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Police State, Indeed [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-02
In 2002 I happened to be in NYC for a couple nights. Being a musical theater nerd, and having never actually been to Broadway itself, I scraped up enough dough to get a ticket to... well, something. But that meant I had to decide. I finally thought this was a time for seeing something I didn't know at all. So I chose Urinetown.
It's a pleasant enough show about resource scarcity (carefully rationed toilets): meta, humorous, somewhat exaggerated. But there was one number that stuck with me, it hit me to the core. "Cop Song," about enforcing the strict laws. Here's a YT version that comes pretty close to what they did on Broadway.
Cute song, right? Until you realize that the flashlights point out into the audience. That we are being watched. That all that "innocent," playful violence is already aimed at us.
And now, decades later, it comes true in ICE.
I've since seen a couple other productions that did not capture the true terror of this. (SPOILER--all the figures named in the song are dead. Urinetown the punishment is death.) Easy to see why. Who wants to confront evil when it is looking right at you and enjoying itself?
Part of me wants to imagine resistance, though, looking something like this: at the next raid a handful of protesters show up with a speaker. They line up facing away from the masked thugs. And as "Cop Song" blares over the speaker, the protestors dance out the truth. That the thugs get off on thuggery. That we are all targets. That we now live in a police state.
Indeed.
P.S. Alligator Alcatraz? Just another Urinetown.
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