The New Age of Assassination
Words BC Wilson
Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
This is the dawning of the Age of Assassination.
As a country, we’ve had a relatively long break from political assassinations. These things seem to come in waves, on top of periods of strife and disorder. We can pinpoint the end of the last wave on March 30, 1981, when John Hinckley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan. That was a long wave. It began with the killing of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and rolled on to take the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. If you include the attempts on Nixon and Ford (twice!), as well as the killing of John Lennon in 1980, you have to admit it was a tsunami of assassination.
Remember this? Here comes history again...
So, it’s been a while. Those were tough times. The civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the rise of rock and roll and the drug culture, the Vietnam War, economic doldrums and the high price of gasoline all contributed to the disruptions, and in desperate times, apparently, more people start listening to the voices in their heads that tell them their problems will be solved, or at least avenged, by publicly shooting someone in power.
In the nineties the economy shifted into a higher gear and social disruption took a back seat in our increasingly larger cars. Everyone was too busy registering new domain names and watching their day trades; nobody paid much attention to politics for a while. Assassinations were limited mostly to rap musicians. School shootings were big, too, of course. From Columbine to Virginia Tech we’ve had an awful run of campus mayhem. Only history will tell if we’re out of the kids-murdering-kids phase of our history, or if we’ll be stuck in it for longer.
And then the crazy happy bubbles started bursting. We first crashed all the way back in September 2001, when we as a country experienced an assassination like we never had before. And we’ve crashed a few more times since then, as the markets for tech, banks, and finally homes all popped. Entire classifications of jobs are disappearing from the landscape. Huge numbers of people who used to report to work in factories are now scrambling to put their lives back together. Employment is down, and crime is coming back up. People are unhappy again.
I’m going to insert a paragraph from an interesting article I found that puts assassination as an American pastime into perspective. We do it more that you might think:
Foreigners tend to perceive the United States as a country prone to political violence and assassination. Nine American Presidents – Andrew Jackson in 1835, Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901 Harry S. Truman in 1950, John F. Kennedy in 1963, Richard Nixon in 1974, Gerald Ford twice in 1975, and Ronald Reagan in 1981 – have been the targets of assassination. Attempts have also been made on the lives of one President-elect (Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933) and three Presidential candidates (Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, and George Wallace in 1972). In addition, eight governors, seven U.S. Senators, nine U.S. Congressmen, eleven mayors, 17 state legislators, and eleven judges have been violently attacked. No other country with a population of over 50 million has had as high a number of political assassinations or attempted assassinations. (Source: DigitalHistory.com)
Now, at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, we are watching the inevitable disruptions that arise whenever people start to get desperate and angry. And we are back to focusing on our politicians. Gabrielle Giffords is a warning that the crazies are tuned in to the conspiracy channel, and they’re on the hunt once again. If economic and social stability is what it takes to keep the assassinations down, let’s all hope we get some more of that, and soon.
Now, on to the paper.
Gun rallies (pro and con) held in Richmond
On Monday, people went to Richmond to talk about guns. The front page of the Pilot features a photo of a man wearing a “pistol” on his waist that looks, literally, like a small M16. I didn’t even know that existed.
No motorcycle rides for kids under 8
If this law passes.
Skeptics question groceries at revamped Waterside.
It is reasonable to suggest, as some have, that the closure of the downtown Market at Harbor Heights might mean that downtown is not a good place to sell groceries. It certainly didn’t work for Farm Fresh. However, I think the problem there was not that people don’t want to buy food, but that people need a more unique experience. The Market downtown was just an ordinary suburban-style supermarket jammed into a ten-story building. It was doomed. On the other hand, a fish and farm market in the model of Pike’s Place Market in Seattle would be something else entirely. That’s a destination with the power to attract people, not just a cookie-cutter grocery store. So, I wouldn’t write off the idea just yet.
Eagle cam!
The WVEC Eagle Cam is back online. Now you can watch the eagles nesting at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens. It’s a dark day for eagle privacy, certainly, but maybe they don’t mind, since they don’t know what a camera is.
""
COMMENTS
Facebook comments:
ABOUT THE WRITER
BC Wilson is an internet strategist, freelance writer, and graduate of ODU's Creative Non-fiction Program. He canceled his cable TV subscription four years ago and now spends his free time dragging his children around in a bike trailer and torturing his wife by playing the recorder.
Other posts by BC Wilson.
Other posts by BC Wilson.
