Fear and Fury

When I wrote a few months ago about Heather Thompson's Atlantic article on the Bernie Goetz subway shooting, I didn't realize she had a book coming out on the subject. 

That book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. If you liked her Atlantic article, the book gives a fuller picture of the whole case, and particularly of the cultural and media landscape that surrounded it.

As with the story of the so-called Central Park Five (the Exonerated Five), Thompson's book makes it clear just how much the four young men shot by Goetz in December 1984 were not the perpetrators in this case. 

One of the four, Darrell Cabey, was sitting at a distance from Goetz, who shot at him once, missed, and then moved to stand over him: 

The man stopped just in front of Darrell, looming over him as Darrell said plaintively, "I didn't do nothing!" But it was as if this man couldn't hear him. In a cold, calm tone, the man raised his gun again and said, "You don't look too bad, here's another," before shooting Darrell point-blank (p. 80).

That shooting of Darrell Cabey is a key part of Goetz's legal case, because as a reader can see, there is no self-defense justification for what he did.

There were two facts about Cabey and Goetz that I learned from the earlier pages of the book.

One is the brief story of Cabey's father, Ronald. He was a truck driver who owned his own truck and made enough income to support a family of six, with a mom who stayed home to care for the kids. They lived in Far Rockaway, Queens. 

When Darrell was 7, Ronald was eating supper in a diner while he was on the road. He saw a thief stealing his truck. Ronald jumped on the running board and tried to eject the thief, but was thrown out the door as another car was passing in the driveway. There was a crash and he was killed. Darrell's mom Shirley was 26, with five kids to support somehow. She moved the family to public housing in the Bronx.

What does something like that do to a kid (and his siblings, and his mom)? They all needed therapy they never got.

Bernie Goetz, born in 1947, grew up first in Queens as well, but then in a rural part of Duchess County, New York, along the Hudson River north of the city. His parents were both German immigrants; his father built a successful business, and by all accounts was a domineering jerk at home. 

In 1960, Goetz senior was charged with molesting two 15-year-old boys. It sounds like there was a lot of evidence against him. Goetz senior "required that his children attend every day of his May 1960 trial as a show of support, and this each child was inundated with 'the unpleasant details of the accusations.'" (p. 21) Goetz senior was found guilty of eight counts. During his appeal, Bernie was sent to boarding school in Europe. His father got some of the remaining counts dismissed on technicalities and took a plea on the remaining four, finally receiving only a suspended sentence on one charge (disorderly conduct). 

What does something like that do to a kid, on top of the earlier emotional abuse? It's not an excuse in any way, but Bernie Goetz clearly needed therapy he never got. 

Neither of these family and personal tragedies is the point of Thompson's book, which is very much what its subtitle says. But on a human level, it's hard not to feel empathy, even for Goetz.

Bernie Goetz will be turning 80 next year. He's still a hero to way too many Americans, and served as a model for other killers like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. Maybe if he'd had some therapy, at least it would have been someone else who set off the flame that was waiting to be lit.