The American Condition
A man jumped the turnstile in Brooklyn on Sunday and was chased by the cops at the station. A few minutes later he was dead and three other people were injured after the police opened fire, claiming he had a knife and had threatened them during the pursuit (the knife has not been produced by the NYPD because it was allegedly stolen from the crime scene). This is a scene that could have happened at any subway stop in the city, because every stop in the city has people from all walks of life skipping the fare, and every station has cops who will not hesitate to shoot.
The easy and correct response to this problem is to say that no person should be killed over $2.90 in subway fare, but that’s also glossing over what actually got Derell Mickles shot — that we have decided as a society that the police can kill anyone they want to for the crime of not doing exactly what the cops say. You saw it with Tyreek Hill last week at a traffic stop in Miami, you saw it when Daniel Shaver was killed by a cop in Arizona for not laying on the ground well enough, as Bluesky user Pope of Chili Town said, “It’s kind of crazy to think about how at any time a cop can challenge you to a game of Simon Says to the death”. The threat of violence looms over every interaction we have with the police, and living under the threat of violence is the quintessential American condition.
You know this because it has permeated the national discourse, focused on Springfield in Ohio, where J.D. Vance and Donald Trump have boosted bogus stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. It’s easy to recognize this for what it is, two powerful men amplifying gutter-racist garbage to distract from their failing Presidential campaign, but as someone who has seen the same bullshit flung at the Somali community that moved into my hometown, recognizing it doesn’t do a goddamn thing. Everyone knows what the game is — demonizing a group of people for having the gall to be forced from their home and into what credulous dweebs call Real America. The thing is, much like the four people shot on the subway platform, American violence doesn’t care who it targets. That’s why there have been at least 33 different bomb threats called in to schools and hospitals in Springfield. The violence can just as easily come for you.
We know this because, for the second time this summer, a man with perplexing politics tried to shoot Donald Trump, this time while he was golfing at Trump International in West Palm Beach. It’s an event that isn’t noteworthy for what happened, but by how quickly we will all forget it happened. There were a lot of people who thought the first attempt on Trump’s life was going to be what sealed the election for him, but when it became clear that it was effectively a school shooting by a kook that just happened to target the President, instead of a specifically partisan act, it got swept under the discourse rug as something not worth considering. The threat of violence in America is so consistent that it’s no longer notable when it comes for the former President.
It’s understood in academic circles that fascism is the violence that defines the experience of the imperial periphery being turned inward on the core of the empire. Earlier this month, JD Vance called school shootings “a fact of life”. We are forced to endure the American condition of the threat of violence every day of our lives, and more or less entirely because of a very specific portion of the political population. That’s the dark irony of what keeps happening to Trump — it’s the violence that his policies and the policies of his allies push throughout America coming back and targeting him. The same violence that he’s inspiring by standing at the debate podium and saying “they’re eating the cats in Springfield” is what is driving people to take the guns that the GOP’s policies pour into America and point them at him.
The problem for Trump is that he can never, ever bring the temperature down. He can’t ever admit that he’s a part of the problem. That’s what makes him Donald Trump. It’s reflected in the party he’s created in his own image. If the guy who hid in the bushes wasn’t an convicted felon and hadn’t scraped off the serial number on his gun, there wouldn’t have been a lot to charge him with because, as far as I can tell, it’s not illegal to have a rifle near the President, because the GOP has created an America where the threat of violence is everywhere and can come for anyone, even the leader of their party, and there is no way to make it stop. We all just have to live with when the cops open fire when we’re on the subway, or when lunatics start calling bomb threats into our towns, or if we’re just trying to enjoy a day on the golf course.
