1.
A young man in medical school at the University of Minnesota goes out to the mural made in honor of George Floyd near 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis. The medical student, who is White, uses a spray can to vandalize the mural. He applies the spray-paint to blacken the eyes on the mural. The entire proceedings are caught on video tape and the young man is not masked – his features are clearly visible. Within minutes, the medical student is identified and “doxed” – that is, his face-book page publicly posted with his address, aspirations to study medicine, and the identities of family and friends exposed. The young man’s father is a prominent physician in southeastern Minnesota, one of the partners in a clinic with branches throughout the area. Before the sun rises, people are calling the clinic to make death threats.
Predictably, the young man announces that he was blind drunk when he put out the eyes on the mural. He says “that (he) is not that person” – the heedless bigot with the spray can. But, of course, the truth is much more complicated. A man who acts out of prejudice when he is drunk is, perhaps, authentically bigoted, at least, in some fundamental way. And, yet, one can also understand that acts committed while drunk don’t always represent the public aspect of our personalities, our presentation of self, as it were, under the guidance of reason. In this country, most White people are instinctively racist – therefore, progress in race relations requires not so much the deployment of emotion and heart as the exercise of reasoned self-discipline. It would be nice if we all loved one another as ourselves – this is the injunction of the Gospel. But the counsel of realism requires the understanding that we should, at least, act as if we love one another – what reason compels may become what the heart desires, but this takes time.
Of course, the young man’s life is over. Of course, he will be expelled from medical school and be, presumably, barred from graduate study anywhere. His life will be threatened and no one will hire him. The storm will pass but not before the young man is scarred beyond recognition. At this moment in history, it would be better for him to have pissed on the Mona Lisa or set off a bomb in the Sistine Chapel. In those cases, he would have merely defaced irreplaceable works of art. But spraying black paint into the eyes of the martyr, George Floyd, will be inexcusable on all levels – the act insults an entire race, and, worse, what is now called, an entire “narrative” of a slow, tortured ascent to equality.
People may understand on some level that George Floyd was a two-bit hustler and petty criminal. But this has nothing to do with his import as a mythological figure. George Floyd’s eyes are watching those of us who are White people. They casting us under their judgment. To efface the eyes on the mural has an all-too-obvious symbolism. Some things are unforgivable.
2.
The thunderstorm passes before dawn with lightning and thunder. The grass is wet and the ditches are full of water. The chorus of bugs is a whirring in which individual notes are inaudible, a continuous rhythmic whining in the moist air.
Is a virus even alive? I don’t think so. It’s just a tiny key that fits into the billion locks in our body and opens secret doors.
3.
I like to watch old movies. But you can’t enjoy those pictures today without a faint shudder of dismay. First, old movies are full of bawdy tavern scenes. Drunk men paw beer-maids who don’t really seem to care that they are being sexually assaulted. Is that what the past was like?
But, more troubling are the crowds tightly pressed together in the frame – this is particularly true of Westerns. As shown in Hollywood movies, the West was crowded with people on the frontier, always strolling along the boardwalks in their pioneer towns, men hauling sacks of flour or gold, women under parasols, small children teasing dogs and horses before the inevitable onslaught of bad hombres who also traveled in packs of a half-dozen. In the taverns, everyone is packed cheek to jowl in complete disregard of social distancing. The saloon girls are romping with their customers, often two at a time, and men are lined up at the bar like pigs at a trough and there is a perpetual traffic of women leading their customers up and down the stairs to the rooms above – even the surly gamblers are wrapped tightly around the table where they are swatting their cards as if they were pesky flies. Outside, the horses also seem to be tightly assembled, tied to hitching posts along the boardwalk. Didn’t these people know about the Covid-19 virus? Weren’t they afraid for their safety gathering in crowded assemblies of this sort? Of course, Covid didn’t exist when these movies were made but it is now impossible to see such scenes without an instinctive retrospective shudder.
4.
Tombstone, Arizona, as everyone knows, is famous for its fine Federal-era row-houses. These structures are well-preserved along the town’s main street and, on several shady avenues intersecting that thoroughfare. Row-houses are built from fire-house red bricks and share common walls. They were efficient and elegant places to live many years ago.
Because the Republican National Convention will reputedly feature much emphasis of law and order, I drove down to Tombstone to learn as much as I could about that subject in a frontier town that had once been famously lawless. Guidebooks will tell you that it is nearly impossible to park anywhere in downtown Tombstone and, so, it is recommended that you put your car on the town’s outskirts and walk into the center of the city from that location. This was what I did when I was in Tombstone over the weekend. I had booked a Bed & Breakfast for the seminar on frontier law and, so, I pulled my car up to the curb, picked up my backpack from the rear seat and hoofed it into the town – it wasn’t far: only a quarter mile or so. Among the Federal-era row-houses the sidewalk had been torn up and was being relaid. A detour sign directed me up the steps and into one of the row-houses. The detour, then, led through the entry rooms of about a dozen of the row-houses. In each entrance, the walls had been pierced and doors made from simple plywood sheets had been hung in each aperture between the entry spaces. These places were very small, utilitarian, with sacks of dog food leaning against the old brick walls, tools like hammers and saws hanging from peg-board, and old coats and boots in the corners. The detour was like passing through a dozen small closets – after pushing forward each crudely made door, and ducking through it, I took three steps only to encounter another such door and another behind it. In a couple cases, the actual entrances to the apartments were open and I was a little embarrassed to see people in their homes watching TV, some of them in the underwear, cooking or reading magazines.
At last, I had completed my transit of the linked entrances, followed a handlettered sign down onto the sidewalk and, within a couple of minutes, had reached the cozy B & B where I intended to spend several nights.
The seminar was dull and difficult to enjoy due to mask requirements. The speakers droned on and on through their masks, words sometimes caught in the N95 fabric and entrapped or mangled there. On the last night of the seminar there was a reception with open bar at the Birdcage Saloon and I must admit that I drank more than my share at that soiree. The next morning, I had a plane to catch in Tucson and, so, I had to rise early to drive back to the airport. I felt hungover and the air was sticky with humidity and very warm. This time the passage through the rowhouse entrances seemed interminable. The tiny enclosures were hot and full of flies and the big overcoats hanging on hooks on the walls alarmed me and, in several places, the somewhat grandiose doors into the actual apartments were open and I was afforded disconcerting glimpses of life in those flats. I must have misremembed the number of temporary plywood doors that I had to push through, one after another – this time, there seemed to be more than a hundred and I was astounded to shove through a door only to find another tiny and airless chamber behind with yet another blank-looking plywood door that I had pass through. And so on and on, an exhausting passage...
Ultimately, I emerged from the last of those row-house entrances-ways, ascending a sort of tiled subway passage to emerge outside. Then, I walked along the curb on the outskirts of town. The county fair was being installed on its grounds on both sides of the road and various booths and workers were anchoring carnival rides in the desert soil. All the cars that had been parked along the curb had been towed. I didn’t know where they took my rental car. But it was obvious that this was a serious problem and that it was unlikely that I could make my flight out of Tucson.
5.
When I finally made it back home, I attended a concert at the new MacPhail Music Center adjacent to the high school. Every musical group in town had been invited to participate but the groups were required to socially distance. This meant each group would be separated from the other groups and, in fact, remote from them so that the musicians and their directors could not see one another. The conductors were linked by BlueTooth style head-phones and they would synchronize the performance so that all the various musical ensembles would play harmoniously with one another. The concert was intended as a celebration of togetherness while remaining apart.
