A Call to Kill
Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Points USA, recently posted this on X: “Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegesth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.” Hegseth responded with, “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.”
I was struck by not only how juvenile the exchange was, but by the ease with which these people embrace killing. Senseless death doesn’t seem to matter. Whether it involves those who will die because of their healthcare policies or their position on vaccines or the people (whether they are guilty of drug trafficking or not) on boats in the Caribbean Sea, death comes as easy as turning on FOX news. They talk about it like toddlers excited about a new toy or teenagers jumping up and down after a deadly kill on Battlefield 6.
The excitement draws my attention. Kolvet’s post wasn’t just a defense of Hegseth. It was an expression of something far more debased and sinister: a desire for violence, a wish to have more victims of the flame to own his perceived enemies. A shared bloodthirst (Hegseth granted his wish) exposed as a critical feature of a politics that is indifferent to suffering (or, more accurately, indifferent to the suffering of those who aren’t worthy of life as they imagine it).
And, of course, this thought spiraled. Death surrounds us more than usual in these difficult days. I am not talking about that inevitable fact of life: that death awaits each of us and the ones we love. Our first breath requires our last. That much is true. But I am thinking about the million or so dead from Covid, the senseless death in Gaza, the dead from mass shootings and the ease with which we see it and move on. Something in the soul gets malformed, because of the refusal to linger. And that is an American inheritance.
In 1977, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography that “our ability to stomach…rising grotesqueness in images (moving and still) and in print has a stiff price.”
“In the long run,” she wrote, “it works out not as a liberation of but as a subtraction from the self: a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life…. The point is not to be upset, to be able to confront the horrible with equanimity.”
Americans have been inundated with killing and death. With words and with images. And every time I hear some pundit or politician talk about killing with clinical indifference (was it legal or not) or an image of a boat with human beings on it destroyed with clinical precision, I shudder.
One can see how indifference can give license to bloodthirst—to the mob. How the muting of moral outrage in the face of killing or calls to kill can set monsters free.
There is a passage in James Baldwin’s essay, “To Crush a Serpent,” that haunts:
“Those ladders to fire—the burning of the witch, the heretic, the Jew, the nigger, the faggot—have always failed to redeem, or even to change in any way whatever, the mob. They merely epiphanize and force their connection on the only plain on which the mob can meet: The charred bones connect its members and give them a reason to speak to one another, for the charred bones are the sum total of their individual self-hatred, eternalized. The burning or lynching or torturing gives them something to talk about.”
The blowing up of boats in the Caribbean Sea gives them reason to speak to one another, something to talk about. Venezuela’s oil and death coat the tongue. Monsters roam.
Kolvet’s post in defense of Hegseth and his clamoring for more carnage exposed a naked truth: that the mob stands at the ready.
The mob, and mob-adjacent people in this and perhaps all countries are perhaps best understood as people with unhealed, unacknowledged and festering, generational trauma which tends to metastasize into 'identifying with the aggressor' and acting out their victimizers' blood lust in turn. The only way, it seems, out of this is for each of us, as individuals and in community to call upon our higher angels to alchemize our suffering into understanding and empathy. Which means accepting pain, in some ways allowing our base selves to be crucified and resurrected by it. No turning away, no projecting our weakness, our immorality, our helplessness upon others and dancing around the fire of burning bones. We must look, and look, and look and finally see what's been going on for milennia, then vow that "This ends with me. I will do no more harm, forever."
It is our loss, our peril to become immune to the hatred and savagery happening in our world. We are diminished as human beings, yet those of us who are sickened and disgusted by the horrendous suffering are mocked as “woke”. I worry that our pushback, our votes won’t be enough.