BY PAUL T HORGAN
Well, it’s not exactly a George Floyd moment.
This isn’t the case of a Minneapolis cop blocking the airway of a repeat serious felon caught passing counterfeit dollar bills, the last minutes of Floyd’s life captured from the single perspective of a smartphone camera. The public outcry over the recent shooting in the same city has been limited to the ideologically committed, but it was still enough to relegate the mass uprising in Iran to a side story at numerous news sites (I’m looking at you, BBC).
The political left are trying to make out Renee Nicole Good is a martyr. Some elements of the right-wing commentariat say she had it coming and, in effect, deserved to die.
Both are wrong.
Both are disgraceful.
This was an inevitable tragedy.
Those opposing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations have been praying for a martyr, and Good is the poster-girl for whom they were waiting, not least because of her name. In fact, Good was the victim of the anti-ICE narrative.
But more than that, Good was the victim of a culture that encourages protest, even when there is little about which to protest. So, the protest culture creates or amplifies issues to make them protest-worthy. This is hardly surprising in the USA, which is, after all, a country founded on protest, where the initial protesters, described as the ‘Founding Fathers’ (women were clearly excluded), are venerated to this day. Their protest turned into revolution, the revolution into war, and, with a little help from the French (because France, England), the war led to independence.
Other protests followed, concerning, amongst other issues: slavery, racism, the Vietnam war, gay rights, women’s rights, nuclear weapons, the Iraq War, Wall Street greed and graft, trans rights, and, most recently, the killing of George Floyd. Protests against Donald Trump over the last decade or so probably helped encourage Thomas Crooks to try to murder Donald Trump. The poor boy must have been saturated with anti-Trump rhetoric since before he was a teenager. True, out of the millions of recipients of this propaganda, only a few people have tried to assassinate Trump, but that is still a few people more than wanted to, for example, assassinate Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris.
The culture of protest in the USA encourages people to enter situations where they may become benign martyrs in a manner that is not replicated to the same extent elsewhere. It is a badge of honour in the hierarchy of Civil Rights culture to be arrested, to get a mugshot, a nominal sentence from a sympathetic judge (in the USA some judges are elected), and a criminal record for ‘the cause’. While for some crimes, a criminal record will stunt prospects and lose jobs, a conviction for a ‘principled’ protest increases status and employability in some sectors, such as academia or politics. Liberals do have to choose carefully. Celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk, while not an offence, has led to dismissals from work and expulsions from college.
This activism seems to be a response to the increasingly congenial, quiet, orderly lives that has been ‘imposed’ on the American middle classes. They are too comfortable. So, they have to cause mayhem to find meaning in their otherwise highly ordered and predictable lives. The middle classes are revolting against the rewards of their own aspiration.
This is best reflected in the monologue by Tyler Durden in the 1999 film Fight Club:
I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”
The difference is that, rather than men working in menial jobs that are rising up against their mediocre lives, it is the liberal middle classes (of whom the most active happen to be women, especially lesbians) rising up against their own emblandment, perhaps due to a mental inability to find personal fulfilment any other way now that most, if not all, of the civil rights issues of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s have been settled in their favour.
In their limited imagination, they somehow see themselves as heroes, warriors in some fantasy based around the romance of a Hunger Games-style repression that they believe they are living under.
Tyler Durden contradicts this delusion:
Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You’re the same decaying organic matter as everything else.”
Last year and the year before ‘the cause’ was Gaza. This year and the year before ‘the cause’ has morphed into Trump and the ICE deportations.
These people live in a culture where arrest and conviction are a form of validation and reward for their activism. Being handcuffed and detained is cathartic, a form of desired flagellation, a way to truly find themselves through constitutionally controlled suffering. Perhaps it stems from a skewed or over-sanitised interpretation of all of the nationalist activists that were jailed across the British Empire, some of whom eventually took high office in newly-independent realms. It is possible they see Nelson Mandela as a role-model, but without the lengthy jail sentence.
