America in ashes no longer about a man’s death
In an alternate reality, Donald Trump would soon be flying into exile, given refuge by one of those “s---hole” countries he mocked.
Like the shah of Iran or Idi Amin or Baby Doc Duvalier. He is of their despotic demagogue nature.
A gravely lacerated America would not have to wait for the November election.
On Nov. 9, 2016, I — stunned — was at the Hilton Hotel in New York City where, in the middle of the night, Trump spoke as triumphant president-elect. “Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division.” Someone must have put those words in Trump’s mealy, pursed mouth. His predecessor used them, too, after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Barack Obama appealing to the citizenry as mourner-father of a nation. “Heal the broken-hearted and bind up their wounds.”
It comes from scripture, Psalm 147:3. President Abraham Lincoln invoked them, as well, in his second inaugural address, as the Civil War was drawing to a close. A month later he was assassinated.
Trump mouthed the sentiment, but didn’t mean it. I wondered and wrote that night: “America, what have you done?”
From there to here, America burning, a week of protests and rioting in the streets, a nation on curfew from coast to coast and a president who pours acid on the country’s wounds, with a Bible as a sacrilegious prop. Naked charade in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in D.C., after police and the National Guard had tear-gassed and rubber-bulleted peaceful protesters to clear the area in advance of Trump’s short photo-op walkabout.
“I am the president of law and order.” No, he is the self-idolatrous president of mendacity and ignorance, emboldening the malevolent.
“Dominate the streets,” he’d commanded state and local politicians, or he’d deploy “thousands and thousands” of army troops.
Not a dog-whistle but a foghorn to his fanatical base.
A declaration from Trump that, should the roiling not abate, he would unleash the American military on American civilians and it’s no comfort that, by law, he doesn’t have the authority, unless a request is made by state governors. None have asked.
Would the generals even obey such an order, if it comes to that? Racial and ethnic minorities — Blacks, Hispanics, Asians — make up 36 per cent of active servicemembers. Would they turn their M16 rifles on fellow Americans? Or rather take a knee, symbolically walk with protesters, as some police chiefs, rank-andfile cops, sheriffs, have done in recent days?
Trump has laid the blame for combustible civil unrest at the feet of the radical left, calling out only Antifa by name. Not Aryan Nation, not the American Freedom Party, not the Hammerskins, not the Boogaloo Bois, with their trademark Hawaiian shirts and tactical gear. Boogaloo is code for civil war, its adherents sharing a hatred for law enforcement. All and more have seized on the street-level violence, engorged on the mayhem because it serves their purpose — to stoke fear and stimulate revulsion. Some identified by civilian video, yet Trump tweets one fragment of alleged Antifa evidence: “We see you.”
A robust dialogue on racism, triggered by the knee-to-the-neck killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, abetted by three other cops, is an outlet for society’s fury, in the United States and Canada and outrage around the world. I would caution only against the polemics of race-baiting.
But none of this would have unfolded, this moment of existential reckoning, without the rioting, the language of the historically unheard.
It must continue, however blistered with looting and arson and vandalism, however the accelerationists exploit chaos. Because the passive, the peaceful, will always be smothered by the apparatus and institutions of the state, and the killing of minorities by police absolved by juries when charges are even laid. Rarely with the muscularity of charges that would have been levelled against a civilian accused.
Even the sanctified Nelson Mandela came to endorse the use of violence to bring apartheid to its knees.
“It would be wrong and unrealistic to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”
America itself was born in bloodshed and rebellion.
Violence does George Floyd no credit — the Floyd family has expressly and passionately condemned it — but America in ashes is no longer about one man’s death. This civil rights movement gathering momentum is about all the men and women who have been killed, who have been brutalized, who have been made to tremble in their shoes for doing nothing wrong, absolutely nothing wrong.
If only the murder of Blacks by law enforcement fomented as much wrath as crimes against property. I don’t want to hear white TV commentators bemoaning the “criminal acts” of looters and arsonists while approvingly patting peaceful demonstrators on the head. Crime is not always an act of opportunism and covetousness. Sometimes it’s a silhouette or wrath. The looting in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, which I witnessed, was as much about anger at a historically notorious public department, about social inequities, at it was plain thieving.
In Canada, we aren’t quite as benighted by that particular strain of endemic racism, more institutionally and constitutionally directed at our Indigenous peoples. But Toronto does indeed have a long history of Black males killed by police and justice denied.
Lester Donaldson, a disabled paranoid schizophrenic, brandishing a small paring knife when he was surrounded by five police officers in his rooming house, shot dead by Const. David Deviney in 1988. After his acquittal on manslaughter, Deviney fired up a celebratory cigar outside the courthouse. It spawned the birth of the Black Action Defence Committee.
Marlon Neal, 16 years old, shot and seriously injured after fleeing a radar trap by a cop who claimed he thought the young man was reaching for a gun. He was holding the emergency brake. Officer found not guilty of criminal negligence causing bodily harm, attempted murder and aggravated assault.
Albert Johnson, 35, shot and killed in his apartment by two Toronto police officers. Both acquitted of manslaughter.
Albert Moses, 41, shot and killed in his room by cops. The Special Investigations Unit laid no charges.
Eric Osawe, 26, killed in his Etobicoke apartment by a cop. SIU charged him with manslaughter, later upgraded to second-degree murder. A judge tossed the charge at the preliminary inquiry. An inquest ruled the death arose from an accidental shooting while police were trying to handcuff Osawe.
Plenty more deaths, but I’ll stop here. You get the picture.
There is always talk of “bad apples” among law enforcement. And that’s true. The vast majority of cops are decent people doing a tough job. But some police departments — not in Toronto, broadly, but definitely at some divisions in the past — are rotten to the core. Only one, Const. James Forcillo, has ever been convicted of attempted murder. And his victim, who did in fact die in a double-volley of shots while aboard a streetcar, was a white youth.
Black Americans die at the hands of police today, as The Washington Post reports, at a rate almost equivalent to the documented lynchings a century ago.
Derek Chauvin, the officer fired and charged in the murder of George Floyd, had 18 prior complaints against him filed by the Minneapolis Police internal affairs department. Only two were closed “with discipline,” unspecified.
What is Chauvin thinking now, in custody, looking around at what he’s wrought? We know what a wretched president thinks.
Rage against the dying. March on, fists raised.