Land of the Free and Home of the Armed

[tealin]

Well, it was something to see Assassins (surpassing expectations; that's saying something) and then a few days later, news of the latest mass-murder in an American school. Those who know me in person have probably had their ear talked off about how insightful the musical is to the rot in the American dream, and how the phenomenon has shifted from targeting the president to targeting innocents, as the cultural status of the president falls and his security detail rises – but it's a manifestation of the same twist in the national subconscious. Nine years before Columbine, Sondheim nailed it, and anyone questioning where this all comes from need only listen to this show, as it's all laid out quite plainly. (And it's fun.)

Watch on YouTube

It takes a lot of men to make a gun,
Hundreds ... many men to make a gun:
Men in the mines to dig the iron,
Men in the mills to forge the steel,
Men at machines to turn the barrel,
Mold the trigger, shape the wheel –
It takes a lot of men to make a gun ...
One gun ...

And all you have to do is
Move you little finger,
Move your little finger and –
You can change the world.
Why should you be blue
When you've you little finger?
Prove how just a little finger can
Change the world.

What a wonder is a gun!
What a versatile invention!
First of all, when you've a gun –
Everybody pays attention.
When you think what must be done,
Think of all that it can do:
Remove a scoundrel, unite a party,
Preserve the Union, promote the sales of my book!
Insure my future, my niche in history,
And then the world will see
That I am not a man to overlook!
Ha-ha!

And all you have to do is
Squeeze your little finger,
Ease your little finger back –
You can change the world.
Whatever else is true,
You trust your little finger.
Just a single little finger can
Change the world.

I got this really great gun –
shit, where is it?
No, it's really great – wait –
Shit, where is it?
Anyway, it's just a .38, but,
It's a gun!
You can make a statement – wrong –
With a gun!
Even if you fail,
It tells 'em who you are, where you stand.
This one was on sale! It –
– no not the shoe –
Well, actually the shoe was, too –
No, that's not it –
Shit, I had it –
Here, got it! – Yeah! There it is! And –

All you have to do is
Crook your little finger,
Hook your little finger 'round –
                   – shit, I shot it
– You can change the world.
Simply follow through,
And look, you little finger can
Slow them down
To a crawl,
Show them all,
Big and small ...
It took a little finger no time to
Change the world!

A gun kills many men before it's done,
Hundreds, long before you shoot the gun:
Men in the mines and in the steel mills,
Men at machines, who died for what?
Something to buy – a watch, a shoe, a gun,
A thing to make the bosses richer,
But a gun claims many men before it's done...
Just
One
More...

Then, yesterday morning, was a fascinating programme about human history, the Enlightenment, fascism, and neuroscience – Steven Pinker is the darling of public radio thinkpieces, but here I heard him directly challenged for the first time by someone who knows what he's talking about and thinks Pinker is a Pollyanna. Inevitably, the election of Trump is often the crux of the conversation, but neo-fascist movements in Europe also get a look-in. They then get onto the power of storytelling and the neuroscience of persuasion, and psyched me right up to keep working on my book, as The Power of Story is a lot of what's behind my willingness to pour so much of my life into it. I doubt that a proper retelling of the story will change the world, but if it can change a few people as it has changed me, it will be worth it. No guns required.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

While I have never even heard of Assassins before, it looks very intriguing. I will add (to no particular end) that my favourite presidential assassin is a would-be assassin of a would-be president, name John Flammang Schrank. He attempted to assassinate Teddy Roosevelt as he ran for a third term as a member of a third party. He was an oddly lucid man who despaired what he had done, and wrote very interesting letters from his psychiatric prison. He also had a troubled upbringing, and I was fascinated to see that his girlfriend had died on the General Slocum (a terrible shipwreck in New York), which contributed greatly to his poor mental health.

After every tragedy, I think people rush to judgement, opinion and action out of a misguided need for catharsis or resolution. If people would pace themselves better (or ration their compassion), think more and feel less, we'd likely see more get done. I doubt we shall ever see this happen though, as it goes against something fundamentally human. I also wish the media would shut the hell up about school shootings, this is entirely their fault.

[tealin]

I don't know if 'feeling less' is necessarily the ticket to success – cold rationality is capable of plenty of sins as well, as the pro-gun lobby demonstrates every time this happens (though one could argue that is also emotion, wearing a mask of rationality). If the depth of feeling could be channelled into productive actions rather than simply performance, then things might happen. As it is, it's as if simply expressing how upset the situation makes you will somehow precipitate change on its own, as though lawmakers were doting parents who couldn't bear to see their precious babes upset.

I mean, the truly coldly rational people here are the ones taking money from the NRA, or at least not saying or doing anything that would cause the NRA to use its money against them. It's selfish, but it's sensible. Once you start arguing for things like the value of human life, you get into woolly immaterial 'emotional' territory. Surely that's more important, in the end, than the interpretation of a few lines of text written at the turn of the 18th century? But you can't quantify it – it's emotional.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply that feeling nothing is the goal. But I also think people over-empathize post crisis. It starts with people with no direct connection to the problem indulging in "if that was me" style thinking, and that results in overly traumatic empathy that causes them to shut down and move on. I suspect people like us, who indulge in the imagined recreations of others' tragic deaths, are somewhat unusual in our ability to take something positive away from it. Or perhaps it's how those stories are presented to us.

The other problem post-crisis with over-emotional thinking is that people tend to attack the 'other side'. But really, if you want to create laws or change, drawing people to your cause very effective (though you still have the problem of bought or intractable government officials.)

If America could pass gun reform laws or create effective measures to prevent school shootings, I would like to imagine it would not require those laws to be passed in the wake of a disaster; baseline support should be good enough. But as you said, they're up against a tough, well-financed opponent who has been doing this for a long time.

And as an aside, I think that economists, actuaries, sociologists, etc. could provide non-emotional justification for the value of human life. In an abstract sense, a person has no inherent value, but as a member (or even visitor) of a community, that value immediately becomes non-zero.