Guest Post by Eric Peters
You may have seen the picture of the Texas sheriff who denouncedHombre Naranja’s efforts to get control of the border. But did you see the general’s stars on the collar of this civilian cop?
One sees this a lot.
There are “sergeants” and “lieutenants” and “majors” and “colonels” with eagles on their collars. There are even four and five-star “generals” – equivalent in rank to MacArthur and Eisenhower and Patton running small-town sheriff’s offices. 
It’s what you might call stolen valor – a term of opprobrium applied to people who parade around in military uniforms (and wearing military insignia) they’re not entitled to wear – either because they’re not in the military or because they didn’t earn the military insignia.
Like the four-star “general” of Bexar County, Texas.
He is not in the military and he most definitely did not receive his four stars from the military. 
As an Elvis impersonator used to ask: Who do you think I think I am?
An interesting thing about this is that there’s a historical precedent for it. One with unpleasant implications.
In National Socialist Germany – it is always important to spell it out rather than use the acronym that the National Socialists themselves never used – there were paramilitary bodies that awarded themselves military ranks – such as SA Haupsturmfuhrer, a kind of “captain” who wasn’t commissioned by the German army.
There were also – and here we hit closer to home – generals der polizei – that is, police generals who were also often officers of the SS, such as SS Oberstgruppenfuhrer (colonel general) and general-der-polizei Kurt Daleuge. He was the man who replaced the “butcher of prague,” SS General Reinhard Heydrich, after the latter’s assassination by Czech partisans. 
Point being, we’ve become a lot like them without most of us even seeing it. More finely, we’ve become used to paramilitary policing – which now (as then) has become almost indistinguishable from being policed by the military. This is an interesting thing in that Americans aren’t supposed to be policed by the military.
It’s actually “the law,” as if that mattered to those who enforce it (and often just make it up as they go).
The military is supposed to be set apart from civilian life except in the extraordinary event that martial law is declared. Because civilian cops aren’t trained to regard us as enemies to be feared – and killed.
Well, ideally.
Civilian law enforcement is supposed to be about keeping the peace and civilian cops are supposed to be civilians.
But – somehow – we live under “military” law in all-but-the-formalities. Civilian police carry military weapons – including the “weapons of war” that Kamala’s second – who comes across like Chris Farley’s Motivational Speaker character on Saturday Night Live, back when it was still funny, says he carried “in war.” Even though he didn’t. That doesn’t matter, either.
They wear battle dress uniforms (BDUs) which include combat boots, flak vests, web gear and lots of tacticool apparatus. Few Americans (especially Republicans) seem to worry about the danger of dressing civilian cops like soldiers; more finely, about dressing cops in such a way that they come to think of us as “civilians” and themselves as soldiers.
Implicit in this dynamic is a relationship of occupiers and indigs – the latter a pejorative term used by soldiers in Afghanistan to describe the civilian populations of the countries they’d occupied. Like the “gooks” and “zipperheads” of Vietnam during that war.
Only now the war is on us, right here.
