A/A.C.A.B.
Or: America you great?
Last summer at the height of the George Floyd protests, I was walking by our local cop shop in the early hours of the morning when I saw a tiny child with his parents, reciting the alphabet. “A,” he chanted, reading from a chalked message on the pavement in front of him. “C.” “A.” “B,” and I giggled to myself. The parents didn’t get it, but just continued to encourage him, which was probably just as well. Still, I wonder if that child will grow up with a different slant on history, one where the arc of the moral universe really does bend toward justice.
It would be nice to think that, right? And one almost could think that, last week, on the day of the Derek Chauvin trial verdict. Not going to lie, I heard about it when I was sitting in the massage chair at my hairdressers and scrolling through twitter. When I saw a tweet saying the decision was coming down, I said something I have never said in a beauty parlor before in my life: “Turn on the TV!” (Usually I plead with them to turn it off.) Immediately, everyone sat up from their respective wash basin and watched in silence as the guilty verdict was announced. And then everyone lay back down to have their hair fussed over again in total silence.
It was weird, but understandable, because although it was a relief, it was not a happy moment; rather, it re-activated in my memory of all the people down the ages who have been killed in America with impunity by the police or other white people – Emmett Till, for starters, whose name hangs off a sign in my bathroom window. There’s been so much injustice here that it’s hard to feel like this one instance of accountability can even make a dent. It’s like the author Brian Broome said in a recent post: Sometimes, when an octopus is cornered by a shark or something else that aims to have it for dinner, it will sacrifice a limb. It will let the shark take a leg. It might hurt the octopus a little but it has to appease the shark with something. While the shark is contently chewing on the octopus' leg is when the octopus makes its hasty escape to heal. And, before long, it grows another leg.
Note that, in this scenario, the octopus is white supremacy, silently healing in the corner.
This is how traumatized we are, now: I was practically – not quite, but practically – sad that things didn’t get uglier. I am still pretty angry that I, along with the entire nation, were forced to watch an actual snuff film last summer. My heart simply bleeds for Darnella Frazier, the teenager who made the video in question. Imagine being forced by circumstances to film a man being tortured and murdered. It’s like something that would happen in a violent thriller with some cartoon villain, not something that happened in real life, recently.
And yet, such is our experience of the injustices of the law, we were still in doubt over what this verdict would be. Anyway, the next day I was driving to San Francisco and the radio spat out a series of songs that all seemed to be commenting on the trial. “All Men Are Pigs,” by the Studio Killers, for example. Replace the word ‘Men” with Cops and you have a real banger: “My logic will prevail/every male/that I’ve met has a curly tail.” “Hero Takes a Fall,” same diff: “…and I won’t feel bad at all/when the hero takes a fall.” Viva la Vida? “I used to roll the dice/feel the fear in my enemy’s eyes.” And then the song America came on, by my friends the Fastbacks: “Lately, been thinking ‘bout what/it means to be in a country that’s not/all that it should be/but I don’t know if I’m ready to leave…”
Like them I may not be quite ready yet – but in part that’s only because it’s hard to know where might be better. Sure, America is still a great unfinished symphony, but it’s a work I’m not sure I want to learn.
On a lighter note, I do know the notes to many songs about America and also, songs BY America, a band whose symphony is thankfully long over. America! This is what I think about when I think about that band: back when I lived in Olympia, in Washington State, I used to really enjoy driving past the Emerald Queen Casino, an enormous green and gold emporium, the pride of the Puyallup tribe, that you can see for miles on Highway Five as you approach the dreaded Tacoma interchange. For a long time it was flashing a sign advertising an upcoming performance by the band Air Supply, and the truth is, that one of my only regrets about my time living up there is that I didn’t go to that gig. Once I told that to my friend Kim, and she said that she’d been to the EQC to see the band America, because the drummer was a friend of hers, having formerly been in the band Jesus and Mary Chain. And I was like…WTF? JAMC are one of the noisiest bands of all time. America are…not. I saw America once, in 1991, opening for the Beach Boys at the Concord Pavilion. Here’s what I wrote:
Still light out and packed with people in pastels. That’s what the Concord Pavilion looked like last Sunday night. The stage was decorated in a luau-beach party tropical Club Med theme – an aesthetic I’m particularly averse to. The group America was opening. Despite having ten Top Forty hits in the course of a decade (1972-1982) they’ve always been so faceless that when they walked on in broad daylight, dressed, like almost everybody else in the arena, in white slacks, the audience forgot to clap. The Pavilion guy had to prompt them: “Let’s give a warm welcome to America!” The welcome was still noticeably lacking in warmth, till it gradually dawned on the crowd that they knew every song: “Tin Man,” “I Need You.” “Horse With No Name.” “Daisy Jane.”
Sadly, I have a terrible genetic defect that enabled me to remember every dumb note. As a rock critic, it is surely galling to know that I can get songs titles by Todd Rundgren entirely wrong but know every single word to “Sister Golden Hair.” The mind really is a terrible thing to waste. And my brother, who was with me, suffers from the same syndrome. America started playing a song and he inadvertently blurted out, “Ventura Highway.”
“Oooh,” I teased. “I can’t believe you named that song in three notes!”
“I could have named it in one note,” he said glumly. “I was just hoping I was wrong.”
Yeah. Not the best. However, looking back, I realize I always thought that song was by the Eagles – just as I thought “This is For All The Lonely People” was by Chicago. In fact, like a badly-thought out Bread or a poorly-executed copy of CSN (with emphasis on the N), America’s songs all sounded like the least important numbers by other bands in their worst phases. But there is a kind of fascination in the stupidity of the group’s lyrics, beginning with the horridly ungrammatical construction “Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man” and ending with the equally ungrammatical, but more famous, chorus, “for there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.” Remember? “There were plants and birds and rocks and things.”
In retrospect, there were also probably drugs, and much needed ones, too, since America was so boring it probably bored itself. But I digress. America, the band is as boring as ever but America the country, is no such thing: if anything it has gotten far too interesting since the days when a person could roam its large arenas and mock its middle of the road music and just be generally outraged over minor things like the fact that a singer wore white pants. I miss those innocent days since today’s days, every damn one of them, are so much more intense.