© AFPAs the issue of race continues to impact the USA, a man walks past a mural in Los Angeles featuring the eyes of an African-American.
I am a Rip van Winkle - a man out of time. As I watch America eat itself, I muse upon this fact more deeply. My status as a black American who has lived in South Korea since 2002, with no real plans to go back, has seemed strange to some.
But in recent years, my friends regard this ongoing decision to not return as less strange. And in recent months, it has come to be a point of no small amount of envy to many of my friends who dream of escaping the twin epidemics of Covid-19 and white supremacy-fueled rampant racism in the United States.
In 1670, the Puritan preacher Samuel Danforth warned his fellow colonizers that America had an ongoing moral challenge as it continued its "Errand into the Wilderness." But the Puritan "wilderness" was not a blank swathe of land, those beckoning fields of
Little House on the Prairie.
To the contrary, it was a land filled with fearful, fantastic beasts and rapacious monsters. It was a moral maw, a gaping abyss that beckoned the gawker to jump. It was a land of moral risk, of spiritual danger.
The spatial and moral wilderness defined the constant fear that Puritan elders had of going "astray" and falling into the beckoning darkness of civic immorality and spiritual iniquity.
In 1987, pioneer rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy made the declamation that America was an "anti-nigger machine," and that, "If I come out alive ... then they won't come clean."
Indeed, neither Amaud Arbery nor George Floyd made it out alive, but unlike most blacks murdered in the USA, their stories made it out - on video. Which is what made the Rodney King incident so shocking back in 1992: the whole thing was on tape.
But absolutely nothing came clean.
Comment: Yep, that's this Mayor Frey:
- What a performance! Minneapolis Mayor sobs over George Floyd's casket at memorial service
Warning to the 'wise': revolutions always eat their own. And because ideological perfection is impossible - and becomes of secondary importance as an ideological movement devolves - anyone can become a target.