Luigi is not the revolution.
Celebrating Brian Thompson’s murder debases us.
Possessing great power and fortune at the expense of others naturally disposes your victims to regard you unkindly, but I still find myself—unfashionable as it might be to say this—spooked by Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and subsequent lionization.
I do not like insurance companies much, but I have seen enough suffering. I understand the frustration that allows Americans to cheer when they see blood in the street. I wish I were cool enough to smirk, cross my arms, and say, “That’s karma, baby.” After all, the role of an insurance company is to treat lives, health, sicknesses, and deaths as numbers on a page to be balanced. Without empathy, these Masters of the Universe dispassionately determine who will survive, become poor, or die. They even decide how much pain the sick will experience.
I understand why a person can rationalize parity when the person leading such an organization is executed with similar mercilessness. Still, this disturbs me. It should.
Brian Thompson caused suffering, and profited handsomely from it, but this was not justice. He was not tried in a court before a jury. He made no allocution or restitution. The scales are not balanced. Mr. Thompson was simply murdered. The world is not more right with him gone. Some other monster will take his spot. UnitedHealthcare is not Saul on the road to Damascus. It will not open its eyes, seek salvation, or change course. It lumbers on denying claims, as always.
So, what has been accomplished? Big bad executives are not more likely today to bend their knees and ask the public for forgiveness. They will not trade Medicare for All in exchange for their lives. They will hire more security, take more isolated entrances into buildings, add more keycard locks to private elevators, and further withdraw. That added distance will not engender understanding or greater sympathy for common persons.
I don’t agree with the Atlantic that the cheerful public response is “decivilization in action.” Society has found itself in this place before. To celebrate Christmas (or as I like to call it, “Holidays”), I always recommend setting aside time to re-read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. When the miser Ebeneezer Scrooge dies, we see the following exchange from his neighbors:
“Why, what was the matter with [Scrooge]” asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box. “I thought he’d never die.”
“God knows,” said the first, with a yawn.
“What has he done with his money?” asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
“I haven’t heard,” said the man with the large chin, yawning again. “Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn’t left it to me. That’s all I know.”
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker; “for upon my life I don’t know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?”
“I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. “But I must be fed, if I make one.”
Another laugh.
The reaction to Mr. Thompson’s death has been yet more cackling. A Christmas Carol was written in the Victorian era, when income inequality was stark. Today, income inequality is also stark. We should not pretend that people are happy. Historians will ask in fifty years: “What were the material conditions in the 2020s like that led Americans, once the proud victors of the fight against fascism, to elect as President an openly fascist stupid bitch like Donald Trump?” This murder and the loud public celebration will be a frequently cited anecdote.
Mr. Mangione allegedly killed a man and will be tried for it. I'm not surprised he is being made a folk hero—a good-looking guy with a gun who lives by his own code is guaranteed to tickle the public imagination. He should not be worshipped, replicated, or ignored—“take him seriously, not literally.”
I cannot change people’s feelings. I cannot raise their wages or give them better healthcare. I can barely manage my own, which is why I am here to hawk Trump Is a Bitch t-shirts. I cannot mourn Mr. Thompson, because his kind hurt me too. But I will not celebrate a daylight assassination. An era of American Troubles will not bring us prosperity nor raise our standard of living. It may incite the tyrants to pull their boots on early. I understand accelerationism sounds romantic for the young, who fancy a life past their imagined war and grand revolution, but I am tired. Additional conflict only takes us further from stability.