Another Week: Number 142

Autumn is getting into gear. The forsythia has taken on a bruised color. Wednesday night, I slept with the windows open. Awake Thursday morning, I needed to turn the lights on downstairs because of the delayed sunrise. Friday morning, the fog was thick and rose-colored. Saturday afternoon was perfection.

Birds continue to cycle through my yard. On Sunday, a female Hairy Woodpecker was part of the fray at the seed feeder, and a platoon of Starlings scoured my lawn. The two hummingbirds of recent weeks did plenty of competitive sipping from my salvias and my feeder, making eye contact and acknowledging me a few last times. Then, following the Saturday morning rain, they left for Mexico and Central America.

The NFL season has gotten off to a grim and sobering start. The Green Bay Packers and Micah Parsons look like contenders. Caleb Williams and the Chicago Bears look like a defective prototype.

Pregame coverage made much of the Bears’ heavenly favor, now that the new pope is a Chicagoan — but my mom knows very well that Vikings quarterback J.J. McCarthy graduated from Nazareth Academy, just like she did.

I went for zero walks this week — but I did read a couple of stories connecting walking to the creative process:

• Luxurylaunches: Steve Jobs trusted this simple, ten-minute exercise so much that he was convinced it made him smarter, and now top neuroscientists at Stanford say he was right.
• The Guardian: The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ works

I also read a story about a local cashier. I remember that she was my checker when I had some window screens repaired two springs ago, and that I was somehow walking on air as I left the store. It turns out I’m not the only one to feel that way:

• CBS 58 News Milwaukee: Checking out with Saint: The cashier who’s Racine’s real treasure

The assassination of Charlie Kirk

Driving home Wednesday afternoon, I was listening as CNN broke news of a shooting at a Charlie Kirk rally in Utah. Dammit, I thought: the news cycle was just settling after two weeks of covering the Catholic church shooting in Minneapolis, and here we go again. Back at home, I watched as news anchors began moving through their shooting routines like reluctant gymnasts on uneven bars.

Nearly every news story these days is prefaced by the warning that some may find it upsetting. Duh — that’s the attraction of news. Another annoying news practice is to obscure the exact thing they’re reporting on. For example, they’ll mention an alleged slur made by somebody, but never quote it, so how are we to judge?

In this case, CNN noted that countless cameras would be recording at any Charlie Kirk rally, and soon they started to show some posted video — but then froze it before the fateful moment.

Frustrated because I wanted to know what happened, I turned to YouTube and found a close-range video in two seconds. It immobilized me with horror. Clearly, Charlie Kirk was dead, but the news anchors were not saying it. Had they reported what they knew, I would not have needed to seek it out.

I have only ever seen a few people die, and it’s just so transcendent and dumbfounding. One second, a guy in a T-shirt is talking into a microphone; the next, his neck is a burst water balloon of blood, and he’s toppling like a stack of blocks. We see deaths enacted every hour of every day as TV and movie entertainment, but those never come close.

A man’s life was extinguished at just 31 years of age. He will not grow older or wiser. His loved ones will suffer lifelong trauma and grief. His followers will rightly feel robbed. And the deep mess we’re in as a nation is instantly compounded.

The TV pundits opened their drawers and pulled out all the shooting clichés they had just stowed in the wake of the Minneapolis shooting. “Violence is never the answer,” one said, as if a platitude from some milquetoast talking head would counteract thousands of hours of first-person shooter games played by young men across this country, in which liquidating people every few seconds is exactly the answer.

Less than an hour after Kirk was shot, two students were critically wounded by a shooter at a high school outside Denver, and CNN was momentarily flummoxed about which shooting to stick with. After a few seconds, they chose Kirk’s, of course.

A commentator declared assassination “un-American.”

As a little kid, I stared frequently at the photo of another little kid, John F. Kennedy, Jr., saluting his father’s coffin. My first political hero — Robert F. Kennedy — was assassinated just before I turned eight, two months after announcing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s own mother was assassinated five years later. Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated. So were John Lennon, radio talk-show host Alan Berg, and fashion designer Gianni Versace, and on and on. Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in Minnesota just three months ago.

Deny it all you like, but assassination is tattooed into America’s skin like a sleeve.

Soon, commentators began extolling Kirk as a “man of God,” because in recent years he had added Christian nationalist ambitions to his program. But while Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Kirk said, “Prove me wrong.” His very last words were a lazy attempt to put a racial spin on a question about mass shootings.

Jesus said, “Sell your possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.” Kirk leveraged anger and provocation, vaulting himself to political power and millions of dollars after just one semester at Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. He was pressing the same buttons that social media companies have used to amass their fortunes.

Kirk wasn’t trying to make things better for Americans; he was trying to improve his financial and political status through agitation. That’s neither a divine mission nor a crime. As Ian Ward wrote in Politico, “Kirk’s real superpower was intuiting — and deftly exploiting — the institutional hollowness of the Republican Party under Trump.”

Speaking of hollowness, Donald J. Trump, whose eyes display all the empathy of an unschooled shark, immediately saw a bloody event that could be hyped to his advantage — a Reichstag fire type of outrage to pin on “the left,” something he’s been waiting for, and even egging on through National Guard deployments.

After taking the privilege of announcing Kirk’s death via his own social media platform, Trump quickly followed with a video that branded Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” before anything at all was known about Kirk’s killer. In the hours that followed, Trump granted himself free rein to go after the “radical left” in retaliation.

Another opportunist, the Director of the FBI — who is somehow currently Kash Patel — immediately started using Kirk’s assassination to boost his own social media profile. Then, after the alleged shooter’s own parents brought about his arrest, Patel tossed aside his Justice blindfold in a nationally televised press briefing to express his deep personal affection for Kirk: “Rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you in Valhalla.”

It’s an odd rendezvous — Kirk had become assertively Christian in recent years; Patel was raised a Hindu. Meanwhile, as Tory Shepherd notes in an unrelated Guardian piece, there is a continuing “Nazi tradition of co-opting ancient Norse mythology.”

At that same press conference, Utah Governor Spencer Cox stepped into the national spotlight to deliver a hunk of fuzzy sermonizing: ”Social media is a cancer on our society right now,” he preached, while simultaneously posting a celebratory graphic on Twitter boasting, “WE GOT HIM,” the opening catchphrase he poached from L. Paul Bremer’s 2003 press conference announcing the capture of Saddam Hussein.

This ritual in the wake of horrific American shootings has been repeated so often that all we can do anymore is go through the motions.

Thursday Murder Club (2025)

Thursday Murder Club started streaming on Netflix on August 28. Nine nights later, my mom has seen it twice. I suggested we watch it Saturday night, but as soon as it started, it was fairly familiar to her. Still, she insisted on continuing because she enjoys repeated viewings.

The movie is a lighthearted murder mystery. It is set in a retirement community in England called “Coopers Chase,” with the breathtaking real-life Englefield House serving as its main building. Some of the elderly residents have formed a club to solve actual murder cases.

Among these elderly are Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and others.

The plot is not important. The movie is 118 minutes in the presence of these stars doing their lighthearted British murder mystery thing in a thoroughly charming setting. We enjoyed it.