The new MacPhail music center has very broad corridors and they gleam with spotless floor tiles and many windows overlooking the courtyards inside the building. Oddly enough, although each musical group had been assigned a location in the big building, either a concert stage or one of the many rehearsal halls in the conservatory, it didn’t seem that the audience was supposed to congregate in any one area. Probably, this was by design – it is imprudent for people to gather in large groups inside buildings. So I wandered through the big, mostly empty corridors. Now and then, I encountered a Glee Club in blazers or a barbershop quartet wearing white straw hats or a mariachi band together with several drum and bugle corps, marching bands, choirs from the local churches, and, of course, both the High School and Junior High bands and the symphony orchestra trailing several small ensembles comprised of string quartets and a chamber orchestra. The musical groups took their places, all hidden behind the doors to the concert halls and rehearsal spaces and, the concert seemed imminent in that I no longer saw them marching through the corridors to reach their appointed places. There wasn’t much of audience – probably the local Tv station was going to broadcast the show and, perhaps, pretty much everyone was a member of one of those choruses or bands and, so, I was alone in the big, wide halls. At the end of a hallway, I saw an old friend, Terry Dilley. He was sitting on a bench waiting for the concert to begin. He looked at me quizzically wondering if I were also dead. (He had died several years before.) He was wearing the white shorts and shirt in which he customarily played tennis. I was happy to see him healthy and dressed for sport. Then, the sounds of music began to waft through the corridor.
6.
In Berlin, a few blocks away from the low and glittering blue-glass skyscraper raised up over the Hauptbahnhof, there is a museum of contemporary art located in the old re-purposed central train-station. The building is enormous with a vast central concourse and, then, there are a series of cavernous exhibition halls accessed by a gloomy corridor that is about a half-mile long. The exhibition halls all occupy big galleries to the right of the endless corridor that leads, ultimately, to a dark dead- end a thousand meters from the main concourse. This vast arrangement of galleries, linked one to another like enormous freight cars, is reached through a subway underpass in which the old signs have been retained pointing pedestrians the way to the tracks or Gleise as they are called in German. This imparts to the visitor’s experience something that is a bit dream-like – one leaves the concourse, a space that is huge and white with an iron dome overhead through a single door atop a ramp. The door is marked with an arrow pointing to where the trains are boarded, but, of course, there are no trains here – the new Hauptbahnhof is across the street and a couple blocks to the west along a channel of the Spree. The passageway to the immensely long corridor is tiled with old brown bricks all painted with some kind of slippery-looking glaze to which are affixed old yellow signs instructing people as to the way to toilets (that also no longer exist) and that they should not smoke. The underpass slopes upward to some double iron-doors that are cast open and, then, the visitor finds himself in the seemingly endless hallway with the exhibition galleries open at 50 yard intervals to his right.
When I was there this last weekend, several of the galleries were devoted to what was called a Traum Ausstellung (“Dream Exhibition”). The walls between the galleries had been removed so that each dream could be socially distanced from its neighbors and there seemed to be about a dozen of them on display. The dreams were displayed in a nearly pitch-black space. You could hear the voices of other gallery-goers but couldn’t see them. The dreams themselves were carved like totem poles from wood pillars and each was illumined from below by several small spotlights. The dreams were spaced so that they would not cross-contaminate one another, each isolated in its own sheath of light.
7.
A young man who attended High School in the town where I live became a professional performer on Broadway. He lived in Manhattan and died in his mid-forties, apparently from a heart attack. The young man was a fine musician – he could sing beautifully as well as play the piano and violin. Many of his old music teachers are still alive and remember him with warmth. Each year a concert is performed in his honor as a fund-raiser for the Austin High School music programs. The concert, generally, consists of light classical fare together with songs presented by member of the High School glee club, the so-called Austinaires.
This year, the concert took place on the west lawn of the Historic Hormel House, that is, the mansion where members of the Hormel family lived until 1927 (when the founder decamped to Bel Air in Los Angeles). By Austin standards, the concert was expensive – 15 dollars for admission to the 5:30 program; 25 dollars to attend the 7:30 pm performance. Although it wasn’t made explicit, the later show, apparently, featured on open bar, at least with respect to wine, and the normally well-attended event was split into two programs to keep the audience from crowding together too closely on the lawn. People wore masks and the orchestral performers, that is, those who play string instruments, were also masked. Chairs were set at intervals on the grass so that no one had to gather together too closely. It was hot, about 92 degrees with high humidity so that it felt like 100 degrees. Breeze was channeled down the streets under the shadows of the trees and, despite the temperature, it wasn’t too uncomfortable on the lawn.
Two groups of performers appeared under the big Doric portico of an addition to the historic mansion called the “Carriage House”. (In fact, the actual carriage house – the mansion’s garage – was demolished so that a larger and more ostentatious structure could be erected on its site.) The eaves of the mansion are dentillated, square white teeth extruding from the mustard-yellow facade to simulate timbers supporting the roof. The squashed triangular porch pediment rests on two white columns with simple Doric capitals. To the right of the entrance door under the carriage house portico, a jazz quartet performed – the dead man’s father, who is a lawyer, was trained in musical composition in Indiana and plays jazz piano. To the left of the entrance, where the porch fits into the corner between the historic mansion and the terrace in front of the carriage house, musicians playing stringed instruments performed. Members of the Austinaires stood directly in front of the doors leading into the carriage house when they sang. (The “Carriage House” is an event center with a large room that can be variously subdivided. This place is used for banquets and receptions.)
It was warm and a little hard to breathe through masks and, periodically, people slipped the coverings down onto their chins to expose their noses. In a position of honor, directly under the porch stage, a member of Prince’s former band The Revolution (he is friends with dead man’s brother) sat on a chair with his wife. When this man appeared in Purple Rain, he wore wraparound sun-glasses and cream white jumpsuits and was a sullen, rather menacing presence in the film – I think he played drums in Prince’s ensemble. Today, the man is pushing sixty and he wore a nicely-tailored blue blazer and he has grown into what he was always: a middle-class Jewish man who’s father ran a pawnshop on Minneapolis’ near north side. The drummer’s wife is a Hollywood actress, a very elegant-looking woman with exquisitely styled hair and a black dress with elaborate sleeves, an open back, and a long swirl of filmy filigree around her ankles. She looks like a movie star and wears heels and sunglasses. Her husband put his hand on her shoulder. On his left hand, he wears a bulbous gold pinky ring. They are people who appear in places to be seen and recognized for their celebrity status and, so, neither were masked. Masks would render their appearance pointless.
This is the first public event that I have attended since March and, curiously, the mask mutes everything. It’s the equivalent of wearing some kind of veil. The music sounded remote to me. The vast sky above the trees produced clouds that towered overhead. Far away, an ambulance rushed somewhere. The program, normally packed almost beyond endurance in previous years, was sparsely attended. No one stayed past 7:15. I suppose the second show was performed to empty chairs on a darkening lawn.
The dead man’s brother imported to our town the former concert-master for the Minneapolis orchestra, a violinist, and his wife, a flute-player with the Minnesota opera chamber orchestra. Both musicians were very pleased to perform – they said that they had not played publicly since everything shut-down in March. Playing outside is demanding – the two artists spent a fair amount of time fiddling with clips to hold down their music and a persistent bee harassed them. The flautist told this story: she was invited to perform as part of an exchange program in the Ukraine and, in fact, played in the city’s central cathedral. One of the pieces that she played is called Syrinx, a work by Debussy for a solo flute. She said that the Ukraine cathedral had a dome that seemed to extend for “about a half-mile into the air” above her. “Syrinx” refers to the anatomical features in the throat of birds that permit them to sing. The word also means a kind of wooden tube whittled so that it can be played as a wind instrument. While she was playing, a bird fluttered into the cathedral and hovered over the place where she was standing to perform. The bird made a soft chirping sound and swung back and forth in graceful arcs over her head. When she played the final low note of the piece, the bird flew upward and vanished through an open clerestory window. It was an uncanny experience. The musician said that she was worried when she played at the cathedral the next day – the piece scheduled for that show was called “Dance of the Goat.”
