Real men

A Sunday letter about Alex Pretti, tough guys, strength and sexuality.

From eyewitness accounts, it seems the last words Alex Pretti spoke before his death were, “Are you OK?”

He said those words to a woman after coming to her aid when she was knocked down and pepper-sprayed by masked, anonymous federal “agents” tricked out in paramilitary gear.

What happened over the next minute is well known, documented in bystander videos from numerous angles, flatly denying claims by Pretti’s own government scarcely before his body cooled that he was a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin.”

One of the features of this administration, and of fascism historically, is the projection of a virulent conception of masculinity glorifying violence, dominance and control including brutal enforcement of social hierarchies. The men who shot Pretti, death squad style, on a city street and left him bleeding without rendering aid, checked the boxes.

It is worth reflecting on why the killings of Pretti and Renee Good earlier in January represent, at least in the short term, a turning point in public sentiment about the deployment of ICE and Border Patrol in civil spaces.

Minneapolis is 300 miles away from the nearest international border, and not the one that seems to dismay the administration so much; but the point, as scholar Timothy Snyder has noted in earnest, seems to be making the entire country a “border area” where constitutional protections are suspended.

Good and Pretti were sympathetic enough as figures — working class folks, a mom and a nurse — to overcome the ease with which Americans are demonized for engaging in protests. And they were white. Rightfully, a number of Black scholars and community leaders said to a dazed public: Gee whiz, imagine that.

“It’s the idea that Black folks were always the ones whose experience signaled to the rest of the country what was soon to come,” Justin Hansford told ABC News. He directs the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, where he is a law professor. “It was because this is the Black experience that you looked at it narrowly, and you failed to address it. And then the experience becomes mimicked nationally.”

Pretti represents a different portrait of masculinity that rebukes the model of leadership and agency coming from the White House and DHS. He was an ICU nurse at a veterans’ hospital — a caregiver, a federal worker. He was legally armed, but his weapon was stored, not brandished. He came to the aid of women who were being roughed up and pepper-sprayed at close range. Moments before doing that, he was helping direct traffic and taking video footage documenting a civil protest.

This is a potent representation of what it means to be a citizen. It’s not hard to understand the impulse to bend it, instead, into “domestic terrorism.”

Coming to the aid of a protestor against a paramilitary force, knowing that that force was able and willing to kill protestors, is recognizable as courage in a way that beating a man who is pinned down by several armed men, then shot in the back after he was disarmed, is not.

This is going to pass, somehow or another, sooner or later. History tells me this. This has helped me through my own nauseating rage over this past month.

At some point it will be possible to discuss what moving forward means for the United States. There will be talk of legal reform, constitutional change, institutional remediation. These are ways of organizing people and delineating power. All of this might be easy compared to reckoning with what it is to be a people: A person on one hand, and also a people.

What conversations might we have about our ideas of whole personhood, of courage, meaning, love, and revolt? Of our mythologies of race and gender and how these serve violence and exploitation? We need these examinations, for our sanity and “to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world,” as James Baldwin put it.

Indeed, Baldwin is relevant even 38 years after he departed and left us with insights (and invitations) like this, from an essay in Playboy in 1985:

The American idea of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one’s sexuality can only with great violence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self. Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American life, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but appears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the American imagination.

All countries or groups make of their trials a legend or, as in the case of Europe, a dubious romance called “history.” But no other country has ever made so successful and glamorous a romance out of genocide and slavery; therefore, perhaps the word I am searching for is not idea but ideal.

The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

It is not only that an unexamined life “is not worth living” (whatever we think that means). The unexamined life tears us away from ourselves and the opportunity for a meaningful health and happiness, which is as communicable as these other “paralytically infantile” fixations and delusions.

Add the latter to an environment of declining literacy and dependency on digital media, and America is pretty well fucked; but not inevitably so. And I think this because I do not see Alex Pretti’s demonstration of self as an aberration.

With love for Minneapolis,