Day 234: Amused to Death
Sadly, this sleepiness hasn't carried over to America as the news has been nothing but bad, with the worst actors on the move.
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The most recent bit of evil is the murder of far-right polemicist Charlie Kirk. This is not surprising, seeing the country's ever-deepening divide. I mentioned that one of my inspirations for chronicling these dark days was Mary Chesnut Boykin's A Diary from Dixie. As I wrote then, I found her chronicle of the slave-holding South's descent into madness and war to be reminiscent of the contemporary mood in America, a time when the nation is dividing along ideological lines. However, unlike then, where the very real evil of human slavery was the cause for division, modern America has begun to turn against itself because it is merely bored with the comforts of 21st-century living. Never before has a country clawed at its own flesh merely because it seemed preferable to doing the hard work of participatory government.
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This can be seen in the recent election, where an oft-incoherent candidate won an election against a statesman-like opponent. Unlike the many pundits who resorted to economic determinism to explain this victory, e.g., "Trump spoke to the economic realities of blue-collar Americans, etc," the truth is that Trump's formula for success has always been the ability to take the serious subject of politics and reduce it to the level of a D-list reality TV show, something the so-called "couch potato demographic" could easily digest. Why talk about the realities of, say, global mass migration as a result of climate change and global economic shifts when you can just shout about immigrants eating pets? Which will better entertain an audience that finds the serious business of policy-making boring, an audience that, when, say, Face the Nation airs, yawns and changes the channel in search of an MMA cage match?
While this reality TV-styled degradation of politics is just one of many reasons why it has become so unstable, it is also one of the most consequential factors. Lincoln once observed that public sentiment is more important than policy because no policy can be enacted without first winning over public sentiment to support it. With Trump proving that putting on a good show is more important in winning over low-information voters than is keen policy insight, an army of influencers whose youthful ignorance is only matched by their reactionary anger has now arrived to capitalize on this new form of empty-calorie politics. What we now have is an ignorant electorate buying magic beans from political snake oil salesmen. It’s the equivalent of a pile of oily rags, stacked by charlatans and lit by fools.
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I bring this up because I believe Charlie Kirk is very much representative of this dangerous rash of wild-eyed young polemicists spouting reactionary politics as entertainment, for an audience prepped to see everything as just another "us versus them" game show. As a man who spent the majority of his political life on the conservative right, I saw the start of this evolution, first with the rise of frank AM radio pundits like Bob Grant, to transformative titans like Rush Limbaugh, who forthrightly described himself as an entertainer and not as a politician or journalist. With the tremendous success of Rush, an army of wanna-be Limbaughs soon flooded the land of broadcasting. However, unlike Rush's unique blend of commentary with humor, the copycats, pushed to extremes to survive in a media ecosphere filled with market share competitors, became noticeably more angry in tone (Morton Downy Jr. & Mark Levin) to more radical, indeed, quasi fascist in political theory (Charlie Kirk, Tim Pool, and even Fox New's Greg Gutfeld who recently proclaimed that he refers to himself as a nazi, obstensibly in jest).
During these early years of the rise of American conservative populism (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one!), Sam Donaldson, the famed reporter of ABC News (this is back before the news network's new master, Disney, castrated it and forced a surrender to Trump's authoritarian war on the media), was asked about his thoughts about this rise of Rush and the new right and its growing media empire. His response, with the benefit of approximately thirty years of hindsight, has proven to be prescient. He said that he believed Rush to be a very entertaining guy, and one who provided a needed counterpoint to the often one-note politics of the coastal news networks, which viewed every issue through a more liberal political perspective. However, Donaldson worried about how the Republican Party was cozying up to Rush and other conservative talk radio hosts. He feared that by having one of America's two political parties openly embrace this brand of political populism, the party, wittingly or not, was empowering not just the more harmlessly entertaining figures of the right, such as Rush, but also the more toxic elements. He feared the GOP was building its own Frankenstein monster and, as with that cautionary tale, would lose control of it, potentially to the great detriment of the nation and the Republican party.
Was he wrong? Or did we simply stop listening before the monster stood up?
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The irony of this domestic situation is that never before in human history has a nation enjoyed such comforts. This is particularly true for young people who are awash in technology that would have made a 1980s young me's head explode. Yet it is precisely this young demographic that is often responsible for the worst shootings. Indeed, as I write these words, we have now learned that the Charlie Kirk assassin was, yet again, a twenty-two-year-old white male with a fetish for guns. And while the details of his home life and emotional condition have not yet been revealed, it is a safe bet that it won't differ much from the other young shooters, what national security pundit Tom Nichols refers to as "The Lost Boys," who often exhibit emotional immaturity and a need to exact revenge on a world they feel has not recognized their inherent greatness.
I have no intention to delve too deeply into a topic that trained psychologists have spent years trying to comprehend. All I will say is that I suspect the answer to why this is happening with greater regularity is the result of multiple factors, most of them cultural. Foremost, I would argue, is a toxic modern culture that has elevated sex and violence to levels that would have been considered pornographic back when I was a kid, yet today is blasted into our homes via countless channels and streaming services, not to mention increasingly realistic combat-themed video games. That, of course, is not sufficient to trigger a mass killing. After all, I have known plenty of people with an appetite for such fare who are otherwise decent people (people familiar with this blog will know my love for video games, as well!). The break, I suspect, occurs when young men, already struggling with feelings of inadequacy, internalize the pop cultural message that a life without incessant sex and action hero grandiosity is a mark of failure. This is the origin of the rage that builds in these misguided kids, with the perpetration of nihilistic acts of violence becoming the outlet. Such nihilism finds fertile soil in the still-forming mind of a young man—flush with testosterone, shaped by a culture of spectacle, and reinforced by peers equally adrift in the cesspool of toxic masculinity.
In short, we live in a time where young men have easy access to guns (particularly in states where deregulation is worn as a badge of ideological purity), violent entertainment, and sexual fetishism. The rags have been drenched in accelerant. Add that poisonous culture to reckless reactionary politics, which conveniently provides 'enemies' for boys frustrated by their hopeless quest for a fictional lifestyle, and there's your igniter.
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I will conclude this long meditation with the following observation. Today, the FBI Director, Kash Patel, concluded his briefing on the capture of Kirk's shooter with the following words:
To my friend Charlie Kirk. Rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you in Valhalla.
If you are not familiar with Norse pagan mythology, Valhalla was portrayed as a hall where warriors, served by the warrior women known as Valkyries, feasted and fought until the end of the world, where they would march alongside Odin for a final battle.
Once again, we find ourselves in a cultural moment that elevates sex and violence to near-mythic status—this time by the FBI Director himself, a self-described Christian who chose not the language of grace or redemption, but the war cries of Norse paganism. His rise, forged in the fires of radical right-wing politics that helped ignite the Capitol assault on January 6, now culminates in a eulogy that glorifies eternal combat over spiritual peace. It’s a telling moment: when even the symbols of faith are traded for the aesthetics of vengeance, what remains of the moral compass?
As Director Patel invoked Valhalla—a hall of eternal combat—as the resting place for Charlie Kirk, I couldn’t help but think of Thoreau’s quieter vision of heroism: a life governed by the dictates of wisdom—simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. In an age where politics has become performance art and violence is mythologized, perhaps this is the truly heroic lifestyle young men are searching for. My fear is that such radical wisdom will never be heard over the din of influencers shouting loud, combative, and tragically hollow rhetoric instead.
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