Justice, Minutiae & the KR Kenosha Sh*t Show

This Rittenhouse trial and verdict are just another iteration of something that plays out again and again in the US: a disturbing, unjust event (2 men killed, 1 gravely wounded by AR-15 faux-medic boy in Kenosha) occurs as a result of a series of disturbing, unjust events (many cop and vigilante shootings and killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd and Jacob Blake) which themselves occur within a larger disturbing, unjust history (US history vis-a-vis Black Americans) which itself plays out within a larger unjust and demented system of values and ideology: white supremacist settler colonial capitalism. Rittenhouse getting off is an outcome after a battle over minutia, specifically questions of “self-defense.” And that’s what all the pundits bicker about and, as with everything else that occurs in America, it all follows the unbreakable rule: Nothing that happens here happens in a historical context; there is no American history, only a context-free, eternal American present in which all crimes are possible, but not sadness or non-white or anti-capitalist rage. A dystopia of thought and feeling.