The Hall of Mirrors

And then we’ll speak no more about it

If nothing else relieves you of any imagined De mortuis nil nisi bonum duty, you may get it from the predictable fact that, after Charlie Kirk was killed, the big Democrats (and, oddly, members of the British Labour Party) were sympathetic and respectful, and the big Republicans called, either implicitly or explicitly, for mass roundups/ extermination of Democrats.

Or you may get it from the fact that, among many other repulsive things, Kirk himself said “it’s worth [it] to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,” though like many other members of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party he probably considered himself exempt from that cost. (I would be much more impressed with his fellow fascists if they outright celebrated him for laying down his life for their right to bear arms — though I suppose, in a roundabout way and perhaps unconsciously, that’s what they’re doing.)

You may get it from the realization that your opinion of his assassination, whatever it is, doesn’t matter — not only because rightwingers will dig very deep into the Mariana Trench of the internet to dredge up outrages on which to feast, but also because, almost simultaneously with Kirk’s death by gunfire, another madman shooting was taking place in a Colorado high school; soon enough there will be another, and still more, and finally this one will recede like the rest into the endless blood-sea of gun violence to which conservatives and their crackpot idea of the Second Amendment have condemned us all.

This has reminded me of something I said back when Tubby was reelected, about “a version of main-character syndrome, in which the author imagines him- or herself a political consultant… with a lot of advice for the Democratic Party, which absolutely does not give a shit.” Except in this case it’s a state in which people imagine their opinions about these events are not just something they might naturally feel and express, but data points in some grand political accounting, and for that reason they must be careful what they say.

I really do think this is one of the more damaging lunacies of our age, because it removes us from our normal social reality, and turns it toward an abnormal social media reality — that is, turns it from a real world in which our values are reflected and amended and sometimes debated among real people that we know, to a simulacrum in which our values are refracted and distorted as in a room of funhouse mirrors.

In the former world, we develop and behave more or less normally in response to social cues with which we have grown up and are comfortable. In the latter, those cues are replaced by memes, propaganda, marketing, and anti-social fantasies, shot at us from every angle; this encourages us to continually and neurotically adjust ourselves so that the reflections will line up with what we recall (if vaguely) as reality.

But no, friends, your opinion will not have an appreciable effect on The Discourse. Nor will your social media post affect Charlie Kirk fans at large, either to hurt their feelings or give them solace. Their minds were made up long ago: Like Kirk, they think you’re subhuman and want to kill you.

The best thing you can do is hang onto yourself: Find what you know is true and moral; follow that, say what’s in your heart, and don’t get lost in the hall of mirrors.