“When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things.” These were the words of Brian Flanagan in the 2002 documentary, The Weather Underground, about the radical, violent American organisation of the same name. The residual energy of that film, and of the organisation it documents, remains potent. At times, aspects of it eerily mirror events unfolding right now. The Weather Underground declared war against the US government in 1970. They bombed, among other things, the United States Capitol building, and the Pentagon.
The shocking glee with which the killing of the US health insurance boss Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare was met tells the world a lot about public attitudes to healthcare in the US and the insurance companies that mediate it. It also tells us a lot about a hardening, among at least some, when it comes to consequences for societal pain.
How could people not be hardened? The US is a terrible country to be sick in. Illness or injury brings with it a threat of debt or bankruptcy. And in a country where so many die from guns and opioids, the architects of both the gun and opioid crises make a lot of money, and suffer nothing like the victims of their profiteering.
The fact that the commentary around Thompson’s death and his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, was instantly translated into memes is revealing. On one level, the ingredients of newsworthiness and therefore memeability are all there: an “attractive” suspect, a violent renegade action as a sort of one-person uprising, healthcare and health insurance as symbols of inequality, and the shock demonstration of a radicalism that can occur when any one person or group of people decide the rules do not apply, and apparently take revenge.
But it’s also about a broader hardening, cynicism and nihilism. It’s hardly a surprise that channels of empathy have narrowed in the US across the board. The expression of a unifying hatred against corporate elites responsible for the construction of extremely unfair systems is obviously a wake-up call for those who design those systems. But that wake-up call will probably result in more private security for bosses who feel they could be targets, rather than a rethink over fairness.
In the discourse, there appears to be something of a choice on offer: do you cry for a dead health insurance boss, or for countless people who get lost or trapped in the bureaucratic labyrinth designed by the health insurance industry – the outcome of which appears to be broken people on one side and huge profits on another? But this is a false choice. Killing people is wrong. For there to be little justice for those who suffer as a consequence of American healthcare and health insurance is also wrong.
To “bring the war home” was a motivating cry during the Vietnam War. “The Vietnam War made us crazy,” Flanagan says in that documentary. The drafting of young Americans into it against their will was an extreme situation. That violence abroad would foster violence at home was something of an inevitability. This is not a new concept.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes the boomerang effect, building on Aimé Césaire’s “terrific boomerang” (sometimes attributed to Michel Foucault as Foucault’s boomerang), to explain the so-called imperial boomerang in relation to 20th-century European fascism. The roots of European fascism lay in European colonialism. Having meted out brutality on foreign shores, who could be surprised that eventually, this brutality would become domestic?
The consequences of serious violence as a project are often felt in ways that are predictable to some degree – the less human life is valued, the more cruelty and suffering happens, the more it is normalised, the more it will occur. But when any society treats people poorly and with great cruelty – as either foreign or domestic policy – groups and individuals will inevitably take a signal from such behaviour and embark upon their own funhouse mirror interpretation.
The consumption of real-life violence has a well-understood conditioning effect. As a journalism student, I was taught about the taboo of broadcasting footage of the moment of death. This is a taboo that has long since been broken. Now social media has normalised what was once unthinkable in videos of beheadings; police murdering civilians; terrorists shooting passersby; schoolchildren being murdered. And every day, people are watching a genocide on Instagram. It is a mark of privilege to be deeply hurt by this, and not by the bombs themselves. Nevertheless, it is having an effect. Many turn away. Others take to the streets.
[ What the murder of a CEO tells us about healthcare in the United StatesOpens in new window ]
There must be a soul-hardening that comes about from viewing death so frequently on screens, never mind celebrating a death in meme form. What the killing of Thompson also demonstrates is the dissonance between how large numbers of people feel – the social media commentary around this event, for example, is almost universal in its lack of empathy for one man’s death – and how the institutions that once framed what was important, especially mainstream media and the political sphere, tell the story.
Fundamentally, a sense of unfairness can lead to the construction of all kinds of rationales for consequences, however extreme. The blithe upshot being: what did people expect? One wonders when new forms of mass-cruelty kick in as the new Trump regime takes hold, what kind of wars will end up coming “home”? Perhaps they have already begun.