Unfortunately, I remember quite a few assassinations and assassination attempts on the lives of American political figures. My first was the murder of President Kennedy as he traveled in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas in 1963, which, from my seven-year-old perspective, was astonishing for its ability to shut down the entire adult world if only for a brief period (see Business as Usual and A Fall Day in Dallas). That was also the first time I learned about motorcades and governors. I already had a vague sense of presidents as kings from children’s stories and myths.
Then came the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee in April of 1968 and Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles in June of that year. I also remember the attempts on Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972 in Laurel, Maryland and President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in Washington, DC. I felt particularly drawn to the story of James Brady, Reagan’s press secretary, who was struck through the temple by the assassin’s bullet and left paralyzed for the rest of his life. That kind of suffering somehow aligned with the wounds of Christ as the suffering servant, at least in my mind.
Dallas continues to serve as my foundational experience for relating to and understanding political violence, especially murder. For me, it mixed spectacle with death, ritual with media, the archetype of a fallen hero with my personal religious experience. At the time, I was in the second grade in Catholic school. I remember my grandmother, who sang in the choir of her church, calling us frantically the minute she saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters on live television. The drama never ended, including the traditional Latin Requiem Mass we attended at the school with black vestments and casket.
The attempt on former President Donald Trump yesterday afternoon at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania brought all of this back to me with its blood, crowds, and ensuing mayhem. By most accounts, a bullet grazed Trump’s right ear while an attendee to the rally lost his life from the shooter’s gunfire. The Secret Service killed the shooter, who apparently had fired at Trump from a nearby rooftop.
This kind of public spectacle and death are what make American political violence distinctive. Assassinations are public spectacles with elements of ritual, theater, sacrifice, and bloodshed. These are crucial to the experience, which can become transcendent. They drive the oft-repeated question, “Where were you when…?” The easier this can be answered, the greater the effect on the public and the ultimate sacrifice of the political victim. It also grounds the person replying in a permanent historical context. Everyone old enough to remember knows exactly where they were on November 22, 1963 when they heard the news about Kennedy.
Add extremist, ideological thinking to this, and what do you have? Actually, it would be hard to characterize the behavior of people who resort to assassination as “thinking” at all, but if you did, you might see it as similar to the French Revolution. The Jacobins’ hatred led them to eliminate anything and anyone who challenged their power, which could hardly be compared to the incompetent tyranny of the monarchy they overthrew. Their ruthlessness and savagery are legendary, which included thousands of public beheadings of suspected enemies on guillotines in Paris alone.
Thankfully, the Jacobins did not last, ending up eating themselves the way most extremists do. And while information about the Trump shooter is still forthcoming, one would assume that he isn’t right-wing, conservative, or a supporter of the former president. It should not come as a surprise if he turns out to be a modern-day Jacobin or at a minimum someone who feels threatened by Trump’s America first policies if not his bearing and demeanor. This is the so-called “derangement syndrome” that I have witnessed firsthand, and it is frightening.
This attraction to blood lust, ritual sacrifice, and near religious spectacles of violence doesn’t bode well for the republic. It could very well be that when we lose the sense of transcendence in one area, which has traditionally been the purview of religion, it resurfaces somewhere else. And why not? In this case with a Jacobean vengeance. It is, after all, le 14 juillet.
Image credits: “Shooting at Trump Rally,” Philippines; Trump tri colors by History in HD on Unsplash. Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”