Reflections on the Trial
Every one, everyone was shocked. I was shocked. But of course nothing shocking happened. The weather report said there’d be a thunderstorm, and then we heard the thunder. There’s nothing original to say, because everyone not living on the Moon already knows the score–it’s the validation of gun culture and the commitment to violence, or it shows the rightfulness of self-defense against dangerous radicals. I know that no one of the latter belief can possibly be persuaded of its wrongness, and I know that the same is true among those of us having the former belief. But there are, some additional comments worth making.
1. As for myself, and I imagine everyone reading this blog, the meaning of all this was perfectly stated in a Letter to the Editor in today’s Times (Saturday, 11/20/221) that some may not have read. I’ll just reprint here the essential parts of it:
“Try to imagine the roles of Ahmaud Arbery and Kyle Rittenhouse in reverse. Mr. Arbery, a teenager, is patrolling the streets of Kenosha with his AR-15-style rifle visible to all. The city is racially charged after a Black man, Jacob Blake, has been shot by the police. There are skirmishes and two men are shot dead by Mr. Arbery and one is seriously injured….Now imagine Kyle Rittenhouse as the jogger outside Brunswick, Ga. Do armed white men respond when they see him running, after a suspicious neighbor calls the police? If they do, does the jogger end up dead?”
Okay, that’s a rhetorical question. But it brings up the reality behind all these cases, and most especially behind the horrendous stand-your-ground laws that, together with the way legislatures and courts have defined and interpreted “self-defense,” (as well as the “qualified immunity” given cops who kill), make it almost impossible to take on the murderous American gun culture. It’s not murderous because people love guns–and shouldn’t. No, not at all.
A confession: when I was in the Army, I loved the firing range, loved getting a Sharpshooter’s medal, loved the fact that I had the fastest time in the Company for field-stripping and then retro-fitting an M -1 rifle in total darkness. A useful talent, I imagine, during the Battle of the Bulge. It’s a machine, and to understand it and be able to use it properly is a skill like any other, and as satisfying. To the connoisseur, after all, a perfectly conceived shotgun is as beautiful as a Gainsborough. The British rural upper classes love to collect guns, and the workmanship involved in making them; but hardly ever actually use them except on foxes (“the unspeakable pursuing the inedible,” in Shaw’s words).
Leaving aside for a moment the question of hunting, about which my opinion is similar to Shaw’s–but which does not lead me to condemn friends and acquaintances of the opposite persuasion–the fundamental problem is the existence of people who think of guns primarily as a weapon, and get hold of them on that ground. And, as I’ll get to, with a particular victim in mind.
Millions of Americans share this outlook, to be precise. I begin this thought with a quotation from Studies in Classic American Literature, by D. H. Lawrence. About Fenimore Cooper’s version of the Deerslayer, Lawrence wrote, “He’s a killer.” Not just of bisons and deer, but primarily of indigenous people; and then of rebellious or runaway slaves; and finally of black men anywhere. From Riker’s Island to the LAPD Klavern, by way of the Tulsa Massacre, the Chicago PD’s torture chamber, the assassination of Fred Hampton, the Philadelphia MOVE bombing, and–but why go on?– one historical fact stands out. As to “normal” white Americans (not psychopathic serial killers), that’s who they mostly are prepared to kill. (Aside from wives, of course, bu that’s another story that never gets the attention it deserves.) One black man in the wrong neighborhood: that’s an invasion that must be repelled.
To take this aside back to Rittenhouse and Arbery, and all the notorious killings of the past few years, that’s what “stand your ground” is all about. It’s about white people having the constitutional right (a phrase involved in both those murders) to kill black people. And cops having that right as the conclusion of a duty. That’s the point of the letter I quoted. None of this is accidental: gun culture and NRA propaganda have prepared us for it. Our Town.
2. But something else that, in the present conjuncture, is even more striking and worthy of comment. The other day the Times –again–-reported that “many Republicans” are secretly disgusted, or repelled, or whatever, by the behavior of Paul Gosar. That is to say, these are “Republicans” (they haven’t yet changed the name of the Party) other than Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger. Who (those two aside) have one striking characteristic in common: they are among the best secret-keepers in the history of the human race. Can you name one of them? Hurry; the polls are closing.
Yes, there were others in their class, of course. Martin Heidegger was really an anti-Nazi activist. Petain and Pope Pius were really dedicated to the rescue of Jews, but were frustrated by the organizational genius of Eichmann. Stalin was secretly against starving the kulaks, but his hand was forced by the Comintern. Thomas Dixon wrote The Ku Klux Klan Trilogy in order, secretly, to call attention to the mistreatment of ex-slaves. Bull Connor was an FBI Confidential Informant.
The usual misunderstanding of the Republicans’ secret liberalism (i.e., not believing in assassination as a public policy) is that they are being “cowardly.” I dissent.
Caesar said, according to Shakespeare, “Cowards die many times before their death. The valiant never taste of death but once.” He did not say, after all, that while they’re dying they enjoy the patronage of the single most powerful political leader in the nation, and collect millions of dollars in campaign financing from Big Pharma, Big Energy, Big Guns, and all the other Biggies who have “no comment” on the behavior of the advocate of assassination. I don’t think that’s what JC had in mind as the behavior of cowards: taking in the big bucks.
There are better words for that piece of whale drek, Paul Gosar, but I won’t use them here. Just to say, I might think better of him than that he’s the guy JC might be thinking if, say, he challenged AOC, or the President, to a hand to hand fight. Or better yet, AR-15s at 20 paces. I’m not sure that I’d wish for his wife that, like Calpurnia, she dreams he’s been condemned by the gods; but if there are any around the galaxy, I’m sure they’re thinking about it.
3. There’s an African folk saying that goes, “Where does the lion sleep when he comes into town?” “Where? Anywhere he wants!”
Well, The Lion is in the Streets. The last lion in the streets, the subject of the only slightly fictionalized novel of that name, was Huey Long. He didn’t last long, nor get a chance to do any great harm, not even in Louisiana. And he famously said (depending on the source of this perhaps apocryphal quotation) “when Fascism comes to the U.S., it’ll come in the name of democracy.” And yes, the Lion is in the streets now, and he’s a lot more dangerous than Huey Long, and with no bullshit about democracy, and despite all the trouble the courts are giving him, he’s sleeping wherever he wants, and prowling, and growling, and preparing for the bloody morning. And no one is doing anything about it.
Which would be what?
