One of my students two weeks ago remarked that we are living in a time of great change. I didn’t disagree because I never do that with students, but I am thinking today that a time of great change may already be past, a trajectory such as that Richard Rorty describes in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” one “defined by the Bill of Rights, the Reconstruction Amendments, the building of the land-grant colleges, female suffrage, the New Deal, Brown v. Board of Education, the building of the community colleges, Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement.” Rorty was more optimistic in 1992 than I am now. He didn’t live to see the neofascism of the anti-Obama movement, though he could have predicted it. “The future of American politics may be just a series of increasingly blatant and increasingly successful variations on the Willie Horton spots.”
Following Dr. King. It may be that the arc of history bent towards justice for a stretch of time in the last century, but if so it has now snapped back with a vengeance as far as I can see. That a seeming preponderance of good people, many of them liberal and some of them African American, can not merely countenance but embrace the official dehumanization of Michael Brown as recorded in the proceedings of the recently closed St. Louis County grand jury hearing, that these same good people can accept the outcome of that hearing as a triumph of the rule of law, that my country at large, including my young President, can not only accept but defend our contemporary surveillance state with its increasingly oppressive policing whose excesses fall primarily upon ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged and disabled, and the mentally ill—none of these circumstances gives me hope for my country’s future.
One of the big stories in St. Louis last weekend concerned the appearance of five St. Louis Rams players making the ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ gesture on the field at Sunday’s game with the Oakland Raiders. The St. Louis police union reacted quickly with a demand for an apology, though news reports alleging that the team had officially apologized were later denied by Rams executive, Kevin Demoff. But more interesting to me is the language of police union representative, Jeff Roorda:
[N]ow that the evidence is in and Officer Wilson’s account has been verified by physical and ballistic evidence as well as eye-witness testimony, which led the grand jury to conclude that no probable cause existed that Wilson engaged in any wrongdoing, it is unthinkable that hometown athletes would so publicly perpetuate a narrative that has been disproven over-and-over again. . . . Our officers have been working 12 hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance, . . .
Not only does Roorda claim that Darren Wilson and by extension all Police were vindicated by the McCulloch grand jury, but he also promotes the grand jury’s findings to the level of absolute proof, delivered over and over again, while displaying a contempt for the community he alleges his brother officers defend that seems deep and abiding.
Along South Grand police still engage in racial profiling. St. Louis police tear gassed a crowd of innocent people inside Mokabes at the corner of Grand and Arsenal on the night the McCulloch announcement, sending a hundred or so injured to St. John’s Church down the block. My priest told me the next evening that she had called the chief of police on his private number—both Mokabes and my church had been designated sanctuaries—to ask what she should do with the wounded. That same evening I talked with two young men who had been among the injured. One of them was likely responsible for some of the video you can review here. I don’t know his name. It may be that police did not provoke the violence in Ferguson that night as they did last August. But Ferguson police apparently raided St. Mark’s Church, and someone allowed a large section of Ferguson to burn to the ground. Read my friend Kevin McGrane’s account of that evening at his blog, The View From Windy Hill.
Michael Brown has now entered the realm of urban legend as an incarnation of The Incredible Hulk, joining Trayvon Martin and a host of others of the publicly dehumanized. The dehumanization of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, of Cleveland, has already begun.
Meanwhile, the cosmic cycle wheels in the heavens and brings the beginning of another Advent season. I think I first understood Advent at about age fourteen when I sang in a Messiah rehearsal at First Baptist Church in my home town. I particularly remember a tenor whose name I have forgotten, a young man who served as a soloist at St. Paul Methodist Church, where I had grown up. His singing that day of the plaintive song of Isaiah forty, for a fourteen year old boy in love with singing, forever imprinted the words, “Comfort ye my people,” in my imaginary so that I cannot recall them without Handel’s music. I no longer remember the sound of the voice I heard that day—perhaps it has been supplanted by that of Richard Lewis. But the gestalt, the old half-round church that was later torn down, and the gray weather of an early 1950s December Sunday afternoon, lodges in my mind together with that musical gesture and other antique rhythms.
These seem particularly antique to me this year. I remember quoting the great Advent antiphon once long ago and moralizing it: ‘Desire of Nations is a handsome epithet; having intoned it, we are left desire.’ As this year winds down towards the solstice I find that I am much in need of such comfort as that of which Isaiah sang so movingly, but my own song sounds more and more to me like “That lucid souvenir of the past, / The divertimento; / That airy dream of the future, / The unclouded concerto . . .” of which Wallace Stevens speaks in a poem called “Mozart, 1935.”
If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
A priest I loved once said in a sermon that we postmoderns are a people who have lost our story. I am feeling particularly marooned this Advent, having lost my story (or a substantial part of it) and perhaps its music as well.
We may return to Mozart.
He was young, and we, we are old.
The snow is falling
And the streets are full of cries.
—Come, Lord Jesus!