Chapter 200: Collective Immersion

My immersion into the story of the killing of Alex Pretti began on Saturday morning when my wife looked up from her phone and said, “they shot someone else in Minneapolis.”

I opened the New York Times app but saw little beyond the alert. I refreshed the page. I refreshed it again. My journalist wife and I began to scramble, searching for news, updates, anything. Who was shot? Was this person dead?

What we could not see nor appreciate at that moment with our eyes glued to our screens, was how many millions of people across the country were experiencing what we were experiencing: the emotional consequences of being pulled into a drama unfolding in real time.

So much has already been written and said in the days since Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents for what appeared to be the crime of getting in their way. There was the news, of course, with the many updates, accusations, revelations, and visual evidence for all to see of what had unfolded on that bitter cold morning when Pretti stepped between agents and a woman they had shoved to the ground.

It took a few days to begin to take the measure of things, to assess the consequences of Pretti’s killing – legally, politically, and viscerally. I have been a journalist long enough to know how hard it is to predict which stories will consume the public and which fade quickly. So why did this story catch fire, even more than the killing of Renee Good?

Perhaps, because several unanticipated things happened at once: the bitter cold and storms that swept the country kept millions indoors with fewer distractions; the fact that this was a second killing in the same city in frighteningly similar circumstances; the news broke and unfolded on a weekend morning; the unusually clear video to give the lie to government spin. Taken together they created the conditions in which so many of us were pulled in and along by the singular power of a story.

Few terms are more overused and less understood than narrative. Narrative, like irony, is a term we may struggle to define but nonetheless feel we get. A story begins. Something stirs within us that makes us want to know more. The story can feel as if it takes on a life of its own. In the hands of a deft storyteller, stories can be engineered for maximum effect – writers of fiction and narrative nonfiction appreciate what they must do to keep readers with them.

Then there are stories that need no guiding hand. These are the rarest stories of all. They unfold in ways that would otherwise necessitate the hand of a writer skilled at pacing, character, and the twists that keep readers glued to the page.

The killing of Alex Pretti is such a story but in a way that transcends the manner in which it unfolded. As minutes ticked by that morning we learned: it was a man who had been shot; he was dead; his name; the specious and patently false accusation that he had come to “massacre” federal agents; the livid responses from the governor and mayor; the videos.

As all this was playing out we were, at the risk of sounding too clinical by half, undergoing a shared neurological experience. A few months ago I wrote a chapter about the changes the brain undergoes when it is presented with a story that has the power to transport. I was especially struck by the findings of a 2015 study, “Reading Fiction and Reading Minds: The Role of Simulation in the Default Network“ which reported that what the authors termed literary fiction made people more aware of others, more empathic, more connected to the world around them.

The researchers studied brain activity and concluded that it is at those moments when we are otherwise disengaged - when we have no pressing tasks before us, the so-called “default mode network” – that we are most open to the power of a story that takes us someplace else. Our neural pathways are not in shutdown. Quite the opposite; they are buzzing.

It took little time for me on Saturday morning to shift from my IPad to the television. That is where I would spend the next five hours. It felt as if something new was revealed with each passing minute. And because the footage from the streets of Minneapolis was live I was in a state of suspended anticipation: what will happen next?

My wife had to run out and I was left alone to watch and wait and when I grew impatient for more I toggled between stations. Absent someone to turn to and say, “did you see that?” I was at one with the story. I could not turn away. I did not want to turn away. Only later did I wonder how many others were experiencing what I was experiencing and how that felt.

In the late 1980s, my wife and I covered the popular uprising against the military dictatorship that for decades had ruled South Korea. Resistance to the regime had been going on for decades, unfolding each spring with campus protests met with tear gas fired by riot police. A dance, we correspondents had come to conclude, too choreographed to bring about change.

Then in the winter of 1987, a 21-year-old student, Park Jong Chul, had his windpipe broken over the side of a bathtub during what was termed an interrogation but which was, in fact, torture. There was no video footage nor photographs. Just the story of what had happened.

The story exploded. It was much like the story of the Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi whose self-immolation after being hounded by the police helped ignite the Arab Spring, and the protests in Iran after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was killed in detention for not wearing her hijab properly. Those rare stories find their way first to the brain and then to many hearts.

The best stories begin with questions and the longer it takes for satisfactory answers to emerge, the longer the story has to gain momentum. More people say to one another, “did you hear?” The question that sets the story in motion leads to more questions.

Questions are the oxygen that keeps stories alive. And when answers are not forthcoming the stories live on. This was a lesson learned by child welfare agencies across the country that for decades would respond to news of horrific abuse of children by insisting they could say nothing because they needed to protect the confidentiality of those children. This only convinced reporters and politicians that those agencies were covering up their failures.

More questions followed. The stories did not go away. Then, those same agencies discovered that perhaps it was prudent to offer answers, candid and full answers. And when they did the stories, in effect, died out because the essential questions had been answered.

The story of the killing of Alex Pretti has now taken on the quality of a long novel whose resolution is far from apparent. I recognize that to compare this tragically needless and horrific death to literature feels cheap.

But I do so because I feel that, in one measure, it helps explain what began happening to so many of us across a vast and varied and otherwise deeply divided country on a cold Saturday morning when we were prompted to begin asking: what happened?

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