The Madness of Luigi Mangione
A calculated and brutal murder of health insurance executive Brian Thompson has ripped open the skin enclosing a vast repository of popular rage.
Before hanging on December, 2, 1859, John Brown slipped a note to a jailer:
“I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without verry much bloodshed; it might be done."
Many abolitionists had painfully reached the same conclusion – the institution of slavery had become too entrenched, powerful and emboldened to be disassembled by means of rational discourse, or moral appeal.
Slavery is not, in the literal sense, the issue today, but the decidedly inevitable manner in which present day events drag the suffering masses hopelessly along, evokes a parallel set of themes to those that confronted John Brown 165 years ago. At what point do crimes of wealth, power and profit, committed by the rulers of society at the expense of those who have no means of defense, reach a moral tipping point? When does the polite habit of acquiescence reach a place and time where a significant portion of the public accepts that the usual means of redress via debate and politics no longer offers relief from intolerable suffering? This question had a simple, unquestionable answer for John Brown.
Violence may be everywhere in the US - school shootings, random gun violence, chemical toxins, proxy wars, domestic abuse, suicides, drug overdoses and, pointedly, an epic and endless body count from systemic medical neglect - but we have not seen a single recent act of violence purposefully launched against the corporate powers that assault vulnerable people, until last week. Slavery and the genocidal obliteration of the indigenous population may be America's "original sins," but now we have an environmental catastrophe synchronized with growing levels of poverty and a US military budget that sucks up every spare dime of tax payer cash. Are we really on the cusp of Armageddon, and, if so, when does violent resistance become morally justifiable?
Mangione escaped on an electric bicycle, but the act appears to have peeled back the repressed veneer of passivity and resignation that characterize the mindset of America, and revealed a shocking substrate of U.S. collective distress.
Violent acts carried out on behalf of systematically brutalized victims have been so vanishingly rare in U.S. history, that John Brown's unsuccessful raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 may well be the only such peacetime event that has ever had lasting impact on our national fate.
We know, of course, that Brown's attempt to arm slaves, and use captured weapons from the attacked federal armory at Harper's Ferry (as a means to spark a widespread insurrection against the economic institute of slavery) had been destined to fail. In the end, Brown and his men were quickly defeated and captured. Brown sustained serious wounds from a sabre and two of his three sons were killed in the fighting against soldiers led by Robert E. Lee. Frederick Douglas refused Brown's invitation to join the insurrection - Douglas deemed the plan to be suicidal. The Harper's Ferry raid was put down in days with 16 deaths—10 were members of Brown's group. The "raid" took place in October of 1859, Brown's trial unfolded in November, and he was hung before a large assortment of soldiers and onlookers on December, 2, 1859. Nonetheless, Browns unsuccessful raid had attached itself to the gears and pulleys of history—slavery was done for.
I am, like most observers, struggling to find historical context for the absolutely remarkable events in the past few days in which a heretofore anonymous young man, Luigi Mangione, assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson on a New York City street. Mangione escaped on an electric bicycle, but the act appears to have peeled back the repressed veneer of passivity and resignation that characterize the mindset of America, and revealed a shocking substrate of U.S. collective distress.
Jokes, snark, celebration and the almost instant lauding of the assassin have reverberated across social media. For a nation so morally confused, lost and numbed that the public willfully handed a mandate to the mediocre, bumbling fascist, Donald Trump, a mere month ago, it appears almost surrealistic to contemplate both the quantity and the quality of resentment that smolders beneath our seeming national mood of defeat. The referendum on violence as a viable form of redress has been - as it was immediately following the events of Harper's Ferry 165 years ago - proven to be unresolved and ongoing.
Unlike John Brown, who had been a major public figure - a celebrity and vibrant voice on the issue of slavery long before his capture at Harper's Ferry - Mangione emerged out of nowhere to (perhaps inadvertently) represent millions of dispossessed, voiceless individuals. While the act of assassinating a major perpetrator in the bloodbath of the US predatory health insurance industry seemed, in retrospect, likely to open up societal rifts, few could have predicted how pitched and strident the public outcry would be.
Songs lauding Mangione's assassination of Thompson have gone viral on the internet. "Free Luigi," has become a meme. T-shirts with the slogan "Deny, Defend, Depose"—written on the bullet casings from Mangione's fatal shots—have been printed on t-shirts that sell for $25 on many sites. Other shirts have Luigi Mangione written in script across a picture of the video game character, Luigi, holding a gun. Another shirt portrays a child holding a machine gun with the slogan, "Universal Healthcare, Let's Give It A Shot". It is indeed ironic that Mangione’s anti-corporate deed should inspire so much entrepreneurial zeal.
One of the verses of a Jonathan Mann song posted on YouTube begins with the following verse:
You can draw a straight line
As straight as they come
From the misery of millions
To Brian Thompson
Under his leadership Profits rose
And all that it cost was a million gravestones
Some have labeled Mangione a folk hero, but if John Brown's legacy proves at all prophetic, pundits, politicians and anonymous keyboard warriors will battle to shape Luigi Mangione into a collection of caricatured interpretations.
