A Violent Country

The chickens came home to roost. A man who built a political career around stoking violence became the target of it.

I immediately thought of the attempt to kill George Wallace in 1972. Another man who stoked violence suddenly became a victim of it. The shooters in both cases sound similar.

Wallace spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He also repented of at least some of his racist actions. Being shot might have made him reflect on himself.

I don’t expect such reflection from the grifting felon that the Republicans are preparing to nominate. I wouldn’t expect it even if he’d been more badly injured. I don’t think he has the capacity to examine himself.

The Wallace shooting provided some of the material for Martin Scorcese’s brilliant movie Taxi Driver, a movie I saw when it first came out in 1976 and am not willing to ever watch again. I left that movie in shock – I still remember how I felt – because it so perfectly encapsulated the violence in our society and the thin line between someone seen as a good guy and someone seen as evil incarnate.

(If you’ve never seen it, you should watch it, but make sure you watch it with friends you can discuss it with afterwards.)

As I recall, the guy who shot at Ronald Reagan (and did more harm to his press secretary, Jim Brady) was obsessed with that movie and with Jodie Foster, who was in it. These things all connect.

Our politics has been intertwined with violence for most of our history. I am old enough to have been shocked to my core by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The murders later in the 1960s of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy made me fully aware of how off the rails things were.

The mass shootings we are so familiar with start about that time, too, with Charles Whitman climbing to the top of the University of Texas tower in 1967 and shooting so many people.

Nowadays, school shootings and similar violent attacks in dance halls, at concerts, even in churches, are now such common news that the response is more numbness than shock.

Numbness was certainly my response to the attack on the grifter. I am sorry for the family of the person in the crowd who was killed and for the two that ended up in the hospital (whose lives may be completely upended by this).

And while I have no sympathy whatsoever for the felon who was speaking, I do have to acknowledge that it’s likely this particular shooting had very little directly to do with him. He stokes this kind of violence, and if we get some right wing extremists on a rampage in the near future, we should blame it on him, but the history we have of such attacks makes it likely that it could have been any politician in that killer’s crosshairs.

In truth, I think perhaps the murder of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth might be the only truly political assassination (or attempted assassination) we’ve had of a president. The rest of them have more in common with the school shootings.

By political, I don’t mean conspiracies. Most of the conspiracy theories around assassinations are absurd. I mean motivated by political attitudes.

I’d also suggest that Lincoln’s death did great harm politically. Kennedy’s, on the other hand, probably gave Lyndon Johnson the tools to do some great good. Of course, the right wing extremists are still trying to undo that good.

I don’t know enough about either the Garfield or McKinley assassinations to address them. I remember when Reagan got shot – I lived about three blocks from where it happened.

I doubt this particular attempt will have much impact on the election itself, though it will certainly stir up the right wing extremists and I fear more violence. There will certainly be ramped up right wing rhetoric.

But the Democrats cannot let this incident keep them from going after the danger to our country posed by this con man and grifter. As I wrote last week, I am still angry that our institutions have failed us. Had we done the necessary things to harden them, we would not be in this situation.

Unfortunately, too many people in positions of power are so invested in their idea of the status quo that they are unwilling to build a bulwark against fascism or even comprehend that the U.S. Supreme Court is no longer worthy of deference.

In a time of violence and rampant voter suppression, the political insiders keep saying “vote harder.” But we did that and they didn’t use the power we gave them to keep us safe from fascist threats. Now we just have to hope that voting harder one more time will save us.

The extreme right is a minority. We can’t give them our country. But also, we can’t keep having these fraught elections every two years. We have to stop this nonsense once and for all.

(Note: I’m traveling, so I wrote this earlier this week. Probably something else will have happened by the time you read it. But I think my take on violence will at least still be relevant.)

[Updated to add this link to Anand Giridharadas’s excellent interview with Anat Shenker-Osorio on how the Democrats should have talked about this shooting. The messaging needs to change.]