struggling to breathe because his face was caught
in the sort of stutter-sputter that babies use to indi-
cate a wail is coming. Rittenhouse tried to keep
going, gesticulating with his arms but speaking
in a vomitous wretch. After a bit more of that, the
judge showed mercy and called a recess.
Rittenhouse’s lawyers told the media they
were happy with the decision to put him on
the stand. They tried their case out on a pair of
mock juries, once with Rittenhouse’s testimony,
once without. ‘‘It was substantially better with
him testifying,’’ one of his lawyers said. ‘‘I mean,
to a marked degree.’’
‘‘Crocodile tears’’ are a phony display meant
to lure sympathy. The blubbering Rittenhouse
did in the courtroom certainly won the under-
standing of a crucial bloc: He was acquitted of
all charges. His tears were apt for a trial that
hinged on whether Rittenhouse had the right to
defend himself in the manner that he chose. The
crying could be construed as more self-defense.
We know that certain crying is meant to
exonerate racial insult or insensitivity by redi-
recting attention away from the off ense under
consideration, toward the crier’s feelings. White
tears, they’re called. Look at how what I did to you
is making me feel. But white tears, manipulative
as they can be, still arouse my curiosity: Where
do they come from? In his book, ‘‘Crying: The
Mystery of Tears,’’ a biochemist named Dr. Wil-
liam Frey reminds us that the ability to shed
tears is what separates us from animals. So let
me state the obvious: A crocodile sheds none.
Sorrow appeared to reside in the weeping I
saw Kim Potter do in a Minneapolis courtroom a
month later at her manslaughter trial. She killed
Daunte Wright when she mistook her gun fora Taser. Potter cried at the scene that day in
April; she also wept on the witness stand. Were
these tears of contrition or a performance for an
audience of 12? Could they, somehow, be both: a
public recognition of her unconscious certitude
that the young Black man she shot was fi tter for
a bullet than a stun? Would the tears of Derek
Chauvin, at his trial in the spring for the murder
of George Floyd, have only mocked the horror
of his crime? (He declined to testify; there was
no self-defense.) To the extent that Potter was
crying for sympathy, her tears remained beside
the legal point. The jury found her guilty.
It can be disquieting, the competition
between empathy and good moral sense. Feeling
for Potter scarcely exonerates her. It just aligns
my humanity with the full expression of hers. I
watched her trial as I do most of these court-
room shooting tragedies, with the defendants
on one side of the scale and the weeping done
by the victims’ families on the other. Wright’s
mother appeared at a news conference such a
wreck that she could barely stand. The scales just
don’t balance themselves, morally. They can’t.
But culpable grief can’t easily be pooh-poohed
as counterfeit. Potter knows the life she took
altered lives. I received her tears as a byproduct
of remorse. One of those lives is hers.
Public tears often do invite dismissal as perfor-
mance. Something moves these people. Regret,
shame, stress, embarrassment. Maybe the sor-
row has arrived too late. No crying could return
Daunte Wright to his people. But those tears are
also what some of us need to restore a kind of
personhood to the seemingly inhuman and osten-
sibly guilty. They’re what we need to feel human
ourselves. Crying can seem more persuasive than
words: The body trumps language. No matter why
they’re shed, tears are a vulnerable outpouring.
Crying feels to me like a performance of humanity42 KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2022 http://www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined
box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box.
A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7.KENKEN
Crying
(Continued from Page 25)SPELLING BEEAutocratic (3 points). Also: Acacia, aortic, arctic,atria, attic, cacti, circa, circuit, cirri, citric, coati, critic,curio, oratorio, ratio, riata, ricotta, tacit, tactic, tiara,toric, trait, traitor, trattoria. If you found other legitimatedictionary words in the beehive, feel free to includethem in your score.SCI-FI SHOWDOWN
Answers to puzzles of 2.6.22
Answers to puzzle on Page 44
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