I have been following media coverage of a deadly head-on
collision on Interstate 87, just a few miles from where I live. In and of itself, the story is not remarkable. We see more than our share of accidents on
this interstate, including head-on collisions.
I initially paid attention because the head-on collision was
at 7:00 a.m. and one driver was heading south in the northbound lane. Someone reported the car stopped for a time
and the driver apparently asleep.
Another driver reported he had seen the suspect car turn around,
apparently making a conscious choice to head in the wrong direction.
I was talking to the owner of a local wine store, and he
said it was devilishly difficult to make that wrong turn, especially during
rush hour. One had to cross a concrete
medium to get to the other side. The wine guy, who rides a motorcycle,
suggested such a maneuver was unlikely to happen by chance.
A narrative began to take form through television, print and
online. The wrong-way driver was a
police officer. He was also an Army veteran, having served in Bosnia and the
Middle East. He was a cop in the Bronx
with the New York City Police Department.
Up to this point, there was only passing mention of the other fatality,
except that he lived in the neighborhood, about ten miles from where the other
driver resided. We would eventually
learn that he was a cook at a local Catholic college.
The only television interviews I saw—and perhaps the only
ones available--were with the police officer’s family. The first I saw showed their understandable
grief and anguish. In later interviews,
while there was no less grief, a clearer narrative began to form. The dead man was “sleep-deprived.” He was working overtime because his
girlfriend was pregnant, and he wanted to be financially ready when the baby
arrived. During the various interviews,
a young man said something to the effect that it definitely wasn’t a suicide.
None of this is remarkable in itself. We understand that a grieving family wants to
have a sustaining narrative they can live with.
And we just don’t know much. Both
men died from blunt force trauma. The toxicology reports won’t be available for
two months. Police report there was no
evidence of drugs or alcohol at the scene.
My first thought when hearing about the accident and knowing
the terrain very well, was that it must have been deliberate. Understandably, this kind of conjecture,
without any proof, is not ready for prime time.
But people in the community were talking about this possibility.
From a journalistic perspective, I found the media narrative
a little uneven from the very beginning.
There was very little reporting about the actual naturalistic detail of
the accident and the decisions that set it in motion. There was little of the old-fashioned cause
and effect. Rather, most reports seemed
to begin with the fact that the driver at “fault” was a veteran who served in
the Middle East. That fact was followed
by the other fact that the man was also a police officer. Now add this to the family’s narrative about
workload, lack of sleep, concern about an unborn child and we have a rather
sympathetic story about a young man who, according to the information we have
to date, made a determined effort to head in the wrong direction and kill
another man. We can argue the motives
but there is no disputing the deaths.
Let me be clear. The
forensics will fill in some of the remaining gaps. I am more interested here in the storyline,
the semantic froth and the verbal associations that too often kick in when we
hear the words veteran, police office, father-to-be and the like. The associations readily come to mind:
honorable, disciplined, and someone in service to the community and nation. I live in the shadow of New York and listen
attentively to the police being routinely referred to as the Finest, always in
capital letters. If there is truth in
these acclamations, there is also hubris.
After the shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, and the
subsequent unrest, we are hearing a lot about the militarization of America’s
police departments with an estimated 400 nationwide indiscriminately awarded
heavy equipment and automatic weapons that were used or intended for use in
Iraq and Afghanistan. These include:
grenade launchers, automatic weapons, night-vision goggles and armored vehicles
that are mine-resistant and ideal for protecting against ambushes. We should be concerned about the
militarization of our police departments because there is more at stake than
bringing home the political bacon. The
September 2014 issue of The Atlantic Magazine provides an interesting
perspective of how America is becoming a police state and explores the role of
local authorities in this dynamic. This
is not a case of Big Brother, per se.
It’s a much more pervasive form of Big Little Brother, replete with
local accents.
But we should also be concerned about the “militarization”
of our language, immediately putting anything associated with the police,
military, terrorism task forces, border patrols, and the like in the same box
that holds platitudes about our patriotism, righteousness and exceptionalism. Our War on Terror has also become a War on
Language where reports, inferences and judgments—our semantic intelligence at
work--are mixed together in a palatable political stew, dumbing us down, dumbing
the country’s discourse down, and making it easier for us to wage a highly
questionable war in Iraq and to “nation-build” in Afghanistan, demonstrating American
hubris and simplemindedness at its best.
America’s rabid international behavior since 9/11 is as much a failure
of language as it is of politics. The
just-announced war on ISIS smacks of the same grammar, inverted and
unbelievable.
President Obama is criticized for wearing a tan suit during
a news conference and for being cautious about committing American military
forces in the Middle East, as if we are in some “King of the Castle” kid’s game. The psychologist Carl Jung writes in The
Undiscovered Self: “Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting
effect than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.” Unfortunately, this sentiment is currently
out-of-vogue and so un-American.
I come from a large family of police officers, veterans and
active duty personnel who have served our time.
We’ve put in our collective half-century of military service since
Vietnam. I recall my four years in the
Navy with appreciation and necessary understatement. Anyone who has served understands the shadow
side of our armed forces, and the subliminal echoes of Catch-22 that will
always resonate in the ranks where mere humans serve. I touch on some of these Navy treats in my
new novel USS
Bunker Kills: A Sea Story.
America loves its sea stories.