It gets dark earlier now. When the concert ended at 7:15, I walked along shadowy sidewalks near the big mansion. The parked cars were lightless, chrome dull and dead. The heat has been good for ants. They came from the underground and rushed here and there on the sidewalks, big and black and silent. I had to take care to avoid treading upon them. The jazz band was still playing behind me on the mansion’s porch: Duke Ellington’s “Don’t get around much anymore”. Where there was a brick wall or the side of an old house or garage, the notes reflected and were amplified. But the heat cast a pall over everything and seemed to mute the music.
8.
After the third night of the Republican National Convention (RNC), there is the usual festival of hatred among liberal commentators. Several of them note that the tone of the Convention is apocalyptic: if Trump is not re-elected, the suburbs will burn, the government will seize your weapons, and mobs will burn the cities to ashes. This hysterical narrative, however, is countered by the speeches that we have heard last week at the Democratic convention: if the President gets another four years, he will supervise the massacre of black and brown men, ravage the economy until nothing exists but billion dollar hedge funds and lemonade stands in the smoking ruins of our cities, and foment the spread of corona virus so that everyone dies.
The pundits attacking the RNC speakers and their rhetoric seem to assume that the Democrats were the soul of sweet reason and exhaled a spirit of gentle compromise. For four years, an increasingly radical press corps, both liberal and conservative, has torn the body politic with beak and claw, competing for the ever more fragmented carcasses of those Americans who find themselves in the middle of this fray.
9.
The eerie pronunciamentos of doom emanating from both conventions are a product of the consistent devaluation of rhetoric, political and otherwise. Political nominating conventions consist of speeches designed to sway public opinion – such speeches are necessarily rhetorical. But Americans pretend, at least, to despise rhetoric. When I attended high school, the very concept of rhetoric was deemed antithetical to anything like the truth. In 11th grade, in particular, I recall my High School English teacher, a very bright and charismatic woman from the South, denouncing rhetoric and showing us how rhetorical tropes and figures were customarily deployed in the cause of deceit, at worse, and, at best, euphemism. The class must have been persuasively conducted because I still recall its precepts now fifty years later. At that time, around 1969, the generation of Peace and Love valued truth-telling, authenticity, “telling it like is”, to use the parlance of the times. And, therefore, all rhetorical approaches to communication were systematically devalued. (This was before the deconstructionist wave swamped American higher education and proclaimed that there is nothing but rhetoric and that, therefore, all discourse can be criticized in terms of its fundamental inauthenticity.) When I was in High School, the liberal presumption prevailed that the truth existed and, even, could be declared but only if rhetorical devices were strictly eschewed – speech should be as clear, bland, and unadorned as possible, without recognition of the notion that this so-called “plain style” was a rhetorical device in itself.
I remember vividly when I was appointed to attend the local Democratic nominating convention in Mower County, my neutrality insured by the fact that I was known for my impeccably Republican credentials – I had actually gone door-to-door for the Young Republicans in the Minneapolis suburbs to raise money for CREEP (the Campaign to Re-elect President Nixon). Although I had some nominal involvement in actual politics, my experience was fundamentally “suburban”, that is, a political milieu in which points are made by seeming to be reasonable, polite, and respectful of opposing perspectives. The first time I appeared as a Parliamentarian for the Democratic Party in a strongly pro-Union and liberal bastion, I was astonished by the rhetoric spewing from the mouths of the speakers on the dais. One after another, speakers addressed the conventioneers in the most intemperate terms, shouting out venomous and, I thought, defamatory accusations against the opposing party. I was naive and experienced a sort of vertiginous horror – it was appalling, something like when a child hears for the first time a really filthy joke. (Is this really how adults talk?) I had never actually heard overtly partisan discourse and I was shocked by its callous indifference to truth and its intemperate tone of denunciation mixed with blind adulation for the party’s standard bearer. Surely, no good could come out of this sort of political practice – at least, so I thought.
And, in fact, the practitioners of this kind of speechifying would probably have agreed with me. Partisan politics is the engine that wins elections. But the notion once was that when the election was won, and power attained, the primitive and brutal means used to grasp power would be put aside and the task of governance would be conducted according to some sort of rational calculus relating ends and means. In other words, the detestable rhetorical devices used to move the morons to vote, and instrumental in gaining power, would be set aside once the election was over. This idea, always quixotic at best, arises directly from the moral and esthetic devaluation of rhetoric – rhetoric is seen as a nasty means to an end, a weapon that can be employed by all sides to a controversy, but which must be set aside once the debated issue must really be resolved as opposed to merely argued over. There was no notion that rhetoric has a role in governing or administering political order. Furthermore, there was no concept that some kinds of rhetoric were better than others, or that rhetoric could be used to serve legitimate objectives. Every partisan politician was a form of Hitler trembling with indignation and vomiting out torrents of debased (and debasing) rhetoric.
The intrinsic problem is that people of my generation have been educated to detach rhetoric from any kind of legitimate or rational political policy. Since rhetoric is snake-oil, the concept is to use this poison to advance a political agenda while, at the same time, conceding that rhetoric is just a pack of lies that should be abandoned when political power is achieved. The effect of this idea is to wholly degrade the notion of truthfulness in politics. Rhetoric authorizes you to say anything to get elected with the assumption that you will exercise political power in service of facts and institutions rooted in objective reality. There’s a radical disconnect between political means and ends.
But extreme partisan politics, something that is distasteful to people of my generation, has now bled into governance and administration. (The old notion of truth and factual reality remains the province of civil servants and self-interested bureaucrats – that is, the organs of government that Trump and his acolytes have denounced as the Deep State.) It is the return of the repressed. Rhetoric, a disgraced species of discourse, has risen from its grave to seize our politics. Everything is now rhetorical and, therefore, partisan – and since rhetoric has been denounced as a mere and debased instrument, the concept of truth and reason in politics has been similarly eroded.
One of the panels convened by CNN to flay the speeches delivered at the RNC featured a fact-checker who listed a half-dozen lies uttered by the Vice-President, Mike Pence. Many of these lies involved the assertion that the covid pandemic is now behind us, a historical event rapidly receding even as the speech was underway. But, of course, this declaration is simply untrue, a bald-faced lie. The Republican defenders of the speech on the panel said that the assertions that the virus was under control and that all was well were merely “aspirational” – not literally true, but wished to be true. This is another way of saying that the assertions are lies and represent “magical thinking”, the hegemony of wish over reality, that is, merely “rhetorical”. It’s bad form to take seriously as truth something that is intended to be merely rhetorical.
10.
