Saturday morning, in bright sunshine and warming temperatures, a young man sat on the concrete railing of the Rialto bridge in downtown Montpelier. He bore two signs, one in each hand. I confess I can’t remember one of them — I think it had something to do with Charlie Kirk’s sainthood — but the other one, which I found attractive, claimed that the Democrat party was a cult. “Prove me wrong.”
Several arguments sprang to my mind, but on reflection were grounded in the obvious differences in the young man’s values and mine, and thus hardly worth pursuing. I think I might have had him by reading the dictionary definition of a cult, which includes its having a strong central authority figure and leader, which the current Democratic party clearly lacks. But I was about to take off on a top-down drive with my sweetheart in my roadster, and was strongly averse to wasting even a minute of her visit haggling with a youngster with an axe to grind. So I ignored his beckoning gestures and putted off into the green fields and forests of Vermont.
To tell you the truth (a constant effort of mine), I’d never heard of Charlie Kirk until a politically deranged sharpshooter murdered him at a rally with one cartridge from two hundred yards. During the next few hours, and still today, it was and is impossible not to know him very well. His organization, Turning Point USA, is sizable and well funded by right-wing supporters. I thought Vermont’s atmosphere too rarefied to sustain its life here, but I see now that vigils are planned for him in the Green Mountain state. The surprise I feel is probably like that felt by my mother almost 80 years ago when she dumped out the soggy duffel bag I’d brought home from summer camp, and a hundred earwigs scattered across the cellar floor.
Commentary on the subjects — the assassination, the mission and methods of the deceased, the search for the identity of the killer and now the background and motivation of the killer — seem adequate. There’s no crying need for anything additional from me, especially given my ignorance of the subject. But I thought it incumbent upon me to get a look at the man whose murder had stirred up so much emotion. There was no shortage of opportunity to get that look.
Turns out he was a professional arguer. Not a debater; an arguer, like the professional boxers who used to travel with itinerant carnivals, challenging all comers. His antagonists, since he traveled largely on the university circuit, were college-age kids, like J. Alfred Prufrock “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse, ” who were easily bamboozled, outwitted and beaten into silence by rapid-fire argument. Kirk was good at what he did. He was a combination of a tobacco auctioneer and the immortal Doctor Johnson, also a famous arguer: “There is no arguing with Johnson,” said his acquaintance Oliver Goldsmith; “for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” Lord Pembroke, another familiar, said, “Dr. Johnson’s sayings would not appear so extraordinary, were it not for his bow-wow way.” Kirk left most of his student questioners flummoxed, confused, and humiliated. Still, he drew large crowds of undergraduates wherever he appeared, and Turning Point USA was a model of a successful startup organization. Charlie was riding high.
But no matter how we high we fly and however popular we appear to be, we can’t escape our history as a culture that often, to solve its problems, shoots them — and that we have a steady, ready supply of the tools with which to do that. From the simple-minded, cynical bumper sticker proclaiming “This truck insured by Smith & Wesson!” to an ever more likely lethal result of road rage, to the supermarket shopper with a Glock strapped to his belt for personal protection in the deli aisle, we have reason to fear people we don’t know who may be harboring serious grievances.
For some reason beyond easy understanding, the public murder of this professional provocateur has commanded far more attention, emotion and comment than the private murder, at their home, of a Minnesota state senator, her husband and their dog. There are almost as many takes on the matter as there are commenters. Charlie was a true patriot who may actually get a bronze statue in the Capitol rotunda; he was a breath of fresh air in our musty political closet; he was an opportunist who, like George Washington Plunkitt, seen his opportunities and took ‘em; or he was a bully and far-right radical dedicated to squashing opposition. Wherever you land on this spectrum, there’s little you can do in our current climate of civil war but shake your head ruefully and put another X in the appropriate box.
