Review: Fear and Fury

Fear and Fury:
The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage
by Heather Ann Thompson (Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor)

There is a universe where this gets a bland review, the book being a summary of the crimes and trials of the 1984 NYC subway shooter Bernhard Goetz, that puts his story into the context of a media ecosystem that led to the racist Nationalism of the moment in the United States. It is good, though overlong.

That this review is not is predicated on a red flag that showed up early in the book, where the author describes someone (Goetz’ father) getting off on a technicality. What this consists of is not explained, and my research has not turend up the answer.

This is relevant for the book. To quote Justice William Brennan:

You in the media ought to be ashamed of yourselves to call the provisions and the guarantees of the Bill of Rights ‘Technicalities’. They’re not. We are what we are because of those guarantees.

Berine Goetz is a monster. No hedging. The book describes his evil comprehensively.¹ It is moral to consider Goetz a monster, motivated by racial animus, and the sort of response that he provoked in the white community at large equally racist and monstrous.

But in a book holding itself out as being about a failure in the justice system, the authorial choices here frustrate the message.

I hesitate to catalog my gripes because I have a deep sense of empathy with where the author is going here and what she is trying to do. You could write a book that tells the story from the perspective of the righteous outrage at it. But in this book feeling more like an audition for the next season of American Crime Story, the criteria for what constitutes a well-argued book on the topic has a different weight. To paraphrase Ken White, there is an odd function that happens when people look at the carceral state and end up feeling that the problem is that it is not more unjust, and if only the right people got hurt things would be okay, rather than it being a system that structural inequities elsewhere poison the process.

…which is a big problem for the book, because it wants to make an argument concerning structural inequities, so there is a whole separate argument plastered over the more narrative history. The text treats the Goetz assault as the cornerstone of a sociological argument about the birth of the contemporary Nationalist movement in the United States. In short, white people, having benefited the most by government social programs, ‘pulled up the ladder’ in the eighties, cutting those same programs or otherwise not expanding them. Thus, criminality is better understood as a structural, rather than behavioral, but things like the story of Goetz become a way for white Americans to justify denying others the advantages that they themselves received: criminality not poverty is the problem.

The irony in this is that the focus on Goetz to make this argument concedes too much to its detractors. The author’s interpretation is one I share, or close enough for government work. But instead of constructing a sociological argument to establish it, the book treats Goetz as a sort of proof in and of itself. I get why this sort of thing happens, first and foremost because the Goetz story is one we keep seeing of someone doing something bad and instead of appropriate condemnation, various grifters come into the scene and turn the figure into a profit center, but also because with Goetz, some of the more notable figures are still around; still grifting.

But to make the argument, you have to make the argument. The closest we come here is more narrative description of the media enterprise creates and perpetuates spectacle like this, and misinformation around these events. The book tacitly accepts the Hillbilly Elegy myth, and while amply describing racist moments, overt and covert, this bigger goal to explain contemporary Nationalism is unfinished. It is frustrating to live in a world where people are urging media to take moral stands, the media not doing so because they have literally been bought, but to have a book make one, yet in a manner that subjects it to criticism.

My thanks to the author, Heather Ann Thompson, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor, for making the ARC available to me.

I wish that the trope about how white men get to be crazy while Black men must be criminals was not a trope. Goetz reads as particularly mentally ill to me, in a way that makes himself a danger to himself and others. The paradox of Goetz perhaps is that the same sort of forces that this book suggests created him – Regan’s destruction of social services – might have provided him with the actual help he needed. As opposed to an illegal firearm. ↩︎

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