In the midst of the RNC, an enormous hurricane toppled like an avalanche against the Gulf Coast, peeling off the facades of casinos and hotels and ravaging trailer courts with 125 mile an hour winds. And, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, another White cop shot another Black man, Jacob Blake, in questionable circumstances – seven bullets in the back fired while the man was opening his car door and with his children apparently in tow. Demonstations in Kenosha rapidly devolved into looting and street-fighting between White vigilantes and Black rioters. Then, a kid from a town 18 miles away in Illinois appeared on the streets of Kenosha carrying a semi-automatic long gun and shot, at least, two people, killing one of them. (Wisconsin is one of those deluded backwaters in which citizens are free to openly carry weapons even into the obviously violent and chaotic environment of a race riot.) Everything is now captured on digital camera, although what we see in these images is no different than what can be seen in real life – that is, often ambiguous and unclear. Pictures of the African-American man’s shooting don’t provide context and, so, we can’t really evaluate what we see – it all happens too quickly to be assimilated to any rational narrative. I have no idea whether the police shooting was justified – the media focus is misguided, that is, on the number of shots fired (seven). Once the decision is made to shoot someone, presumably, police protocol is to kill the suspect whose dangerous conduct had triggered the shooting – therefore, the actual analysis must be focused on whether the first shot was justifiable (after all, one bullet can kill you as dead as seven) and not the ensuing fusillade. Similarly, the footage of the vigilante killing on the Kenosha streets is ambiguous as well. We see someone carrying a gun and running forward in a large group of young men, some of them masked. People are shouting that the “dude” has just shot someone. Obviously, some sort of mob has formed to pursue the kid with the gun, although this posse is disorganized and chaotic. People converge on the kid and knock him down. (Or, possibly, he trips over his own feet and falls.) He, then, sits up and confronts two men who are charging at him. He shoots one of them point-blank and, then, fires another shot (or series of shots) that hits another man. Then, the kid gets up and holding the gun over his head walks down the street toward a group of police cruisers and armored personnel vehicles that are parked by the curb in a rotating spray of red and green lights. The kid simply walks by the vehicles which, then, rumble forward toward where the victims of the shooting lie on the asphalt.
The liberal media’s response to this is bizarre. The argument on display is borderline pathological: If the cops are authorized to shoot a Black man seven times in the back, then, presumably they should have gunned down the 17-year old White boy with the long gun. Instead of arguing for racial justice, the Black liberal pundits, maddened it seems by their own narrative that it’s open season on Black men, seem to be demanding that the cops commit equal mayhem on White suspects – parity in shooting victims is demanded. For every African-American pointlessly gunned down, the pundits seem to argue that a White vigilante should also be shot to death.
Of course, the Press later reports that the 17-year old with the semi-automatic (he’s named Rittenhouse) is a big Trump supporter – at least, if we accept the content of his Facebook page as accurately depicting this kid’s thoughts. So Trump is accused of pulling the trigger in Kenosha, a notion that is as absurd as it is dangerously simplistic. (Nothing at this point is yet known about the victims of the shooting on the streets of Kenosha.)
No one really points out the real problem – too many guns in volatile situations. I’m not in favor of defunding the police; I’m in favor of increasing their budgets and de-gunning them. If cops carry guns, they will shoot all sorts of people, at least, half of the time without any legitimate reason. If you are packing a gun, you have no incentive to de-escalate a tense and, possibly, dangerous confrontation – the gun can reliably solve all problems. Similarly, in what kind of miserable world does a half-crazed 17-year old vigilante get to roam the streets of a major American city during a race riot carrying a semi-automatic assault rifle?
11.
Dawn on the Louisiana coast: an estuary has flooded and water stands in blue lagoons under big concrete buildings that look as of a car-bomb has exploded next to them at curb-side. Several semi-trucks lie on their sides along a road. So how bad is this? The scope of damage and death in most disasters is not known, usually for several weeks.
The real disaster is in the world of sports. The police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin has led to, at least, three NBA teams canceling the rest of the season and its play-off games. A famous Black basketball player and now sports commentator stalks off the set of an ESPN broadcast. He says that “as a Black man, (he) can’t idly sit by while people like (him) are being murdered by the police.” There are two other hulking Black men, also sports commentators, sitting socially distanced on the set. They look down at their notes but don’t leave the set. The sole White man says that he respects the decision of the man who has walked off the set in protest. It’s embarrassing: what about the other two Black men who stay?
12.
I dreamed the last chapter to a novel that I have been writing. I dreamed the chapter in sentence and word. The pandemic had ended and people were free to pursue their ordinary activities. Characters gathered in bars and restaurants to celebrate as if they were giddy at the end of the a long and terrible war. Strangers embraced on the sidewalks and great festive crowds paraded down the boulevards. The love affairs and conflicts that the covid-virus had suspended were suddenly resumed. Mysteries were solved and problems resolved. In a forest, I had planted a number of trees and carefully watered them and, as they grew, warped and deformed them by bending branches and twisting trunks. I had made the trees into ornate, green candelabra so that they could be harvested and carefully set into place to complete the architecture of my book’s last chapter. It was time to rise and greet the dawn and, then, finish my book. Except that as I ascended into waking consciousness, I realized that I hadn’t written the novel. I had a splendid last chapter but no book preceding those pages. I would have to reverse engineer the novel from its wonderful denouement (which now seemed no longer wonderful to me.) I had a truckload of strange contorted wood, bent and twisted branches, trunks like corkscrews but there was no place to put it.
13.
At the RNC, the speakers declared that the pandemic was in the past. The virus was never mentioned except as something that we had experienced and had successfully overcome. The entire pandemic was reduced to a grammatical instance of the past perfect verb tense.
Words are talismans. If something is referred to in the past, people feel that the crisis is behind us. Try this experiment: refer to someone who is very alive and present in the past tense, not once, but ten times. You won’t be able to complete this exercise – putting someone in the past tense is equivalent to verbally murdering them. It’s something too dire to contemplate.
So, similarly, if we wish something to be past and, therefore, absent in important ways, this can be accomplished also to create a counter-reality. Utopias are primarily grammatical constructs: once there was disease and poverty but now no more; we had racial injustice, but now have equity. Humans have suffered but, now, they suffer no more.
This form of magical thinking inspired 1500 people to gather on the White House lawn, without masks, and seated side-by-side at the RNC gathering. Covid was once a problem but now it is gone. It has exited our narrative. And, to some degree, this was true: the headlines of the day were about race riots, protests marches, and a mighty hurricane. Covid was pushed to the margins. It is not the story for today.
14.
The sky seems brushed and spotlessly blue. The storms have scrubbed away the humidity and the morning air seems fresh, vivid with cool breeze, clean and, almost, cold. There’s a whiff of autumn in the air.
A helicopter is circling overhead. I can hear both the treadmill beat of its wings and the putter of an engine. But the vast, blue sky is immaculate. The helicopter overhead is invisible.
15.
Inexplicably, Trump agreed to 18 hours of taped interviews with journalist Bob Woodward. Woodward has now written a book called Rage. (Two years ago, he wrote a book about the Trump administration entitled Fear.) On tape, Trump tells Woodward that he has been advised that the corona-virus spreads through the air, that the disease produced by the virus is very much more deadly than the most “strenuous flu” – in fact, five times as deadly. It is a “very tricky” and dangerous disease Trump tells the journalist. The interview was recorded in late January 2020, at a time when Trump was publicly minimizing the risk from the virus and repeatedly saying that it was no more worrisome than the flu. In an interview in March, Trump says that it is his plan to “downplay” the virus to “avoid panic.”
There are several things noteworthy and, perhaps, troubling about this. Substantively, this news merely confirms something known long before Trump took office: the former Reality TV star is an inveterate liar. Everyone knows that Bob Woodward is no friend to the presidents subjected to the tender mercies of his journalism. A long time ago, Woodward, with his partner, Bernstein, tanked Nixon. Since that time, Woodward has written books about many presidents and none of them have been even remotely flattering. So the question arises: what lunacy induced Trump to deliver into the hands of the bitterest enemy that could be imagined, eighteen hours of raw, stupefyingly monstrous admissions? Obviously, Trump advisors are fools or, more likely, were wholly ignored when they told the President to run in the opposite direction from Woodward. Apparently, Trump thought that his personal charm and the rectitude of his political positions would bewitch Woodward into some kind of enchanted paralysis. (A lot of narcissistic people think they can “spin” an interview with an adversary, and, even, win that person over to their way of thinking – but this has never happened in the history of the world: certainly, the advisors of Gilgamesh told their ruler what Trump’s aides undoubtedly pressed upon him –under no circumstances should you speak to that man.)
