karma

Sowing Discord: The Death of Charlie Kirk

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When I taught high school English and attempted to explain to students how karma works, I employed the analogy of dropping a pebble into a still pond. If the pebble was positive, a pearl, let’s say, the expanding concentric circles spreading outward would promote positivity.  

There’s a Liberty Mutual commercial that effectively illustrates this phenomenon:

A man notices a young girl’s doll has fallen out of her stroller and retrieves it for her. 

The girl’s mother, seeing him rescue the doll, later moves a man’s coffee from the edge of a table where it is in danger of falling off. 

A customer who witnesses the mother’s benevolence is inspired to carry an elderly woman’s groceries . .

Of course, if it’s not a pearl but a turd you drop into a still pond, the expanding karmic circles are going to be negative:

You cut someone off in traffic.

The driver tries to run you off the road, shoots you the bird, screams inaudibly from his pick-up.

You get home to discover your dog has gotten into the trash, having strewn garbage everywhere, so you yell at her, then bop her on her nose with a rolled up magazine . . .

For whatever reason, very early in his young adulthood, Charlie Kirk decided to drop out of college and become a culture warrior, to redress what he feared was a takeover of white culture by brown people, third world immigrants, and lovers who did not share his sexual orientation. To wage this battle, he became a provocateur, a master of manipulating social media platforms like TikTok, and therefore, he became rich and famous and influential because disaffected white males could identify.

Alas, unseasoned young people, like his followers, like his assassin, are susceptible to hyperbolic messaging, are easily influenced.

Not surprisingly, he created enemies, essentially because he broadcast outrageous, often racist and misogynistic statements like “Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee [i.e., Black women] do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”

If you’re a public figure and are dropping asteroid-sized turds like that into the karmic ocean of public discourse, you’re going to make enemies. Being provocative is dangerous, especially when your message reaches millions in a country where assault weapons are as easy to purchase as Sudafed.

Of course, I wish Charlie Kirk were still alive, and I’m thankful that his murderer, a Mormon gone bad, has been apprehended.  I pity Charlie Kirk’s wife and children.  To celebrate his death is ghoulish.

On the other hand, I find it chilling that in the United States of America that by merely quoting postmortem a political operative’s views you find objectionable can get you fired from a public university.

That is  – to coin a phrase – un-American, the antithesis of conservative, a word, unmoored from its etymology, that is now for all intents and purposes a synonym for reactionary. 

And, by the way, wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who rather than stoking anger would try to bring us together as a nation?

Sickroom Notes from a Whiny, Wounded Epicurean

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painting by H. James Hoff

Sickroom Notes from a Whiny, Wounded Epicurean[1]

Perhaps boasting non-stop about my superhuman immune system for the last thirty years wasn’t all that judicious. Oh, you should have heard my cock-a-doodle-doing![2].

My immune system makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Denver Pyle.

I haven’t been ill since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

An airborne virus does a one-eighty when it sees me bopping down the boulevard, etc. 

And it’s true that in my thirty-four years at Porter-Gaud, I maybe missed ten or so days in total, most often because of laryngitis.[3]

Well, comeuppance has arrived, taken off his mask, and sneezed in my face. For the last four days, when it comes to coughing fits, I’ve been giving tubercular John Keats and DH Lawrence a run for their money. Although doubly vaccinated, I drove the day before yesterday for a Covid test, which unsurprisingly was negative. Afterwards, I retreated to bed, ministered to by nurse Caroline, who throughout my malady has plied me with chicken broth, hot tea, and good advice, like not going the Singer/Soapbox Open Mic the previous Monday[4]

Let’s face it: a summer cold isn’t exactly kidney stones or a case of the shingles (not to mention bone cancer), so the source of this whine festival lies not so much in physical discomfort but in the boredom I’ve experienced, borderline ennui. I felt so drained Wednesday afternoon, I couldn’t read anything longer than a tweet, and scrolling down my feed is disheartening, with all that talk of the decline of democracy coming from the likes of Steve Schmidt and Bill Kristol. And I have two books I’m rarin’ to read, Peter Guralnick’s Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, which until today lay on my bedside table like a couple of concrete blocks, heavy, cumbersome. Petite misère but for a second or two, misery nonetheless.

But, hey, I must be on the mend because I’m sitting at my desk and taking this opportunity to roll my right foot over a frozen water bottle to combat a king hell case of plantar fasciitis I’ve developed walking to and from bars on Folly Beach in flip flops.

Like they, say, there’s no fool like an aged, wounded epicurean.

still from WF Murnau’s film The Last Laugh

[1] No one can accuse me of click-baiting with that title.

[2] And no doubt you have if you know me personally.

[3] I also took a couple of personal days along the way, one to see the third game of the ’91 World Series, another to see the Stones in Columbia, and several during my late wife’s last week.

Missing school is a drag. It’s more work to miss than to trudge through (and I never got close enough to students infect, I’d like to think).

[4] I’d made a solemn promise to Kelly West I’d be there for her debut poem, and who would break a solemn vow because of what at that time was merely a scratchy throat?