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I went way back into my old recipe files, locating yellowed and dust-covered index cards from the 1960’s, with all the ingredients for a pie full of nation-wide protests and riots. There they were, cut out of the Newark Star Ledger and the Detroit Free Press, with instructions for cooking up tragic events. Although many years old, the recipes, with a few new ingredients just to spice up things, seem to be an all-too-perfect fit for someone who hates the taste of injustice and has an appetite for protest.
INGREDIENTS
1 black man (ideally large, young, and a little feisty)
1 arresting officer (white, ideally with a history of complaints against him)
4 police sidekicks (none black)
A handful of bystanders
At least one person with an iPhone
1 local district attorney
1 President of the United States of America
COOKING DIRECTIONS
Begin with an ordinary arrest for a non-violent crime. The suspect, young and black, offers some limited resistance at first, just enough for the arresting officer, who is white, to call for backup officers who arrive on scene. The suspect is completely subdued, lying on the ground on his stomach, shackled with his hands behind his back. Yet the arresting officer apparently decides that the suspect needs further restraint, and places his full weight on the suspect’s neck with his knee.
A small crowd begins to gather, and the four others officers present do little else other than to keep the bystanders at a distance, although close enough to record all the events clearly. Shortly after, the suspect plaintively announces that he cannot breathe, and continues to make it clear that he is in distress. The officer maintains his position, his full weight, via knee, on the man’s neck. Bystanders urge the officer to ease off, but he does not respond to them, nor do the other officers do a thing. After about five minutes, the suspect not only ceases to complain, but appears totally non-responsive. One bystander announces herself as a nurse and urges the officers to allow her to check on him, to no avail. Finally, after more than eight minutes, the suspect is taken away, to be announced dead shortly after.
Police brutality, white officers toward men of color, is far too common, and this might have been just another in a long list of tragic incidents had the recipe called for swift action, in this case by the northern, liberal city of Minneapolis. But instead it called for heating over a large flame. With the whole event recorded, with eyewitness-participants repeating exactly what the camera had seen, the Minneapolis district attorney waited three days before arresting the officer, offering the excuse that the clear evidence of his eyes and ears was not sufficient to even charge the officer with a crime. That officer has now been charged with third degree murder, the lightest of the crimes that they might have charged him with, and even today the other officers, who looked like accomplices to me, are still at large. As icing on the cake, the autopsy report makes a point of noting that the deceased had heart disease and hypertension, with the likely implication that high blood pressure might mitigate the officer’s crime. Yes, I’m certain that high blood pressure is often a problem when a large man places his knee on your windpipe and holds it there even after you lose consciousness.
This entrée would be enough to satisfy the appetite of those who would march and protest, who would congregate to denounce the continued injustices in a world that is hardly post-racial. But Master Chef Trump has served up the perfect dessert, flambe, to complete the meal. “If they loot, we will shoot, “ says the man who knows how to stir up people’s appetites for violence. If the protestors had come near the White House, he tells us that would have set off vicious dogs and other terrible things. Very likely, alligators, crocodiles, and poisonous snakes would have viciously attacked anyone trying to wade through the moat that he had secretly installed around the White House.
Turn up the heat, bake at 450 degrees, burn baby burn. So sad and so tragic. Let’s hope that one day—soon—we can toss this recipe away, permanently.
perfect.