Attention span deficit.
Something I hadn't expected, but which really says something about our times, is that the murder of Charlie Kirk is already, for the most part, in society's rear view mirror.
Yes, there's a lot of discussion about it still, but it's in the chattering class, which I suppose includes this website. Otherwise, things have already moved on.
The speed at which news moves, and the lack of attention to it, is a very bad thing.
Of course, now that it doesn't really appear to be a politically motivated killing, it's lost its attraction as a story to some degree.
A fictional narrative
The story, as noted, is now in the domain of the chattering classes, but also the possession of right wing myth makers, which are really working on it. The odd thing here is that the media has an incentive to downplay what is being learned about the killer, and to an extent, the MAGA myth organ does as well.
What we now know about the killer, Tyler Robinson, is that he was a homosexual living with another homosexual who was in the process of being mutilated to take on the appearance of a woman. Unless this isn't clear enough, they were in a "romantic" relationship, which means they were engaged in sodomy. The "transitioning" roommate was apparently shocked by the killing, but according to one family member, that person was deeply anti Christian and hated political conservatives.
Now, the reason that this isn't getting this much press as the "transgendered" aren't particularly associated with crimes of any kind, let alone violent ones, and homosexuals certainly are not, but this story is deeply weird. A man trying to become a woman is deeply weird, and it is not the same thing as homosexuality. One man screwing another man who is trying to take on female morphology is very weird as well.
We touched on this in a post about Robert Westman, who was an actual "transgender" figure who committed a mass shooting recently. Indeed, he's the only "transgender" figure I know of to commit one, the overwhelming majority are white hetrosexual men.
Anyhow:
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked find traitors in our midsts. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis.
I explored the topic pretty fully there, and I'm not going to repeat it here other than to note that finding a transgender person hating Christianity isn't surprising. Real Christianity holds that to be wholly immoral, even while real Christianity still loves the person. And such a person hating conservatism isn't surprising either, as conservatives hold a similar view.
Robinson wasn't the transgendered person here, but the whole story of this relationship would lend to the theory that he was pretty pliable as a personality. The point is, therefore, this likely wasn't really an act of domestic terror in the conventional sense, so much as it was a person reaching out under the influence of a sexual partner. In an odd sort of way, this killing is more comparable to Dr. Carl Austin Weiss Sr.'s murder of Huey Long, which was over redistricting that impacted his father in law. I.e., a personal connection is likely to have motivated it more than any overarching weltanschauung.
That's a story that's not really going to get explored, I suspect. The right wing wants Kirk to be a martyr, the left doesn't want to talk about the mental health issues this really brings up.
Groypers?
I'd never heard of this term before, but apparently they are followers of Nick Fuentes. As I don't pay any attention to Fuentes, I didn't know that.
Apparently they've drawn a lot of attention following Kirk's murder as there was some peculiar speculation that they were responsible for it. They obviously are not, but that speculation was there, and I'm not sure why.
Fuentes, whose movement is outwardly anti homosexual, as well as anti a bunch of other stuff, has said some really odd things in this arena, one being that having sex with women is gay. Eh? Another apparently was that homosexual sex doesn't mean what it used to, as women aren't living up to their reproductive responsibilities.
A shit post?
This is a really interesting analysis of this topic.
Shit post.
The extra scary part of this is noting, as this person does, how many people in Trump's administration sort of fit into the same demographic.
Not in homilies
Apparently, at least according to Twitter, a lot of people are mad today as their parish priest didn't include a reference to Kirk's murder in their homilies yesterday.
Why would they?
For Apostolic Christians, Catholic and Orthodox, yesterday was the Feast of the Cross, and homilies probably largely had to do with that. Moreover the Catholic Church is just that, catholic, i.e., universal, and this is a domestic American matter that remains unclear. Kirk wasn't attacked because he was Catholic, he wasn't, and the attack upon him may only have a tangential relationship with his Christianity.
Nonetheless, I saw one person who was irate at the Pope for having not mentioned it.
Spencer Cox
The guy who is really coming out looking good after all of this is Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox. He's spoken multiple times and has been a calming voice every time.
