After the Bears

I got a note from a friend recently.  We write each other sporadically, and have done for most of our lives.  Right now, we're trying to help each other understand and survive the current political nightmare.   

His story astounded me, because it was so closely aligned with my new vision of that current nightmare, a vision that helped me get back on the horse here at New World II, and a vision that I tried (awkwardly, in my opinion) to lay out here.  

Here's the story:

It was many years ago, Richard and I were in Glacier National Park on one of our every two years most excellent backpacking trips, and we were anxious about bears.

We were quite anxious about bears.

The ranger was explaining to us that the huckleberries were scant that year and the bears were hungry and irritated - this was October - and he was underscoring bear safety stuff, and then spoke briefly and clearly about bear encounters, and said, "Remember, you cannot outrun a Grizzly bear" to which Richard, standing right next to me, said "I don't have to outrun a Grizzly bear - I just have to outrun Keith."

So we leave the ranger, we are excited for our trek, alert to significant danger, and we  drive a long way, both time and distance - - there is one dirt road and it goes north to Canada, and Canada isn't so far.  We were somewhere near Polebridge, Montana, woods to our left with a lot of leaf fall, and flat boggy land to our right, and that's all we were seeing for a long time, and then there was all at once a big Grizzly stepping out of the woods and onto the road, followed by a young one.  These are magnificent animals.  They stopped on the road and hung for a bit -- we were forty feet away in a car but it was intense and extraordinary and thrilling, and the bears stepped off the road and moved on into the wet lands to our right.  We sat for a while, quietly, then drove on and parked, hiked a very long way and set up basecamp, and on that hike and for the days and nights we were there we were still concerned about bears, we were careful, we were paying attention, but we were not frightened, there was no longer a short shadow of something like terror, of something dark and dangerous and unseen.  

We'd seen it.

So with Trump's troops in Washington what I hear over and over, almost dismissively, is that it's optics, it's a distraction, it's a grand photo op.

I believe they are showing us the bears.

Yes - and now that we've seen them - the whole shambling, powerful, incoherent, dangerous, flailing and damaging mess that is the current administration - we are still careful, still paying attention, but are no longer afraid.  There is danger, and outrage, and things will be destroyed, but eventually we will get it back, and rebuild, mourn and carry on.

I was missing that.  But now that I've seen the bears, I'm ready to go on. 

Six-Fingered Man

So we have to figure out how to feel about Charlie Kirk's assassination.  

I'm not going to go into the reasons why this is such a conflicted situation.  Charlie Kirk was an extreme right wing "influencer," well-known, and someone who advocated - and publicly professed - very extreme views.  You could look him up.  Hint:  He suggested mass incarceration as a fix for the housing crisis, and advocated for public, televised executions even for children to watch.  So we're not talking about one more conservative pundit, and there's certainly no room for both-sider-ism.

As I consider his brutal assassination, I will certainly rise to the level of civilization that is expected of me, as Johnathan Last has done:

So the assassination of Charlie Kirk is not just a human tragedy for his family. It is not just an affront to society. It is an attack on our civic compact. It should be confronted as such, with no qualifications or equivocations.*

But I'm also a flawed human being, and a politically active one at that, and a big part of me wants to say something like "good riddance to bad rubbish."  How can we celebrate a murder?  I guess the same way I celebrated the murder of Count Rugen.  You remember Count Rugen.  The last thing he heard before he died was Inigo Montoya saying "Hello.  My name Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die."**  No regrets.  

So how is this different?  I understand that Charlie Kirk was a real human being and Rugen was a fictional character, but that distinction doesn't carry a lot of weight.  Both were evil people, both were killed by determined people who (we would assume in re: Kirk's killer) were injured by them.

I've got no answer to this question - I'll feel the way I feel, and so will everyone else.  However, two things Kirk has said are relevant as we consider his brutal assassination:   

"It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights". (4/23)

"I think empathy is a made up New Age term that has done a lot of damage" (10/22)

The irony is, I suppose, that we honor Kirk's humanity by expressing - in word and action - our strong opposition to what he has said. 

* - From today's Bulwark Triad e-mail newsletter; no link available

** - [Update]  I just remembered that the last thing Rugen heard before being skewered was "I want my father back, you son of a bitch!"  But you get the point.