All Americans Dream of Murder

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For lunch yesterday, I met up with my friend VVV, who was visiting from the Bay Area on what I guess you’d could call a Gluten Tour of New York. For the past few days, she’d been eating tons of pizza—Mama’s Too, Scarr’s, Lucia’s—and this day would be no different: We were going to the West Village branch of L’Industrie, and we’d arrived several minutes before it opened to find ourselves tenth (or so) in line. The slices were quite good, with crackly-chewy crust and solid tomato sauce; VVV preferred the one with pepperoni, sausage, and ricotta, while I loved the white pie (to my surprise: I’m usually a salty-spicy-saucy guy). Would I have waited more than 15 minutes in line for this pizza? Nah, but my essay about waiting in lines—about tourist tsunamis in general—will have to wait for another day.

Afterward, we grabbed coffee (for me) and plum-ginger iced tea (for her) and walked into Washington Square Park for dessert: a maritozzo from L’Industrie, and two pastries from Supermoon—a malasada stuffed with passionfruit cream, and a yuzu-glazed croissant filled with blackberry jam and cream cheese. Now this was my thing. I discovered a couple of years ago that I just absolutely love inventive, French-style pastries, and I’m filled with regret that I spent so many decades never really giving them much consideration. I’m an idiot—but you already know that.

Stuffed with wheat flour and all manner of dairy derivatives, and tired from kicking pigeons aware from our feast, we walked back toward the East Village, and as we crossed Washington Place at Broadway, a huge SUV swung around the corner and almost hit us. I threw up my palm to make him stop (my imaginary superpower), he threw up his own hands in outrage, and we each barked at the other, unable to hear a word past the car’s thick glass. But as I looked at his furious face, I knew: He wanted to kill me. Literally. And to be fair, I wanted to kill him, too.

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Let me clarify: He didn’t want to intentionally run me down right then and there. Or if he did, he had the presence of mind not to do it. But what he was really wishing is that I’d been too late to stop-palm him, that he’d come just a bit faster around the corner, and that he’d flattened us to death, as we clearly deserved. After all, we were, technically, crossing against the walk signal. Death was what we deserved for making such an error, and he would’ve gladly delivered us our punishment, and with a clean conscience to boot: Any jury would clear him—that is, if any cop had the balls to arrest him. He could kill and get away with it, that was his dream.

I know because it’s been my dream as well, and probably yours, too. As a lifelong shrimpy nerd, I’ve lived in fear of bullies, and though it’s been decades since I’ve had to deal with any, I still imagine doing them harm—in self-defense, of course. I imagine being accosted by thugs in the dark streets of Gowanus, then turning the tables on them with my lightning-fast moves, breaking their arms, smashing their heads into curbs, launching them into the festering canal. This will never happen, I know, partly because no one ever bothers me and partly because my go-to defense is called “the fetal position.” Still, I dream it, and the righteous anger it arouses in me is more delicious than a well-made maritozzo.

And I firmly believe my dream is the American Dream these days. Right-wingers salivate over the thought of gubmint troops and pansy-ass liberals coming to take their AR-15s, because it offers the chance to slaughter them all, fully protected by the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, lefties cackle at the miserable fates of the red-state fools who voted for Trump, whose policies will end their lives with pollution, unrestricted firearms, deportations, and unaffordable health care. We each want to see our enemies laid low, to see them die of their own arrogance, and if we can participate, so much the better. There’s nothing to feel guilty over.

It’s as if, faced with philosophy’s famous Trolley Problem, we all said: Yes! Let me drive the trolley—I’m good with either outcome.

Legally, I know, this is not murder. No one is setting out to kill other people—we’re just open to the opportunity, as they say on LinkedIn, so I guess that counts as, what, manslaughter? I guess we’ll have to see what Daniel Penny, the former Marine who chokeholded Jordan Neely to death in the subway last year, gets convicted of. But in our hearts, we are murderers, one and all.

This Is Not Good

This is, according to the subhead above, not good. The thinking part of my brain is pretty sure that I—and, I hope, we—don’t want to live in a country where we dream of killing each other all the time. And that same part of my brain also doesn’t think we’re about to become a country where we are killing each other all of the time. It takes quite a lot to shift a populace from lusting after accidental, incidental manslaughter to going on a communal kill-crazy rampage. Not saying it’s impossible, just not imminent. (I hope.)

Still, I’d love to shift this land (and my own subconscious) away from this mode of poisonous thinking, which does no one any good. To do that, though, we need to find an alternative to murder. I know—that’s a tough one! Murder solves so many problems, what could be better?

What we need is a good, public, prominent comeuppance. Seriously, when was the last one—the last time a hypocrite, a villain, a famously arrogant famous person met with a fate that matched their crimes?

Forget your cancelled celebrities: They may leave the public eye, but they never stay cancelled, and the never really lose anything. Forget politicians who lose electoral battles: That’s the inevitable consequence of being a politician, and the punishment, alas, is never permanent. Forget as well the criminals: A prison sentence may certainly justified, but with the exception of a Capone convicted of tax evasion, it lacks the dramatic heft of a true comeuppance.

And dramatic heft is, I think, what we all need to see. We need a contemporary Oedipus realizing his mistakes, understanding he can never escape his fate—and tearing his eyes out. Now that’s a goddamn comeuppance.

At the moment, we’re seeing a pretty good version with Alex Jones, the pathologically fraudulent conspiracist manbaby who was sued into bankruptcy by the families of the Sandy Hook victims—and whose showpiece website, Infowars, has now been purchased by The Onion, of all places—for “less than a trillion dollars”—which plans to turn the publication into a satirical version of itself. This is some delicious irony, people!

It’s lost, alas, on Jones himself, who claimed, “Everything in this process—just like Trump being targeted by lawfare—has been as phony as a three-dollar bill.” Jones’s problem, or maybe his strength, is that he’s shameless; nothing will ever make him reflect on his actions. The shameless understand only brute force.

My friends, I do have another dream—a fantasy that does not involve death. In fact, the opposite! My dream is this: You know that guy who used to be president but just won the election again? (Can’t quite recall his name, but you know who¹.) Not long from now, this overweight, always-angry 78-year-old is going to suffer a massive stroke—and he’s going to live. He will, however, be damaged: partially paralyzed perhaps, unable to speak clearly, incapable of feeding, bathing, or dressing himself without the aid of others. And those aides should be the very people he’s spent decades demonizing: immigrants, people of color, Dreamers, amputee veterans—all of them attentive, kind, professional, and laser-focused on ensuring that this fellow lives a long, long time in this state from which he will never recover. It might be decades. He might beat Jimmy Carter’s longevity record, even. But given what we know about him, it might take him that long (or longer!) to come to terms with where his choices have landed him. And in the meantime, we can watch his downfall, at first with the cathartic glee of an Ancient Greek odeon, later with the mild satisfaction of waking at 2 a.m. and remembering where he’s wound up. Maybe one day we’ll even forget he’s alive, then recall in an instant his tragically cautionary tale. And along the way, the murder will fade from our hearts and we can live normal lives once more.

Look, I know this isn’t going to happen—either the stroke or the large-scale societal change. In a world dominated by the shameless, there is no tragedy, only a farce that gets less and less amusing with repetition. Fate laden with irony? Downfall tinged with pathos? Unlikely. For the idiocrats, the punishment tends to be as dull and dumb as the crime. But a boy can dream, can’t he?

Notes

1. Recently, I was reading through my old clips, and I was shocked at how often that guy’s name came up in them! Who knew he’d so dominated my thinking so many years ago?

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