One of the most ironic things about extremists is their absolute anathema of feeling ambivalent about anything. To them, all the answers are simple. You just have to sit down and figure it out.
It was so with Charlie Kirk, too. He thought--and this has been re-published several times now--that the unwanted deaths of some Americans was worth the maintenance of what he believed to be viable and deserved gun rights, that that was the price that needed to be paid for his concept of 'freedom.'
Thus are the machinations of those who believe that they, too, will live forever, and that nobody would dare mess with their lives and their very existence. He, instead, became a sought target, and a recipient of the very philosophy that he espoused.
Will I miss Charlie Kirk? No, but I'm sad for his family. His ideas, though, are still out of the mainstream of American thought, though follow-up articles will suggest otherwise. I'm sure he became quite rich because of the intensity of his presentations of them. With that comes some semblance of deservedness and lack of perspective as to what exactly his worth really is in the bigger picture of things. His potential to do far more harm to our public discourse, largely because of the lack of effective resistance to his absolutist notions, stood to propel him to what some may have called future greatness.
Is he a tribute to our First Amendment freedom of expression? Only if you accept it as a gateway to his insistence that his way is the only right way. Did he want to take people on? Yes, we know he did. But only in surging to prove his point, not to accept anyone else's. He didn't flourish in the exchange of ideas. He wanted to bury and destroy others' adequacy. That didn't feed his intellect. It fed his ego.
But did he deserve to be attacked and killed? No. See? I can feel both ways about him. That he became a recipient of his own twisted values shouldn't be surprising, though, the way that political violence has never drifted far from our consciousness--and that goes back quite some way, at least to Lincoln's assassination if not farther. Our very nation, in fact, was borne out of the inability to compromise and willingness to shoot it out with the British rather than sit around and wait for them to recognize Americans as equals.
Few people alive remember the shooting of Huey Long, he also of a certain form of craziness and deception disguised as sincerity, and also known for his sweat-drenched, hyper-emotional populism. In 1935, at the height of the attention being paid to him, someone planted a bullet in him and he died from its complications. Being a U.S. Senator and what appeared to be an intraparty presidential candidate who was about to challenge FDR for nomination to a second term, he was a far greater threat to democracy than Kirk, though we will never know what kind of threat Kirk would have been now.
But he understood it. Kirk understood what kind of influence he could be. Because he did what everybody agrees one has the right to do, but few actually do it: He contrived a style of thinking and never relented about informing others of it. We all say we have that right, but only those of us most daring ever afford ourselves of it.
Why? Because few of us are ever as hard-baked as we need to make ourselves to absorb the impact of it and the feedback that will inevitably ensue. But Charlie Kirk likely figured out that, if he hung in there, he would gain a following that would make the naysayers irrelevant. It would take work, and it did. It would take time, and it did, though far less than most people thought.
He must have also seen, and in a sense copied, the effects of someone else who had made the decision to go national with his irrationalisms and--surprise!--he found that people were hungering for it, hungering for the simple, force-filled, pseudo-religious, absolutist ideas. Suddenly, he found that his demagoguery took hold, and we have had to endure ten years of it--and running, finding its way to the White House and its dangerous power.
That's what happens when someone decides to utilize the freedom they have and twist it out of recognition. That is what happens when nobody takes it upon themselves and calls out the nonsense of it, or at least doesn't do it enough. That is what happens when the fierce undertones of the lies and innuendoes aren't responded to with facts laden with equivalent, fierce undertones: Nonsense becomes truth, and truth disappears.
Someone stopped Charlie Kirk from rising to the top of the culture with his piles and piles of illogical conclusions. But there will be another like him, soon enough. Kirk may be made into a martyr of nonsense: someone who, in death, may become larger than the life he was leading. His legacy will be reflective of our inertia and neglect, which also continue.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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