Well this is humiliating. I might need to change the name of my blog essay collection. Yes, I’m aware what year it is. I realize Megan Trainor isn’t topping the charts anymore. It’s not my fault the Internet went from blogs to posts to 180 character Tweets to Instagram and TikTok shorts (never more than 60 seconds because who has the attention span?) to Chat GPT ghost written cover letters and wedding vows. Get off. My. Lawn.
Anway! Last month, Donald J. Trump was shot hard in the ear. It wasn’t shrapnel. It was all bullet. Mr. Trump took a bullet for democracy. The amateur hour young would-be assassin had previously flunked out of shooting class for being a poor shot. Well duh. At least we know he didn’t just choke for the final exam?
In American history, four troubled loner incels have actually made their dreams come true by killing the President. With nothing better to do, I thought I would explore those four incidents. Maybe we’ll learn something. I doubt it, but it never hurts to try. PS—don’t let anyone tel you Wikipedia doesn’t count as research.
On April 14, 1865, a guy named Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford Theater in DC during a performance of the comedy smash Our American Cousin by English playwright Tom Taylor. It was the Hamilton of its day. Booth, an actor himself, timed his shot with the inevitable laughter from the audience after one of the play’s biggest knee slappers:
Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing man trap!
I guess you had to be there. Sockdologizing apparently meant a decisive blow or a conclusive argument. I'm laughing on the inside.
Booth was a Confederate sympathizer. 26 years old, an angry young man out to save the world. Slavery wasn’t going down without a fight as far as he was concerned. If we aren’t free to enslave our fellow man, what kind of slippery slope are we talking about here? He and his conspirator buddies originally planned to just kidnap him. But you know what happens when a bunch of guys get together. The plan was soon upgraded to murder--probably after four beers. Robert E. Lee surrendered four days earlier, but Booth wanted to January 6th The Civil War. Some idiots in Tennessee were still fighting, so this wasn’t over until we say it’s over!
Union soldier Boston Corbett later shot Booth in Virginia. Corbett was a Methodist Episcopal Church acolyte who had annoyed the crap out of passing strangers in North Square with his preaching. The poor guy was also struggling with sexual urges which we all know are sinful AF. But he took some valuable life lessons from The Bible, particularly. “If they right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee, and there be eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” That’s all he needed to hear. Parental discretion advised…..he cut off his penis with a pair of scissors! This guy REALLY loved God.
Killing Booth made him a hero, but he still couldn’t hold a job. He would stop work and pray for his coworkers. That’s pretty annoying, although we could have used him at my job, actually. JK.
The second Presidential assassination happened on July 2nd, 1881 at a train station in Baltimore. Four months into his Presidency, James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a 40 year old who had turned to politics after failing at everything else in life: theology, law, bill collecting and membership in the Oneida Community—the big hippie commune of its day which practiced free love. They too had taken life lessons from The Good Book. St. Paul said there is no marriage in heaven so should there be marriage on earth?? The Oneida Community said we can share the women, we can share the wine. Think Eyes Wide Shut with more Corninthians readings. Women over 40 “mentored” teenage boys in the bedroom. Ditto 40-plus male creepers with adolescent girls. All so things could be just like Heaven. Boy people REALLY did some crazy stuff for Jesus back then. Christian right, are we absolutely sure these are the good old days we should bring back? If we're banning books, do we need to start with The Holy Bible?
Except…..no one wanted Charlie. He was considered far too weird for a sex cult. They called him Charles Git-Out. If that won’t give you homicidal ideation, nothing will. He imagined his own campaigning singlehandedly got Garfield elected. He belonged to the Stalwart branch of the Republican Party: old school hardliners who believed in a patronage system. But Garfield had had it up to here with nepo babies so he planned to ruin the party with reform. The only reasonable solution was to kill him so VP Chester Arthur could take over. Guiteau’s defense attorney and egger on—God-- told him this would be a “removal” not an assassination. While gun shopping he had to choose between a .442 Webley British bulldog revolver with either wood or ivory grips. Decisions, decisions. He went with ivory because he thought it would look better in a museum! And in fact, it landed in The Smithsonian—before it was lost.
Guiteau became a media sensation during his trial because he cursed at his lawyers, the jury, and the judge and composed his defense in the form of epic poems and solicited legal advice from random spectators with him he exchanged notes like 8th graders in Social Studies class. He dictated his autobiography to The New York Herald and ended it with a personal ad. He was looking for “a nice Christian lady under 30 years of age.” Sadly, our Christian mingler never found a lucky young lady he matched with on all 29 dimensions of compatibility. His planned Presidential run in 1884 was also thwarted. (Today he would get 46% of the popular vote). Iowa and New Hampshire weren’t meant to be. His campaign was suspended after his hanging in 1882.
Next, an anarchist (things are really heating up now) named Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley on September 6, 1901. Who said nothing exciting ever happens in Buffalo? It happened at the Pan American Exposition at the Temple Of Music during a public meet and greet. McKinley tried to shake his hand but Leon shot him in the stomach twice instead. He had lost his job in the Panic of 93—a stock market crash/Depression--so he turned to anarchism as one does. Anarchists had assassinated an Italian leader and were credited/blamed for a bombing in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in 1896 which killed striking workers. This was known as the Haymarket Massacre. Or the Haymarket Riot. Or the Haymarket Incident. Or the Haymarket Affair. That’s a lot of names. And you thought euphemisms began with “persons experiencing homelessness” or “the unhoused.” But I like the way they think. That time 15 years ago I got too drunk at a UConn basketball game and smacked my head against a poll trying to get a cab, let’s call that The Union Station Affair.
