The Knee on the Neck: Watching from a Distance

Tears come out of my eyes and wet my cheeks and go into my mouth and taste salty. I watch Atlanta’s mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms tell the citizens of Atlanta to go home and I get it. This is no way to blah blah blah I get it, I hear the reason born of pain and oppression and I get it but I would be there too, wouldn’t I, if I were  there. I would also be feeling that enough is enough, fuck it, burn something, turn something over, throw something, break something. Because something breaks inside. Something of reason and forbearance breaks inside when you have seen enough and been lied to enough and enough is enough and you go out into the streets and break something to match what is broken inside because enough is enough.

So I had to get up from the TV. If I was still living in a place where there are cafés where a person can stand up and speak, shout, sing, yell what is going on inside, I would do that. But I have only the silent keyboard to tap on. I am in Italy, a little town, a town with a wall around it, a house with a garden with a wall around it, where we fled to, where we escaped.

Black lives matter. I get that, the rage born of fear that faceless men in suits of power somewhere high up in the omnipotent government do not give a shit about what happens to me or my brothers and sisters, I got that during the Vietnam War when people my age might be plucked off the street to fight in a war that was wrong, that was immoral and corrupt, that was criminal. I get that rage one feels when one is lied to by officials who have the power over you, who can send you to jail or to war or who can put the knee on the neck with their fellow officers watching, can put the knee on the neck and just wait for you to die, waiting with one hand in the pocket, casual, imperious, the idiot sadist doing his work of terror.

The knee on the neck. So I watch CNN and I watch people in downtown L.A. go in and out of the shattered glass door of a Starbucks on a corner, I watch the commentators, the witnesses, the lawyers, the fine and knowledgeable leaders and spokespeople and organizers and I hear their reasoned pleas, I hear Keisha Lance Bottoms speak of her 18-year-old son and I get it, I understand, this is no way to behave, go home, be peaceful, be your better self.

I get it and yet I would be there too because the rage does not know reason. The rage only knows years of being lied to and being ignored, the rage not just at the lack of action but at the demeanor of nonchalance, the privilege of safety, the smiling lies and lip service, the coded arrogance, the coded insults, the denials of what is plain before our eyes, that is what makes you crazy and in the streets, throwing rocks because rocks is all you’ve got in the end, rocks found on the street that is littered with glass as the phalanx of armed and uniformed men and women moves toward you like a wave of idiot lava spewed from an idiot and fascist core of a country on its way down to the depths of hell.

So the tears come out of my eyes and go down my cheeks into my mouth and I taste the salt of my disbelief, the salt of my own remembrance, the salt of my own pain and impotence in the face of powerful evil. I sit in my comfortable chair in my walled town in Tuscany and remember the fleabag hotel room on Columbus Avenue in North Beach in the 1980s to which I retired in an agony of addiction and poverty, I remember my wretchedness and suffering, I remember my bafflement at how I ended up there on that sagging mattress with the frayed coverlet, that room smelling of curry, that sink into which I pissed, I remember where the hopelessness and disillusion took me and I identify, I feel it, what you do when you don’t know what else to do, why you go into the streets and start a fire. And I remember how it is to realize that no political organization has your back, that no employers have your back, that no government has your back, that it’s you and that’s all it is, that you’re on your own in a hostile country and you’re going to have to make the most of it, you’re going to have to find a way to survive and stay safe.

Safe is boring. Gone is the rush of streaking down an alley pursued by police. Gone is the thrill of facing the enemy across a line of batons. Gone is the beauty in the heart of marching with strong young comrades chanting and singing with moral courage, with the courage of knowing you are right and you are together. Gone is the feeling of power speaking at a microphone words that stream out of their own volition as if making themselves up as they are sounded, as they come into being as autonomous sound escaped from speech and reason, melded with emotion. Gone is the sad voyeuristic thrill of being an American in America at a time when America is convulsed with its own idiocy and greed, when America is blinded to what it has become.

Gone is all that. But still here is CNN, a television in a room in a thousand-year-old house, Chris Cuomo and Keisha Lance Bottoms, Van Jones and an image of the ruined façade of CNN in Atlanta. Still here is the knowledge of a country gone awry, going down. Still here are the tears.