RELATED POSTS
- Op-ed: Bus Rapid Transit a Viable Alternative to Extending The Tide
- Release: Hampton Roads Gets its ‘Reality Check’
- Candidate op-ed: Norfolk: Find your home here
- Follow-up Story: ODU Students Pitch App Ideas to Tech-Gurus and Entrepreneurs at This Weekend’s Start Norfolk
- Op-Ed: An Account of a (Horrific) First-Time HRT Experience
More Opinion Posts
RSS
Leave it to the libs. Nevermind that 9/11 was perpetrated by insane muslims. Nobody really cares about the DC sniper shootings, right?! VT shootings? Bah, dude was Asian. Fort Hood? Another muslim, nothing to see here. Happy Land club? Hispanic. WAIT. It’s all your fault, middle class Americans! How DARE you bitterly cling to your guns and religion! Don’t you know you are CAUSING all our societal problems?!
Hi Robert,
Methinks you’ve wandered astray of a regional news site, Fox.com or some place like a regional news site or Fox.com. Of course, your comments on those sites just disappear in the blizzard of equivalently stated opinions. Here, however, those thoughts stand out, which causes me to think that maybe you’re onto something.
Maybe this is a right-wing wingnut call to all like-minded to descend upon every alternative (aka left-of-center) media site out there and lay waste a new blizzard where people may actually notice. Wow. Wow. Wow! Genius! Of course, that would only leave the liberals to run rampant without a check or a balance on the mainstream sites. Ah well. Can’t win ‘em all.
By the way, I didn’t see any mention of who was possibly to blame for our US assassinations nor did I see a blatant call against arms or religion in the above commentary. Your diatribe says way more about your deep-seated racism and fears than anything else. It’s very sad.
BC
I can’t wait to invade eagle privacy. It’s going to be great!
Where’s the thumbs up smiley?
I think there are a lot of things to dissect from your article. I also think that you’re riding in the mystical hovercraft of ambiguity that pleasantly strides along the line between implication and inference.
I personally didn’t think that you were passing a partisan agenda from your article, but to people with certain pre-existing perceptions on reality, I could see how the inference was made, albeit unjustly and potentially ignorantly.
That said, I am fascinated by US history up through the time of “Reconstruction”. I’ve never really tallied the assassinations in our history before, and it’s eerily impressive and disconcerting.
I just hope that all the people on the right that fear some sort of physical altercation between the Feds and the armed “right” don’t make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Aye. It makes my stomach turn how easily we can arm ourselves and take another life. Blech, thank God American Idol premieres on Wednesday!
Just noticed – not trying to start a riot – does alternative media always equal left of center? Is exclusivity inherent?
Jeff Daniels (not that Jeff Daniels)
Hi Jeff,
I intended my remark to be mostly tongue-in-cheek. However, I would love to hear a bigger discussion about how “alternative” media can be liberal if the mainstream media is also liberal, as many believe.
Thanks,
Anon (as in “Anonymously yours” in public.)
So quickly I am called a racist. Do you guys have anything else besides “racist”? Oh yes, of course, I wandered away from the evil behemoth “Fox News” which millions of stupid Americans follow in a mindless trance. Come on, we can do better than immediate personal attacks? We have killings, even mass murders, from all types, as the examples I cited established, and they’ve been happening for quite some time. To call this a recent trend, , or to say, as the columnist did, they are “the inevitable disruptions that arise whenever people start to get desperate and angry,” is, I’m sorry, an absolute farce. These events are the inevitable disruptions of insane people. This has been happening since the beginning of civilization. We simply have more people now. That’s all. Please consider, there is often no meaning in insanity. Yes I realize it’s much more convenient to attribute it all those with whom you disagree politically.
Deviation is among the great consequences of our prosperity and freedoms. More prosperous people means greater numbers of deviants, certainly greater deviations, and greater access to tools which can be used as weapons. Guns were not used to mass murder on 9/11/01, nor were they used at the Happy Land club. But they are easy targets for blaming. And blame makes for great rhetoric. Guns and religion have been blamed often, even on this site; forgive me for using one comment to respond to it all.
The partisan agenda on the left is constant undertone drumbeat of the blaming of America and Americans. That who we are is wrong, and we must change into someone else in order to be acceptable to the left. As though what we are seeing is somehow new. As though societies have never before been thusly divided, certainly not after wave upon wave of invasion. The real blame lies with humanity. We are imperfect. There have always been crazies and there always will be; this is not a new phenomenon, to be singled out, denoted a special case among all history, despite what the columnist would have you believe.
I don’t know about this “age” thing. Arbitrary delineations between points in time that can be moved to support any assertion or narrative without being, technically, incorrect. If nothing else, there’s a quantum problem at play; we’re too close to the events to classify them like historians without that classification having a direct impact on the narratives that guide what will become history.
Also, I think the injection of clearly violent rhetoric by a fringe selection of the dumbest, most kneejerk conservatives (thanks mostly to the media, including that liberal media that everyone loves to complain about) had an influence on this nutter. U.S. political discourse has gotten crazy again, like we haven’t seen in a good while; hell, am I the only one that remembers Joe Stack and his final flight about a year ago?