KILLSHOT

There has to be an element of madness, a clinical psychological aberration at work in individuals underlying the belief that killing a powerful man, a symbol, can accomplish an ideological goal, which is not to deny it can produce monumental consequences.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Josef of Austria, did not achieve what Princip wished it to do, but it ignited World War I.

To believe that the murder of an individual can effect ideological change in the world, that belief must be accompanied by a sense of personal grandiosity in the assassin.  He must have faith in his almost godlike potency in the act to make it possible.

In Czarist Russia, educated youth desperate for reform, driven to the edge of insanity by the brutality of the Czars, created the nihilist Narodnaya Volya, The People’s Will.  Its members swore that assassination was the only hope.  Their murder of Alexander II produced only their own execution and worse repression.

Although assassinations of power figures are done by insane or grievously unmoored characters, it is clear that their acts are a response to tendencies in society that are deeply troubling to normal personalities.  This, by no stretch of logic or imagination, can render them comprehensible, much less justifiable.

Yet it is fact that ours is a nation with a unique and involved relationship with guns, because we had to kill multitudes of the original inhabitants of the land we occupy to make it ours.

Guns are a deep, permanent presence in our mythology.  Despite societal efforts to sanitize or trivialize their role in our cultural history, they have always been understood as the ultimate means of enforcing good when other means fail.  From Stagecoach, to Shane, to Matt Dillon, guns spoke for right and justice, and that meme is unconsciously imprinted to some degree in us all.  It empowers the assassin in his own mind.

We suffer, periodically, the shock and awe of another heinous act of mass murder—Pulse nightclub, Sandy Hook, the Vegas tower, the massacre in Parkland High—but part of us knows they will happen, must happen, cannot be prevented.  In every case it is a human derelict, a broken monster, driven past his endurance, who turns our sixgun mentality against ourselves.

It has long been clear that our Capitalist system that deranges society with its injustice and exploitation, will never reduce the grotesque inequities that gall and oppress us, as it denies it is the force that drives many to despair, and the sick to distraction.

In America, the vast majority is entirely excluded from the profits of our massive economic engine which all go to Big Capital, thus creating great anxiety and insecurity.  Most people work for grossly inadequate wages, under tax laws that exempt the rich and corporations, and a predatory pay-to-play Sickness Industry.

A humane system, in which government works for the benefit of citizens was long ago ruled out to favor Big Capital’s effort to generate the most money with the least cost, excusing the state from concern for its people, and Americans have accepted this.

Indoctrinated and passive as they are, they have not escaped the neurosis that comes of acting in conflict with one’s best interests.  This inner dis-ease is exacerbated by political parties acting only for Capitalist extortion, masking that fealty by flaunting opposing bogus moral postures designed only to agitate and infuriate.

Confusion and lack of clarity about one’s reality, like that which has been imposed in America by Capitalist governance, is known to be a constant factor in mental illness, and rampant disease is clearly indicated in the frenetic tornado of hate that envelopes us.

In that maelstrom of fear and dread, the weak, most psychically vulnerable often lose their tenuous hold on what maintains them, and slip into nightmare conditions of delusion, degradation and madness.  It is why our big cities’ streets are campgrounds for the hopeless, a vast, horror asylum that is the ID of Capitalism, that National Guard can not cure.  The wonder is not that there are so many mass killings, but that there are not many more.

Assassins function several steps above the bottom rung of the desperate lost.  They are still animated by purpose.  They cling to their obsession.  One cannot know what was in the boy’s mind as he sighted through his scope.

It can only be said that his act could not be a surprise to us, for whom it has become a routine event in our mortally wounded culture.  His killshot was to him, in some terribly sick sense, his last, frantic hope to restore some order in his world.