Stuck in a long, rainy tailback on the M4 recently, a driver in the bus lane had made repeated aggressive attempts to cut in front of cars each time the traffic shunted forward a metre or so. Then he missed my car by a millimetre as the traffic suddenly stalled again, leaving him stuck in the bus lane. Lowering the passenger window to placate him, I realised too late that his tanned, 30-something face was already half way out the door, contorted with rage and spitting a fusillade of abuse carefully tailored to his target : “ya ugly old c**t”, “ya dirty old hag”, “ya filthy slag”. “F***in’ bitch” was his clear favourite.
Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, in a culture so sexist that no one quite believes it who didn’t live through it, was a useful preparation for defusing later threats in lonely places. But even then, before social media and Donald Trump, the sexualisation of abuse was more about condescension than hate.
Back on the M4, the hate-filled ranting a few metres away felt so menacing that I was about to jump out of my car when the traffic finally moved. Afterwards I wondered what he did for a living and who he went home to in the evening. Wondered how I might describe my larger fears about that driver to a busy garda without sounding like an elderly fusspot. His was the kind of verbal rage that feels like a prelude to something potentially much darker.
Maybe that’s why among the millions of hot takes and forensic analyses of the shooting of Renee Good by an Ice agent in Minneapolis, two commonly used words leapt out from the agent’s own phone video. Seconds after firing three bullets into the 37-year-old’s face, a voice – which appears most likely to be that of the shooter, Jonathan Ross – is clearly heard to say: “F**king bitch”. What most women will hear in that expletive and its tone is not fear, shock or regret, but the cold rage of a disrespected man.
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Then copious video footage forced the official narrative to shift from “’domestic terrorist’ ‘rammed’ her car into agent” to arguing self-defence for Ross on the grounds that he had suffered a recent traffic stop injury and has a family. That implied that he was just a scarred patriot and family man who needed post-trauma counselling (and shouldn’t have been near a gun). Or that his modus operandi was to stand recklessly in front of cars. In fact he was a highly trained combat and Ice veteran, described as “aggressive, gung-ho” by colleagues.
[ Trump has a new justification for the shooting of Renee Good: disrespectOpens in new window ]
His own phone video footage seconds before the shooting shows Good smiling at him from her driver’s seat and saying she wasn’t mad at him. Some suggest it was said sarcastically – Good’s wife, outside the vehicle, was indeed throwing light sarcasm – but Good’s smile looks more like a placatory mechanism familiar to many women faced with an angry man. She was a liberal Christian whose politics were written on her sleeve. She had just dropped her little boy to school. The dog was in the back and the glove compartment was full of stuffed toys.
The Atlantic writer David Frum writes that all the videos raised the possibility that Ross fired because he felt disrespected by a person who, in Ross’s opinion, owed him deference. Letting protesters drive off unscathed without punishing them for their disrespect would be letting them “get away with it”. And that, writes Frum, would be an intolerable affront to the Maga vision of who must submit to whom.
That was the tenor of many social media comments from Ice/Trump supporters; she didn’t comply with a split-second demand to get out of the car, so what did she expect? The great Don’t Tread On Me, right-to-bear-arms, second-amendment warriors – the well-armed militias that exist supposedly to defend against tyranny – are suddenly all for comply-or-die. But only if you’re a liberal or a brown person.
The irony is crushing. A 37-year-old mother is required to remain ethereally calm and submissive in the face of an angry gang of heavily armed masked shooters, while her male killer is being pre-emptively pardoned on emotional/psychological grounds.
Angry “disrespected” men, enabled by complicit women, appear in many guises. A Talib in Afghanistan, a sadistic prison guard in Iran, a partner who batters his wife, a driver on the M4. It’s the raging lack of self-awareness that distinguishes them. The only explanation for the White House’s dissemination of Ross’s damning phone video was that it showed Good’s wife being a bit mean to the Ice boys, but mainly showed that the dead woman was gay. She wasn’t one of them. She was guilty of being a liberal, of having “pronouns in her bio” as one popular Maga broadcaster put it, of being condescending to a big, swaggering Ice man who then shot her in the face.
Really she was just a “f**king bitch” who had it coming.
Well done to all the raging “anti-woke” merchants at home and away. It’s your world now.
