Shock it to me

I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that I’ve been walking around in a state of shock since November 9, 2016. As such, I recently got to wondering what is it that makes an event truly shocking…and consequently what have been the most shocking events of my lifetime.The first and most obvious criterion for an event to be shocking is that it has to be unexpected…the more unexpected the greater the shock. 
Second is that it has to reverberate long after it first occurs, often it’s a reverberation that deadens down to an ever-present haunting.
Third, it has to be powerful enough to force a reassessment of life, either on a personal or national level…the more universal the impact the greater the shock.
Finally, the shock should be negative. When I first started compiling this list, it contained a number of what for me were positive shocks, such as the ending the most recent Super Bowl. Then I realized on reflection that such an unexpectedly happy ending soon settles into a warm memory, like a surprisingly fine meal or good sex. There’s no haunting involved…no moment that you want back for a do-over…no sense that you’ve dropped the egg of creation, never to put it back together again. I understand if Super Bowl LI is on The Big List of Shocks for every Atlanta Falcons fan…or that of every sworn hater of the New England Patriots…but this is my list: JFK’s assassination . More than a half-century later and I can still remember sitting next to Tom Quinlan in Mr. Fowler’s math class when the Principal came over the intercom with news that the President had been shot in Dallas. Haunting? I just read another “think” piece about how Boomer selfishness, shortsightedness, and self-centeredness are responsible for the sorry state of our politics (a case admittedly harder to argue against given the Boomer who epitomizes all of that now at the top of our politics). I still maintain that if you could actually lay a generation out on a psychoanalyst’s couch, you might find that having a childhood of ducking and covering out for fear of nuclear annihilation topped off by having your glamorous young President’s head blown off in public is going to leave a scar that just might lead to some anxiety about life if not exactly sociopathic behavior.  9-11 : Did it change everything, as they claim? At the very least it reinforced the message of the JFK killing that life can be brutally cut short in a minute on a grand scale and that the world could be turned upside down. Air travel, military commitments, government surveillance, spending, and dysfunction…all changed profoundly by 9/11.  I’m not sure how anyone who even had an inkling that it might happen and didn’t do anything about it lives with himself (looking at you, George W. Bush). Nixon’s Downfall : Not just the resignation…the entire unraveling from the Watergate break-in to Agnew’s resignation to the Saturday Night Massacre coming after such a resounding electoral landslide. It was one long, slow train wreck of historic proportions. The reverberation…the haunting…has come in the form of the Nixon loyalists and acolytes (Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, etc.) who over the decades have sought revenge against the liberalism they hold responsible and see embodied in the media and the Democratic Party. In their dirty, relentless war against to exact their vengeance they have turned the American political process into a turf war for gangsters. The Jonestown Massacre : More than 900 killed in what was termed "revolutionary suicide"…though the inclusion of some 300 children among the dead probably means it was more like revolutionary murder/suicide. It began as a populist uprising against a corrupt and ineffectual system led by an egomaniac with a deep and abiding affection both for Russia and his own flimflam abilities. As the walls started closing in him on him, his madness became more manifest in word and deed until it seemed that blowing his whole phony empire up became the only resolution of his narcissistic vision.    The Trump Election A closing note: Today I watched The Walk, Robert Zemeckis’s feature film version of Phillipe Petit’s 1974 wire walk between the Twin Towers and I realized that Petit’s stunt actually occupies a rather extraordinary place on my shock list. It’s rather bizarre for a number of reasons. For one, I never heard about this highest of high wire acts until more than 30 years after it happened when I watched the Academy Award winning documentary made about it called Man on Wire. My shock--more like my delayed shock—rippled multi directional. There was the shock that it took me so long to hear of this amazing, if reckless, feat. When I learned that it happened on August 6, 1974, I understood why. That was at the height of the deathwatch on the Nixon Presidency, and it’s most likely that all other news was blocked out for me by its expanding darkness. Then there was the shock of seeing the Twin Towers in all their Olympian glory just a few years after they had been so brutally brought down.
So Petit’s walk, even decades after the fact, was a sharp, painful connection to two of the five events on my list of shocks. But the act itself was also shocking for the sheer audacity of it. Watching the movie had me wondering about myself, as I believe shocking events must do to truly be shocking. I wondered how Petit and I could be of the same species…similar heart, lungs, brains, limbs…and still so profoundly alien from each other because I could never imagine attempting…or even wanting or imagining…to do such a thing as walk on a wire a quarter mile up in the air…with or without a net. 
And then I thought of Osama bin Laden, also of similar biology. Like Petit, obsessed with the Twin Towers but whereas Petit’s illegal act in fact glorified them, bin Laden’s destroyed them. And I am shocked all over again to realize that if you make a triptych of Petit, bin Laden, and me you have the three faces of mankind—creator, killer, observer.


The 5 seconds when Richard Nixon shocked the nation into thinking he was fit to be President.