This isn't the first time he's waded into these issues. Following the killing at an Orlando gay bar some years ago he appeared at a vigil and stated:
How did you feel when you heard that 49 people had been gunned down by a self-proclaimed terrorist? That’s the easy question. Here is the hard one: Did that feeling change when you found out the shooting was at a gay bar at 2 a.m. in the morning? If that feeling changed, then we are doing something wrong.
Cox's comments are clearly against the stream of the MAGA mainstream. He was originally a never Trumper but claimed to have changed his mind and voted from Trump in his Presidential contests. I suspect we'll be hearing more out of Cox going forward, and he may very well be a Presidential candidate in 2028.
Ballroom Blitz
King Donny went from being outraged by the Kirk killing to bemoaning how it interrupted his might fine, in his mind, ballroom from being the focus of everyone's adoring attention.
That's pretty weird.
Also weird is how quickly this is going up. It's apparently under construction right now. Trump clearly wants it up before he leaves office, on the theory that will mean nobody will take it down.
The monstrosity will now be 40% bigger than originally planned.
Quite frankly, I thought this vandalization of the White House would not actually occur, as it would, in normal times, take quite a while to design and engineer a building. Indeed, I was frankly planning on just that. I never thought the monstrosity would go up, as whomever is Present next won't be stupid or narcissistic enough to bother with a Trump "look at me!" ballroom. It's really moronic.
But it's going up.
If I were President, which of course I never will be, my first executive order would be for the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the offending pile of dogshit within twenty foour hours of my being sworn in. I'd have the resulting trash hauled and upmed in front of Trump Tower. But that won't happen. Trump is probably right. A giant cancerous growth will be there forever.
Here is the oldest photo of the structure, and what it's actually supposed to look like:
Of course, as it might be noted, the building has been altered before, most notably the addition of the West and East Wings. Those additions were made due to legitimate working concerns, however.
Again, if it were me, I'd be tempted to take it back to purse original. It's just supposed to be a big house.
The architects for the vandalization are McCreery Architects, whose website has an image of the interior of the structure as its first slide. The following slides show a lot of other impressive structures they've worked on. They do seem to favor heavily classic styles, which is nice. The site oddly doesn't have any text, but maybe if you need to hire a heavy duty architect, you don't need text and the equivalent of architectural headshots works better.
A rational question would be why does this bother me so much? Well, perhaps I just have an irrational reaction to all things Trump by this point. But the ostentatiousness of the whole thing smacks of trying to be The Sun King.**Have we reached that point in this country? I fear we have.
We've always had rich men, of course, but this is the era of fabulously wealth men. It's not right.
Ah, sic transit gloria mundi.
Something we may wish to consider a bit. . .
Maybe we have it too darn good (so we're self sabotaging).
It sounds absurd, but there's something to it.
The current Wyoming Catholic Register has an article pointing out that, in 1980, the year before I graduated from high school, 40% of the world's population lived in desperate poverty, an improvement from the mid to late 19th Century when it was 90%.
Now, just 10% does.
Big, huge, improvement.
By any objective measure, the condition of the world has massively improved.
Why do we believe otherwise?
Evolutionary biology has a lot to do with it. We evolved to live in a state of nature, and nature if pretty rough on everyone. So we're acclimated to things not being quite right, and trouble being just around the corner. Now, for most of us, that's not the case.
Gershwin wrote:
Summertime and the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin'
So hush little baby, don't you cry
Well, it turns out that in summertime when the cotton is high and the fish are jumping, we're looking for a thunderstorm and worried about work on Monday.
I know that I do.
And a super rich society, like ours, seems to make up its own problems.
This is all the more the case when the gates are off the door, as they are. Now, not only are there all our real and imagined problems, but we just go ahead and make new ones up. Woman trapped inside a man's body? Not if the Goths are at the city gates planning on killing everyone.
Anyhow, it seems like we're busy, now that we are in the richest period of our existence as a species, making sure that real problems appear. Apparently we missed them.
Footnotes
*Ballroom Blitz is an early 1970s, rock song by the band The Sweet.
**King Lous XIV.
Related threads:
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Labels: 20th Century, Agnes Repplier, Americanism, History in politics, It was because of the Vietnam War, Politics, Populism, Red Scare of 1919, Red Scare of the 1950s, The Second Trump Administration, Zeitgeist
