He Served Those Who Served: Portrait of a Man Named Pretti

A week before the government murdered Alex Pretti, they dogpiled him in their usual fashion, and broke one of his ribs. The news says he was “protesting” the detention of “other individuals.” That's a fine thing to do. But considering they call anyone in the vicinity of an ICE raid a protester these days, it seems more likely he was doing what we now know he often did: observing, warning, deescalating, and documenting.

That’s what he was doing when the government came to steal away yet more of his neighbors a week later. They pushed a woman down in front of him—she was also observing, warning, deescalating, and documenting—and he put himself between the government agent behind him and her on the ground and asked, “are you okay?” Pepper spray might’ve hovered around his face with the low morning sun of a Minnesota winter shining through it. His chest almost certainly still ached with pain of the existing wound.

Wounds were a thing he understood well. As an ICU nurse, he saw many, studied many. His business was working on wounds. The new wounds that find us all in daily life, the old wounds of hard use, the scars of combat; these were his purview. When our country grew tired of the broken people it called heroes, they went to Alex Pretti at the VA. He found them on their worst day and asked them, “are you okay?” They couldn’t always answer, it being an ICU. He escorted many dead heroes to whatever reward awaited them, reading their final salute in a fashion familiar to many this country has called heroes.

So when they dogpiled him a second time, a knot of worms stuffed into the skinsuits of men, when they pistol-whipped him and locked his arms behind his back, when they disarmed him of his rights, and when they shot him in the back again and again and again, he could’ve named every wound they gave him.

Our nation never called him a hero. He didn’t serve himself, he served those who served. But I think that you can learn a lot about someone through a study of their enemies:

• First, a preening octogenarian dilettante in clownface with little more than the skill to keep talking, just keep talking, when shame would’ve already killed better men. It turns out that in this nation of broken heroes you can rise quite high with so little, provided you have a sufficient amount of money to start.
• Then, the incarnation of daddy issues as a concept, soft at the jowls and so ashamed of where he’s from that he’s also ashamed of where he pretends to be from. Thank God for Yale, I suppose. He’s on his fourth name and fifteenth personality with no doubt many more to come in his lifelong pursuit of a father who won’t find him tedious and disappointing. The nation did call him a hero once, though. In a not-too-distant but different life, Alex Pretti might’ve treated some of his wounds.
• Next, a worm who never should have been born and whose every day spent breathing is an insult to the universal commonwealth of all humanity. His sallow pate reflects stagelights while he recites the constructed language of his careful worldbuilding; magic words he believes will unlock the hell he’d prefer to live in. If someone disputes his magic words, he begins screaming so he won’t cry.
• Then, the essence of venal grasping, adorned with hair extensions, her own clownface lavished on to cover the scars of her adolescent acne, the warp and weft of the many tensions scalpeled under her skin, and the bottomless pit where her desire for license and exception hides. If she ever met the fate she wished upon disappointing puppies, no one would mourn her except bagmen.
• Next, a creature so ate up with the rot of his own byproducts he looks like he was drawn as-is by Eli Valley. Even the bagmen who no doubt clamor to shove sacks of Cava takeout into his hands would likely be happy to see him gone. Bribery is best kept hidden, but someone so noseblind to his own stink can’t imagine how easy it is to follow his trail when justice finally puts its nose to the ground.
• Then of course, a little-known minion gifted with a moment in the sun and unable to stop himself wilting. At least he enjoyed the cosplay of power and forced perspective of photography. May he have the retirement he deserves.
• And finally, a legion of the talentless. A fleet of overfinanced truck payments, used nicotine pouches, and Instagram following lists that would spike the national divorce rate and spawn a thousand FBI investigations, if there were an FBI capable of investigating and if any of them had wives left to leave them.

While it was a troop of the last kind who actually broke Alex Pretti’s body and ended his life, every link in this chain of corruption and incompetence laid a pound or more on his back and pulled some portion of the trigger weight. His body was still prone on the ground when the hair extensions called him a terrorist. As the first of many videos of the shooting began its rapid tour across every screen on earth, creatures up and down the ladder began generating mutually exclusive, counterfactual fantasies of the event everyone was watching, as we were watching it. When it became clear there was no room for even the most motivated of reinterpretations, no moment of ambiguity or angle where those who sympathize with inhumanity could project a justification, the apparatchiks of the Pervert Regime simply reiterated their fantasies. They doubled down. Tripled down. Conjured larger confabulations. The lies became nothing more than demands to comply: “Lie. Lie with me. Lie. Real patriots lie, real Americans lie.”

When pushed back against a cold wall by an unbelieving public threatening to fully awaken from this awful stupor, they demanded that their loyalists abandon their most sacred dogmas. Alex, after all, had a gun. He never brandished it, never even gestured in its direction, and was licensed by the Constitution of the United States and the State of Minnesota to carry it in precisely the manner he did. To reiterate: there is no ambiguity. Every possible angle is covered in at least one video. This was an execution. And lacking any grainy frame or shadow to hide a lie, the response of the Republican president was to attack the right to bear arms itself.

These are not men. At least, not in the valorous sense that they covet so much for themselves. They are not strong. They’re certainly not tough. Nothing animates them but the twin desires to hurt those who are better than them and to pose for an audience who loudly applauds them for doing both. If weak men create hard times, I fear the hardest of times may be inbound.

These are rapists. A party of perverts who swagger and posture like John Wayne behind podcast mics and hide behind bottomless portfolios of assets that mean nothing to them but the power to buy off human dignity. They’ll look square into the camera with eyes glassed with cocaine and ketamine, giggle and hoot while watching their stupider cousins tear gas an elementary school, and congratulate themselves on their masculine virtue.

But get them out from behind the mic, or even just ask them a question from the other side, and they’ll abandon every principle to play the victim. Harsh words are free speech coming from their mouths, but deadly weapons when wielded by anyone against them. They would make it illegal to dislike them, had they any means to do so. Whatever value lies in being a man, it remains very far from them—and likely anyone they even happen to like, just to be safe.

It’s been five days since Alex Pretti died. I wish he wouldn’t have. I wish I never knew his name, his face, or the heavy burden of his common decency. It’s better to not know heroes exist than to find out they did only after they’re gone. Here you are, here I am, wondering if we have anymore like that.

The world is a gift we build for each other, friends. Glory to the martyrs who defend the republic.

Featured image is VA of Minneapolis