In a minor news item that you might have missed, Donald Trump got shot, recently.
Alright, only just. A bullet, fired by the now-standard “lone young man with mental problems”, missed Trump’s head and just barely grazed the top of his ear. He was about the least amount of “shot” that a person can be and still qualify.
When I used to sell chainsaws, I’d occasionally give myself a minor nick on the chain of a non-running, stationary saw. Donald Trump was shot in the same way I’ve been cut by a high-powered chainsaw - technically true, but far from the spurting, crimson medical disaster that’s implied.
This hasn’t stopped everyone freaking out about it, of course. It’s a huge PR win for Trump, because he gets to play the martyr whilst still drawing breath. It’s a blow to the already shaky Biden re-election campaign, as any attack on Trump is now open to accusations of stoking hatred.
More broadly, the reaction has been the same one that gun violence in American always draws; huge, billowing clouds of disingenuous hand-wringing. Modern America often feels like a bullet-riddled, neon-lit, healthcare-denying sprawl of opioid addiction, industrial pollution and mega-churches, so I’m not saying the worst aspect of the country is the hypocrisy, but the hypocrisy is probably still on the podium.
Pacifist Terminator.
Every weekday, I get an email from Arnold Schwarzenegger.
If I could travel back in time and tell my nine year old self, he’d be thrilled. He’d also ask what an email was and what had happened to his hairline, but I digress.
Every weekday, I get an email from Arnold Schwarzenegger and his various employees, discussing trends in gym culture and general health and fitness news. It’s mostly useful and I like that it’s trying to send a positive message, although it can suffer from toxic positivity. Arnold has been a millionaire for over forty years1, and whilst I think he’s a fundamentally well-meaning person, he seems to be the type of old fashioned Republican who thinks it’s possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Maybe in his day it was.
Last week, however, Arnold’s email was spent decrying the assassination attempt against Trump and urging people not to turn to violence.
That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, telling people that solving problems with violence isn’t okay.
Who can forget his iconic roles, like Conan the Negotiator, a hulking barbarian who famously solved his problems with long discussions and drum circles?
Or maybe Commando, in which Arnold’s daughter is kidnapped and he responds by writing a strongly worded letter to five hundred faceless foreigners before tutting at their boss and wagging his finger?
Arnold Schwarzenegger is literally the poster boy for wholesale, indiscriminate gun violence, and now he’s urging people not to try to shoot their way out of problems?! His most famous character is on-screen for a minute and forty-four seconds before he pulls a man’s heart out through his chest for not letting him steal his clothes. I counted.
Alongside that (and including the aforementioned Conan movies) Arnold Schwarzenegger has killed eight hundred and ninety-five people in the movies, according to the sort of websites that should probably be on a government watch list of its own. (If we include his recent Netflix series and a very early role in The Streets Of San Francisco, Arnold’s kill count rises to 920.)
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who can committed casual murder nearly a thousand times in fiction, all within American movies, is condemning the violence in American culture. Next week, expect Road Runner to condemn the use of the word “Meep.”
Back To Black
If Arnold Schwarzenegger’s condemnation of the Trump attack is patently ludicrous, perhaps less trigger-happy celebrities can weigh in.
Step forward Jack Black, actor and (now formerly) one half of comedy rock band Tenacious D.
At a concert in Australia, a cake was brought on stage to celebrate his bandmate Kyle Gass’ birthday. As Gass blew out the candles he was asked to make a wish, and went with “Don’t miss Trump next time.”
I laughed. In footage of the event, Jack Black laughed. It’s a good line. Afterwards, however, Black claimed that he was “blindsided” by Gass’ remark and condemned all political violence, before cancelling the rest of the tour and leaving future Tenacious D projects hanging in the balance. Gass, meanwhile, has been dropped by his agent and is attempting to find the correct amount of public grovelling required to rescue his career.
Maybe Jack Black has some credentials decrying violence. Sure, he might have had early roles as a background character in Demolition Man (in which Sly Stallone punches the future for being a pussy) and Enemy Of The State, in which Black played a government hacker trying to help assassins find Will Smith’s private citizen so they can kill him for political reasons, and yes, the first time I remember seeing Black in anything was when he played an arms dealer in The Jackal, in a scene where Bruce Willis graphically blows his arm off to remind audiences that violence is cool, but all of these projects were in Black’s youth. He’s mostly known as a comedy actor. He’s the voice of Kung Fu panda.
He’s also the voice of ClapTrap in the upcoming Borderlands movie, a film based on a franchise of video games where graphic, over-the-top violence is the whole selling point. The Borderlands games are admittedly a satire, depicting an ultra-capitalist future in which life is cheap (you can be reconstructed from your stem cells if you die, for a fee) and violence is everywhere; weapons are available on every corner from vending machines. It’s not exactly realist-
…Okay, fine. Jack Black is playing a robot that shits bullets in a film based around a cartoonishly bloody game franchise. But he’s absolutely against violence, or jokes about violence. Except when he laughs at them or is paid to be in a film.
Do As We Say.
One group of people who might be sincere in their condemnation of political violence is politicians. After all, violence is only acceptable when it’s happening to other people. Joe Biden called Donald Trump after the shooting to order a pizza and check the weather, and once it had been explained to the President what the call was meant to be about, he apparently reassured Donald that political violence would be condemned.
Biden has recently resumed selling bombs to the Israelis so that they can drop them on hospitals and refugee camps, so we should probably establish that “political violence” means violence against politicians, not violence by politicians, which is fine and normal.
