Frozen Hysteria

How’d you endure America’s annual deep-freeze week?

Did you spend the snowy Sunday watching both NFL title games, eyes-wide-impressed by Zak Kuhr’s brilliant defensive calling or bored-to-snore by Sam Darnold’s command? Did you beg off the office commute, opting for telework paired with an Irish coffee at hand? Or maybe, like your humble author, you performed the torturous balance of watching kids and managing Zoom meetings, which always ended with a cry for “NEED MORE APPLE JUICE!” right in the middle of reporting annual metrics.

Or if you’re an unfortunate resident of our imperial capital, you probably spent five-plus days waiting for the city to plow your fronting avenue. To think: Washingtonians ardently believe they deserve statehood!

For the rest of the country, the last week of January was a chilling reminder of the Summer of Floyd, with cabin-fevered ennui snapping at political provocation.

My younger, lollipop-sucking readers may not recall the parlous Wu-flu era, which essentially shuttered all unnecessary commerce and schools for months—in some states, years—on end. The country spent the enfleur spring cooped up like Christmas ornaments, unceasingly reminded that drawing breath around non-nuclear family was a death sentence. Every home was a cordoned pesthouse. The only escape was the attention vortex boxes in our hands. And the occasional venture to Target in a hazmat suit.

Before all eyes online, a tragedy emerged. A black man was cuffed for trying to pass off a counterfeit Andy Jackson. He died after the white flatfoot jammed his knee upon his neck for a prolonged period, inducing cardiopulmonary arrest. The agonizing footage made the internet rounds at speed, and was subsequently viewed more than “Titanic” during its prime theater release.

Machiavelli famously remarked that man is “satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often even more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

Floyd’s prior fentanyl use weakened his respiratory system. His recalcitrance exacerbated the scene. But no matter! The video, often abridged into thirty-second bits, broadcast a more potent narrative: the vulnerable black innocent trampled by the prepotent white devil; Uncle Sam as a pale-hooded Baphomet.

Had the country not vacuum-sealed itself indoors for a season, perhaps the snippet would do its normal viral jag, topping the news cycle for days at most. But with the iPhone as most of our portal beyond closing walls, the clip was impossible to ignore. Pent-up anxiousness, bottled for so long, finally uncorked. A “racial reckoning” took hold—which was a media euphemism for wide-scale rioting, looting, and wanton arson.

The same heated sequence rewound to play again during the coldest week of this new year. Like Hegel concretized, the Trump administration’s illegal-alien crackdown in Minnesota spurred a counterrevolution of lib resistance in the blue-north city of Minneapolis. This ragtag army of boomer retirees, single moms, grad students, paid vagrants, and millennials afraid of a DoorDash price hike has been jamming a proverbial spanner into the ICE engine. Confrontation over state power inevitably turns sanguine. The first shot was Renee Good catching a 9mm barrel after personally blockading an ICE operation. The second, and arguably more egregious, was the 10-point barrage sprayed into Alex Pretti.

Pretti was gunned down after interceding between ICE agents and a female agitant. He was armed, but was stripped of his gimcrack pistol before being fired upon. Pixelated stream captured the last tense moments of his life. The vid-capped killing happened on January 24th—the next day, the country was cloaked in a foot or more of snow, with an impenetrable layer of ice laid on top. The “snowcrete” had cometh.

Forced isolation yet again: schools closed, businesses boarded, front doors were barred not by state decrees but by an unmovable glacial mass. As HVACs across the country sputtered and knocked, the Pretti reel whirred at an exponential RPM. Pent inside, without escape until Phoebus’s mercy, we had little choice but to view the snuff film in between checking the ambient temp. This, to quote playwright Matthew Gasda, view of death “snake[d] through the internet and weave[d] [itself] into our cortexes.” The entire week was a nonstop psychic assault, a continual rewind of Pretti’s slugged end.

Within 72 hours, with roads an icy slip’n’slide, normal, non-political influencers concluded that anti-deportation efforts were the equivalent of the Vélodrome d’Hiver. “Black Lives Matter” anagrammed, with a few letter swaps, to “ICE Out.” A Virginia nurse TikTokked herself urging care aides to deliberately incapacitate immigration agents within their charge. A nationwide strike was demanded by celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, who haven’t jobbed for low coin since the ‘70s. January 30th was deemed the official shutdown day. Commence America’s commercial machine grinding to an absolute… hold on! Many schools were still empty thanks to polar conditions. Business was already slow given the slick streets. This was a protest piggyback.

A slight temperature rise over the weekend thawed both ice and tempers. By Monday, normal business hours resumed. Classes were back in session. A million heat pumps ceased incessant clanking. The frigid quarantine melted off. Much snow remains, but it was back to the prosaic grind. And with the partial liquefying also went the frothing calls for ICE’s abolition.

The lesson from this tundric tuition: touching grass moderates tear-it-down whims—even if we won’t see green shoots until March.