Assassin's Creed

I swore and be damned that I wouldn’t do political writing, but I find, when I rummage through my mind in search of topics, it’s like grubbing through a kitchen junk drawer in search of anything other than crusty ketchup packets, lone chopsticks, and stiff, cracked rubber bands. Anyway, the events of the last couple weeks pretty much demand that I give them shrift, even if it’s short. Trying to write about the beauty of automatic transmissions or the joy of slicing off single fibers of wood with a dangerously sharp chisel—these are wonderful concerns and undoubtedly I occasionally give them mind, but at the moment indulging the fun themes is like aiming a laser pointer at the sun. 

If you’re like me, you’re presently wallowing in the unexpected burst of decisive activity from the Democratic Party. Fortune favors the bold, and in my experience “bold” and “Democrat” go together like mayonnaise and iron filings, so this is a moment and no denying. It’s enough to make you forget the shortcomings of Kamala Harris. To be fair, everyone has shortcomings, but many of them have become temporarily invisible. I’m blind as a bat and go about my days in a haze of joy at the prospect of Donald Trump drifting off to some grotesque and richly deserved fate like Klaus Kinsky at the end of Aguirre, the Wrath of God—an emperor of nothing, trapped on a log raft with a troop of fucking monkeys in hideous red baseball caps. 

It’s not true of course: The battle is still ahead. But one gets one’s joy where one can, and watching the MAGA faithful grasping vainly at whatever slur or fiction might offer purchase on their muddy slope to Hell is a vision so sweet it makes my teeth ache. This too is a misguided impulse: it’s a two party system whether we like it or not, and in the end we have to find a way to live with these cretins, even if they spend November 6 firing AR-15s at Fort Sumter. But give me my pleasure for now; I’ll be the sober voice of reason tomorrow or the next day.

Regardless, Biden’s departure from the stage, a voluntary renunciation of power that puts him in a class with George Washington and Samwise Gamgee,¹ was not the only once-in-a-lifetime event this month. It already seems like a footnote in a future book about the 21st century, but it was only a couple weeks ago that some lunatic took a potshot at Trump’s melon. In normal times that alone would have galvanized the whole country. The fact that it kinda didn’t—my own reaction was a bit like the one I have whenever the McRib comes back to McDonalds—says something about the fundamental instability and division of the moment.

Frankly, it’s shocking that this is the first time anyone has fired a round at a significant political figure since Trump glided down his golden escalator like a turd navigating a drain pipe. The man can barely get through a sentence without threatening bodily harm to someone, either through the vigilante efforts of his more mentally hunchbacked followers or through the levers of state he constantly reminds us he’ll wield against his political opponents like some kind of cheeseburger-scented flag-humping Idi Amin. 

And let’s be honest: there’s fertile soil in the United States for political violence. Indeed, the City on the Hill is almost uniquely violent in human history. Even putting aside our mind-bogglingly intense appetite for gun deaths among the hoi-polloi, assassination is more common in the U.S. than impeachment. Four of our 45 presidents—Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy—died by the hands of assassins. Three other sitting or former presidents—Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and now Trump—have been wounded by would-be assassins. That’s like, a lot already. 

Most people don’t even remember the 37 failed attempts. 

This is to say nothing of the countless non-presidential political assassinations. Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Robert Kennedy are the most notable, but there have been some 57 successful slayings of governors and mayors and representatives and judges and political activists of various stripes. What happened to Trump probably had more in common with a mass school shooting than an act of political violence, but American violence is so widespread that there’s bound to be an overlap between species. I bet most folks don’t know or have long since forgotten that one of Dylan Roof’s victims was a South Carolina state senator.

Man, woman, television, petard, hoist, Trump. The joke makes itself—doubly so since it’s the GOP rigid intransigence that allows a man to spend two whole minutes preparing to kill a presidential candidate in full view of hundreds of people without provoking a swarm of SWAT guys. 

It’s that hypocrisy, the world-blotting hypocrisy of Trump and his Trump Party that I see when I look at the much discussed image of our marmalade Berlusconi, captured an instant after the bullets rang out. A bloodied Trump rises beneath an American flag, fist aloft like some kind of Orange Power Tommie Smith. It’s great cosplay, and one can see how the truly dim among us could be put in mind of Joe Rosenthal’s photo of six marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi in February 1945. 

