In some ways the US civil war has already started
The appalling tragedy in Minneapolis is what happens when you hollow out a democracy’s intellectual inner life
To the casual British observer, what happened in Minneapolis on Wednesday was baffling. It defied all sense, all reason. To us the idea anyone, in a functioning democracy, could be shot in the head while simply driving back from a school run is shocking. But then, I wonder: is America a functioning democracy? Death is a way of life for them. Killing — it’s in their constitution. As for the facts of the incident: well, good luck. How is it possible, in this age of constant livestreaming — there’s not one but four videos of the incident, plus many witnesses, including the dead woman’s wife — for no one to still quite know what happened?
To read anything about this appalling tragedy is to be dragged, with full force, back into the depths of America’s culture war. It is to be spat at, again, in the face. It is to be flooded with videos of these agents — a newly expanded praetorian force that’s now been told it can arrest anyone it suspects of being an illegal immigrant — screaming at people, pushing them to the floor, arresting them, bloodying them, marching them around, dragging pregnant women along the street, just because they think, sometimes on sight, they shouldn’t be in America. But — how do I put this? — it is also to be brought, once again, face to face with the country’s screeching victimhood and paranoia. “Get the f* out of Minneapolis,” bellowed the city’s mayor, Jacob Frey, just after the killing on Wednesday — a strange, turkey-necked man last seen weeping at the coffin of George Floyd, who died less than a mile down the road. An excited Tim Walz, Minnesota’s governor, most famous as Kamala Harris’s dundering VP pick, went one further: he’d issued a “warning order” to the state’s national guard.
https://archive.ph/3qFvn
