This morning I watched the video of George Floyd begging for his life, his life being crushed out of his body by a policeman’s. So, another death, another ‘I can’t breathe’ and America burns again. But this time it feels different. This time I hope it is different.
That video has haunted me since I watched it and will haunt me for a long time to come. Today was a hot and humid day and the air wrapped around me like a wet blanket, I felt I was suffocating, or maybe it was the horror of that video, smothering me. Gentler, though, than a knee to the neck, insistent pressure crushing out blood and air, as one calls, in the final moments, for a dead mother.
The horror of America is profound. It’s not a greater horror than others have other than because of sheer size, to say otherwise is to buy into American exceptionalism. But there is the size after all. Everything is bigger in America, it is true.
What was that policeman doing? He is, certainly, a killer, but it’s so far beyond a single individual. It has made me think of Orwell’s ‘Shooting the elephant’, or of watching the nine goddesses in Patan over a year ago: the moment when an individual becomes the manifestation of something greater than him or her. That policeman killed George Floyd, but that policeman was also America, and his crime is at least partly that he submitted to that role, agreed to play the part. In that moment he was as much America as the Statue of Liberty is, or more.
Suffocation and disgust. I watched the film and then turned to the news to see Trump, having his path cleared with tear gas and rubber bullets, so he could walk over the rubble from his bunker in the White House to a church, the scent of tear gas in and the air and distress scrawled on the walls, so he could have a photo-op, Bible in hand (the Bible held upside-down).