Last November I printed a blog post entitled “The Relevance of the Irrelevant.”* The main point of the post was that when someone introduces something into an argument or discussion that is off-topic, they are inadvertently revealing what is truly in their mind.
That latest example of this comes to us from the state of Mississippi. The mayor of a town called Petal, Hal Marx, commenting on the death of George Floyd, contended that he “didn’t see anything unreasonable” about it. Apparently, pressing one’s knee on a man’s neck for almost nine minutes while one’s victim cries out that he can’t breathe is quite reasonable down south. Marx added that “if you can say you can’t breathe, you’re breathing.”**
What we have here is an example of pedantry used as an attempt to segue into an irrelevant tangent. Yes, Mayor Marx is pedantically correct in that if you can speak, you’re alive and breathing. Except, of course, every English speaker understands the words “I can’t breathe” are not to be taken literally. They are a signal that something dangerous is happening.
Why did the mayor go off on a tangent? The irrelevance tells us the truth about his mindset as proven by his subsequent words: “Most likely that man died of overdose or heart attack.” “That man,” George Floyd, a Black American, had to be a contributor to his own demise. He couldn’t just be a victim of (white) police brutality; he had to be a criminal of some sort—at the very least a druggie.
If Hal Marx had not offered up the irrelevant pedantry, would we know him as a racist?
I wonder what Marx would say to Mr. Shakespeare, whose Hamlet says (in Act V, Scene 2) after he has been pricked by a poisoned rapier: “I am dead, Horatio.”
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