not wanting to create a disturbance, they decided to bring their iPods and groove silently to their own beat.  But of course, this is George Bush's America, and anything that involves a political symbol and people expressing themselves in some way represents a grave threat to national security and must be suppressed immediately.  So the National Park Police did the only thing they could do, and broke up the gathering, arresting one of the dancers.  Videos of the incident can be found here, here and here.

Courtney and I were about 10 minutes late, but by the time we arrived it was already over. The National Park Police broke the whole thing up just a few minutes in, punctuating their lack of a sense of humor by arresting one of the dancers (we’re keeping her name private at least until she’s released later this morning). She was cuffed, taken out to a paddy wagon, then booked and held at a Park Police station. Everyone I spoke with says there was no noise, there were no threats, and no laws broken (the park police I spoke with–including the arresting officer (who, oddly enough, denied to me that he was the arresting officer)–declined to say why she had been arrested).

[...] The people I spoke with say the other officer pictured in the foreground of this photo told the rest of the group to “shut the fuck up.” When one person politely asked why it was unnecessary to use the word “fuck,” the officer replied that if the guy who asked the question used any more profanity, he too would find himself arrested.

Yes, you read that right.  A woman was actually arrested.  For dancing.  At the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.  Yeah, that Thomas Jefferson - the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence.  The guy who said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."  The logical incongruity wasn't lost on Radley Balko:

Of course, the real irony here is that all of this happened at the Jefferson Memorial, in observance of Jefferson’s birthday. Go out to celebrate the birth of the most hardcore, anti-authoritarian of the Founding Fathers, get hauled off in handcuffs. The photo’s almost poetry, isn’t it? One of history’s most articulate critics of abuse of state authority looks on as a park police cop uses his elbow to push a female arrestee into one of said critic’s memorial pillars.

Where is Kevin Bacon when you really need him?

::

(via North Texas Liberal)