The United States of Floyd

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

It's only Hump Day. Yet the number of conspiracy theories and general, all-around right wing nuttery that have flown out the Oval Office windows like so many flying monkeys of Oz would be enough to keep OANN on the air until the Rapture.

     It really kicked into high gear at 8:34 yesterday morning when a real president would've already attended his or her fourth meeting of the day and made real executive decisions more demanding than what shade of umber makeup to wear before calling Fox and Friends. That was when Donald Trump fired off one of his most despicable tweets ever. It was a completely unfounded conspiracy that accused Greg Gugino, the 75 year-old Buffalo activist who was nearly killed after he was shoved the ground by Buffalo ERT cops, of being an "Antifa provocateur."

     We're a nation that has grown dangerously inured to such fevered right wing conspiracy theories poorly masquerading as social media dispatches from an actual Commander in Chief but even this one stood front and center with Donnie Bunko's other idiocies on Twitter of late. To show that he still had the touch, Trump then ordered the White House to float another trial balloon, this one accusing the Black Lives Matter protests as being orchestrated by Maduro all the way from Venezuela.

     And then there was the Confederacy's Second President's new one today that flatly refused to even consider renaming US military bases that were named after Confederate figures. Essentially, by cradling the crumbling bones of a failed treasonous rebellion that was crushed over 155 years ago, Donald Trump is shamelessly sucking up to a southern redneck base that's apparently abandoning him in droves, if CNN's latest poll numbers are any indication. The numbers have spooked Trump so much he'd even threatened legal action against CNN (their response was priceless) if they didn't apologize for the numbers that frightened him so (Bottom line: Biden's leading Trump by 14 points nationally).

     While I'm sure the rapidly spreading Floyd protests have surprised everyone, the fact that the Day of Reckoning has finally arrived should not. Hell, anyone who's ever read Langston Hughes' famous poem, "Harlem" can tell you the chickens would come home to roost. And of course, White America couldn't wait to prove once again why the stewardship of the "greatest nation on earth" should be snatched out of their hands forever. Because it doesn't matter to White America how many Tamir Rices or Trayvon Martins get killed by white men with mental health problems or how many Eric Garners or George Floyds get strangled by cops on camera and in broad daylight.

     White America is simply angry that their own endless day in the sun is reaching its sunset, that African Americans are getting uppity that so many of them are getting killed by police and other white racists for jogging, sitting in their own apartments or sleeping in their beds. In the world view of thrashing dinosaurs like Donald Trump, who'd infamously took out $85,000 in full page ads in New York newspapers demanding the execution of the Central Park Five (who were innocent), African Americans should just shuck and jive and continue to endlessly take it with the good nature of Topsy or Bill Bojangles Robinson.

     That's why we're now hearing the right wing hysterics coming from (Candace Owens aside) almost exclusively white people such as the Tulsa, OK police major who thinks we're not shooting enough black people or the Texas mayor who claims Black Lives Matter is a threat to our lives ("Our lives", meaning white lives) or the Philadelphia Police Union president who called BLM "a pack of rabid animals" and a "hate group."

The Storm Before the Calm

 

George Floyd's televised memorial service and funeral in Houston, Texas was yesterday. A week ago, Houston had provided an admirable model for the rest of the nation's law enforcement when the Houston PD's Chief, Art Acevedo, came out to greet the protesters to give an impassioned speech about the need for peace on both sides and actually hugged some of the protesters. (George Floyd was a Houston native and a member of the city's gospel-singing community).

     Acevedo's department has its own spotty history with police violence but at least the chief was trying to make amends. If he's finally seeing the light and realizing that things have to seriously change starting now, then he stands virtually alone. Since the Floyd protests began in Minneapolis two weeks before Floyd's funeral, police have responded in their typical way- Meeting black protesters with riot gear, rubber bullets and tear gas. 

     It's as if they take out a skin color chart for guidance on how to interact with protesters. (In Lansing, Michigan last month, the chart apparently told them the general skin color was a dozen shades lighter than a paper bag, hence the complete lack of riot gear, tear gas or even interaction.).

     Yet aside from the Floyd protests taking place all over the planet (London, Auckland, Berlin, etc), the most striking aspect of the American protests is the invariably heterogeneous makeup of the protesters in every conceivable way. We're seeing protesters who are white, black, Asian, Latino and Middle Eastern. They're Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindi, Buddhist, atheists and agnostics. They're young, middle age and elderly, male and female, straight, gay, bi and queer, from virtually all economic strata.

     In short, we're seeing the entire United States represented (the bottom 99% at least) and this is what the white Old Guard fears- national unity and demand for change that threatens a dominance they were arrogant enough to think would last forever, a dominance that stretched all the way back to the first Continental Congress of 1774 and a century and a half before that when the first slaves were imported to Virginia in 1619.

     So, Donnie Bunker is going to deliver a speech about race soon and he's stumbling right out of the gate by appointing Stephen Miller the job of writing it. So a white man who called neo Nazi protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 "Very fine people" is going to whitemansplain about racial inequality in a speech written by another white man who essentially wrote a policy that put Hispanic children in cages. Don't expect a surfeit of brothertly love to ooze from the teleprompter. Trump never cared about people of color except when an election loomed.

   But the Floyd protests have graduated from mere loosely-connected protests into an actual movement that will, in some way or the other, influence this election. We're not just tired of Trump, we're tired of the established order of things that have in some way or another, to some degree or another, have always kept a knee on the neck of people of color.

   And like a dying, savage beast, there will be pain, there will be thrashing and there will be bellowing from those who also never gave a damn about people of color. Because America may be the only country left on earth to put the lie to Oscar Wilde's maxim that humans always find the strength the bear up under the misfortunes of others.