Murder As Spectacle

We are so desensitized to gun violence that most of this year’s school shootings (forty-seven, so far) barely register. Until one happens in our neighborhood.

Thus, the news of yesterday’s public assassination arrives on our phones. It shocks us, as it was designed to. This murder is an efficient and ruthless spectacle devised for our visual consumption. Here we see a wide shot of the crowd, dense and dotted with bobbing red hats. Here are vivid close-ups of the soon-to-be victim beneath the canopy, with his pale, well-lit face smiling beneath a mop of fresh-cut black hair. He speaks into the mic. It doesn’t matter if you have the sound on. You can clearly read the wide-kerned text across his clean white shirt: F r e e d o m.

Somebody (unseen) asks: Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?

Our protagonist delays and deflects with a snark against Black people. Playing to the crowd. A sudden shot rings out, and he recoils, blood leaping from his neck. You recognize these tropes from a lifetime of political commercials and political thrillers.

Cut to black.

Regardless of who committed this crime, the jump scare moment was cinematic in its irony, but also trite, like a screenplay by a college freshman (male) or AI.

But maybe you weren’t watching. Maybe you were gaming. Gaming is the third realm of visual culture. This death feeds the gamer’s hunger in the operatic 3-D style of a video game. Or maybe you were on your second screen, where the same scene arrives in three thousand tiny cameras. Welcome to the multiverse, so artless and agonizingly personal. Three thousand blurry captures of a celebrity who sucks daily at the minds of every follower and hater in the crowd. Everyone’s on-camera and everyone’s carrying a camera. How many are carrying a gun?

Polite news media pauses the video a millisecond before the bullet hits. Is it real? It isn’t real. It’s real. Within minutes, countless homemade reels arrive on social media. And—the warnings flare—these clips are being watched and shared by kids. The sweet-faced next-gen manosphere-in-training.

After some thought, but not too much, I found a few on TikTok. I need to see it with my own eyes, what the children are seeing. And I feel it, too. The boil of adrenaline, the listlessness that follows. I want more—I kill the app and put my phone face down.

The summer my daughter Madeline was thirteen, we drove to Kohl’s to buy the required white performance clothes for her chamber music camp concerts. It was a blazing hot August afternoon. As we walked through the parking lot towards the store, we came upon three standing men: two police officers and a third man in street clothes. They were all gazing down at the ground. They seemed relaxed. We looked down, too. There, between two cars, lay a man. He was a black man, middle-aged, dark-skinned, in a white Oxford shirt and black dress pants. I think I remember a pair of glasses askew. A scarlet trail of blood, wide as a necktie, flowed from a hole in his chest to the asphalt. His dark skin, his brilliant blood, the white, white shirt, the cloudless sky. My daughter and I continued shakily to the store. Our other choice was to turn around and go home, but somehow that seemed impossible and wrong.

I don’t remember what I said to Madeline, or what we bought. White t-shirts, a white skirt. For the concerts. In a far-off fairytale land where children play Mozart string quartets and nobody gets shot. In the checkout line, an older white woman rang up our purchases. She seemed angry. Gingerly, I handed her my Kohl’s card. Another employee, a teenager, came up and whispered into her ear. The woman shook her head.

“What is it?” I asked.

Without looking up, she muttered, “Some people don’t deserve to live.”

We never heard sirens. When we left the store, those men were gone. There was no mention in the evening news. We avoided walking past the blood. For days, I quietly scoured the news for a clue, and there was nothing. Then, I found it in print, a two-inch article buried deep in the Metro section of the city paper. Would-be assailant shot by off-duty police officer in Andorra Kohl’s parking lot. What carjacker or strong-arm robber dresses like he’s going to a job interview?

A pointless question, I know. I don’t get to know the story. There was never an omniscient narrator and never will be.

Anyone half-awake can see who benefits from the spectacular cinematic murder of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Unlike the other 10,313 (and counting) violent gun deaths this year, Charlie Kirk’s death yanks attention from the Epstein files. We all look away from the billionaires’ grift, the collapsing economy, our utter abandonment of climate work, the destruction of our universities and healthcare systems, the implosion of our government institutions. That, and all the other crap swirling inside this shitty snow globe.

The murderer was a tactical sharpshooter. It was a professional job, well done. Maybe there was makeup and craft service, and sleek, black, darkened-windowed cars. For a comic intermezzo, the FBI men bumble about in Keystone Cop apparel (quite a contrast to the still-functioning Utah State Police). Trump, Bannon, Loomer, and the rest of the rogue’s gallery yammer about radical left lunatics, whatever that means. As if the discombobulated Dems and the ragtag band of hippie elders (the only ones who show up to demonstrations and reliably write their senators) could pull this off, even if they wanted to. Which they do not.

One imagines the King’s court and palace intrigue. Or looks East to Putin, who, in a footnote, had invaded Poland’s airspace just thirteen hours earlier. There are so many possibilities, so many players on the board. But that isn’t the point.

Charlie Kirk’s followers are young, white, and mostly men. They are bursting with self-pity, arrogance, and testosterone. They have been steeped since childhood in the pornography of violence.

Whoever killed Charlie Kirk, you can bet your sweet and fragile life it was a man. It is always a man. Like the men who flew the planes into the Twin Towers twenty-four years ago today. Like those four men in Kohl’s parking lot. (Two black, two white, three living, one dead. All men.) Like the billionaires and diplomats who bought teenage girls from Jeffrey Epstein.

But not all men, you protest, and I agree. It’s true. I am personally acquainted with, related to, love, and have voted for many a good man.

But I’ve been twice a fool, and now I accept the hard truth that I will never see a woman president. Not in this life, and maybe not my daughter’s, or her daughter’s.

People still name their sons “Jeffrey.” And no one will ever name their daughter “Karen.”

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