Violence is Its Own Party

Awhile back I wrote a (very long) piece detailing how an anti-internet terrorist movement might rise up and operate. Several people told me that it read like fan fiction, which I think is more or less accurate, even though I don’t actually want what I described to happen. I was not excited by the possibility of the story coming true, just by the math I used to make the prediction. I intended the piece to be neutral about the morality or even politics of the imagined movement, focusing instead simply on the many infrastructural vulnerabilities in online connectivity and our culture as fertile ground for zealots and their movements. As for the former, I think we’re in an era of discovering that the many networks we’ve built in the 21st century are more vulnerable than we thought, like the supply chains that sag and break under the influence of Covid, or Vladimir Putin, or the Houthis. As for the latter, there’s my ineradicable feeling that many millions of people live lives exsanguinated of meaning, and the fact that this condition has not yet been exploited by committed extremist groups is mostly a matter of luck. Perhaps nothing so organized as a cult or terrorist cell will ever coalesce, thanks to the deadening effects of iPhones, opiates, Xbox, booze, Amazon, porn, TikTok. But the opportunity is there, for people ambitious enough to take it. I don’t even think you need to be smart.

There is of course a great deal of debate going on about the partisan identity of the would-be Trump assassin. He was a registered Republican; he donated to a progressive group; he was a gun nut; he was out to stop Trump. You are of course free to engage, but I think you might be wasting your time. One side will arrive at one answer which supports their political narrative, the other will do the same in the opposite direction, and nothing will be learned. If he’s your team, he says nothing about you or your candidate, and if he’s the other team, he is an avatar of them and theirs. About this kind of question there is no truth, only use.

Perhaps this kid was an antifa radical, perhaps he was MAGA, blah blah blah. He was definitely and existentially a doofus, a bumbling and unimpressive product of the internet era and several different bad models for modern masculinity, only moderately a loser, rifle club washout, 8th grader haircut, looks like a background character in a John Hughes movie, didn’t even have the sense to drop out of junior college and confirm the stereotype. Not even exceptional in being unexceptional, he has found immortality in taking his AR-15 to a Donald Trump rally instead of to a middle school. He missed widely, wildly, unthinkably, caught a piece of an ear, killed an innocent person, and maybe changed the course of American politics forever. And to think, he could have been stopped by any number of officers, any number of times. If anything in our system worked.

Extremism is its own ideology and violence its own party. I’m not exonerating anyone, nor pretending that there’s no such thing as a political motivation for violence. Maybe the Trump shooter had a copy of Mao’s little red book, or perhaps Dianetics, hidden away under his floorboards somewhere. Motives, as such, are uninteresting to me, and you might define them as you like. I’m interested in need, in what kind of need these fucking losers are not getting fed, what drives them, what hole inside of them can’t be filled by Pornhub or Monster energy drink or Counter-Strike. It would be good to know what pre-political hunger drives some of them to politics, not because what they do isn’t political but because politics is effect and not cause. Because the indelible image of spectacular public violence in the 2020s is not an image of a Muslim suicide bomber or a leftist revolutionary or of January 6th. It’s the mousy kid that shoots up a school for lack of a better target, an 8chan terrorist, the disaffected loser with a parent’s unsecured assault rifle - relentlessly analyzed in political terms, but politically inert as a human soul. They are drawn to violence like a mayfly to porchlight, driven not by ideology but by the 21st-century phototaxis of virality, the directionless need that seeks the fame that attends carnage. A bunch of Mark David Chapmans with Discord accounts, just hanging around outside the Dakota, hoping that someday they’ll be the ones signing the autographs.

The Pulse nightclub shooter, a consummate loser, went to a straight club first and found it closed. Imagine farming out your target acquisition to Google Maps. Some say he was a radical Islamist, some say a homophobe. I say that (either way) he was a loser whose desire to inflict spectacular violence was undone by his inability even to imagine the spectacular. Couldn’t tell you his name. That’s the thing, about these guys, they don’t even have the decency to make it memorable. 9/11, that was a sight to see. John Wilkes Booth was a poseur but, by God, what a pose. Shinzo Abe’s assassin did it with a homemade gun. That’s verve, baby. That’s the work of an artist in a lonely, pointless medium, our medium, the only creative act an endless little procession of sweaty losers can think to engage in. What could be more American than the fact that all of this has become rote, these perpetual spasms of obligatory attention, given to young men whose evil is not sufficient even to demand the organic kind? Perhaps that’s the only way this all ends, when this peripatetic hikikomori violence that jumps from one impotent loser to another becomes a stale meme, something shared by Boomers on Facebook. I hope so. Because otherwise I’m fresh out of ideas.

I tell people all the time: politically, the thing that twists the knife is that we can’t even struggle and fail beautifully. You read about some other era and the losers look dignified, dressed in purpose. Now losing only makes losers. And here, too, in the arena of random and ritualistic bloodshed we live in a senescent America whose reliable splashes of virgin-borne violence are pathetic even as they are tragic, pitiful even as we labor to memorialize the innocent dead. That there is Cormac McCarthy’s evening redness, and we are the Forever West, a musket-clutching frontier spirit haunting a nation of bored and anxious children who think that to be noticed is their birthright. And they’ll keep on coming, one by two by two by one, trailing body odor, clumsily clutching guns they can barely use, young men who feel neither young nor manly, invisible losers who lack creativity even in their desultory spasms of outrageous violence, leaving behind pathetically twitching corpses whose faces and bodies and clothes tell the world in precise sociological detail why they felt they had no greater possible purpose than squeezing off rounds, even in death good for nothing but sharing somebody else’s meme.