More troubling, I suppose, is Woodward’s complicity in foisting a dangerous lie on the American people. Most of the journalistic hand-wringing amounts to this claim: if the American people had known what Trump knew in late January 2020, they would have been better informed and thousands of lives may have been saved. The TV journalists, at least, make the brazen claim (wholly without proof) that if Trump had told the American public that the disease was airborne, “very tricky”, and five times more deadly than flu, somehow the dire outcome of the pandemic in America would have been different. This premise is exceedingly questionable. If Trump had gone public with his information on the virus in late January, of course, the same media that assails him so violently over concealing the dangers would have accused him of lying to create panic – since as Woodward’s earlier book, Fear, implies, this man rules on the basis of engendering fear in the electorate. Furthermore, the American public has known for many months how the virus attacks and that it is deadly and I don’t see a whole lot of evidence that about half of the population has changed anything about the way that it calculates, and, even, embraces, risk. (Over 250,000 bikers converged without masks on campgrounds and bars in Sturgis, South Dakota in mid-August – surely, they had access to everything known by Trump in January and it made no difference at all in their conduct.) Therefore, the hysterical assertions that Trump’s lying to the public about the level of risk posed by the virus made some sort of difference are, at best, unsupported and, at worst, just more meretricious pandering to liberal hatred of the President.
But, let’s assume for the purpose of argument, that Trump’s knowledge as to the real consequences of the spreading virus, if publicly disclosed, would have saved innumerable lives – this is the present media narrative. Then, isn’t Bob Woodward profoundly complicit in the carnage? After all, he knew that the president was lying and was aware of the actual state of knowledge about the virus in late January. If this information could have saved lives, shouldn’t he have released his tapes, perhaps, in February and, thereby, exposed the President’s deceit? But Woodward didn’t do anything like this. He concealed the tapes himself as proprietary information and released them only as teasers to his new book, a tome very nicely calculated to be published on the very eve of the election. If I have this thought, then, of course, many millions of people have the same idea – originality is much overestimated: most people think and believe more or less the same things at the same time. In fact, on TV, one pundit mentioned this problem but said that the Woodward had “not fully believed” that Trump was correct about his assessment of the deadliness of the virus. (In other words, Woodward thought that Trump, a famous bullshitter, was bullshitting him when he bragged about the virulence of the pathogen – Trump communicates almost exclusively in superlatives, everything is best or worst with no middle ground.) But when Trump appeared before the media in March, minimizing the risk of the viral disease, didn’t Woodward have a moral obligation to disclose what he knew at that time? If Trump has actual blood on his hands (which I doubt in this context), then, so does Woodward.
16.
The great statesman, Joe Biden, comes on TV to capitalize on the news accounts that Trump knew about the deadliness of the virus in January and did nothing except lie about it. Biden’s eyes have shrunk to slits – it’s like he’s peering out at the world through the kind of diffraction-grating sunglasses that Eskimos used to carve from walrus tusks. He always seems to be staring into a great, and blinding light that has narrowed his eyes to mere grooves in his face.
Biden stretches out his arms and speaks: “Think about what he did not do!”
This is a baffling declaration, something on the order of “Elect me because of what Trump isn’t.” But it’s the best that old Uncle Joe can manage.
17.
Hundreds of fires ravage the West Coast. In the morning, the sun is raw wound, a red smear above the horizon. The sky is suffering. A pale pall hangs over the land – this is smoke in the upper atmosphere. Sunset is also red and diffuse, the sun weeping scarlet tears onto the horizon.
Meanwhile, a hurricane lashes the Gulf Coast and the pandemic has now killed 196,000 Americans.
18.
The place was derelict, with large empty rooms that gave me the impression of being elevated, a second or third floor perhaps. Although it was well-known that the place was haunted, I felt no fear and, indeed, was even giddy with excitement. I entered a room filled with a diffuse orange-yellow light. In the center of the room, set on the floor was an old TV. It was the sort of nondescript television that everyone owned before flat-screen plasma TVs. The television was like some kind of art installation or sculpture in the empty room. I approached the TV and could hear that it was whispering faintly. So I reached down and lifted the TV and tucked it under my arm. The television must have shrunk and, then, become very light because I had no difficulty moving it. Then, I ran. I ran very fast with the Tv tucked under my arm like a football. The TV said the word “suicide”. I ignored the whisper and continued running. “Suicide,” the TV said again more loudly I kept running. “Suicide!” the TV now shouted and I understood that it was a command directed to me. I set the box down and it was a computer screen on which I could see images. Someone had gathered pictures of people killing themselves on Facebook. Guns were put in mouths or to temples and, then, flashed and the persons holding the guns suddenly vanished, dropping below the level of the camera. A succession of self-murders followed, one after another, then, accompanied of autopsy picture of horribly disfigured corpses. I wanted to look away but could not. I awoke gasping a little for air. The word “suicide” was on my lips, lingering there like a foul taste.
19.
On September 18, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. Now what? God help us. The South is drowned by another hurricane, the forests of the West are burning, the number of Covid victims will cross 200,000 this weekend and the police keep killing Black people. The country feels like it is about rip apart.
God help us. Now what?
20.
A few hours before I learned that the Supreme Court Justice had died, I went to vote. The polling place was an airless suite of rooms in a corner of the upper level of City Hall. Everyone was masked and there was one other person, with a friend, voting – an elderly woman with someone at her elbow in case she were to lose her balance. I had not yet completed a request for an absentee ballot and so this was the first order of business. I sat on a chair against the wall, holding the request form clipped to a board, and filled-out the information, all identifying data: Minnesota driver’s license and the last four digits of my social security number. Then, I was handed a ballot and shown the way to another small room in which there were several voting booths, really just cubicles where you stand to bend over the ballot to vote. The whole thing was accomplished in ten minutes. It was odd to exercise the franchise wearing a surgical mask over my mouth and nose. I’ve found that the mask creates fugitive moments of confusion and, when my breath fogs over my glasses, there is a corresponding sense of blurriness in my thoughts.
The day is cool with brisk winds, but the sun still is warm and the pall of smoke from the western fires seems to have been blown away so that the sky is clear. Some of the trees are adorned with leaves already changed into gold and amber and scarlet stained glass.
21.
In one light, it is possible to see the upcoming struggle over the Supreme Court nominations as something beneficial. The Court has been increasingly politicized since Gore v. Bush in 2000 and, as this tendency increases, the moral authority of the Justices has waned. Once the Court is freighted with six conservative judges to three liberal, the institution will be marginalized – at least, for a while. (Lifelong appointees are unpredictable and the institution nudges them toward the center unless they are die-hard ideologues like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – there are no wholly predictable votes on the High Court and, even, a profoundly conservative judge like Scalia was capable of issuing liberal-seeming rulings on cases involving First Amendment freedoms and criminal procedure.) If the Court is marginalized, then, legislators will have to do their job – that is, pass laws and lead, as oppose to merely mirroring the most dysfunctional fantasies of their constituents. My fear, however, is that legislators have so long forsaken the skill-sets necessary to pass laws and have abandoned the old arts of persuasion and compromise, that they will be unequal to the task – there is no one alive today that is the equivalent of the Old Deceiver, LBJ, for instance, with respect to his skills as a legislator. For an interim period, therefore, the nation will be left without either effective legislators or a Supreme Court that is supported as an institution by the majority of people. Legislators won’t be able to legislate and the Court will have no credibility as a politically corrupt instrument of presidential power. But this, too, as they say, will pass.
