Masked and muted, deep in the pandemic and training ourselves to live with fear, most of us thought we’d seen the strangest things the Year 2020 could possibly show us. Then George Floyd was murdered on camera by a psychotic policeman, many African Americans lost patience with America, and street protests from coast to coast included concentrated assaults on the nation’s commemorative statues, especially those celebrating the Southerners who lost the Civil War. If this seemed only marginally logical, it was wildly illogical that statues glorifying generals like Nathan Bedford Forrest and Braxton Bragg had been tolerated for the 157 years since the Emancipation Proclamation. Or that the state flag of Mississippi had incorporated the Confederate battle flag well into the 21st century.
But the strangest thing yet, in our year of tears and terror, was that the greatest defender of Rebel statuary and the Confederate legacy turned out to be the demented president of the United States. Donald Trump, A Confederate General From Mar-a-Lago? (Apologies to the late Richard Brautigan.) The Orange Ogre, notorious for his ignorance of history, still remembers which side of the Mason-Dixon Line has buttered his bread. Everything he says about the George Floyd protests indicates that he’s hoping for a race war to distract us from the coronavirus and his dismal polls. How can we tolerate him for even six more months?
Maybe if we could find the man who actually took Trump’s SAT tests (according to his niece’s new book), who may or may not be alive and named Joe Shapiro, and interview the poor devil on on national TV? I’d put my best reporter on that story, if I were still an editor. Would it have more impact than the testimony of the makeup artists who grind up two bricks every morning and smear them on the president’s face?
There’s no doubt that the accumulated stress of the pandemic has fueled the fury that followed George Floyd’s ghastly death. It was the final straw for African Americans with personal histories of the police brutality that his helpless martyrdom epitomized; it was another rough awakening for white liberals, many of them very young, who keep forgetting that the America of their social studies textbooks is not the America most black people inhabit. The raw horror of that video from Minneapolis, in this summer of all summers, has provided the Black Lives Matter movement and all its allies with unprecedented momentum and political leverage. Already Floyd’s face has become as familiar as Barack Obama’s or Muhammad Ali’s. But the mediasphere has such a brief attention span — even without a presidential election or a deadly virus to distract it — that leverage and momentum can dissipate rapidly. The great challenge for the movement’s leaders is to maximize and focus their precious leverage, to waste as little as possible on futile symbolism and dead-end rhetoric.
This is the place where the wise old white man does well to step aside and stick his helpful advice where the sun doesn’t shine. But that’s not my nature. I think that major reform among urban police departments is well within reach, along with a national consensus on demilitarizing the police and reallocating urban resources from law enforcement to education and social services. The rules and standards are changing already — the next officer who’s videotaped using a chokehold or kneeling on someone’s neck will face an immediate career change, or worse. White racist cops won’t all be eliminated, but they can be defanged when enough minority officers are recruited and assigned as their partners. A national database for police misconduct is now being legislated.
A lot of positive change is possible, at labile moments like these. But golden opportunities are lost when cooler heads don’t prevail, when justifiable rage goes unrestrained and unfocused. No doubt it’s very satisfying for the descendants of the enslaved to topple the graven images of Confederate heroes. But removing the statues of dead racists from public places isn’t half as urgent as removing live racists from public office. And rhetoric — the exact words chosen — is critical in maintaining a wider base of support. I knew from the start that “Defund the police” had an unfortunate ring of anarchy about it, but I wasn’t sure how it was meant to be interpreted. Research revealed that the “Defund” movement was closely allied with an actual “Abolition” movement, previously obscure, that seems to be dead serious about getting rid of local law enforcement altogether.
The abolitionists are also dead serious about closing all the federal prisons and eliminating life sentences. And none of this will do, finally, either as rhetoric or as policy. I see that one of the guiding elders of the abolitionist faction is the legendary Black activist Angela Davis. In my own (futile) defense, I’ll recall that back in 1969, when Davis was at war with Ronald Reagan and the California Board of Regents, I wrote the stories about her case for Time magazine. And I had three drafts of one story rejected by my editor because they were too favorable to Angela Davis. There’s much to be praised about her life and her commitments. But her experiences as a communist and a Black Panther — and her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, in the grim shadow of Police Chief Bull Connor — have left Davis with a view of the police, the FBI and the prison system very different from the average American’s, or even the average African American’s.
It’s one thing to denounce “the prison-industrial system” for its ample abuses and injustices. It’s quite another to release maximum-security felons and murderers back into local jurisdiction. No life sentences? What about the Golden State Killer? Do you want him back living on your street, even at the age of 90? The more extreme advocates of prison reform, like Davis, seem to honestly believe that there’s no such thing as a criminal, only misguided victims, disproportionately non-white, of a punitive racist government. Police reform will never be successful and widely supported as long as activists choose to portray the entire law-enforcement profession as a kind of national Gestapo dedicated to persecuting minorities.
