Radioactive

On some of the many meanings of MAGA and murder right now.

So now there is news—and yet we remain in the in-between. Now we know a name, and there is evidence of a “motive,” or several conflicting “motives,” or maybe motive and anti-motive, a paradox some will declare relieves us of the need to ponder meaning at all. There are inscriptions on casings that some will read as clear confirmation of what they already knew. Others will see the words as pointing in different directions. The bullet’s path wasn’t ambiguous, but we’re still waiting, even as we observe the simple fact of time passing since the “first” news on Wednesday, each minute still weighted with too much meaning.

There’s each minute that passes, as of this writing, without an invocation of the Insurrection Act. That’s not no-news, that’s good news, the powerful force of inertia doing one kind of work, slowing our acceleration past slow civil war into something faster, something worse.

And there’s each minute passed in which this particular state of emergency becomes a new normal, in which for some uncertainty becomes so intolerable that they declare the no-news, the not-enough-news, to itself be “proof” of their darkest convictions. This is the inertia of objects in motion, which tend to remain in motion even unto collision, obliteration.

Unto. An archaic term. I’m trying to slow this down. Old language not as conservatism but as continuity, a recognition of one minute giving way to the next, and each moment built for both better and worse on those that came before. We try to remember.

I can’t understand time as a physicist would, but I do attempt to observe it as a writer, watching the stories form and re-forming right now, “real time.” As any time wasn’t. Physics-as-metaphor: moments such as these, catalytic, exert their own gravity. It's why, I think, you see so many within MAGA comparing “this” to 9/11 -- it "draws people together." But not all the people. MAGA consolidates, persuading itself that those outside its furious and, now, yes, grieving heart, the rest of us, not-MAGA, maybe aren’t even “people” at all.

I began writing these notes in response to a query from another journalist who’s paying close attention to the return to MAGA of some of its most violent actors. Proud Boys and the lesser known gangs, Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, who had his January 6 seditious conspiracy prison sentence of 18 years commuted, declaring it’s time to get the band back together again.

“I’m going to be rebuilding the Oath Keepers,” Rhodes told David Gilbert of Wired. “You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States. They’re committing insurrection, they're aiding and abetting an invasion, and they're blocking the execution of federal law.”

Gilbert observes that some cracks in MAGA are, for the moment, fading. Militias that saw Kirk as too establishment, as too pro-Israel despite his anti-Semitic belief that that Jews finance the “replacement” of white people, now mourn his death and call for vengeance. Agree to disagree about which Jews to hate and how, they seem to be saying—what matters is their common desire for a retribution rooted not in justice but in the expansion of power.

Movements such as MAGA fray and cohere, fray again, cohere again. Then something like “this” happens that creates for the believers a feeling of unity, of purpose, of whole cloth. Outside of MAGA, some who hope to calm the moment call for "both sides" to “take a step back.” But while I'm deeply in support of everybody in the whole country taking a step back right now, "both sides" does not describe MAGA geography, its sense of not just the “Gulf of America” but the known world, the world as MAGA knows it. They aren't experiencing themselves as a "side." There's only MAGA, and MAGA enemies. MAGA is what is; everything else might as well be anti-matter. Join or die.

Some MAGA enemies—some of us, everyone who is one way or another not MAGA—suggest that the killer is to the right of Kirk, perhaps a Groyper, an accelerationist. Maybe. It doesn’t seem to me a likely interpretation of what little we already know, but I don't think it would matter to MAGA, because on this map there is only MAGA and not-MAGA. Histories of fascisms in many countries have shown us its ability to push rightist movements it finds inconvenient, the also-rans of authoritarianism, into the great disposable dustbin it labels “communism.”

MAGA; not-MAGA.

The incendiary hazard posed by this binary is self-evident, and can be heard nonstop across the MAGA media spectrum. It is similar to the language of good and evil so many who had yet to even imagine “MAGA” was possible in America embraced after 9/11. Not of “evil” as a slur against political enemies, standard MAGA usage, or even of evil as an existential fact, a sort of special-occasion MAGA invective that sorts all into two categories, but of evil as an imperative fact. A fact that compels action.

