Ice comes to Memphis

The National Guard swept into Memphis a few months ago. Governor Lee invited them in, and for the next few months I would see them strolling down Beale, four or five young ones trailed by an MPD officer. The British Tourists who stop me on my run (“Love, do you know where Beale St. is?”), now stop to take selfies with the boys in camo. I imagine they will show these photos to their families in Sheffield or Bristol as they tell them that seeing the guard made them feel safer somehow-“I guess Memphis isn’t as dangerous as it seems,” they’ll say.

Of course the guard I saw weren’t the ones dealing with the violence—the violence the caused and that they sought to control. They saved that for the ICE agents down on Summer Ave, the only place to get a cheap oil change and a decent tostada. A few weeks ago I passed a protest against ICE there, where Mexican and Guatemalan flags were held aloft by Mexicans and Guatemalans and the occasional gringo. As I leaned forward against my horn I could hear it mix with them chanting, “el Pueblo, unido, jamás será vencido,”—the people, united, will never be defeated.

This weekend, an ice storm trapped Memphians in their homes. There were no more guardsmen on Beale—unable to break their blankets of ice they too stayed inside and watched the world unfold on their phones. I resumed the COVID lockdown ritual—Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, email—cycling through like the cardinal points of a compass.

On Saturday I saw the murder in Minneapolis. I made the mistake of leaving my speaker on on my phone and so the gunshot cracked across my living room like a whip. It’s not uncommon to hear gunshots in Memphis and wonder if anyone ended up on the end of them. But there was no mystery here because you saw the murder in real time. To call it anything else is to deny reality. 

Sunday night I read The Dead by Joyce—around midnight I came to the final lines. “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” I thought of Alex Pretti, again, falling in forensic frame, faintly falling and falling faintly and then all at once.

Like many Americans, I have spent the last year thinking about how democracies die. Just like us, they can die a million ways—they can choke on inflation, their throats can be cut by generals storming out of the barracks. As Plato says, the people can raise up a wolf from among them, feeding on the holy blood to become a tyrant. As a political scientist, there are a few examples that come easily to mind—Spain 1939, Argentina 1973, Tunisia 2024. But the first is of course Germany 1933–the fall of Weimar that elevated Hitler and led to the destruction of Europe and the fires of the Shoah.

What strikes me about Weimar is the tremendous violence that occurred before the fall. The paramilitary forces of the NSDAP smashed homes and tore men from streetcars and beat partisans to death, leaving them on the stones of Utter den Linden in Mitte as a warning. The modern vision of the manicured Nazi, the Jew Hunter of Tarantino hides the fact that most Nazis were just jackboot thugs. The violence wasn’t a means to an end, it was the end. And as I watch ICE agents pump six bullets into a man on his knees it is hard to think of it as anything other than an end. 

Yet just as important as the similarities are the differences. Hitler was popular, Trump is not—20 points underwater and drowning deeper. And while the existential violence in Nazi Germany meant families mostly holed up, wondering who next would go Nazi, we see something different in Minneapolis. Trapped in my home I find hope in every dumpster dragged across the street and every human Daisy chain in open defiance of laws that no longer accord with decency.

In political science, we learn about critical junctures—moments in political history more important than others, branches of trees summering out into different futures. To paraphrase William Carlos Williams, against every swastika is poised the protestor. One question we sometimes ask in my field is whether people know they are in a critical juncture. I have always been skeptical, but I know we are in one now. We are because a VA nurse with a license to carry and a cell phone and a clarity of vision died on his knees before he could comprehend that he was dying for that vision. It is instead our job to decide what that means—which branch we travel on, to Majdanek or to Nuremberg.