Paranoia strikes deep
The strangulation homicide of Jordan Neely, Michael Jackson impersonator, on a New York City subway has prompted a flurry of commentary. Neely’s race and that of his killer is familiar. What’s out of the ordinary is that his assailant was not a cop and did not use a gun. Also familiar is the judgment by law enforcement officials (for now) that a homicide of a black man is not necessarily a murder. The assailant has not been charged.
“Barack freaking Obama would not be allowed to walk away after choking a homeless white man to death on the subway,” rages Elie Mystal at The Nation. Poverty, homelessness and mental illness in the richest nation on earth are all accomplices, as are the bystanders who remained bystanders as they watched (reportedly) a former Marine choke the life out of Neely for behaving erratically.
There is a forest here, not just trees. The string of Americans killed lately over mundane, nonthreatening actions, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, should unsettle us all. But it is the outgrowth of paranoia that’s been cultivated.
Since the 1980s and earlier, unreasoning fear of the “other” has been cultivated and marketed. There was the moral panic over rumors of ritual Satanic abuse at day care centers. There was the repressed memory syndrome fad. There was “stranger danger.” The response of parents fearful of their children being abducted was to have them photographed and fingerprinted at mall clinics designed more for identifying bodies than for preventing rare abductions. There were ubiquitous “Baby on Board” signs in car windows. Danger lurked around every corner.
By the 1990s, there was Rush Limbaugh’ and imitators’ version of “Two Minutes Hate” that lasted three hours per day, five days a week. There was the “Clinton Death List.” There was a bombing in New York City that did not take down the Trade Towers. That came later. And another in Oklahoma City that demolished a federal building, killing 168, including children in the daycare center.
Not to mention the daily firearms slaughter. The individual risk remains near-infinitesimally low, “but the incessant rat-a-tat of bloody headlines makes people feel—viscerally—that the risks they do encounter are unbearably dangerous,” writes Elizabeth Bruenig in The Atlantic in response to the Neely killing:
This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by all the incidents of random gun violence that came before, is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society. Nobody looks forward to encountering people behaving erratically on the subway, and neither does anyone want to fall victim to an act of stochastic violence, but killing a mentally ill man on a train doesn’t represent much of an improvement upon either circumstance. It represents the loss of a peaceful commons, the absence of compassion, and the overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence. This is the country we have become.
“Paranoia strikes deep” dates from the 1960s. By the 2020s, it’s reached our doorsteps, writes Roxane Gay in the New York Times:
We are at something of an impasse. The list of things that can get you killed in public is expanding every single day. Whether it’s mass shootings or police brutality or random acts of violence, it only takes running into one scared man to have the worst and likely last day of your life. We can’t even agree on right and wrong anymore. Instead of addressing actual problems, like homelessness and displacement, lack of physical and mental health care, food scarcity, poverty, lax gun laws and more, we bury our heads in the sand. Only when this unchecked violence comes to our doorstep do we maybe care enough to try to effect change.
There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us.
More than a few of the paranoid have turned on our democracy and deemed themselves its executioners. More were convicted Thursday of trying to kill that. We’ve become “a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it’s our own,” Gay laments.
It’s hard not to agree.