The most pernicious legacy of the Trump presidency will be the continuation of politics as revenge. Once, someone said that there was a strain of paranoia in American politics. This is subordinate today to a tendency to conduct politics as a blood feud – that is, as endless, and uncontrollable, revenge and retribution. If Trump succeeds in appointing another Supreme Court justice, the Democrats, when they achieve a majority (which is inevitable – this outcome is demographically mandated), will abolish the filibuster as to legislation, and, then, pass laws to increase the number of justices, thereby, essentially destroying the authority of the High Court. This is the catastrophe of current politics – the party in power acts as if the party ousted from a majority will never again regain power. But, of course, this is a delusional notion, short-sighted to the point of clinical insanity – particularly with respect to the Republicans who are in the minority now and will remain a minority party that is increasingly besieged by armies of brown and black and young voters. Simply put, the Republicans are dying out and we are witnessing, perhaps, the final death spasms of a generation of voters who opposed civil rights once, opposed Gay rights once, viewed feminism with suspicion, and finds themselves submerged by the tides of change. The problem is that an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retaliation is no way to operate a Republic and this is what we will witness for the next twenty-five years. I think it will take a generation to erase, or, at least, reduce to insignificance the deep scars caused by today’s partisan politics.
The world is mutable and the future can’t be known. The only thing that is clear is that today’s victors are tomorrow’s losers – and the triumphant must always fear the wrath of those that they have defeated.
22.
It used to be said that only a die-hard Cold Warrior like Richard Nixon could have gone to Red China. Similarly, only women will be able to reverse Roe v. Wade. And Trump is poised to appoint a conservative woman to the Supreme Court who will likely take this measure.
The President has publicly vowed to appoint to woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. This measure will have many advantages in the confirmation process. First, the woman is not likely to have sexually harassed anyone or have attempted rape, allegations that were (unpersuasively but embarrassingly) presented against Brett Kavanaugh. (The power of such accusations is not that they can be proven but that they humiliate.) Indeed, if Trump plays his cards right, he will nominate a woman who can convincingly claim to have been the victim of sexual violence. Second, there are still some vestigial instincts for chivalry among the male members of the Judiciary Committee and these men will likely wish to avoid the appearance of using their bare knuckles on a female candidate. Lastly, a woman can count upon much support from other women (even if that support is sotto voce) and, so, criticism of the appointee will be muted.
If Trump’s female candidate is properly vetted, she will probably be confirmed. Even if Trump loses the election, something that seems likely, a moderately conservative female jurist will be difficult to defeat if a lame-duck session of the Senate proceeds toward confirmation. This is because the spectacle of liberals joining together to crush a qualified female candidate will simply be too unappetizing for the public to abide.
23.
Claims of hypocrisy resound against the Republicans who are now gleefully eating their words spoken when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. That nomination was made to fill the seat vacated by the conservative Antonin Scalia who died about nine months before the the 2016 election. At that time, Republican senators such as Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell trumpeted that the appointment was too near the upcoming election (in November of 2016) and that democracy required that the seat be filled only after an election had established the will of the people. This was the sole rationale advanced for delaying proceedings with respect to Garland, a jurist otherwise centrist and, certainly, well-qualified. No other arguments were advanced as far as I can recall. Of course, the Democrats cried foul and there was a polemical battle between right- and left-leaning editorial staffs at the major newspapers and news outlets. Several of the Republican senators announced that their opponents could use their words against them were they to ever seek to appoint a justice within a year of a presidential election. But, of course, the shoe is now on the other foot and these very same Republicans who argued that democracy would be defiled if a President appointed a justice on the eve of national election are now blithely maintaining a position wholly inconsistent with their early declarations on this precise point.
The best specimen of this blatant partisan hypocrisy can be studied in a recent Wall Street Journal issued only two days after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (She hasn’t yet been displayed lying in state in the Supreme Court – her corpse is figuratively still warm.) A fairly long editorial presents arguments contorted into pretzel logic in support of the notion that it is just and virtuous to rush to appoint a new Justice for a life-long term on the High Court only about forty days from the National Election. A opinion piece on the facing page also endorses this position.
These writings are a little difficult to follow because they aren’t exactly models of rational argumentation. As someone has said on Cable News, the situation is now Hobbesian – that is, a savage exercise of power unmitigated by any principle other than pure political force. Here, as far as I can ascertain, are the arguments, now loyally mouthed by Mitt Romney, for instance, in asserting that he will support Donald Trump by rushing to vote on a conservative appointee to the Supreme Court in derogation of the democratic arguments (elections have consequences – let the people decide) that were so steadfastly endorsed by the Republican Senators in quashing the Garland nomination in 2016. In this context, it must be noted that Mitt Romney, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, waited for a couple days for someone to come up with an argument, albeit one that is farcically implausible to justify his position. Needless to say, he would not have been able to figure out a justificatory rationale without the help of the Wall Street Journal. It is eerily conspicuous that the arguments now justifying an accelerated rush to appoint a Trump Supreme Court nominee have never been made in this form before. That is, when the Republicans were denying Garland his hearing none of these sorts of arguments were ever advanced. This shows that these rationales are purely opportunistic.
This is the concept: in 2016, the Democrat President Obama nominated a Justice to the Supreme Court in the last year before the election to replace the two-term executive. At that time, the Senate was controlled (as it is now) by a Republican majority. It is this fact – the existence of a Republican majority in the Senate that rendered the nomination of Merrick Garland futile and justified its suppression. But this argument is obviously invalid. First, the argument is based on the idea that a nomination of a justice by a Democratic president in the face of a Republican-controlled Senate is impermissible because that nomination will be futile. But this assertion deserves careful consideration. We don’t prohibit a proceeding or a vote because it is expected to be futile. After all, the Senate is a deliberative body and, therefore, one must hold out hope, albeit slim, that someone in one of the warring camps will persuade someone on the opposing side to join in bipartisan initiatives. This is why there are hearings in the first place – if no one could ever be persuaded on non-partisan grounds, then, why waste time with a public hearing. The aspirational concept is that legislators of good will may be able to put aside partisan differences to reach an accommodation – that is, to undertake some good old fashioned horse-trading of the kind that might result in the nominee being approved. If we were to forestall all hearings and votes merely because an outcome can be predicted by the Cable News networks, the entire work of deliberative bodies would be thwarted. We need to encourage bipartisan cooperation not enshrine partisan differences as an abiding, inviolate principle. And this is precisely the meaning of denying a nomination merely because it is likely to be futile in the context of the partisan control of the Senate. This idea elevates to a doctrine the idea that no one can ever be persuaded of the merit of an opponent’s position and that, therefore, it is futile to allow proceedings on a nominee when it is unlikely that the nominee may be confirmed. This makes no sense at all and is completely contrary to the norms of the Senate.
As is always the case, the Republican position is short-sighted. In effect, the Republicans are announcing the principle that no hearing can ever be conducted on a judicial nominee unless the Senate is controlled by the party advancing the nomination. This is blind madness. There will come a time when the Senate will be controlled by Democrats – this may be sooner as opposed to later. The Republican position is tantamount to the notion that no Republican nominee to the High Court can ever be considered if the Senate is democratically controlled. One would suspect that senators would hesitate to embark down this dark and dangerous path – but most senators are myopic fools and no one seems capable of seeing beyond the tips of their noses. (On a purely forensic note, I should observe that the argument in the opinion piece had to invoke proceedings in 1980 relating to a lower Court appointment to support its obviously defective reasoning – in other words, a forty-year old, and questionable, precedent had to be invoked to distinguish between the Garland nomination in an election year and the situation today.)
