I continue to flatter myself that I am a reasonably informed person. I cursorily scan the newspaper each day, and until fairly recently Joan and I were regulars in watching the PBS Newshour. But I apparently don’t take all that much in, or at least don’t retain it. One evidence of this is that I am frequently blindsided by events involving eminent Americans of whose existence I have apparently been unaware. Being murdered seems a grotesque way of coming to my attention, but it has happened a couple of times just recently. I seem to have been one of few Americans who learned about the existence of the Republican Party activist Charlie Kirk only from the news of his brutal extinction. Just this week, in similar fashion, I was unaware of the name of an obviously very important movie director, Rob Reiner, even though I had seen a couple of memorable films he had produced, until he too was murdered, along with his wife. The most immediate shooting took place at Brown University in Rhode Island, and one of the random victims was an undergraduate student who by chance was also a Young Republican. This factoid invited, and received, predictable speculation. It is the nature of the human mind to resist the idea of random mindlessness and to impose upon chaos a purposeful surface.
The frequency of our American mayhem makes it difficult to really get into the Christmas spirit. Murders never have much to recommend them, but these are acts of evil that perhaps cannot fail, and most assuredly have not failed to become political emblems of our national discontent. Charlie Kirk was an effective political operator within the political apparatus of the more conservative circles of Republicans. He either actually was, or and plausibly became, a virtual emblem of the American far right. Rob Reiner, a movie actor, director and prominent Hollywood personality, was a conspicuous artistic and financial success. He was also an outspoken dispenser of liberal political opinions and an Obama schmoozer. Perhaps this was enough to make of him in minds so inclined an emblem of “the left.” For purposes of what follows I will dispense with such ordinarily prudent words as alleged and reported, as the crimes alleged and reported did happen. I can only assume that the killers are literally madmen whose mental pathologies are probably so severe as to render their sanity questionable. This seems manifest on the surface in one of the cases. Certainly the killers in each instance have disturbing qualities almost requiring allegorization. But they do not require crudest form of politicization, which is what they are getting.
Mr. Kirk’s killer is a furry, or perhaps only furry-adjacent. If you didn’t know what a “furry” is, join the club. I learn from an on-line dictionary that a furry is “an enthusiast for animal characters with human characteristics, in particular a person who dresses up in costume as such a character or uses one as an avatar online”. The typical misuse of the noun avatar suggests the quality of online dictionaries. Furriness or furdom thus is apparently a lifestyle, presumably a niche lifestyle. At least I had not before this heard talk of it. Mr. Reiner’s killer was his own thirty-something son, who made a clean sweep of things by killing his mother at the same time. Parricide is a rare crime that must always challenge our very concept of human personality. These murders certainly do. The Reiner family was wealthy and moved in important social circles. The report that that killer-son was “troubled” may seem something of an understatement. He was “battling” addiction to “substances” for many years. He had received official rehabilitation nearly twenty times. The manifest pathology of the situation demands the stilted language for its description.
My stiff tone is not meant to disregard the pathos and human suffering that are the substratum of journalistic gossip. Narcotic addiction is a terrible scourge. It is terrible for the addict, and terrible too for widening concentric rings of the addict’s associates. It is terrible for our body politic as a whole. And it is no respecter of persons. Just like all those other annoying things your mother used to tell you, it is sadly true that money cannot buy happiness. But it can pay for a strong and competent legal defense. So although Nick Reiner has yet to be arraigned, there is already a buzzing conversation about the high legal fees to be paid to a celebrity defense attorney from the patrimony of the parricide. Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. I read that in a book somewhere.
It is difficult to think about such matters with unstinting honesty. Among the most memorable of the of the Maxims of Rochefoucauld is the following zinger: “In the misfortunes of our best friends, we always find something which is not displeasing to us.” The celebrities whose stories are the stuff of newspapers—a celebrity being someone who is famous for being famous—have much less psychic purchase than our friends. True enough, the annals of the rich are perhaps often more lengthy and complex than those of the poor, but they are often just as tragic. Their pathologies should be comforting to no one. But for the grace of God… If you don’t believe in the grace of God—and you ought to—you can imagine it is just good luck.
What I most dislike about winter is not so much the cold as the dark, and as I write this, we are already two days past the year’s longest night. This fact, based in a stable astronomy, is the likely reason for the traditional calendrical dating of Christmas, the allegorical date to which the birth of Jesus Christ is assigned. The event is theological even before it is calendrical. As my namesake John famously put it, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not blot it out.” So neither the cold nor the dark will finally prevail. That’s the gist of it. Merry Christmas—merry and bright. Peace on earth, and good will to all.