Political figures from all over the spectrum have leapt forward to say that political violence has no place in America, a country that has now shot four of its 46 Presidents dead and wounded three others.
Special mentions are due for a number of other Presidents. The first was Andrew Jackson, in an 1835 attempt in which an assassin stepped towards him and fired two pistols, both of which jammed. A man with a concealed pistol got within a few feet of William Howard Taft before being apprehended. FDR was shot at, and while the shots missed, they killed the nearby Mayor of Chicago and wounded four others. A gunfight broke out when assassins tried to break into Harry Truman’s temporary residence in 1950 (the White House was being rennovated) in which two people died and two were badly wounded. The score was evenly split between would-be assassins and police.
Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a former Manson Family member, pulled a gun on Gerald Ford in 1975, but it was improperly loaded and failed to fire. Seventeen days later Ford was narrowly missed by another bullet after a bystander grabbed the shooter’s arm.
Being U.S. President is statistically one of the most dangerous things a human being can do (unless you’re George W. Bush, in which case you might just have a shoe thrown at you). If you worked at a business with 46 employees and four of them were dead, three of them were wounded and there had been at least five decent attempts on the lives of the others, you’d find a new job immediately after you found your first priority, which should be “something to hide behind.”
This is, of course, dependent on the above definition of “political violence” as something that is done to rather than by elected officials. If we factor in the number of U.S. backed coups and assassinations in the world (just the ones we know about) then being President of anywhere becomes a dicey proposition. Nonetheless, following Trump’s very minor wound, America is once again attempting to declare that it is not a country that should ever be assosciated with bloodshed.
Iconoclasm.
Y’know who is happy to be assosciated with bloodshed, on this occasion?
Me.
I’ll say it, and I’m not going to walk it back like Kyle Gass: I’m disappointed that Trump wasn’t killed. I would have been happy if he was.
I can agree, intellectually, with the people who say that violence is always bad and that we shouldn’t condone murder, but at a certain point, practicality has to step in. I don’t think it’s good to murder people, UNLESS THEY’RE GOING TO DO HARM TO OTHERS.
In Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s renegade cop is castigated by the mayor for having apparently got into trouble the previous year. Harry shrugs and explains that he saw a naked man chasing a screaming woman and waving a butcher knife, so he shot him, as it seemed like the expedient thing to do.
As an audience, we’re meant to see the no-nonsense logic of this. Many people, if wandering around San Francisco with a loaded magnum for whatever reason, might like to think that they’d behave in the same way. Trump and his supporters would love to imagine that they’re Dirty Harry, even if they never fully grasped the nuance of the character.
The awkward truth is that violence can be justified to save people from harm. And another Trump term is going to cause immense harm. People are absolutely going to die if Trump gets in. Bigots of all stripes will feel that they have tacit approval to commit hate crimes, and people who aren’t white, christian and heteronormal are going to immediately be in more danger than usual. Trump is soft on Russia and Israel, meaning their respective war efforts - and war crimes - will only intensify. Trump’s supporters turning COVID into a political wedge issue led to inumerable deaths, before we get to America’s already horrendous healthcare system being made even more draconian and inaccessible under Republican rule.
The Republican party also loves to slash workers rights. American industry will be made less safe, because America needs to compete with China, a nation where workers sleep at the same factory in which they’re employed and are frequently given crystal meth to make them more productive.
I can’t say this clearly enough: A lot of people are going to die if Trump gets in again, and orders of magnitude more people will suffer, in the U.S. and worldwide. Furthermore, the Republican party has bound itself so inextricably to Trumpism that without him, their whole party would now disintegrate into factional squabbles.
Which means I think it would have been better for the world and for America if Trump had been killed. It might not be a very nice thing to say, or even to think, but unlike America I can at least be honest about it.
In case anyone wants to accuse me of hypocrisy, I also think that people are going to die if Biden gets in. It’s just that it will be a smaller number of people.
I’d also agree that a great number of American presidents deserved to be killed for their actions. Even the sainted Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the (so far only) American Civil War, had journalists who were critical of him locked up, because they were detrimental to the war effort. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the best Presidents America has ever had and the closest thing the nation has yet managed to a socialist leader, signed off on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War Two.
Arresting journalists who criticise you and putting people in camps due to their ethnicity are both examples of things that Hitler did, and nobody bats an eyelid if you say someone should have shot Hitler. Hell, one guy eventually DID shoot Hitler, and the fact that the guy in question was also Hitler is the only reason we don’t give him more credit.
Violence is always unpleasant. It’s also something that is sometimes necessary. You can argue that I’m wrong about this, but at least I have the courage to make the statement. And if I’m wrong, you’ll have to forgive me for thinking that violence is the answer - I was raised on a lot of American culture.
As a brief end note, I’m trying to transition away from Substack as they keep platforming and making money from Far Right figures. I’m intending to move this email to Buttondown, as soon as Buttondown’s “transfer mail list” feature stops being a steaming pile of feculent dogshit. As and when I accomplish this, it shouldn’t make any material difference to you, the reader, except that the colour scheme might change. Also, as I’m pretty sure I just advocated for the murder of all U.S. Presidents, I might get booted off this platform anyway, and my next trip to the States could well involve some awkward questions at the airport, and a cavity search that borders on the archaeological…
Arnold Schwarzenegger ploughed all his early bodybuilding winnings into real estate, and was actually worth more than a million dollars before he turned to acting, which is how he was largely able to pick and choose his roles despite his thick accent and marquee-extending name.