There was, of course—and remains—clear action to pursue, the "normal" action attendant to rule of law: apprehend the murderer and investigate fully and accurately what made his crime possible. By which we would mean in "normal" times security lapses, red flags, gun purchases, and if relevant the pathways of radicalization pursued by this individual.

But that's not the imperative action called for by MAGA’s use of “evil.” Think back to 9/11: How do you get to national support for a war against not the men who committed the atrocity or even their patrons but a whole other nation, Iraq? What explains this cognitive dissonance? Some psychoanalyzed one individual, George W. Bush -- “it's about his dad!” -- and some reduced the swirl of war and occupation and the dead and the men and women they limping through supermarkets on prosthetic limbs to one economic factor -- “it's about oil!” Yes and yes, but yes, and, only it's not a joke.

This is what I meant when I wrote yesterday that the scale of Kirk's influence—instrumental to the near-decade now we have endured MAGA, to all the dead and displaced in its wake—will shape the fury of MAGA’s response.

Let it not shape ours. I’m not a judge, a philosopher, so I can’t really preach to you the pursuit of justice in the abstract. Just a writer—my work is perception and description, the collection and curation and contemplation of detail. That I can recommend, because I believe these are verbs from which justice grows.

Right now, as I write, I see tremendous energy already being exerted “proving” that the murderer wasn’t motivated by anti-fascism but by his own fascism, that maybe he dressed up for Halloween as the Groyper mascot, and wait, isn’t that a III Percenter sign in this picture of his father, who is a cop, and of course we know what that means.

Do we? Even as I write with broad strokes here, I want to veer away from generalizations. To think like a writer, seek the specific and its context, each detail understood as only one among within that which the critic 20th century critic Alfred Kazin called “the vast granary of fact.”

I’m writing this on the fly, in a room from which I was supposed to check out an hour ago, so permit me a mixed metaphor: Writers, or, at least the kind I try to be, work within a cloud—clouds—of meanings. That doesn’t preclude conclusions. Here are a few: Charlie Kirk was one of the most powerful people in the most powerful nation on earth. His vision of that nation was suffused with open white supremacism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. He explicitly promoted violence—his advocacy, for instance, for televised executions, mandatory viewing for children. Also: Charlie Kirk was murdered. Because even as I name this period we’re in a kind of slow civil war, that adjective, slow, matters. This is not an actual war. The rules of war don’t apply. There are no “enemy combatants,” and FAFO isn’t community or solidarity or democracy, it’s just another fucking cliche. Like all cliches, it obscures the moving parts: A murder isn’t just a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, a killer on a roof, a bullet in the air, a bloody video on your screen. A murder—a public murder—is radioactive. We all feel it, whether we “believe in it” or not. It’s in our water, in the air, in our bones. It has a half-life.

***

I’m writing this from Canton, a small town in farnorthern New York, where I came to give a talk related to the book the subtitle of which gives this substack its name, Scenes from a Slow Civil War. I’d begun the day before in another small upstate town, Canajoharie, and as is my practice when traveling, I walk, talk to strangers when I can. There are a few common places which sometimes afford me opportunities: bars, churches, libraries, laundromats. Many towns have gun shops, and I often stop in these, too. What kind of guns does a town want? How do they think about them?

In Canajoharie, I stopped at this one.

Or, as the owner would tell me, I was in not-Canajoharie. He wanted nothing to do with the town, claimed there was hardly any town left. There was some truth to that: a kind of hole in its middle, a rubble-strewn concrete slab, 22 empty acres where the one-million-square foot factory of Beech-Nut baby foods had once hummed. The gun shop owner—I know his name, though he didn’t give it to me, but I don’t think it matters—wouldn’t talk to me about the guns he sells. He wouldn’t “talk” at all, in fact, only shout: about “them,” the ones who did this to Canajoharie.

