Not That Funny Really

I only really want to write about Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, but I know that I can't really and I shouldn't. Part of it is that I don't really give myself the time or space here to develop things properly, and there's no way my single-draft slapdash aesthetic is appropriate for the subject. Besides, I know there's already better writing out there on it already. Just last night I tried to make a small point on social media about it, but ended up echoing exactly* ideas already put forth by Jesse Williams and Larry Wilmore. What could I really offer that's a) original and b) would begin to do any of this justice (no totally horrifying pun intended)?

Part of what I'm feeling on this is paralysis; born mostly of the rage fed by the deep, basement-furnace level frustration that comes from knowing nothing is likely to change and Americans will continue to die. This is not different from the mass shootings issue. The apoplexy and grief rung out by both are of the same pitch and timbre.

The other part is that there are too many traps for writers and this issue is, like most all tragedies, brutally simple. I almost mentioned that Philando Castile managed a cafeteria at a Montessori school in Minnesota, without comment, as my writing instincts tell me those kind of details and the associated images implied of students, faculty and staff suffering upon hearing of his murder, but I don't really think I can. Yes, details round out the human picture of who it was specifically that we as a country and a people have lost, but wading into the biographical elements of the "good" people who've been unjustly killed by police inadvertently raises the idea that the level of outrage should in some way be tied to the perceived social utility of the person killed. Like for example how CNN fished out Alton Sterling's mugshot because it's the television news' job to duct-tape together some kind of narrative so they can tell a story. In this case they took a flier on the tried-and-true "inevitable crash course between a troubled man and the authorities" storyline.

Both instincts are bullshit. They're both just as useful. Their biographies are meaningful, but only inasmuch as any obituary is at this point. That sounds harsh, but the details of who Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin and dozens and dozens of others have made no difference either. Shifting the attention onto the victim by necessity obscures the problem by either deflecting blame or blurring it out in the soft-focus lens of human interest retrospective.

There has to be a point where the law enforcement culture, which probably exists for a good reason a large percentage of the time, is allowed to be questioned by externally (by us through our governments at any and all levels) and internally by police officers themselves. The current course is unsustainable. And yet somehow we seem to be sustaining it OK.

We've seen so much change. We've made headway on finally (150 years seems like long enough) beginning to properly contextualize the Civil War by curbing some of the Confederate fetishists in official spaces. Gay marriage went from political hammer to law of the land in the space of about 10 years. Also? Black president. All things I thought I'd never see achieved in any measure. So I'll say maybe, still, on this issue as well. Hope is a trap too, though. Some action, futile though some of it may seem in the moment, is needed if we're ever going to lever ourselves out of this ditch.

And in reaction to immediate breaking news: note I said some action, not any action. Just because violence begets violence, it's no justification for succumbing to that most wretched and irredeemable of human impulses. That's how we got here in the first fucking place.

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*an actual meme, meaning a thought or idea that passes though a culture, not the kind that involve copying and pasting text-enhanced pictures to convey a thought of questionable pithiness. Not that I'm denigrating that version of memes. I like the one with the eight-bit sunglasses, usually on cats.