A Salt Lake City cop was filmed throwing an elderly bystander to the pavement in the first 50 seconds of the video posted below. It’s just one of many brutal acts that have been committed by cops under pressure from protesters in cities all over America. (I’m not claiming that pressure has been all good. I doubt the woman who blew up a police van in New York with a molotov cocktail is George Floyd’s sister under the skin.) What distinguishes this scene of brutality, though, is the nada response of one reporter who witnessed it.
Perhaps the reporter was discombobulated. Or maybe she has a slow nature. But journalism doesn’t seem to be her calling. The opposite of street-wise, she didn’t register how duplicity followed brutality. Her camera crew showed how the bully got religion after another cop, realizing there was an old man with a cane on the ground, rushed to help that elder up. Thug then became boy scout. The cop who’d brutalized the senior made a pretense of joining the humane salvage effort, taking the old man’s elbow. (That cop may have to take the Fifth as Salt Lake City’s Police Chief has said he’ll pass the film footage on to the Civilian Review Board.) The reporter took in none of this.
A talking head in the studio realized something nasty had gone down and tried gently to clue her in: “pictures are striking there Nicole.” But his respondent on the street remained unstruck.
All you need is Hannah Arendt to explain the banality of Ms. Oblivious. But when this imperv turned things over to the boy-reporter down the street, he took you into a new American Ugly–a context of no context where jargon (police-lingo in this instance) is conflated with expertise. Reporter #2 was tender to cops and their machines (those poor cars with their broken windows), but his fanship didn’t seem grounded in any deep identification. I doubt he has any explicit politics. But he’s full of reactionary beans. Stoked by the prospect of a “Battle of Salt Lake City,” Mr. Breathless might just make you long for Ms. Oblivious.