The rest you know

The video by the lady in the pink jacket changes nothing, and everything

Until today, I had never actually seen someone murdered. I was never a soldier, nor was I ever a policeman. An old schoolmate of mine worked, I know, as CSI, a crime scene investigator, in Glasgow, and he must have had to deal with some pretty gruesome crime scenes. But I’m not entirely sure whether he will ever himself have actually seen a murder. If so, I can now say I can understand how he felt.

I have written recently about The Godfather, in the course of which the viewer is entertained by no fewer than 72 on-screen deaths and 9 suggested deaths (plus one resurrection—Jesus in the opera the family attend in part 3). Seventy-two on-screen deaths and, when you see the films for the first time, I think there’s no question but that each one of them conveys a shock to the cinemagoer. It’s the reason they’re sitting in the auditorium.

The lady in the pink jacket who filmed the attack by ICE agents in Minneapolis-St Paul can’t have known that she would be filming a murder. The outrage in her voice is uncontrollable. Her shock at the murder itself is met with incredulity. By her; and by me.

Events are now unfolding at such a rate that the draft post that I sketched out this morning before I went to work is almost made irrelevant by what I learned upon my return from work. A conscientious blogger who wants to say something original about the events unfolding in America is therefore constrained either to report on the hoof as things happen, or to hold back until some kind of reflection has been allowed to settle on the events, in order to review them some considerable time later, with some kind of wisdom in retrospect. The latter, it is now clear, is becoming a luxury.

When, in 1974, the Watergate affair was boiling to a head and pressure was being placed on Richard Nixon to resign, the Anglo-American reporter Alistair Cooke did not know at the time when he was recording his weekly Letter from America for broadcast on the BBC on a Sunday morning, whether Nixon would or would not have resigned by the time his 15-minute talk was sent out on the airwaves. So, after presenting listeners with the alternatives facing Nixon—the 156,000 dollars of pension he would receive if he resigned, and the 18,000 he would get as an old congressman and an old sailor if he was impeached—Cooke ended the talk with these words: These were the awful alternatives he faced as the leading conservatives in the Senate met to decide whether he should go. The rest you know. What listeners knew when hearing his words was what Cooke himself had not known when he recorded them. Such techniques are no longer available to the journalist of relevance.

I am no journalist. I am no reporter. My domain lies in conveying my feelings, and inviting you to consider yours. Forgive me if I tell you how you should feel. I cannot make you feel as I do. In that sense The rest you know is also what I must tell you. For by now you must be aware of that incriminating footage. Not, as in Watergate, a tape, but a digital movie. I have difficulty breathing when I see it, so be warned.

I stared this week in disbelief at a newspaper headline in The Guardian. It reads: As the world finally punches back, was this the week Donald Trump went too far? … Is this the week Trump went too far?

I like Jonathan Freedland. He has a difficult task and all the skills as a journalist that fit him for it: a Jew who needs to take a balanced view on Gaza, and does so in exemplary fashion. My disbelief is at the words “this week”. Trump went too far when he pardoned the J6 rioters. Trump has been going too far every week since then. Quiet acquiescence has developed into squirming unease, has developed into outrage, has developed into disbelief at outright criminality. No, Mr Freedland, this is not the week that Trump went too far. That was already a year ago. The question is rather is this the week that the pushback really begins? I think it might just be.

For what it’s worth, here are my feelings on what was being talked about before the Minneapolis murder. I’m not sure that a period for reflection is that necessary when you’ve seen the crime with your own eyes.

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Another blogger who was at the Minnesota protests yesterday went to a preliminary meeting of organisers in order to be prepped on how to deal with “situations”. One of the panel asked the audience, “Why don’t we act like the cops?” After a short pause, someone in the audience replied, “Because we don’t like cops.” That is not a frivolous answer. In fact, it pinpoints the whole dilemma.

There are two mindsets that pervade this whole sorry state of affairs. One is that we want to go back to how things used to be. I have consistently argued against this, because how things used to be is how we got to how things are. Mr Carney put it succinctly: nostalgia is not a strategy.

The other mindset is more akin to “If you can’t beat them, join them”. No end of epithets to accompany that, from beating ploughshares to swords, to the tactics of guerrilla warfare.

The dilemma comprises this question: do you endeavour to uphold the standards for which you are fighting in order to show the world how sincere you are in your commitment to those standards? Or do you resort to underhand methods in order to have a “better chance” of winning, with a vague promise to return to playing an open hand once victory is yours?

A classic example of this dilemma is the response by California to gerrymandering in another state by gerrymandering in California itself. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Regardless of what the sauce tastes like?

ICE mask up because many of them were local sheriffs before this, many of them are criminals from Fort Bragg - which has a proven history of smuggling drugs and highly suspect history of murder - and they are not yet secure in the knowledge that they are going to be able to pull off this me/aga stunt. I always recall the scene in Schindler’s List where Göth instructs his adjutants to shoot the Polish architect: “Shoot her. Go ahead, shoot her, on my authority.” An officer withdraws his pistol, cocks it and shoots the woman dead on the spot.

When we are there, everyone will wear masks, the good, the bad and the ugly. Until then, there will be a dilemma: do we stand proud for that for which we stand, like the early Christian martyr Vibia Perpetua, who took the tip of the gladiator’s sword and directed it to her throat, so unafraid was she of the destiny that lay before her? Or do we try to hide somewhere in this Circus Maximus, somewhere where the gladiator cannot find us?

It’s not my throat, and it’s not my sword, either. It’s not even my Colosseum. There is no end of good advice on how to protect yourself from the cold. But how to protect yourself from your moral dilemmas is for each to his own.