The fourth horseman of the apocalypse cometh

For weeks, the news was all about three things, all bad: the pandemic, the economic meltdown, and the ravings and inanities of Donald Trump. (Remember injecting disinfectants?)

The concentration on these topics is no media fixation. Over the last four months, a new and deadly virus, COVID-19, has killed about 108,000 Americans and continues to kill them at an average rate of 1,000 a day. During about the same time, unemployment increased from the lowest ever to the highest since the Great Depression. It will soon go higher. To complete the trifecta, an unhinged president, hoping for a smooth ride to the White House on the back of a full employment economy, reacted to the huge setback in his plans like a disturbed child, trying to break everything and spite everyone, anything except rallying people and resources to fight this plague.

Could things get any worse?

They could and they did. The fourth horseman of the apocalypse came galloping in. It might as well have been the spirit of the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. On May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a white policemen killed a black man, George Floyd, handcuffed, lying on his belly, helpless, pleading, fully under the control of not one but four cops, had his life snuffed out of him by an officer applying force to his neck by kneeling on it with his weight for almost nine minutes while the other three officers stood by in silent complicity and video rolled.

Since then all hell has been breaking out, north and south, east and west, bicoastal and multiracial anger.

All the elements that fed the public outrage for days were plain for the world to see, murder by an officer of the law, an unlawful killing resembling a lynching with an audience of three. In another country, the human rights people in the State Department (if Trump hasn’t fired them all yet) and the non-governmental organizations would call it an “extrajudicial execution,” a hallmark of death squads all over the world. We don’t use the concept when it happens here because, hey, that is not supposed to happen here.

Yet it does, far too often in recent years. There is a long and sad list, too long to transcribe here. Even in Minneapolis, a liberal city with only a 7 percent black population, it has happened more than once in the last couple of years. It usually involves white cops, black men, and a deadly result for the latter. But it doesn’t have to involve cops, or black men, or lethal force.

Racism is pervasive although not universal. A black man says it is like dust motes in the air, always there but unseen until a ray of light reveals their ubiquitous presence. Or it is shown through a tragic or absurd incident. White man running in a suburb, jogger. Black man running in a suburb, burglar. That’s when two “good ole boys” take off after the black runner and kill him.

White man hanging out in a certain area of Central Park, birdwatcher. Black man doing the same, stalker, potential killer. So the woman walking the dog without the required leash (for the protection of the birds) when asked by the black man to leash her dog goes ballistic, calls the cops to say a black man is threatening to kill her and the dog while the camera’s eyes and ear reveal nothing like that is happening. Meanwhile the woman is controlling the dog by swinging it by the neck like a rag doll. The NYPD cops saw through the woman’s charade and concluded this was a case for the NAACP or PETA but not for them. The woman’s boss saw it too and was not amused. She got fired from a good job which, as the saying goes about a good man, is hard to find. Undoubtedly, she got tons of ridicule and scorn, with an extra dose because it happened in New York, a tough crowd. Sometimes there is poetic justice.

The racial disturbances were in some ways like those of the late twentieth century, including Miami (1980) and Los Angeles (1994) and in many ways different. The first scenes of the script are alike. Cops try to apprehend a black suspect for a minor offense. The subject tries to evade them or offers some resistance. Now the subject is, in the eyes of the police, guilty of a much worse offense than speeding. Disrespect of cop. Bad offense for a white suspect, maybe deadly for a black subject. The cops are incensed at the “uppity” behavior. They will teach them who is boss, blow by blow. They beat him to death (Arthur McDuffie, Miami) or half the way there (Rodney King, Los Angeles). The cops are charged, the trial is moved to a city with fewer minorities, and all the officers are acquitted on all charges. Black Miami and Black LA erupt.

The differences start with the fact that not only have African Americans seen this movie far too many times, a new generation of whites and Latinos have seen it too and they don’t like it. They showed up on the street too.

A second difference is that the protests and violence then were localized. Now, they are happening in multiple cities across the country, from fiery New York to mellow Fort Lauderdale.

A third difference is that the presidents of those times merely provided the kindling that made the fire possible. President Donald Trump provides the kindling, the matches, the accelerant, and the motives and, once there is ignition, adds gasoline to the explosive mix.

Where is this all leading? Anybody who tells you they know is lying. Some things are predictable, but others are not. No doubt Trump will try to do what Nixon did, a crook posing as law and order president to win an election. Hell, he is already doing it big time before the ashes are cool, putting the military on the streets of the nation’s capital as if the country were under attack by an underground revolutionary movement planning on decapitating the state. Preposterous, yes, but we live in Absurdistan.

The ultimate question is: Amid the larger set of disasters that have happened on Trump’s watch, will the same ploy play again? Or can we in November cast out this malignant know-nothing and all his loyal clones and cronies through a crushing electoral defeat at the national, state, and local levels?