COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : ‘Justice’ Was Stripped of Pretense : The Rodney King verdict was pure, without phony nods to ‘fairness.’

Injustice was not only done, but seen to be done. All thoughtful citizens should applaud. The jurors considering the beating of Rodney King had two options. They could have accepted the arguments of the prosecution and the apparent evidence of the video footage and convicted the four Los Angeles police officers. Amid rousing cantatas to “the basic fairness of the system,” life would have continued on its usual unfair course.

Or the jurors could have taken the course they did elect, which was to go to the heart of the matter and conclude that these officers were only doing what they had been trained to do and that the famous video footage demonstrated only that they had indeed gone by the book.

Many people supposed that because King’s violent beating was captured on videotape, his uniformed assailants would be unable to lie their way out of trouble. But such people forgot that, for most Americans, television is an inherently incredible medium. In the King case, even if it was “believed,” it demonstrated merely that Los Angeles police officers were subduing a human who, out of sight of the video camera, might have been threatening them with fists, a machine pistol or a portable SCUD.

Just as there are life and television, with scant connection between the two, so also there are justice and symbolic justice. Symbolic justice was what the system was supposed to produce in Simi Valley--which is, after all, host to the library of a symbolic President. Had the jurors followed the prescribed menu, George Bush and Pete Wilson and Tom Bradley and Daryl Gates would still be applauding the essential soundness of the judicial machine and the inherent fairness of America.

But, a bit like Robert Alton Harris’ execution, whose ugliness prompted calls for less-repulsive “lethal injection,” it didn’t work like that. The judicial system was indeed demonstrated to have worked soundly--in favor of policemen with clubs and against black men with the temerity to drive around Los Angeles at night.

Of course it would have been very satisfactory to see King’s assailants behind bars. Relatives of the boys murdered by Harris found it similarly gratifying to stand on the other side of a thick glass window and watch Harris choke to death on cyanide gas. A video of this execution might soon be available to the public for home use whenever people feel the need to have “justice seen to be done.”

But we have to look at the larger picture, and welcome the fact that the jurors of Ventura County did not disguise their true feelings or their forthright acknowledgment of the realities of law enforcement against African-Americans in 1992.

This is a big year for symbolic politics. We have George Bush symbolizing the resolve and purpose of a mighty nation by placing an embargo on little Libya. We have Bill Clinton calling symbolically for Americans to “take their country back,” while his entire political career demonstrates abject surrender to the corporate interests of Arkansas. And we now have Ross Perot, white knight set to symbolically storm Washington, who has said that it might be necessary to suspend the Constitution and place black neighborhoods under martial law.

The society is in gridlock and people snatch fitfully at such symbols before realizing their inadequacy to the situation.

A week ago I watched a store burn brightly and swiftly to the ground. Some 600 miles to the north of South-Central Los Angeles, it was the general store in Petrolia, the small town in Humboldt county where I live. The store caught fire some minutes after 11 a.m. a week ago Saturday, right after a 6.9 earthquake heaved the town, our houses and the store briefly off the ground and, in the store, an electric coffee pot overturned.

The earthquake was unusually violent and a bit unexpected because we’d already had a strong one at the start of March. But no one was really surprised, because our area is the most seismically active in North America. In the quiet of night I lie in bed and hear the rattle of stones down the cliff across the Mattole River as, far below, three tectonic plates strain and buck against one another.

You can either close your eyes and hope the earthquake will spare your house, or you can look ahead. Prudent homeowners build their houses on continuous foundations rather than on pier blocks from which they can be bucked when the shake comes. The jurors of Simi Valley, mustered to the courthouse from around Ventura County, opted for the security they knew best. Amid the seismic pressures threatening our society, they selected the only insurance policy they trust against the threats and tremors from below: boots, clubs, Taser guns and other appurtenances of society’s present foundation.