Brian Thompson and the Faceless Horror of America

11 Dec, 2024

Like a lot of folks, I've been thinking about the assassination of Brian Thompson. The mainstream media, of course, is trotting out the bare minimum. "shouldn't you have some empathy for a fellow human being? A father of two?" Father of two, killer of thousands. A pretty bad ratio. They only tend to do that when someone really awful dies. Like Kissinger, or someone. But of course, it's true, at the end of the day. A man was killed, and no great change is likely to come of it. The American health insurance industry will continue to grind the money out of the sick and desperate, killing and maiming millions in the process. And the beat goes on, as The Whispers said.

I would, of course, have the common decency not to mock his death right to the faces of his wife and children. But death, and the act of telling stories about it, is a part of politics. When we talk of the glory of battle, and the heroes of wars, wars that have caused untold death and suffering, do we not trivialize their pain? And this isn't even about this or that party, every single political ideology has blood on its hands. Even outside the genocide of the Native Americans, the founding fathers of the United States were responsible for the deaths of thousands of British troops. And those British troops were responsible for the deaths of thousands of American troops. The Bolsheviks murdered the children of the Tzar, and the Tzarist regime murdered Jews in their pogroms. All around, everywhere you look, politics is a bunch of death merchants,whose functioning requires you to turn off your empathy in certain cases. Just look away from those people's pain and suffering, and loo0k at these people's.

I always kind of felt sad for Judas, when I was younger. I thought that it must be terribly sad to feel the weight of that guilt, of the killing of the Son of God. I felt sorry for him, when he tried to return the 30 pieces of silver, and when he killed himself, his entrails spilling onto the ground. I wonder what would have happened if he had been around when Jesus came back. Would Christ have forgiven him?

This is the empathy I extend to Brian Thompson. The kind I extend to killers and rapists of all stripes, to the great villains of history. I see no virtue in not extending sympathy to the devil. I believe, or4 at least, I hope, that all men can someday find salvation, and that everyone shall someday share in the warm embrace of God's love. Aquinas wrote that perhaps hell would be seen from heaven, so that the subjects of God's mercy might take delight in the enactment of His wrath. I don't know if I could take joy in that. ¹

I wonder if Brian really could have changed anything. I wonder if, even if he could have, Brian really believed that he could. Most Americans feel utterly bound by the rules and regulations, the way things are, at their jobs. They don't want to risk their income by challenging things, so they do their best to fall in line. What if a CEO had come along, said, "Now, look here: this rate of denial is ridiculous. I'm not going to abide this. People are dying because we aren't getting them medical care. This is going to end under my reign." Would the board have just replaced them? Was any one person in charge of accepting the mass injury and death caused by healthcare denial, or was the entire system a phantom, lumbering along because, even though nobody liked it, everybody knew that this was just the way things were? Was anyone even evil, or just... lazy? Maybe that's the real horrifying thought, for us Americans. Maybe the stories of psycho killers and maniac tyrants are comforting to us, because we live in a world where evil seems to originate from thin air, from nothing at all beyond bureaucratic apathy and incompetence so severe it may as well be malice.