CNN reporter Omar Jimenez's arrest on live TV Friday morning offered a view of American disintegration

The Washington Post

"At 5:13 a.m. Friday in Minneapolis, under a blue-gray dawn sky choked with smoke, the power and frailty of the camera’s democratic potential were dramatized in front of the world when police arrested CNN reporter Omar Jimenez, his producer Bill Kirkos and photojournalist Leonel Mendez," says Philip Kennicott. "The confrontation had started a few minutes earlier, but it was at 5:13 when one member of the team who was being taken into custody asked if he could put the camera down. Suddenly the all-seeing eye was on the ground, recording legs, shoes and concrete. Now the world was askew, utility wires cut across the frame at a sharp and unnerving angle, and every eye on the planet could see the scene unfold from the same position that George Floyd, the African American man pinned under the knee of a white Minnesota police officer on Monday, witnessed in the last moments of his 46-year life. The television camera generally reflects the traditional orientation of screens, capturing the world in the horizontal mode known as 'landscape' format. At 5:13, it was accidentally rotated 90 degrees, converting landscape to portrait mode, giving us a picture of ourselves. When George Orwell distilled his chilling vision of totalitarianism into a single image, he imagined this: 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.' The last word is critical — forever. It implies a choice, a small measure of hope. As long as the picture of a boot on a face is intolerable, there is hope for political self-determination, a meaningful public sphere and democracy. When it becomes tolerable, when it is normalized and visions like the one America witnessed Friday morning are commonplace, then the authoritarian longings latent in every democracy become totalitarian reality, and there is no escape from what Orwell called the 'intoxication' of brute power."