[As we get
closer to what some
are predicting will be another rough winter, a series AmericanStudying
significant winter events from our history. Leading up to a special weekend
post on Pearl Harbor!]
On
assassinations, celebrity, and how to AmericanStudy senselessness.
As any
investigation into historical assassinations reveals, there’s a wide spectrum
of motivations behind such political murders: some, like John
Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln, are motivated by genuine
(if of course extreme) political
and social perspectives and purposes; while others, like John
Hinckley’s attempt on President Reagan, are driven by the most delusional
fantasies and psychoses. Mark David Chapman’s December
1980 killing of John Lennon, which took place only a few months before
Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan, certainly seems
to fit the latter category: like Hinckley, Chapman was an
obsessive fan of a celebrity; whereas Hinckley tried to impress that
celebrity (the young movie star Jodie Foster) by killing the president, Chapman
expressed his obsession more directly, killing the artist himself.
Moreover, I
would argue that the concept of celebrity can help explain not only these
particular killings, but also virtually all American assassinations, even the more
ostensibly political. It’s not at all coincidental, that is, that John Wilkes
Booth came from a
family of actors and was a onetime
prominent performer himself, nor that Booth chose a theater for his
assassination attempt (and famously jumped onto the
stage and into the audience’s awareness after the killing)—every such
action seems driven at least as much by the ego and needs of the assassin as by
any historical or political purposes, a trend that has only been amplified in
our media-driven age (leading, for example, to the
debates over whether the name and identity of mass shooters should be released
in the media, a practice that might have the effect of feeding and perhaps even
amplifying this need for attention). In any case, all the aforementioned assassins
likely number among the most well-known historical figures, and have thus
become celebrities
of a particular, macabre sort.
Yet that
paragraph and those such analyses notwithstanding, I think it’s important to
take a step back and recognize that there’s a certain level of senselessness
inherent in these kinds of killings, and doubly so in one as driven by delusion
by Chapman’s shooting of Lennon. Obviously I’m always interested in finding
contexts and meanings, of any and every event and moment; and contexts (for
example) are indeed always present and can at the very least help us understand
both the historical situation in which an event took place and the broader
national narratives to which it might connect. But there’s something—something important, again—to
be said for an ability to recognize that sometimes history, like all aspects of
life, defies explanation, seems devoid of analytical meaning. In his song “Nebraska,” a bleak
work inspired by the mass murder spree of killers Charles Starkweather
and Carol Ann Fugate, Bruce Springsteen has his speaker (the male killer)
offer only this explanation for his crimes: “I guess there’s just a meanness in
this world.” Sometimes, it’s as simple and as painful as that.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other winter events you’d highlight?
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