“The liberals!” he shouted. “They wrecked it! There is no town here! I don’t want anything to do with it!” Then he decided he didn’t want anything to do with me, either. “Liberals!” he shouted again, as if the word itself might slam into me, a representative, he suspected, of the affliction.

That sounds more dramatic than it was. It was a gun shop, but he wasn’t holding a gun or reaching for a gun or, as far as I could see, carrying. He wasn’t even thinking of the guns he evidently, in calmer moments, found fascinating and—leave aside for a moment your own aesthetics—beautiful, well-made. He was thinking about them, which meant not-him, which meant me. Something had to be done about this collision. Fortunately, we still had between us the old normal of the everyday: “I’m working!” he shouted, as if I’d disputed the fact. “I can’t talk to you!” It was true. He couldn’t.

At the book event last night in Canton, I talked some about Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist shot and killed in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and how from the minute we saw her fall, almost live, on our screens, a MAGA martyr myth began to swallow her up. This is my replacement theory: the myth disappeared the full facts of her life and formed “Ashli Babbitt” instead into a story to be used. Like words written on a shell casing. It’s very bad writing.

I talked about her husband, until her death not a political man—that was her “scene,” he’d say—a body builder, an amiable lunkhead who didn’t dream of going to the Capitol on January 6, whose only thought of it was that he should bring her one of her favorite burritos when he picked her up from the airport, who didn’t turn on the TV until—and then, he’d recall, there she was, falling. He’d remember how they played it over and over, and he couldn’t stop watching, his wife falling, because it was as if as long as he was falling she was not yet fallen. The story wasn’t over. How then he’d keeled over, flat onto his kitchen floor.

I told this story not because it redeems Babbitt. It doesn’t. She was an armed insurrectionist, a domestic terrorist. I told it because I encountered it in the granary of fact, and because it seemed to me to say something about the passage of time, how stories end or continue or, via the strange physics of writing, they can do both simultaneously. I’m a journalist. There’s always another page, tomorrow’s edition. A thing happened on a Wednesday; yes, and then what happened on Thursday?

After the talk, the first student to approach was a young woman with long red curls, nervous as most of us are in such encounters. “I’m a conservative,” she said. (And no, dear reader, she did not “look the part,” or what you may imagine that part to be. She wasn’t “MAGA-style,” there were no signifiers. Just a kid.) “Thank you,” she said. She said something about Turning Point, Kirk’s organization, but I didn’t catch it—was she a member? Didn’t matter. She said she liked the book, liked the reading, and of course I thought that mattered! She said something about Kirk. It was loud, people chatting and she was quiet, and her voice, as much of it as I could hear, was wobbling. She might have been close to tears, moved, I knew, not by my story—it hadn’t been that kind of story—but by grief and fear. “Me, too,” I should have said. Not her gried, or her fear, but mine, not the same but not wholly different, either. I’d mentioned in answer to a question the death of my mother when she was young and I was very young. The student had also lost her mother. Her mother wasn’t mine, but not wholly different, either. She gathered herself. She had something else to say about the dead, not our mothers but “Charlie.” Not about what I’d said about him—the terrible facts of the hate he so effectively promoted and the terrible fact of his murder—but about how Charlie had said we have to have words or else we’ll have violence.

I nodded. I thought about the video I’d watched of “Charlie” discussing his dream of televised executions with a panel of fellow-travelers, the way they seemed to think they were just trolling, but Charlie, “the alpha,” had been so skilled at meeting them in their shock-humor and pulling it into earnestness, of taking the troll and making it “real,” a real idea. A proposal, from one of the most powerful men in the world. I thought about how, when he’d fully drawn them in, he’d said that they would teach the children to witness executions as “holy.”

I didn’t say any of this. What I said, to this frightened kid, was, “well, I agree with Charlie about that.” What I wanted to tell her was that simply by approaching me, by letting herself sit with the stories I’d told for awhile instead of resolving them, she was—I thought—braver than the dead man for whom “ask me anything” was a means of turning every question toward certainty, all of MAGA’s pre-determined answers.

I thought she was braver than that. Later, one of her professors would tell me she was an uncommonly good student writer. I believe it.