I figured the bombing was a setup. Bosses scapegoated anarchists—the Mexican migrants of their day—for killing striking workers. Apparently not. Anarchists were against both labor and management because you’re all part of the same rotten system that needs to be toppled immediately! Socialists? They were Sunday school teachers. Anarchists were the true edgelords of their day. Thank God we have Twitter and 4Chan now so they can get it out of their system. #TruthBombs replaced pipe bombs. That’s progress.
Our man Leon also struggled to fit in even with fringe groups. The anarchists thought he was nuts and shunned him. Emma Goldman, the leader of the anarchists, warned everyone to stay away from this weirdo who she thought was following him around. And never let this guy near your couch.
He considered McKinley a symbol of oppression and it was his duty as an anarchist to shoot him. McKinely gave a speech at the fair that day in front of 50,000 people—not that crowd sizes matter. He encouraged lifting tariffs and going nuclear on free trade. What happened to America First, Bill? “The period of exclusiveness is past. The expansion of our trade and commerce is the pressing problem. Commercial wars are unprofitable.” What a globalist RINO. Yes, they were fighting over the same stuff we still fight over today.
McKinely liked to meet with the public directly without armed guards. In the aftermath of his assassination—the 3rd Presidential assassination in 36 years—they created the Secret Service.
The fourth and, to date, final assassination came 61 years later on November 22, 1963 when, of course, Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Oswald was a Socialist. What, no anarchist? America had really become a snoozefest since 1901. He lived briefly in Russia. He married a 19 year old Russian girl after previously dating other women. (No eunuch here, he might be our first sexually active assassin so far. No wait, John Wilkes Booth was an actor).
Oswald’s Marine training was a mixed bag. On one hand, he was court marshaled for accidentally shooting himself in the elbow and court marshaled again after he fought with the sergeant he thought was responsible for his punishment. On the other hand, he learned sharpshooting. One of the great ironies of the Kennedy assassination is our own military, our own government inadvertently taught a young recruit how to kill the President. (The movie Full Metal Jacket—which references Oswald’s background—is about the same thing. Young recruit gets bullied by his Marine drill sergeant while training him to become a killer until said recruit kills the drill sergeant and himself). From the sixth floor of the Book Depository building where Oswald had worked for a month (he also had problems keeping jobs), 265 feet away, he fired three times and managed a direct hit on Kennedy.
You could argue Oswald forever changed America less from shooting Kennedy than by what he said afterwards. “I’m a patsy.” Criminals insist on their innocence all the time, of course. Justin Timberlake claimed he only had one drink, officer, and this was going to mess up the “world tour.”. But Oswald’s comment forever opened the Deep State conspiracy Pandora’s box which may never close again. This was further exacerbated when Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him two days later on live TV. (Now that must have made for gripping TV). Chivalrous Jack said he wanted to spare Jackie from going through a trial but of course….he had to shut Oswald up. “I’m a patsy” made it clear he was going to be squeal to the authorities and blow the lid on the whole conspiracy, so he had to be taken care of. So the thinking went. The Warren Commission said otherwise but of course……are they not the Deep State too? Covering their own tracks? It was the CIA. It was the mob. It was angry American businessmen who wanted to re-open Havana casinos (during a period of gambling Prohibition in America) and watch the money roll in like before that killjoy Castro ruined everything. The botched Bay Of Pigs invasion meant more drastic measures needed to be taken…..
All of this is plausible—as conspiracy theories usually are. I’m not Oliver Stone or the My Pillow guy, so I can’t speak with authority on conspiracies. But I think I lean towards saying Oswald acted alone. He had tried to kill the Governor of Texas months earlier too. Was that a conspiracy? Was he, like his three assassin predecessors, just a troubled and disturbed loner looking to make some point or vent his frustration with the world in the most dramatic way possible? And again, it doesn’t even need to be an organized conspiracy, just dramatic irony. The Military-Industrial Complex taught Oswald how to kill for the protection of the country, but this backfire spectacularly when their trainee aimed his weapons on an internal rather than external target.
Then again……Bobby Kennedy was killed too. Sirhan Sirhan. This was due to Bobby’s support of Israel against the Palestinians. See what I mean about the same old unresolved issues? But why the Kennedy’s in particular? Mob connections? Inside jobs……?
Our first two assassins might be called far right. Our last two far left. So by this metric it’s inconclusive which side is more dangerous. But when it comes to shooters, is political ideology really the motivator? Is it more misdirected rage? Do they latch onto ideology as a permission slip to give it a focus and target? Trump’s would-be killer had apparently also put Biden and other Democrats on his hit list, so it doesn’t look he was anti-MAGA. Maybe he was also a modern day anarchist—the entire thing is corrupt!. But then shootings in shopping malls and schools aren’t about politics at all. The real problem is of course easy access to guns—not going to turn this into a sermon on gun control I swear--but all four went gun shopping shortly before their acts. All four had shown evidence of mental instability. No worries. I’m legally blind. I can’t drive a car but I’ll bet I could buy an AR-15 if I became suddenly crippled with insecurity about size--and I don't mean crowd size. Oh forget it, this is starting to resemble a gun control speech….
What have we learned? I guess nothing. Please keep guns and The Bible safely away form children? Thank you. Have a great day!