George Carlin talked about this once, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” 

Real courage, for those who have forgotten.

The image bears similarities, mostly accidental shit like the jaunty angle of the flag and the sense of dynamic action frozen in time. The only intentional thing in the photo is Trump’s dainty clenched fist, and the calculation inherent in the gesture ties it to the peak of Suribachi only if you honestly believe this greedy, self-dealing, thin-skinned and vindictive narcissist—who has never had a decent word for another human being who wasn’t actively licking his ass—is truly interested in anything other than himself. 

Note how those six marines on Iwo, three of whom would die there, have their backs to the camera. They’re not mugging like Trump, they’re doing what they were told to do, through a chain of command that began with the entire American public and ended with a marine colonel and a couple lieutenants. These six walked open eyed into mortal danger and did what was asked of them. Nobody can know their reasons, but we can be damn sure it wasn’t to weasel out of a possible prison sentence. It wasn’t to make a killing renting hotel rooms to government officials. It wasn’t to get away with raping a woman.² The fact that he had the presence of mind to make the gesture in what was surely a high-pressure moment is not reflective of some as yet unseen dignity in Trump’s character so much as it was a shocking boldface expression of his eternal, all-consuming grift. A chance to sucker the rubes as thoroughly as my uncle did when he dressed up as Santa Claus on Christmas Eve in 1974 and staggered across the snowy driveway while I watched gape-mouthed from the bedroom window. “Trump is a saint,” I can hear them saying, “Remember the fist!”

C.S. Lewis wrote that courage was chief among the virtues because it is “the form of every virtue at the testing point.” I think the converse is also true: courage in the service of vice is not courage. It might be bloody-minded recklessness or the savagery of a cornered animal, but it’s not courage. Courage has to serve some larger purpose, and what larger purpose exists in Trump’s world other than Trump? Seriously, what is it? Is it love of country that drives him to seek retribution against his fellow citizens? To paint half the country as subhuman vermin, worthy of exodus or indeed murder? That’s some dictatorial shit right there, and if you can’t see it, I can only conclude that you’re being willfully ignorant. Does it make you feel better when people with differing political opinions are upset or in pain? Congratulations, you’re antithetical to every virtue this country possesses. 

It’s easy to be pessimistic when one of our two major political parties seems bent on the radical elimination of the other, but I think there’s a good chance Trump’s self-fascinated wallow in his own assassination attempt could prove to be his high-water mark. The milieu of which it is a part is a narrative of relentless violence, a descent into chaos and hatred, underscored by the selection of J.D. Vance, a hatchet-faced sourpuss whose claim to fame is a diatribe against his own people, and whose idea of a good stump speech is to shit on childless women. And suddenly there’s Kamala Harris laughing, and the response of Trump’s vampires is to attack laughing. 

Cain’t nobody live like this forever. It’s unhealthy and a waste and fucking boring besides. This nonsense may be fine for serially failing twenty-something white supremacists searching vainly for someone to blame their impotence on, but it’s no basis for a system of governance. People don’t want to live in Mali, even a wealthy Mali, and as long as they still have a voice and breath, they’re going to keep trying to right wrongs. 

One way or another the fever will break eventually. The shooting was a reminder of Trump’s mortality, as was the departure of Biden from the race, which leaves Trump in the unenviable position of being the new old and deranged guy, clinging selfishly to power. I don’t want Trump to be martyred. But you don’t have to wish death upon him to recognize that the actuarial tables aren’t in his favor. One day in the not too distant future, he will leave us and the stain of his presence will be washed away like the trails of slugs in the rain. Between now and then—and November 5 specifically—let’s do ourselves a favor and pry his grasping, feeble sausage fingers from the throat of our government and all the things we cherish. Let’s do it with joy and energy and verve.

Fuck that guy.

1. Comparisons to LBJ have abounded, but Lyndon was arguably forced out by members of his own party.

2. Women, if we’re being honest. Children, if we’re being brutally honest.