Charles J.G. Griffin, offers this from a 2009 paper entitled, 'John Brown's "Madness"':
"But on one point, at least, a great many of Brown’s contemporaries were agreed: Brown himself was almost certainly “mad.” In pulpits, public meetings, and a significant number of the nation’s 4,000 newspapers, North and South, Brown was routinely judged to be “deluded,” “fanatical,” “maniacal,” or “crazed.”........Some pointed to heredity or personal tragedy as the source of Brown’s derangement, dismissing Harper’s Ferry as a frightening but isolated incident. Others saw Brown as a man driven to insanity by the words or deeds of others, arguing that the raid was representative of the increasingly chaotic and irrational state of the Union itself. And still others believed that Brown’s mania was divinely inspired, his raid a providential intervention into the nation’s affairs."
It would seem, from two of the most famous depictions of John Brown - by Frederick Douglas and by Henry David Thoreau - that those who lauded Brown regarded him as quite sane. Thoreau, in his "A Plea for John Brown," written shortly before Brown's trial said this:
"Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves."
It should be noted that Thoreau's admiration for Brown was unequivocal. Unlike the pundits of today, who feel absolutely mandated to offer a condemnation of violence as a sort of rhetorical tic, Thoreau, well known as a seminal figure in the evolution of non-violent resistance, never tempers his admiration for Brown with doubts about the captured hero's chosen methods.
Frederick Douglass, speaking at the graduation ceremony at Storer College 21 years after John Brown's execution had this to say:
"The crown of martyrdom is high, far beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, . . . Cold, calculating and unspiritual as most of us are, we are not wholly insensible to real greatness; and when we are brought in contact with a man of commanding mold, towering high and alone above the millions, free from all conventional fetters, true to his own moral convictions, a “law unto himself,” ready to suffer misconstruction, ignoring torture and death for what he believes to be right, we are compelled to do him homage."
Douglass, like Thoreau, observed that ordinary human beings must contemplate heroes from behind a veil of their own limitations.
But what about Luigi Mangione? Should we be universally obligated to first offer a reflexive disavowal of violence before we even begin to unpack his significance? We are just beginning to learn a little bit about Mangione - that he comes from a privileged background, that he has a masters in engineering from an Ivy League school. We also have reason to believe that he is unusually thoughtful and cautious for a man who took the mortal risk that not one in 330 million US residents had taken. In his review of Theodore (The Unabomber) Kaczynski's manifesto he wrote:
"Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn't possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self defense."
While partial approval of the unabomber's societal formulations may not be a good look from a public relations standpoint, Mangione's assessment of the current human predicament rather follows the standard model proposed by any number of responsible climate scientists—the only difference is the proposal that violence may be the only intervention to stymy the fossil fuel extinction juggernaut.
Where do we set the moral threshold of violence?
I had suggested, as a thought experiment—before Mangione's capture—that we view the assassination of Brian Thompson as having a parallel to the 1942 killing of Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich. Few of us would feel comfortable condemning Czech assassin, Jan Kubis, for hurling a fatal grenade at Heydrich's Mercedes in the May, 27, 1942 assault that took out the architect of Nazi genocide. Political violence summons violent retribution that ordinary people like myself have no willingness to risk. In Kubis' case, he met his last moments face to face with 800 machinegun wielding SS troops. Mangione is certain to spend the rest of his gifted life behind bars if he is not killed in custody.
Is it okay to kill Heydrich, but not Thompson? Where do we set the moral threshold of violence?
The quest has already begun to reduce Mangione to a generic lunatic. Cable news is awash with public psychiatrists eager to pronounce him with a neat mental health diagnosis. As such, the past effort to "insane wash" John Brown is being brought out of historical mothballs. The editors of Counterpunch have just published Mangione's alleged "manifesto," and I am struck by the measured, rational, modest tone of this single paragraph:
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
In preparation for this piece I read the section in Martin Luther King's autobiography discussing the dialogue between MLK and Malcolm X—a rhetorical confrontation ironically cut short by the assassination of both men. I learned that MLK was not entirely comfortable with merely a "moral" argument on behalf of non-violence - he also felt compelled to make a practical point - that the Black community lacked the force of numbers and preparedness to challenge the militarized state.
As a lifelong believer in nonviolent civil disobedience, I am not comfortable at all advocating for political violence, but, like Thoreau, I feel that I have no right to condemn those like John Brown or Luigi Mangione who invest their entire being toward the goal of liberation. Objectively, I wonder if nonviolence and violence are opposites or, rather, shades of one another, complementary tactics working in tandem. When MLK was murdered, people rioted for almost two weeks and 43 people died.
It is likely true that a vibrant population might manifest its determination with both acts of civil disobedience and violence. The more fearful and repressive a society becomes, the smaller the window for civil disobedience. I suggest that political writers, rather than condemning violence as a glabella reflex, ought to be analyzing the viability of peaceful protest. Luigi Mangione tells us that peaceful protest has no effect on corporate malice.
It is too early to know how significant a historical figure Luigi Mangione will ultimately become. The American news cycle can obliterate almost any event in short order. It seems, at this point in time, that Mangione has ripped open the skin enclosing a vast repository of popular rage. One hopes that his violent act summons the force of sustained civil disobedience - general strikes, public protests, non-payment of taxes and a willingness to bring the corporate machinery of death to a grinding halt. The fact that people can suddenly imagine such improbable things is, in and of itself, astonishing. Two weeks ago we were effectively dead.