This was probably the delusion and fantasy that led Good to her death. She probably thought that she and her wife could obstruct and abuse Federal officers and be arrested in an ordered and organised fashion. Certainly, Good’s wife seemed to expect that the only adverse outcome would be that the officers would make a note of the number plate of their car, find their home address, and then arrest them at a later date. She actually pointed this out to them in the last moment of Good’s life. Home-jail-bail-home, all in time for Jimmy Kimmel, their newly-acquired ‘heroism’ being part of their enhanced identity, their mugshots bolstering their image online and garnering more clicks and likes. A safe martyrdom at the hands of the state.
The ICE officers did not see things that way. They saw a lawbreaker committing a felony. Using a car to block, threaten, or physically impede an officer’s movement or an operation is considered a “forcible act” that elevates the offence from simple interference to a serious federal crime.
Good was told to get out of the car. She didn’t. Instead, she reversed the car. An ICE officer reached in through the side window, possibly to open the driver door and drag Good out. The car started accelerating forwards towards another ICE officer, Johnathan Ross. Ross saw a car moving towards him and a fellow officer at risk of being dragged by the arm as the car moved. Ross himself had been seriously injured when being dragged by a car in a similar fashion a few months earlier. The car was heading towards him and not stopping. He drew his sidearm and fired three shots. Good died almost instantly. The car turned and crashed a few yards away.
Unlike the single view of Floyd’s death, the incident was all caught on multiple video cameras, not least Ross’s own smartphone.
Perhaps Ross had been traumatised by his previous incident and fired in response to that trauma. He saw a dangerously similar incident quickly unfolding, and a fellow officer’s life in danger in a manner resembling how he was injured. He put a stop before events could get out of control and he or a fellow officer was hurt. Cars are built to accelerate quickly and are sold on their ability to do so. Good’s wife had been confrontational, and there was no evidence of good intent from either Good or her wife. Ross could not know how far Good would go with her defiance. Some videos suggest that Good’s car actually struck Ross.
Good’s death was a tragedy. She somehow seemed to believe she would drive in the middle of a group of armed and armoured officers, try to block their activity with her car, and the worst that could happen is that she would get arrested a few days later, charged, tried, convicted and sentenced to a term in jail or a fine, all the while gaining liberal brownie points. In fact, the worst that could happen was that she could be shot dead as the officers saw her car not as a conveyance, but instead as a dangerous kinetic weapon. Real life is not like the GTA5 computer game, where being shot dead just results in restarting the game.
In real life there is no restart. When a person is shot dead, they stay dead.
The tragedy is that a deluded liberal came into contact with an ICE officer who had received serious injury in a very similar situation. The deluded liberal thought her actions had certain consequences. The ICE officer feared different consequences, based on his direct experience. He did not see a liberal protester behind the wheel. He saw a driver defying direct orders and beginning to put himself and his colleagues in danger.
Good is not a martyr to ‘the cause’, whatever ‘the cause’ is. She did the wrong things to the wrong people in the wrong place and time to do those things. The political left telling us she was murdered, the political right saying she had it coming, are both wrong.
This should not be an incident to polarise opinion. This should be an incident to unite in sorrow. The best place to challenge ICE’s activities is not in the streets in direct protest. It is in the courts.
The whole point of the protest by the ‘founding fathers’ was a desire for representation and constitutionality, as well as due process. Due process is not blocking armed officers in the course of their legal duties. That suggests that the courts and the constitution stand as nought and that direct action is the only solution. In the USA direct action can get you killed if it crosses a line, like accelerating towards an armed officer while another officer has his hand inside the car, after being told by an officer to get out of the car. The left should respect the rule of law, even when the law is one they don’t like. The right should not crow when a liberal is shot dead.
Left-wing American politicians upping the temperature with wild declarations do not help. English mayors sending a message of ‘solidarity’ to America over the death of one citizen while hundreds die in Iran fighting for freedom are pathetic.
Prominent liberals in the USA need to stop and think. This is not a cause worth anyone’s life, and encouraging people to put themselves in dangerous situations will only divide American society further by causing further tragedies. Virtue-signalling is has no virtue if it leads to people dying.
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.