The Assassin

The week marked the 51stanniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination, and it got me reflecting on the assassinations and would be assassinations of my time. The first, of course, was of Bobby’s brother John. I was president of my senior class when news of his killing came over the intercom, interrupting the last moments of our final period math class. As we filed out into the school, some kid ran by me with his hand formed in that familiar facsimile of a gun, went Bang! and ran off yelllng, “I just shot the president!”  I heard about Martin Luther King’s assassination while standing outside the Cinerama Theater in Hartford dressed in a white shirt, black bow tie and red usher’s jacket. It was during the intermission in Gone with the Wind, believe it or not, and the news struck like a bullet from the radio of a slow-moving, open convertible on Farmington Avenue.The news about Bobby came in a call from a friend that got me out of bed. He told me to turn on the TV. Minutes later, I had picked up a floor lamp and was swinging it around wildly, wrecking the living room.After all that in rapid succession it became commonplace for liberals to believe that their leaders were marked men who would never be able to lead the nation to its noble promise. But then came assassination attempts on notable non-liberals…George Wallace, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan…and it became clearer that the real marked men were any public figures who managed to stir the instability of lonely, demented people who saw their personal, pathetic destinies manifest at the end of a gun barrel. They were, I believe, the prototype for today’s mass killers.That does not mean that assassination has gone out of style. It probably means that we’ve gotten better at protecting obvious assassination targets. Thus would-be assassins have moved on to easier targets in churches, shopping malls, school rooms, etc., trying to make up in quantity what may be lacking in singular, value-rich targets. Although the scary, frontal attack on Kamala Harris at a campaign event in California this week (days after another mass shooting in Virginia Beach) did show that a determined nutcase could still get as close to a presidential candidate as Sirhan Sirhan got to Bobby Kennedy in June of 1968.There was an infamous piece of graffiti that started appearing after JFK’s successor Lyndon Johnson lost his way in Vietnam. It read, “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we really need him?” There are many days during this Trump presidency where I’m tempted to grab a can of spray paint and start writing that myself on the subway walls…tenement halls. (Hello darkness, my old friend, indeed.)But I resist. I really do not want Donald Trump to be assassinated. Three days of national mourning with Pious Mike Pence presiding would make it too painful to bear. Plus there'd be the subsequent martyrdom of the Con Artist in Chief by his tribe of Trumpanzees, and he'd be enshrined to our nation’s embarrassment forever…compliments of Mitch McConnell: The Grand Trump Dam, Mt. Trump, Donald J. Trump International Airport, the Trump silver dollar, reflecting pool, and toxic waste dump.I want to scream!Which leads to me to this conundrum: What final end would I prefer to see for Trump. Nancy Pelosi, who probably has more to do with answering this question than she’d like to have at the moment, recently said she doesn’t want to see Trump impeached; she wants to see him in prison. Nancy has made that into an either/or proposition on her accord. Those options are not mutually exclusive. The nation can have this menace deservedly impeached and then imprisoned without breaking any of the rules of predicate, protocol, or principle that seem to have so tied the Democratic leadership in knots.  I understand the reluctance to impeach, given the probability that the Republican-controlled Senate will fail to convict, thereby handing Trump another premise for proclaiming exoneration and further excuse to wallow in his precious victimhood. I also believe that the popular fantasy of seeing Trump marched off in an orange jumpsuit and ankle chains will be a disappointment. In that greatly desired scenario he will still not be humbled, shamed, or embarrassed. His NPD makes him constitutionally incapable of any of those things. He will strut in from of the cameras exactly the same way he clumsily strutted in front of the cameras on the world stage this week. He is totally oblivious to what a jerk he is and how laughable he is to anyone not symbiotically afflicted.   His evident mental illness provides another possible option for a satisfying ending to his MAGAT existence. His lunatic episodes are becoming more frequent and undeniable. In just the past week he called the mayor of his host city, London, a “stone cold loser”; asked for his impressions of the Queen he observed that she walks impressively fast; in a sit down with the Irish Prime Minister he encouraged the Irish to follow his lead and build a wall along their border and when he was told that the Irish don’t want a wall he insisted that they needed one and would be glad when they had one; on a state visit with the serious concerns swirling around Brexit, the EU, NATO, abused immigrant children on the US border, his contempt of congress, breaking the Emoluments Clause and general lawlessness, he found time to send out a tweet attacking Bette Midler as “a washed up psycho”; at taxpayers expense he hauled his ridiculous, uninvited adult children through every ceremonial and substantive event in Britain as if they had any other purpose or skill in life than transmitting his corrupt, privileged DNA from anteroom to anteroom; he explained that he didn’t go to Vietnam because it was too far away, he never heard of it and he wasn’t a fan of the war anyway but maintained that he'd made it up to military by giving it over $700 billion as if it came from the same checking account he paid off Stormy Daniels; and he posed in front of the gravestones of World War II dead with the execrable Laura Ingraham of the state-controlled FOX News to call actual war veteran Robert Mueller a fool.
I want to scream! (But I repeat myself.)

Alas, I believe I lack the killer instinct…or as I prefer to put it…evolved beyond it. So in lieu of being an assassin, I must settle for an old-fashioned character assassination. I can only hope that my aim is true and that one day somebody writes on a wall, Where is Dan Riley when we really need him?