The Wall Street Journal is more naked in its approach to the problem of hypocrisy vexing the Republican’s current position. That editorial is wholly bloody-minded, simply a recitation of past misdeeds by the Democrats that somehow justify their current maltreatment at the hands of the Republican-controlled Senate. Since the Democrats were never as pure as driven snow on the subject of judicial appointments (for instance abolishing the Senate filibuster which is a mechanism for protecting minority rights), therefore, the Republicans have the right to do whatever they want at this current juncture. But, of course, this attitude will have dire consequences when the Democrats accede to a majority in the Senate and, then, inflict their revenge on their Republican adversaries. Any concept of reason and principle has now fled the halls of power in Congress. The rationale for legislation and appointment of a High Court Judge is nothing more than naked revenge. We have seen this already in action: Harry Reid knocked out the filibuster for Democratic ends; Mitch McConnell now uses the very procedural mechanisms made possible by Reid’s imprudent act to advance the nomination of the callow and dimwitted Brett Kavanaugh and, now, Trump’s nominee who will likely be seated before an election less than six weeks away.
21.
History will record that the “Black Lives Matter” movement drifted into irrelevence when Grand Jury results were declared in Louisville, Kentucky as to accusations of police misconduct. These findings arose in the context of the killing of Breonna Taylor, an event that should be called “tragic” if anyone understood, or accepted, the fundamental meaning of that characterization.
On its face, the slaughter of Breonna Taylor seems tailor-made for outrage. A promising young Black woman, Taylor worked as an EMT. Police served a warrant in a context that is widely disputed. There were shots fired and Taylor was hit six times. Her boyfriend who was standing next to her was also shot but not killed. Taylor was not involved in the commission of any crimes and not a suspect with respect to any wrongdoing. She was gunned-down in her apartment in an early morning shoot-out, killed as a bystander to violence she did not instigate or cause in any way.
For reasons that will be later apparent, the Louisville police didn’t regard the shooting as criminal. In fact, nothing was done. Breonna Taylor’s death was merely “collateral damage” to the implementation of a law enforcement function, that is, service of warrants. Only when George Floyd was murdered on-camera did questions arise about what had happened to Ms. Taylor. Further investigation was warranted and, as protests ramped-up about the Floyd killing, demonstrators insisted that the officers involved in killing Taylor be brought to justice. After some suspicious seeming delays, a Grand Jury was impaneled. Evidence presented to the Grand Jury resulted in the indictment of only one of the three White officers involved in the shooting. The sole felony charge arising from the incident was the accusation that one of the officers had acted with criminal negligence, a charge of reckless endangerment arising from spraying bullets all over the landscape, including three shots that penetrated an adjoining apartment (said by some to be occupied by White people). Thus, no charges were issued with respect to Taylor’s death and she is not even named in the sole indictment declared by the Grand Jury. The three Caucasian cops are shown in pictures to be typical “good ole boys”, a group of goobers with military-style hair cuts and dumb doofus grins, typical White soldier males. Accordingly, the optics of the situation are not good when it comes to exculpating these three officers.
And, yet, the Grand Jury’s findings are wholly reasonable. Here is why: when the cops approached the apartment, they knocked on the door. All three police claimed that they gave notice of their intent to “breach” (this means ‘knock down’) the door. This testimony was corroborated by an “ear” witness to the event. Of course, the devil is in the details and one would like to know how much time elapsed between pounding on the door and the “breach” of the apartment; similarly, one would want to know more about the corroborating witness and how closely that testimony lines up with the cops’ account of how they announced themselves. But, at this stage, it is clear that door wasn’t simply smashed down without any advance warning and that the police did attempt to rouse the inhabitants of the apartment so that they would open the door for them.
As soon as the door was knocked down, the police looked into the dark rooms and saw two figures standing inside. One of those figures fired a weapon and a bullet hit one of the cops in the upper leg. The police, finding themselves under fire, discharged their weapons in a fusillade that riddled Breonna Taylor, although, apparently, only one of the bullets pierced her fatally. The figure who had fired the shot was Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend who was sleeping with her in the house. This young man was armed and thought that the intruders were associated with Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, a man who had apparently made threats or behaved in a sinister way previously with respect to Ms. Taylor.
The simple fact is that the police were lawfully serving a summons, although one can, and must, question the way that this task was implemented. The first shot was fired by Taylor’s boyfriend. Once that shot was fired, and, in fact, an officer hit by the bullet, the die was cast – the police had legal authority to return fire in self-defense with the deadly effect. There is no jury in the United States that would convict the police of any crime – they were acting in self-defense, not responding to a “furtive” gesture or a “reasonable belief” that an attack was imminent, but, in fact, returning fire at a gunman who had shot first, and, already, wounded one of them. The indictment of the cop for reckless endangerment is a “fig leaf” – he will never be convicted of anything. In essence, the charge against that police officer is that he was a lousy shot, that is, that his aim was actionably imprecise – this sort of claim sounds in negligence, but will not result in a criminal conviction.
Remarkably, the media has obscured these facts and continues to portray Breonna Taylor’s shooting as a murder, pure and simple – this plays into the overarching media narrative in the mainstream outlets that cops in general are thuggish brutes who can’t be trusted not to kill any and all Black folks on sight. The problem is that people can’t grasp the concept of “tragedy” – Breonna Taylor, who seems blameless in the affray, was killed because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Police were blasting away in legitimate self-defense at two people, one of whom had fired a bullet with sufficient accuracy to wound a cop. She didn’t do anything wrong but died anyway. This happens all the time – people die from cancer or ALS who never deserved any misfortune. Car crashes kill people in circumstances in which no one was at fault. The New Testament, Jesus is asked about a number of pious Jews who died when a wall inexplicably collapsed on them – he doesn’t have any answer for why God allowed this to happen. The general experience of humanity, at least, until recently is that people perish for bad reasons or no reasons at all – as King Lear says: “we are like flies to the wanton gods, they kill us for sport.”
The notion of meaningless suffering is anathema to the Press. If there is a harm, someone must be to blame and, therefore, fault must be found in some person or institution – this is the habit of applying the law of negligence and the sensibility of a litigator to all tragedies. And, indeed, construed in the light of negligence theory, one can almost always find someone or something at fault. But, it must be recalled, that the criminal law doesn’t operate on the basis of probabilities. The criminal law requires proof beyond in a reasonable doubt as to the guilt of an identified person – not just a general sense that a wrong has been committed and that there is something “systemically” at fault. I repeat that no jury could convict anyone of any crimes relating the death of Breonna Taylor and the charge that one of the cops committed a felony because his aim was poor is ludicrously weak.