This excess may be a natural reaction, in the wake of an atrocity like the murder of George Floyd. But it’s not close enough to the truth to gain and hold adherents. The irony in the George Floyd case is that we don’t even know, after all the racial anguish and hand-wringing, if Officer Chauvin is a racist. We know he’s a sadistic psycho who probably deserves the gas chamber, but we don’t know that he wouldn’t have done the same thing to a suspect who was white or yellow or brown.
The vast majority of police officers are neither racists nor sadists, of course. They deserve our respect and gratitude for trying to keep the peace, a near-impossible job in a thoroughly impossible society. If the police have recently attracted a few more reckless, immature and irresponsible recruits — and I’m not denying that possibility — what in the name of the bloody Second Amendment would you expect? Is this a job any sane person would covet, when every wife-beating, child-abusing, dope-lobotomized cowboy is armed to the teeth and itching to beat you to the draw? Being a policeman in America, where there are an estimated 390 million guns in the hands of private citizens, is unquestionably the most dangerous job in the world. In America there are 120 guns for every 100 citizens, more than twice as many as any other nation. The only country with close to half of our firearm saturation is Yemen, site of a savage civil war dominated by weapons America’s gunrunners have sold to the Saudis and their homicidal prince.
By contrast, England records 4.6 guns per 100 citizens, Japan 0.3. Counting children alone, our hair-trigger homeland is a pediatric slaughterhouse where a child dies from a bullet wound every 2 ½ hours. An American child is 15 times more likely to be killed by gunfire than a child in any other developed nation; since 1963, guns have killed 186,000 American children — four times as many deaths as our military forces have suffered in all the wars we’ve fought since then. But these are the ridiculous, the terrifying statistics that have grown familiar over the years. Sample the facts and statistics from the past few weeks alone. Chicago: Forty wounded, seven dead, including a 7-year-old girl, over the Fourth of July weekend. One hundred and thirty-five shootings, 34 deaths between Memorial Day and July 13. New York: Sixty-four shot, 10 fatally, over the Fourth of July weekend. Atlanta: 93 wounded, 14 deaths, including an eight-year old girl, since Memorial Day. And so on, and on. The youngest victim of America’s holiday bloodbath was 20 months old.
The bodies pile up, of course, as I write this. The Chicago Tribune reports that gun permit applications are up more than 500% in Illinois in the midst of the pandemic and the George Floyd protests. Bullets won’t stop a microscopic coronavirus, but they’re the only defense a certain tribe of unhinged (and unmasked?) Americans can think of. And to many of these concealed-carry cretins a badge is the same as a bull’s-eye. The United States is the only nation in the world — or the only one allegedly at peace — where children are routinely cut down by stray bullets, or where police officers responding to domestic disturbances confront wannabe Rambos with AK-47s and AR-15s. Since Jan. 1, 2019, at least 453 police officers have been shot in the line of duty. That’s a monthly average of 25, an attempted or successful cop-killing nearly every day.
If you’re still unconvinced that guns are the root of all evil and every American nightmare except COVID-19 and global warming, maybe you’ll listen to a posthumous message from George Floyd himself, in a social media posting reported by the formidable Amy Goodman: “But man, the shootings that’s going on, I don’t care what religion you’re from or where you’re at. I love you, and God loves you. Put them guns down.”
Amen. Anyone who didn’t pity George Floyd is a monster. And anyone who doesn’t feel sympathy for the average policeman in the line of fire is a damn fool. As I see it, there are at least three groups who’d like to abolish the police: Black people like Angela Davis with a lifetime of personal grievance, much of it legitimate; armed vigilantes like the white thugs who murdered Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery; and professional criminals and street gangs.
Protesters, still prevailing in the court of public opinion, need to know when it’s time to cool their rhetoric. And remember that for every sign that reads “Abolish the police,” for every looter who spoils a peaceful demonstration, Joe Biden probably loses a thousand votes among small businessmen and moderates of all colors. The fear of rioting radicals is the fear that Mad King Donald is hoping to ride to another four-year term.
Black Lives Matter. It doesn’t diminish the sincerity of that belief to add, “Cops’ lives matter.” And kids’ lives, too. But they never mattered, or mattered enough, to the NRA — “one of the most evil organizations to exist in any nation, past or present,” according to the late Southern novelist William Styron — or to the corporate gun-runners who fund the NRA and feed its fanaticism. Those merchants of death own Donald Trump outright and purchase legislators by the busload. I doubt that I’ll live to see them disarmed. But America’s life matters, too, its life as a viable, inhabitable democracy. And it’s on life support.
Hal Crowther is a longtime journalist whose essays have been awarded the H.L. Mencken, Lillian Smith and American Association of Newsweeklies prizes for commentary and the 2014 Pushcart Prize for non-fiction. His books include “Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers: A Gallery of Memorable Southerners,” published in October 2018 from Blair Press. Email delennis1@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2020
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