🎶”Do You Know What I Know?” 🎶

So this guy I’ve never heard of (I’m not ashamed. Besides, he’s never heard of me.) gets detained in Chicago:

And sensible people are asking: “WTH, dude?”

WHY WAS THIS A TWO HOUR CONVERSATION

BRO YOU TALKED TO THE COPS ABOUT YOUR ***TWITCH BANS***????

STREAMERS NEED TO BE DEPROGRAMMED FROM THEIR TERMINAL INFLUENCER BRAIN

He says he did this because one of the cops was “sympathetic.”

I have never been interrogated by a police officer for anything but a speeding ticket (“Do you know how fast you were going?”), and even I know about “good cop/bad cop.” I’m pretty sure I learned about it in the ‘60’s, probably from The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Or maybe some of the semi-radical books I got hold of. Anyway, by the end of the ‘70’s good cop/bad cop was a trope used as a joke in buddy cop movies. Everybody knew what “good cop/bad cop” meant.

I mention this not to dump on the person whose name I am intentionally withholding, but to muse on the transmission of knowledge, especially outside of popular culture. My daughter would be confused by references to “Captain Kangaroo” (pops up in “Counting Flowers on the Wall” in my Pandora Kingston Trio station. I do wallow in the music of my childhood now.) We all understand that. But in graduate school I took a course in bibliography and textual criticism. Basically, the transmission of knowledge across time, largely via documents. It’s an interesting topic because minor variations in texts meant to ce exact copies can be the pebbles that start landslides of variants and miscommunication. You might think that’s a problem confined to monks in candle lit scriptoria in the Middle Ages, but it’s actually more common in printed books published in multiple editions over time. (I spent some time studying the typescript of Forster’s A Passage To India, which included a manuscript section for the famous incident at the caves.) This is, of course, a huge issue in Biblical scholarship, where there are multiple variant copies of the books and letters of the New Testament. But W.H. Auden struck a number of his early poems from his canon;, there’s an entire “biography” of “The Waste Land” thanks to the publication of Eliot’s original manuscript (or is it a typescript? I can’t remember.). I also have vague recollections of books revised by the author, or where scholars have noted words in the print edition vary from the manuscript. Whitman amended and added to Leaves of Grass over his lifetime. Some of these things are just interesting trivia (well, interesting to some of us); some may reflect unauthorized changes by editorial hands, or even shifts in authorial intent/decisions.My brother kept the memory record of our family events. Now that he’s gone and my parents are gone, I have no one to check my memories against, so never discount the valid sound documentation. All reflect a change in transmission of information, or how information is recorded.

So it’s field of study, in other words, that relates to who we are as human and cultural beings; and affects both what we know, and the accurate transmission of what others recorded.

Transmission of knowledge is actually critical to civilization. Had the Muslims not protected their copies, we’d have lost all knowledge of Aristotle (at least) after we burned the Library at Alexandria (tell me Trump wouldn’t do that again if somebody told him some books in there were “DEI.”). Which is the “Big Picture.” But what about the small one? 

This is supposed to be the “Age of Information,” because of the technology that allows you to read my words. But what does that mean if someone doesn’t have the simple knowledge of “good cop/bad cop? Popehat attributes this to “answering questions for the REVOLUTION,” which sarcastically underscores that these “informed” people are woefully under- so. Hence my point about knowing this much when I was a very young child of the ‘60’s and real revolutionary jargon (the smidgen I was ever exposed to) seemed very crazy to me. The idea of “good cop/bad cop” was hard to square with my gentle uncles, both in law enforcement. I grew up to figure out there were other people in the world than the ones I grew up with.

But despite my sheltered childhood, I had more knowledge than this guy, at a much younger age. As I say, this nugget of information was so ubiquitous movies not meant to challenge the audience st all safely assumed everyone knew what “good cop/bad cop” meant, yet our hapless victim never heard of it, and no one (besides me) seems to have pointed that out.

And why is that?

Transmission and preservation of knowledge. Nowhere in the BlueSky discussion of this event that I’ve read does anybody even use the phrase that once carried a world of connotations and inside knowledge. Shorthand, once, for not trusting the police and not being a fool. Now? Well, it’s gone, I guess. But it’s not the phrase, it’s the knowledge that’s missing.

Nothing of importance in the grand scheme of things. Less important to me than the memories I shared with my brother, and now have to preserve for myself. But the preservation and transmission of information is what interests me. Information not shared, not passed on, dies. Information in books is stored, but if nobody reads them, is the information lost? Not entirely; but if it isn’t recovered, it is lost to general knowledge. “Good cop/bad cop” was in books when I learned it. But nobody’s reading those books now. 

This lacunae is not the pebble that starts an avalanche; but it’s curious such a piece of knowledge is missing. The critics in the BlueSky discussion go to some pains to explain why you don’t talk to cops freely, and most of it comes down to: “BECAUSE THEY AREN’T YOUR FRIENDS!” Which is not wrong, but then you have explain why Mr./Ms. Police Officer is not your buddy.  At this point I think of the narrator if Al Stewart’s “The Roads to Moscow.” It’s a song about Stalinist Russia in WWII, told from the point of view of a foot soldier who fights the Germans with guerilla tactics when Germany followed in the footsteps of Napoleon, and then follows Russia into Germany and the fall of Berlin. After the war he’s returning to Holy Russia, when he’s called aside for interrogation:

“And now they ask me of the time that I was caught behind their lines and taken prisoner
"They only held me for a day, a lucky break, " I say they turn and listen closer
I'll never know, I'll never know why I was taken from the line and all the others
To board a special train and journey deep into the heart of holy Russia
And it's cold and damp in the transit camp, and the air is still and sullen And the pale sun of October whispers the snow will soon be coming
And I wonder when I'll be home again and the morning answers "Never"
And the evening sighs, and the steely Russian skies go on forever

Not exactly “good cop/bad cop,” but like the phrase, there’s an entire history lesson of Stalinist Russia in those lines. If you know anything about Stalinist Russia, that is. Like the point of saying “good cop/bad cop” is to say they are manipulating you. They are playing a role, and by rules you don’t know about. And assuming the truth is your friend, and sword and shield, may put you on a journey deep into the heart of holy Russia.

Then again, how many people get that reference anymore?

My first year of teaching, in graduate school in the late ‘70’s, I assigned a short Woody Allen essay as a sort of palate cleanser. It was a page and a half long (barely), and it was Allen’s sardonic comic take on revolutions (a lot of radical groups promoted revolution in the ‘70’s. Chayefsky got that right in “Network.”), chiefly the American, French, and Russian. All you really had to know to enjoy the essay, was that those events had happened.

The students hated it. Because they had no idea what Allen was joking about.

Knowledge that is not kept alive is dead; and eventually, lost. But how to keep it alive, and in circulation?

Aye, there’s the rub…