This analysis is evident from the pundits brought to bear on the events that led to Ms. Taylor’s death. On MSNBC, a famously liberal cable news service, a Black NAACP official was asked about the killing. She responded at length with platitudes about police killing Black people. The host, then, asked this question: “I know you are an experienced federal prosecutor, tell me how you would present this case to the jury to get a conviction.” The guest responded that something must be done to remedy systemic police violence and that the entire criminal justice system is corrupt and must be reformed. In other words, she didn’t answer the question because there is no rational answer when applied to the facts of this case. There is no way to successfully prosecute cops who returned fire that had wounded one of their group. On CNN, also a liberal news agency, a Black police chief who formerly managed the force in Houston was asked a similar question – basically: did he agree with the Grand Jury findings? The commentator said that he didn’t have enough information but that “it must be remembered that the police were fired upon and one of them was even shot before they returned fire.” Dismayed, the host turned to another guest who reliably commented on “systemic racism.” Even a generally neutral and responsible news source such as the Manchester Guardian reports the findings of the Grand Jury in a way contrived to engender outrage. The Guardian leads with the decision of the Grand Jury said to be “disappointing” and “enraging” by community leaders. A half-dozen quotes from activists decry the outcome that is said to arise “from the shooting by three police officers of an innocent woman, Breonna Taylor.” The inconvenient detail that the shooting was justified legally as self-defense isn’t stated until about ten paragraphs into the article at a point at which most news consumers, confident that they have the gist of the report, have stopped reading. More sophisticated commentators, ignore the self-defense justification and just say that the (petite or trial) jury should have been allowed to decide the issue. But this is absurd and makes no sense. Would we generally want prosecutors to waste resources in trying cases that they can’t win simply to make political points, particularly when the inevitable jury-acquittal is certain to result of further protests, rioting and mayhem? I would think that liberals would not want prosecutors to try cases without merit simply to make political points – after all, there are all sorts of political points that a prosecutor might want to make, many of them pernicious. If one wants to cast blame on institutions, then, the notion of serving warrants in the middle of the night to intimidate and surprise alleged wrongdoers should be closely examined. Do we really want cops barging into people’s houses in the middle of the night with guns drawn? But, of course, when the conservative and vicious Roger Stone was the subject of a warrant, the media was delighted the feds descended upon his house in a pre-dawn raid with drawn guns and smashing down doors. I guess it depends on the target of the warrant. The other obvious cause for the shooting is the grotesque aspect of American culture that encourages everyone to be fully armed and ready to start shooting in order to vindicate their supposed rights. If Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend hadn’t been packing heat, apparently in her boudoir, presumably no one would have been shot that night – although who knows? Cops have a hair-trigger and, perhaps, the sight of two shadowy figure standing upright would have been enough to justify a fusillade even before a shot was fired. But, of course, no one wants to drop down this particular rabbit-hole when you have three White villains, right out of central casting, on display.
22.
A block from my office, on a quiet residential side-street, a white plastic bag is tethered somehow in mid-air. I can’t quite figure out how the bag is supported, but it hangs over the street, bobbing in the breeze like a pale balloon. The air has inflated the bag and it seems to represent something...but what? Does the bag signal something about the activities of those who live on this street or in the adjacent house? My eyes aren’t sufficiently sharp to detect how the bag is tethered – some filament must hold it fixed to an overhanging bough or power line. Perhaps, this is a mark of deliverance – pestilence will pass over this place.
The bag hovers in the air for two days and, then, is gone.
23.
After the debacle of the debate between Trump and Biden, the President tests positive for the virus and, then, within 18 hours is hospitalized. No 25th Amendment transfer of power is implemented and tweets from the President in Walter Reed Military Hospital are optimistic, even, cheery. But the news also reveals that the President has been administered an experimental “cocktail” of antibiotics intravenously. This medication has been given contrary to FDA regulations under a so-called “compassionate” exception. Later, it is diclosed that the President has also been administered Remdisivir, also on an experimental basis – and, so, it seems that his illness is more severe than is being admitted.
Later, a number of high-ranking Republican officials, including two Senators (as I now write) have tested positive for the virus. The infections seem to trace back to a Rose Garden Event on Saturday, September 26, 2020 – at that gathering, largely unmasked as photographs show, the President announced Amy Barrett Coney as his nominee for the Supreme Court seat made vacant by Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s death. Pictures of the event establish a cluster of cases, all of them marked with superimposed red circles, most in front of the dais from which Trump was speaking, flanked by the Judge wearing one of the frumpiest dresses ever to appear in the public eye.
The implications of the President’s sickness are vast, but shadowy at this moment. One day all will be written out in the clarity of a historical account and the people of the future will understand how this crisis developed and its outcome. But all that I can report in the midst of these events is a sense of ominous foreboding – no one is in control and things are careening toward chaos. It’s the sickening feeling of a car spinning on icy pavement: the tires can’t grip and the landscape whirls around and there’s no way to brake, indeed, attempting to apply the brakes will make things even worse. There is literally nothing that you can do.
At the debate, Trump and Biden traded insults that were without wit, savagely glum, in fact. For the first fifteen minutes, partisans, at least, were excited, even gleeful – our side (whichever side that was) was energized, feisty, fighting back. But the exchange of body-blows never ceased and Trump with the louder voice (he’s three years younger than the frail-looking Biden) simply out-shouted his adversary. Biden wasn’t allowed to speak, probably a good thing, because it seemed that the old man was having difficulty putting together coherent sentences. (At one point, Biden enthusiastically touted his “new Green deal,” extolling its excellence, before recalling that he opposed the “New Green Deal,” a creature of the flamboyantly left-wing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. After praising the “New Green Deal” for 45 seconds, Biden suddenly grasped that he was supporting something that he had publicly denounced and, then, shifted to praise his own “deal” on the environment, a confusing tirade that the Press subserviently ignored. Biden likes to say “Here’s the deal” and, one supposes, that the word “deal” in AOC’s “New Green Deal” seduced him into error.) After 15 minutes of name-calling, even the most partisan viewers sickened of the spectacle: It was like a heavy-weight boxing match that begins with a cunning and artistic exchange of punches but, then, deteriorates into raw carnage – except that in this debate there wasn’t nothing cunning nor artistic – it was all just raw carnage and, ultimately, profoundly disheartening, a disgusting disgrace.
After the debate, it was widely thought that another spectacle of this sort would tank Trump’s campaign, already faltering badly, and, in fact, some were calling for the second and third debates to be canceled – or, at least, to proceed under radically different rules although no one could exactly agree as what those rules would be. But, then, there intervened the so-called October surprise – in this case, the surprise of all surprises, although history will placidly view this as foretold and predetermined: Trump fell sick and was hospitalized and, then, all bets were off.
At this moment, everything hangs quite literally in the balance.
23.
This morning, news broadcasters obsequiously announce that they hope that President Trump and the First Lady (also sick with Covid) will swiftly recover. This is yet another example of “fake news”. In fact, the leftist media are thrilled by Trump’s illness, almost giddy with delight – their voices tell a story different from the glitter in their eyes and many of the pundits, who express sorrow and concern, are not even able to summon a frown of dismay: they mournfully announce Trump’s illness through grins of delight. The temper in the country is that half of the population hopes that Trump will die, and not just die, but suffer before his passing in his lonesome hospital room. Don’t let historians tell you to the contrary. I know. I was there.
24.
My daughter, Angelica, is tested for Covid. She works in the school system and the fear of illness (or more accurately the fear of infecting others) has broken her spirit. Every night, she sobs in her room afraid that she has become a carrier.
Every sniffle, every pang, seems a harbinger of doom.
At my law firm, an associate announced that last night her heart was fluttering. It sounds to me like some kind of panic attack. She felt in her chest, she told me, that “fascists were marching in boots down the Champs Elysee”. This woman is a staunch Republican. She said that this morning she is going to the clinic to have a Covid test. This is allergy season in Minnesota with the sickness that used to be called “Hay Fever” abroad and active. The wind is cold and blows with tiny fragments of pollen that embed themselves in mucous membranes and inflame them. Allergy, common cold, flu or Covid-19? Who knows?
25.
Masked, you walk past people that you have known all your life, but don’t acknowledge them. Identity is hard to establish – that’s part of going about masked. The mask not only covers half the face, but wearing the thing fogs your glasses, particularly as the weather is becoming colder, and not only can’t you see clearly, there is also a sense in which it seems that you can’t be seen either. The whole world is veiled.
I am parking at the grocery store. When I get out of the car, a woman wearing a kerchief over half her face approaches me and begins to talk excitedly. I can’t figure out who she might be. But, it seems, that she believes that she knows me. A couple of spaces away from where I have parked, there is a big old hearse parked among the cars.
“That’s a hearse, isn’t it?” she asks me.
“Yes, it is,” I say.
“I don’t like to see that,” she says.
And, then, the unknown woman gets in her car and drive away.
26.
The TV whispered suicide to me. I am sure that there are many to whom the television is whispering murder. We are teetering on the very brink.
October 3, 2020
