Simon Says Watch Your Mouth

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The preliminary hearing in the case of Tyler Robinson for his assassination of Charlie Kirk took place a couple weeks ago. Apparently it accumulated a large crowd of trial watchers. Many of them had been brainwashed into believing the hearing was an appropriate occasion to scapegoat trans people as inherent murderers maddened into violence by their hormone treatments. Of course there’s also the Jews, Mossad, and antifa writ large to vie for dominance in the marketplace of conspiracies.

Some politicians have said there are two Americas. That’s surely wrong. Given the kaleidoscopic visual impairments of the conspiracy lensed US public, there are many more than two. But there are, at least on simplest analysis, two kinds of terrorism: terrorism of illegitimate grievance and terrorism of earned despair.

There’s the bigoted, paranoid world of made-up grievances. Made up by the dominant population whose real gripe is that they might lose the unearned privileges an unequal system has deluded them to believe are their rightful property. And contrarily there’s the legit despair of the oppressed, stigmatized, and marginalized.

Speaking of courtroom action, assassin Vance Boelter – or as Wikipedia calls him, American murderer Vance Luther Boelter – just received two consecutive life sentences. Interesting way to guarantee living twice as long. It’s a medical miracle.

Remember June of last year in Minnesota when that rightwing psychopath with a hit list of 45 Democratic elected officials and about two dozen abortion providers and activists went on a shooting rampage? Vance Boelter critically wounded Senator John Hoffman and his wife and killed Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband. If his hit list was in alphabetical order, I guess he decided to start with the H’s.

At that time, David Simon, award winning creator of the HBO shows, The Wire and Treme, revealed he had been sitting on a grievance about “numbnuts on the left” who had been glazing Luigi, and chose the moment of Boelter’s commission of murder to air his complaint. I didn’t know about his grievance. Why would I? But on the heels of Boelter’s attacks, that’s when he decided to unload on the numb-nutted left for applauding Luigi?

It seemed an odd event to bring Luigi into. Simon could have brought up the stochastic violence of the demagogic right, whose violent power increases daily, whose federally unleashed minions disappear people off the street or kill them before our very eyes, but he decided to punch at the left, as if there were some equivalence in the left and right’s blameworthiness for, let alone a causal link to, what the media have come to call “political violence.”

But that’s not why it irked me. It pissed me off for two reasons:

1. Luigi ventilating a killer CEO’s skull was certainly better than, say, Luigi opening fire on a Sunday school class full of children being taught white supremacy and the anti-trans teachings of Jesus. But no one gives Luigi credit for such restraint.

Reason 2. Lumping in with “the numb-nutted left” everyone who appreciated Luigi’s service to the community is a category error. The lumpenproletariat were very into it. I heard cruel jokes about an arrogant, coldhearted, over-privileged healthcare CEO’s death evoke jovial laughter quite often when I found myself on public transportation with teeming masses of the underclass, who Frantz Fanon called the most radical force in colonized society, who Black Panthers called the left wing of the revolution.

The put-upon underclass understand what David Simon doesn’t. And apparently so do the numbnutted left. And be advised that “numbnuts on the left” is a paraphrase. I can’t look up what Simon said verbatim because he blocked me after I mocked him for having held onto such a grudge till such an inappropriate moment and called him a class enemy. I guess that proved I was a leftwing numbnut, and fair enough, fair enough.

David Simon is a writer I admire as well as a moral voice I respect, and I understand why he would react negatively to anyone taking Luigi’s act of murder as somehow a net positive for social change (although as the joke goes about a busload of lawyers at the bottom of a lake, it’s a good start). But he does have a blind spot: he isn’t able to parse the difference between the despair of the oppressed and the grievance of the privileged.

And, incidentally, Mr. Simon, if you doubt nuts on the left, whether numb or tender, fall under the category of “the oppressed,” I’d ask you to read NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM 7 aka NSPM-7. But I guess as long as you’re safe it’s fine, right? To lock up for multiple decades protesters at ICE detention centers or those labeled thought-crime members of an imaginary syndicate called antifa? I’m sure there’ll soon be a leftwing equivalent to that tyranny for you to disparage by comparison. (Yeah, right.) Or you could just blame Luigi for provoking Trump’s Nazi-esque draconian wrath.

Do I claim Luigi’s crime was an act of despair? It comes across more as an act of grievance. But it seems we’re ignoring the corporate terrorism, the banality of corporate terrorism, the terrorism of not challenging the immorality and violence of one’s legal, socially acceptable job positioned at the top of the socio-economic food chain. Because the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, might have surmised, somewhere deep down, that his way of operating consisted of terrorizing people and their loved ones with threats of illness, aggravated injury, neglect, and death.

What then was the purpose of such terrorism? We can say the effect was to extort worker obedience and force them to compete to prove merit through productivity. To merit doctor-prescribed medical care. Which one might think a person merits simply by virtue of being a person.

Of course, Brian probably didn’t think of his job that way. It’s likely he considered his job to provide the greatest dividends possible for shareholders of his company and somehow thereby improve the world. But that’s how the banality of corporate terrorism works.

The corporate terrorist doesn’t skulk and scheme in cabals in dark cave tunnels under the Central Asian mountains. Corporate and state terrorists live their lives blithely thinking themselves productive, virtuous, model citizens. They give each other honors, and those they don’t give honors give themselves honors. They consider themselves more meritorious than less well-paid members of society. And, barring some sexual criminality only tenuously, if at all, connected to their offices, perhaps they’re correct.

In which case we begin to detect and map the moral limits of meritocracy. Because a system of justice and economy under which a select few merit the privilege of terrorizing a great many – terrorize them by doing activities considered acceptable and workaday even by many they terrorize – wherein a select few merit the privilege to commit banal evil (ironic, isn’t it, Israeli state apparatus and settlers?) – suggests meritocracy itself is anti-democratic. It’s undoubtedly anti-egalitarian.

And if the point of democracy isn’t to give those – regardless of apparent and highly reductive merit – equal rights to shape their own destinies and those of their communities, is democracy even a thing?

It must be a thing, because the most wealthy and powerful voices in the most overvalued sector of the economy speak openly and vehemently against it. They hate democracy, especially its pretentions to equalizing power. Who made them the democracy police? It sure wasn’t democracy, but rather its hideous reflection: socio-economic quasi-Darwinist meritocracy.

The human world is in bad shape,

The human world is in bad shape,

The human world is in bad shape,

Which nobody can deny

Nobody can deny it, and unlike in the silly Vonnegut parable, “Harrison Bergeron,” the world is not suffering from too much equality. It might be suffering from too much meritocracy. But do you think you’d convince the most meritorious of us that we’re suffering from too much meritocracy? You’d never convince those who’ve won the merit to decide on the merits of that notion. It’s like that Upton Sinclair quote about trying to change someone’s mind when their paycheck depends on them remaining intellectually intransigent.

Seems we’re on a treadmill increasing in speed. Or – rather than in a widening gyre whose center cannot hold (as the manospheric libertarians might have it) – in an ever-tightening spiral speeding us inward to its crushing vortex. Some cosmologists posit our universe exists inside a black hole. True or not, it’s an apt analogy for our moral universe.

See y’all at the center of the world, I guess.