American horror

Go to bed and once a week you wake up to another mass shooting. Some weeks, you wake up to two.

The names are so numerous they blur in the mind. New Town. Aurora. Boulder. El Paso. Pittsburgh. South Carolina. Parkland. Pulse. Only a few are recalled by the mind.

Then, before you shake yourself awake with your first morning coffee and turn on CBS This Morning to find out how the murder trial of a cop who killed a black man by preventing him from breathing, resting his full weight on his neck for almost ten minutes, you learn another cop in the same city has killed a young, unarmed black man for the crime of…whatever.

A few days before that, a video surfaced showing Virginia officers stopping, and abusing, and firing pepper spray at a Black Latino member of the armed forces, in uniform. Why? For no discernible reason.

Any excuse will do in a country in which cops can do no wrong—the ones who killed Arthur Mcduffie in Miami in 1980s, pummeling him with huge flashlights, and who claimed he died in a motorcycle accident, a tale which the medical examiner blew out of the water; then there was Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, who was beaten by cops within an inch of his life, all captured on video.

All these cops were found not guilty by mostly white juries in cities which were not where the crimes took place and had white majorities. These were all cases of jury nullification—I am not going to find police officers guilty no matter what they did to big, bad, black wrongdoers regardless of the pettiness of the offense or what the evidence is.

Arthur McDuffie was a Marine, and insurance salesman, but his crime was failing to obey unquestionably the authority of the police by hopping on his motorcycle and trying to get away. The punishment for his audacity in giving the middle finger symbolically to cops was capital punishment. Just like the assault on Rodney King, McDuffie was killed by cops in a frenzy of rage for not being obeyed. And they got away with it, which is why we have the George Floyds now. Impunity.

I know that most cops never fire a bullet in their entire career. But that is not the only way to abuse citizens. Cops lie, all the time. I was once arrested by a cop who claimed he had followed me from U.S.1 and observed me driving erratically all the time. I was never near U.S. 1 that night. I was once called to serve on a jury where a citizen, who had been arrested illegally by another South Miami policeman and in a scuffle, broke the cop’s arm. I almost screamed Hallelujah and told the judge I could not be an impartial juror because I knew from my own experience that South Miami cops are, in some cases, damn liars.

So, no, I will not join the chorus that repeats “there are some bad cops in the police but mostly they are great public servants.” Yes, some are, but they are the exception because most are socialized in the extremely toxic police culture, which features machismo, authoritarianism, and racial prejudice. They do not go out looking for crime, they try to create it.

Once I was pulled over by a cop near Brickell Avenue in Miami at 2 am. I was baffled as to why, but he would not tell me, asked me to step out of the car and conducted a roadside sobriety test. Realizing that I was sober, he found an excuse for the stop. A tiny light, one of two lights on my tag had burned out, and for this he gave me a ticket. How many people check out these lights when they are going out at night? How many of them burn out while you are driving? Had I been an ‘uppity’ Black guy half my age I could easily have ended up dead. My experience with police can be summed up in two words: zero trust. This from a guy who looks more like a redneck than some rednecks, although I bear the official stamp: Made in Cuba.

The violence of American life is only the most visible part of the horror, although it is worth noting its scope at the outset. The most frequent cause of death among American children, second only to accidents and surpassing cancer, is gun violence.

That is only the ugliest face of the much celebrated “American exceptionalism,” which also includes:

• A level of economic inequality exceptional among advanced democracies.
• The most miserly social safety net among rich countries.
• The absence of universal health care.
• Capital punishment, which has been abolished in Europe for decades.

And this is only on the domestic side. On the foreign policy side, we are a rogue nation, refusing to abide by the International Criminal Court, absolving our own war criminals even when they are convicted by our own armed forces in court martial trials, supporting any and all misdeeds by our Middle Eastern allies, including murder by Saudi Arabian leaders and Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians.

Trump is gone, thank goodness. But American exceptionalism, in almost all its malign forms, is still very much here.