Mourning in America

 

I seem to be among the rather few Americans not able to claim that I knew Charlie Kirk well or admired him greatly.  In fact I knew practically nothing about him.  But you don’t have to possess any special insight or personal bond to deplore a fellow man’s brutal murder or to lament the circumstances surrounding it.  And there are times when confident and facile “explanations” merely thicken the actual opacity surrounding aberrant events.  So long as we choose to arrange our political affairs according to the customs of a democratic republic, we perforce must abhor all acts of political violence without equivocation or mental reservation.  Easy to say, difficult to do.  We didn’t make it through our first century of nationhood without the catastrophe of a Civil War.  And while cold wars are to be preferred to hot ones, we surely do not want what so many commentators now tell us we have come to the brink of.

 

I have what might be called an historical consciousness that encourages me to see historical analogies.  Analogies can be useful, I think, but remember that the terms of analogies concentrate on the features that make things, events, and situations seem similar without considering other things that may make them very different.  One such “thing” is political martyrdom, real or imagined.  In 1914 a Swedish-American labor radical whose Americanized named was Joe Hill was executed by firing squad in Utah after being convicted of a murder.  The charge on which he was found guilty was questionable if not actually trumped up.  He was not the first American labor martyr or perhaps even the most prominent.  That title would be jointly share by two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti whose controversial convictions and executions as bank robber/murderers was the greatest left-wing cause of the 1920s and was still alive when in 1977 Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, on the fiftieth anniversary of the executions  declared them to have been wrongly convicted.  Yet in the annals of political hagiography all American political martyrs pale in significance when compared with Horst Wessel (1907-1930) in Germany.    Wessel became the patron saint of the ascendant National Socialist Party (the Nazis) in the 1930s. He was a Nazi  brawler who participated in the recurrent battles between fascist and Communist demonstrators on the streets of major German cities.  Two of his anti-fascist opponents were convicted of shooting him to death.  I first encountered vivid eye-witness descriptions of this genre of political violence in the accounts given by Jan Valtin (Richard Krebs) in Out of the Night, a book important for me when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos.   Wessel enjoyed a posthumous fame exceeding the normal fictions of even political hagiography.

 

            Poems in honor of martyrs form a special category of medieval hymnody.  It is only to be expected that political martyrs, like their more spiritual models, often inspire musical tributes in song,  The ballad accounts of their virtuous suffering is a frequent feature of their cults.  I myself first heard of Joe Hill from Pete Singer, a once popular folk singer persecuted by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.  “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, Alive as You or Me…” appeared in 1936.  But in the twentieth century politics is more important than religion.  And the musical cult of Horst Wessel went off the charts.  The lyrics of the “Horst Wessel Song” are bad enough that they may have indeed and as claimed been written by Horst himself.  This song became the peer of the “actual” German national anthem, the beautiful “Deutschland über Alles”.  It is likely that even now somebody in Nashville is memorializing the ordeal the country is going through in the style of Country and Western.

 

            I presume, at least I hope, that there is still a national consensus concerning the wisdom of our Declaration of Independence, which rests upon truths claimed to be self-evident.  For I do believe in self-evident truths.  One of them is that murder is wrong and abhorrent--in addition to being a crime.  There surely may be numerous sociological factors relevant to the commission of any murder relating both to the murderer and the murdered, but they cannot challenge the absolute certainty of the wrongness of murder.  And although if we are truthful in our self-examinations we must recognize the vagaries and the uncertainties of many of our own actions, we are very quick to assign motives to the actions of others with a certainty totally unwarranted.  My own suspicion is that a serious mental abnormality would be a necessary prerequisite for any murder, and certainly for most political assassinations.  That is perhaps a theological hope rather than a scientific observation, but it is only in the realm of the spirit that we have a chance of understanding the mystery of iniquity.

 

            So far, alas, there has been much outrage but little sober reflection.  For I cannot class the competitive historiographies of partisan mayhem as reflection.  What about sowing and reaping?  What about Paul Pelosi’s battered head?  Yeah, but there’s the girl on the train…Oh, yeah, well what about the maniac in Buffalo? Etc., etc.   In 1977—forty years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti--Katherine Anne Porter, one of the truly greatest of American writers, published a book called The Never-Ending Wrong.  For it has indeed never ended and never can end except by the conscious and corporate wish of a whole nation.  Imagine though for a moment that our current president were Abraham Lincoln.  Here was a man in whom a sense of grievance might seem plausible, indeed inevitable.  But even on the bloody battlefield of Gettysburg he could exhort our fellow citizens: with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds. But in those days, there were giants on the earth.