Meaninglessness

On certain recent events.

Stephen B. Smith, “Washington, Utah #15”

Charlie Kirk was a man who chose to devote his life to making the world a stupider and more violent place. There is something which one can find within most people which was missing from him. Whether he was born without it or, rather, it was taken from him at a young age is ultimately academic. What matters is that this emptiness made him desirable to a certain faction of Capital, not really people, you understand, just some flows which all for one reason or another would like to drown the world, and he was happy to become their vessel. He encouraged them to pour their infernal sludge into that emptiness, and fill him up with it, so that he might work it into something which could spread across society like cultural black mold. It’s a real laugh seeing his colleagues and collaborators wax poetic about the depth of his “faith” – this man believed in nothing as much as anyone has ever really believed in nothing. He was a cardboard cutout, an empty signifier. He had never existed before and he had existed since the beginning of history, might perhaps have invented it. His face had no features. His body was wrong. When you tried to look at him, the light started to bend funny ways. His family, of course, doesn’t really exist, either. They’re just an idea, like gravity, indexed to some bodies in a very bad dream. There was really no substance to Kirk’s life, is my point. To paraphrase that gay novel half his fans are obsessed with, he simply was not there. There was only one real thing about him, and it was his willingness to make himself useful to death. It is this which will define him, ultimately, and nothing else – we can say this for sure now because his project is over and the results are in: he won! He accomplished his goal. Spurting like a broken sprinkler on a college quad in Utah, he achieved apotheosis. I wonder, do you think he felt anything?

I’ve been thinking about that school shooter who wrote a manifesto on Google Docs and then forgot to unprivate it before she, I don’t know what word I should use here, do you get what the problem is? I mean, seriously, do you get it? Do you get why I hesitate? Let me try again: Lately I’ve been thinking there’s a bunch of stuff you can’t really look at straight on because you’re just not equipped for it, doesn’t matter how tough you are, it feeds on that just the same as submission, and the problem is this stuff is at the heart of everything now and if you don’t look at it you can’t really see what the fuck’s happening. I think there’s a lot of names for this stuff and one of them is Meaninglessness. A school shooter’s manifesto left privated on Google Docs is Meaninglessness. A fake security camera for ten bucks on Amazon is Meaninglessness. Charlie Kirk was also Meaninglessness – his life was Meaninglessness, his death was Meaninglessness. For a minute there it seemed like maybe his killing was different, the act of someone with a cause, a reason for their action – of course, this no longer seems to be the case. “Tyler Robinson” appears to be as hypothetical as Kirk was, a person only by default, a trick of the light. There was a boy with that name who was a real child with a real life, probably, but at some point that boy went away, got caught and ground up somewhere deep in Content Mill, and then there was nothing in particular there to replace him, just generalities, stale memes, small talk for people that don’t talk to people, standing in a dorm room in jeans and a t-shirt, looking out towards nothing. Already, you can feel him receding, losing dimensions, getting very vague at the edges. His story ended a long time ago. It’s just that these days things don’t decay the way that they used to.

I don’t know if any of this makes much sense. I’m just thinking out loud here. It’s funny, when that healthcare CEO got domed, I knew I had to write something right away, and I did. The words just flowed, in a way they almost never do for me. For once, I felt totally sure of what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I remember feeling this incredible sense of clarity, of everything snapping into focus – here, like a bolt from the blue, amidst all the sound and fury, was something concrete, something that meant something. That piece ended up becoming by far the most popular thing I’ve ever published on here, the closest my writing has come to “going viral” (my real writing, I mean, not a Post). I don’t expect the same sort of response to this piece. For one thing, I’ve missed the window for maximum engagement already – if I wanted that I should have had this out on the 11th, 12th at the latest. For another, I have no clear and cutting diagnosis to offer this time, because I feel no sense of clarity. Quite the opposite. I can’t tell you how to think about Kirk’s slaying because I don’t think I feel any particular way about it at all. He deserved it, of course, but so what? Lots of people deserve lots of things and sometimes they get them and sometimes they don’t. I think that to me it’s just something that happened, like a forest fire – which is a “political” event, of course, with a “political” cause. But once one gets started, all that matters is how dry the land is, and how strong the wind. And the thing about the wind is it doesn’t come from anywhere, and there’s nowhere it’s going. It doesn’t have a purpose. It isn’t a symbol. It just blows and blows. It fuels the flames and it spreads the choking ash, but it doesn’t mean anything by this. That’s the wrong question. Do you get what I’m saying?