I keep talking about the TV so much because I've been laid up for 3 months and counting with a broken ankle and the television's there.
The other day there were some women from some of the harder-hit New Orleans communities testifying to a Congressional committee or sub-committee of some kind, or reporting to it, I'm not sure what the right term is. They were leaders, responsible to groups of others less articulate or less comfortable with public speech, or less endowed with enough free time to be able to do the things that local grass roots community leaders have to do. Two of them that I saw were inspiring in that full-hearted way so glaringly missing from what I'm coming to think of as commercial politicians.
Real women, whose souls were carrying the sufferings of the people they stand for, speaking bluntly and eloquently, sometimes fiercely but nonetheless politely to the panel and the cameras of C-SPAN.
Somewhere today I read someone talking about the blacks who refused to evacuate and refused offers of rescue and other emergency services during and after Katrina doing so because they were being offered by whites. Not out of racism, reverse or otherwise, so much as fear and distrust. It was in the context of Jamie Foxx moving to LA and calling home to tell his friends and relatives that "We're free out here", though he still wouldn't let more than one white man at a time into his house, once he got one.
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So last night there was a post-execution interview with some of the official witnesses to the Williams execution. I saw two of them speak to the camera, against a backdrop of institutional wall close behind them, both were from either television or radio stations, they gave call letters after their names.
The first one was named Michael, I didn't catch his surname, and he had on an interesting horizontally-striped green sweater that may or may not be a Southern California harbinger of elder style so advanced it's indistinguishable from dorky eccentricity. He was bald, fit, grave, and he kept his face at a 3/4 angle to the camera most of the time. He was exhausted-looking and very humbly articulate, moved, a man bearing an immense burden. He described the opening of a small aperture in one of the doors and a paper being passed through it - signalling the governor's refusal of clemency, I guess.
What stayed with me was the humanity in everything about him that the television transmitted - his face, his posture, his tone of voice and the language he used to say the things he said. Even his agitation.
The second man, whose name I missed completely, was wearing what passes for the "blue serge suit" of days of yore in these rapidly changing and stylishly fickle times. That dark blue three-button with a red tie still worn by junior conservatives. He had a full head of trimmed dark hair and wasn't particularly haggard looking.
He said at one point that Williams, as he moved toward his place in the event, had turned and stared directly at the press.
He said it was done to intimidate, that there was an evenness in his look, that he held it for a long time, then abruptly and dramatically turned away.
The man being interviewed said with emphasis that Williams had done it to intimidate, he elaborated on why he thought so and that's when I turned the TV off.
I've started talking back to it, which I don't like to do, not least because the neighbors are literally 15 feet away on both sides.
Not only am I talking back to the TV now, but directly to the people on it. I told the man who'd been talking about Williams trying to intimidate the press that he thought that because he had been intimidated. Seeing the intimidation as done intentionally is a way of diminishing it, a defense against it - "he's doing that on purpose to scare me" is a more comforting way of looking at it.
That he'd been intimidated by Williams' size is a given - all those photos of his thigh-shaped arms, the first interviewee said that you could clearly see Williams breathing because of the size of his chest - that he, the second man I saw interviewed, had been further intimidated by Williams' strength of character as reflected in the levelness and duration of his gaze; and I told him, speaking to the empty room with the TV now turned off, that it was impossible for him to know much of anything about Williams' state of mind in those last minutes before his death, but that it was very likely completely outside his experience.
It probably didn't occur to the man being interviewed until later, if at all, that Williams may have been at least in part silently accusing the press, as a body, for their complicity in enabling and maintaining what his whole life was a reaction against.
So to talk about him making thug moves, with all that implies, even though the man being interviewed didn't use the word thug, is nothing but his own fear projected, and subdued, into and by the event he was there to witness.
A man with Williams' resources of character and intelligence wouldn't go to his own death as an animal, but it was as an animal that he was seen by the people who killed him, and because of it. His execution wasn't an act of justice, not from any but the most naive angle. It was done to make the people who wanted it done feel safer.
Safety, security have become the highest attainable moral good.
There is nothing that can be put above them and placed before the public that won't be cast aside now, in favor of reassurance and material comfort - no matter how backed by violence and injustice it is.
The wonderfully-named Nancy Grace had a woman on for a little post-game color, or maybe it was a pre-game warm-up, whichever it was the question Grace asked her was how she felt about Gov. Schwarzenegger's refusal of clemency.
She was I guess an asian woman though I took her for a light-skinned black woman when I saw her on television, whose son I think it was had been one of the victims in the murders Williams was convicted of and executed for. The woman said she was glad.
She had an open, almost but not quite smiling face.
