JUne 1, 2023
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Chokehold

by Jonathan Wallace jw@bway.net

I did not realize when I launched The Ethical Spectacle in January 1995 that much of my focus would be on our uses of language. Somewhere around 2009, I also began the Mad Manuscript, a work originally more narrowly focused on the history of the idea of free speech, now 14,000 pages (no shit), also now concentrating on the uses of language.

A few weeks ago, on the New York City subway, an ex-marine named Daniel Penny placed "a 30-year-old homeless man named Jordan Neely in a chokehold" for more than four minutes, as a result of which the latter died. Ismail Muhammad, "The Most Disturbing Thing About Jordan Neely's Killing", The New York Times May 12, 2023. The wording here is disturbingly fascinating: the Times professes to be shocked, shocked, by the killing of Jordan Neely, yet uses the word "chokehold".

According to the Oxford English dictionary, a "chokehold" is "a tight grip around a person's neck, used to restrain them by restricting their breathing". The same dictionary defines "to strangle" as "squeeze or constrict the neck of (a person or animal), especially so as to cause death". Trying to establish a relationship between these two vocabulary words, by a sort of triangulation, a "chokehold" appears to be a tactic available in a situation of inequality, in which the person applying it has some kind of moral or other authority to exert control over the other. I can easily imagine two situations in which that might be possible: someone attacks me without any justification, with intent to inflict death or terrible harm, and I adroitly save my life by placing him in a chokehold. Here I have some implied moral authority, for the same reason that the law recognizes self defense as an exception or out (a defense) to a charge of murder. More commonly, a "chokehold" is a tactic used by someone in uniform, in actual authority, to "control" someone who is not: someone who is resisting arrest, for example.

When someone is not cloaked with either form of authority, we probably should not use "chokehold" but might select "strangle" instead. If someone waits in hiding in a park, pops out of the trees and sociopathically place an unsuspecting and unoffending passerby in a "chokehold", resulting in their death, he has "strangled" them. A journalist describing that as a "chokehold" is suffering (at least) from a form of psychological confusion, as much as if they had said, if the criminal attempted to abduct that passerby, that he was "arresting" them.

The critical question in the subway incident which is vastly concealed in the choice of language, was: what moral authority did Penny have to place Neely in a chokehold, if any? Neely was acting as a traditional New York street or subway schizophrenic of the type one sees almost every day in New York City: shouting or ranting while wandering around, but (if you have lived in the city any length of time) basically inoffensive and usually physically quite frail. Growing up in New York City, and, though I don't live there now, visiting anywhere from once to six or eight times in a month, I have encountered thousands of city schizophrenics, most of whom never came within five feet of me. I learned, with the one or two who did (one started poking a litigation case I was carrying, asking what it contained) that I could say, "Back the fuck off" with conviction, and they would in fact back away frightened. I never felt the need or saw it as my role to place anyone in a "chokehold".

All accounts indicate that Neely never touched or personally threatened anyone. Therefore, Penny singled him out to be strangled, and did in fact strangle him to death, without any authority to do so. Penny was not a cop (who also would not have had cause to place Neely in a "chokehold" based on his behavior). Nor was he defending himself, because Neely never attacked him. Penny strangled Neely-- and that is what the Times should have reported.

Another takeaway is that even cops should not be authorized to use chokeholds unless they are in the same situation that a private citizen would acquire authority to do so: to avoid their own deaths or infliction of grievous harm. Protocols should not authorize a cop to strangle anyone merely because they are thrashing or refuse to put their wrists together for the handcuffs.

Penny's lawyer's later comment to the press becomes very black (and bleak) comedy: "[H]e could not have foreseen his untimely death". Omigod. He strangled him but death was a mere accident or glitch for which Penny was not responsible. The world of the criminal defense attorney is often a very Derrida-ian world of Deconstruction: I remember a law professor acting out a scenario in which one man yelled words of hatred at another, then fired a gun at him from ten feet away, the latter immediately dying of a projectile through the heart. This isn't evidence, the professor said. Maybe the bullet flew in from somewhere else. Maybe it was a meteorite. This is the same universe in which David Hume pointed out that the fact that the sun rose every morning for millions of years is not "evidence" it will do so tomorrow.

Everyone deserves an assertive defense in our system, but at times defense attorneys (I have been one) advocate a universe of complete irresponsibility, no Agency, all Glitches all the Time. In an age of hatred and lies, we are seeing this argument used, not necessarily with any conviction, as a cover story (covering fire) for the advocacy of murder. We are living, increasingly, in a world of murder. The people who have contributed millions of dollars for Penny's defense are saying that he had the "right" to murder a schizophrenic man who made him nervous, or even uncomfortable. The people making a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse are arguing that they have the "right" to carry a gun into a Black Lives Matter demonstration, and murder the first person they see who is also carrying a gun.

The adage we all learned as children, that "words can never hurt me", is untrue. Words create Murder World.