September 12 Friday roundup

For the most recent episode of the podcast, I wrote about last weekend’s big march in DC, and why virtue signaling is critical at a moment when state-sponsored violence is rampant and intimidating so many people. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

I want to address the Charlie Kirk shooting a little bit today, because it (or the ramifications of it) are on a lot of people’s minds right now. This morning, the suspected shooter was identified as a 22-year-old from Utah. He appears to have grown up exposed to a variety of weapons. The bullets the shooter is said to have carried with him for his attack were engraved with niche inside jokes from video games and online forums. We’ll see what emerges in the coming days and weeks, but at the moment, he appears to be irony-poisoned in a particular way that many young right-wing reactionaries are.

During a press conference this morning, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah didn’t try to whitewash that the killer was home-grown. Neither did he quite rise to the occasion. “Bad stuff happens,” he said. “And for 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us—that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country. Sadly that prayer was not answered the way I’d hoped for, just because I thought it would make it easier on us if we if we could just say, ‘Hey, we don’t do that here.’”

But the problem is that we do that here, and we seem to do more of it than most other places. And one big reason for why we do it isn’t because of religion or a lack of it, or any generation being worse than the next, or even due to politics (though that is a load-bearing part of this week’s events), but because we have so many guns.

That fight to keep the quantity and lethality of guns in so many forms from completely swallowing the country is a long one, and it’s one we should continue. But for the moment, I want to address another part of the assassination—the irony-poisoned element.

First things first. Though I do think there are generational crises and risks of new kinds of isolation, I’m definitely not one to condemn kids today, or music, or video games. The year I graduated high school, Tipper Gore created the Parents Music Resource Center. Most parents were satisfied to hector their kids whenever they heard scandalous lyrics on the radio or floating out from their child’s room. But intentionally or not, Tipper Gore gave a soft-focus side to evangelical creeps like Jimmy Swaggart by starting an indecency crusade to label music for the protection of children.

That crusade subsided over time and exists now mostly in the form of the Parental Advisory sticker, which (when I ran a record store) served as a beacon to preteen kids to help them identify and buy what their parents didn’t want them to hear. The era of streaming has ended much of the sticker’s influence. But still holding a grudge, I occasionally wear a Parental Advisory shirt to the gym to memorialize Gore’s political project disguised as a morality play.

As in that earlier era, the degree to which kids are ill and misled today is not due to any crisis caused by them. Responsibility lies at the feet of the adults in the country. It’s less their peers or hip hop or violent video games or even social media platforms that bring them to despair than the world we’ve made for them.

Nihilism can seem like fearlessness, especially when you’re young. But really it’s just refusing to acknowledge any stakes at all, any means by which you might be made vulnerable. My sense is that those of us who want to get a different result than our current society have got to own that vulnerability ourselves.

That doesn’t mean we have to be sentimental or maudlin or to swear off snark. But it might mean that while we still have any ability to change what’s going on, we should take risks to make the world a better place. It might mean that we should be present in the daily life of our various neighborhoods, to open our lives by committing to the things we love and sharing them with other people. The universe is bigger than online posturing for strangers, and we’re seeing kids filled with rage realize that they can act out in real life, that they have the power to destabilize a city, a town, a whole country.

We can change the country, too. What do you want to bring into our society to stabilize it—not to maintain the status quo, but for the future you want to see unfold?

When I was teaching martial arts, one of the most amazing things I saw took place when kids and parents signed up as beginners together. The parents were risking just as much as the kids, and while they tended to progress faster than children (if the kids were little), the kids still got to see the adults in their lives having to learn new things, literally falling down and getting back up. The kids got to share the sense that their parents were invested in something new, in which the power differentials with authority figures were erased. They saw their parents as peers, trying something in which it was guaranteed they would make mistakes, and might even fail.

What is the last thing you tried that was completely new to you? When was the last time you ran the risk of failing at anything? What chance have you taken or what have you tried to make that could create a universe where the assassination this week wouldn’t have taken place, where the current dynamics in the country didn’t even exist?

I’m not a sentimental person, so I mean this in ruthlessly practical terms. I have a friend who worked on New York elections in recent years, and he would tell me stories about meeting with local activists and organizations. He was trying to get them to think about not only how to get that additional budget item into a grant or add that one program in for the next fiscal year but also how to address and end the social ill they were focused on combatting, or to truly deliver the public good that was their mission.

What would it take to actually solve the housing crisis? What would it take to provide a real working transit system for the public? What big push could they try to create a platform for and momentum behind, what vision was big enough to sell politicians on? He felt it was critical to be thinking in that larger framework that might help shape a program that would actually reach their goal one day, because if they never even tried to work the big-picture side, they would be guaranteed to be hunting for scraps and Band-Aids for as long as they lasted in their jobs.

We can take a similar approach today. We can keep our barbed commentary going, afflicting the comfortable (or sometimes even just one another) while still remembering to stop and ask ourselves what it is we really want to see in the world. It’s impossible to be irony-poisoned in the moments that you’re in the middle of learning a new skill or creating something real.

And whether it’s a creative endeavor or a public good, the more opportunities and possibilities we can bring into our own lives and others’, the less foothold people who spread the gospel of nihilism and death—the people looking only toward destruction—will find to spread a gospel of hate.

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