The additional violence of George Floyd’s autopsy report

It’s Friday night, May 29, the year of our Lord 2020, and I am looking at Twitter. I see a news item: George Floyd’s autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of asphyxia or strangulation,” citing instead “underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system” as the cause of his death, which inconveniently happened under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. I see news items dutifully reporting that Floyd died, somehow, after said officer “kneeled on” him. I see a US senator comment that he doesn’t know what kneel on means while murder is right there for said news outlets to use. I see a local news crew in Louisville fired on by police, with rubber bullets shot square into the camera. I see an anonymous Facebook employee fretting that “history will not judge us kindly” for their employer’s acquiescence to the violent rhetoric of the president.

And as I often have in recent weeks, I think of the words of the German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, who died by suicide in 1940: “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” George Floyd is dead, may God rest his soul. But whether he will have died by deliberate violence or “underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants” is being contested and decided right now. Whether innovations in violence against media outlets and in tech platforms boosting violent rhetoric will become a new standard is being decided right now.

In 2017 it was fashionable to point out the year in our common Gregorian calendar and express disbelief that some depredation was taking place in this apparently quite advanced year. Progress should have spared us this in twenty-effing-seventeen. But that fashion died down as it became clear that trends were not favorable and that the advancing numbers may not mean anything good, if they mean anything at all.