Gaga at Breezy Point

9/11 Memorial --Breezy Point 

This summer, amid the national uproar over the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a long list of others, I spent a Saturday visiting a friend in the beach resort of Breezy Point, Queens. Wrapped around the western tip of the Rockaway peninsula, this is an enclave of middle-class homes on sandy pedestrian paths, festooned with American flags and sprinkled with Trump signs -- a summer haven for New York City police and firefighters, heavily Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, 100 percent white.  It was organized as a co-op in the 1960s, with rules that keep it a closed society, a gated community.  

I took a walk by the bay, watching children play in the sand and trading wary nods and glances with the adults.  It was a perfect beach day, a time to relax, but the atmosphere felt subdued and tense.  Some residents had recently been involved in a confrontation with protesting Black surfers in nearby Rockaway Beach.  Others had faced off with demonstrators in the streets. As a stranger with a beard, I was regarded with caution. The last time I visited, in 2017, one guy told me I looked like his dog.  This time there was no conversation.   

It reminded me of South Africa in 1990, in the last days of apartheid, just before Nelson Mandela was released from prison. All those white faces grimly trying to milk their white privilege to the last drop, knowing that the outside world was turning away from them.    

These feelings came back at me this week, watching Lady Gaga's new video, "911." 

Stefani Germanotta (her real name) could fit right into Breezy Point. An Italian-American beauty from the top Catholic school in New York, she could be a young matron, lounging on the beach watching her kids. Instead, as this video begins we find her alone and unconscious in the white sands of New Mexico, next to a wrecked bicycle. She wakes up to  to a mess of broken pomegranates in the sand.

A lone horseman appears on a desert ridge, and guides her to an adobe mission -- one of the first outposts of Christianity in America.  There she is ministered to by a mysterious young man and woman, persons of color.  While the setting and the characters look American, the costumes and symbols are from Armenian culture -- suggesting the stories of an ancient survivor people.  

Gaga is in bad shape. She survives by "poppin' 9-1-1," pills that transport her to a paradise where no one can hear her cry.  But the pills have stopped working.  Desperate, she pleads for emergency aid -- calls 911, screams when she can't get through.   

With an electric shock to the heart she suddenly wakes up at a crash scene in a city street, jolted back to life by a machine in the hands of those two young persons of color – now EMTs, talking her down.  "Stay calm, look at me, look at me.. you're gonna be fine."  Overhead is an LED billboard that reads "Life is good," across from a movie marquee for an Armenian Film Festival.  Gaga's last line: "I don't want to die." 

                                                        ____________________

All this could be just the story of a high-strung celebrity with a drug problem. At the same time, in today's feverish atmosphere it could be seen as the near-death experience of white America, where clinging to the status quo has become a heart-stopping exercise in denial.  The antidotes for white guilt and fear -- segregation, racist ideology, brute force, and emotional anesthesia -- have stopped working.  White America cannot save itself, it needs a new life, a new identity in a multi-racial culture.   

James Baldwin wrote the prescription, long ago in 1962. 

"If we persist in thinking of ourselves (as a white nation) we condemn ourselves to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his….

The difference between 1962 and today is the strength of Black culture, its growing economic power and confidence.  White supremacy is finished, the results of it speak for themselves.  But white people can survive and thrive without it.   

Post-apartheid America is coming.  It is already here.  For Breezy Point -- ready or not -- it's a breath of cold, fresh air. 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips