This Strange Moment

A message to you from the fleeting present.

December 5th, 2024 – New York

I am writing to you from a strange moment. Yesterday, for the first time in a very long time, a man was killed in America whose death was not part of the plan. He was a rich and powerful man, and he was not killed for any of the reasons we have been told the rich and powerful can be killed for: he was not killed by a spurned lover, a deranged stalker, or a foreign terrorist. The killing did not lend itself to being made a “referendum” on mental health and/or gun control, nor could it be made plausibly indicative of the “growing threat” of this or that enemy state. No, the killing occurred for a very simple reason, one which is obvious to everyone, but which will be spoken of by the mouthpieces of official discourse, if they speak of it at all, only in tones of disgust and condescension, because it is outside, well outside, the parameters of what they are permitted to recognize as legitimate – that being, that this was a man who made himself rich off the suffering and death of others. For this reason, understood by all, he was killed, and for this reason, given the lack of a legal mechanism by which he could have been brought to account for all the lives which he had sucked dry, and made himself fat and happy upon, it can hardly be considered unjustified. After all, had he not been stopped, he would have continued to kill until he was himself too old and infirm to continue, or had found some even more profitable set of thumbscrews to twist, or simply decided he was content with the fortune he had amassed, and retired into comfort and security. It is true, no doubt, that his successor will continue in his footsteps, and kill many more people themselves, because this is the nature of the business they are in, which is not the “healthcare” business but, rather, parasitic upon it, and which derives its profit not from providing healthcare but from withholding it, and demanding a handsome tribute for this “service” – but this successor, I suspect, will be somewhat more cautious in how they go about their business, how many they consign, for the sake of the margin, to expiration in slow agony. They will think twice, sometimes, about the decisions they make, not out of some remarkable rejuvenation of their shriveled ethical faculty, but out of simple, animal fear, a fear which they will deny feeling but will feel nonetheless. And even if this is not the case, even if this man’s successor is a creature too cold or stupid to be troubled by their own mortality, we can say, at least, that some accounting has been done, that no, the books have not been balanced, not by any measure, but that a fresh mark, at least, has been placed in the column of Justice, and, in these times, this is a great and rare thing.

Perhaps, by the time you are reading this, this strange moment will have passed, and the dominant order will have reasserted its authority over time and space – which is why I think it’s important for me to write this to you now, while I am, while we are, still within it. For when this moment passes (and it will pass, as all things do), every effort will be taken to erase it from memory, to exclude it from the official record. This effort will sometimes take the shape of denial, at other times of revision, of an appeal to some ostensible authority who will tell us that what happened did not actually happen, that it was actually something else, something quite small and sad and meaningless, quite unrelated to class struggle, which is really quite an outdated concept itself, by the way, and that we should all feel very embarrassed to have mistaken it for anything significant – in the service of this effort many discourses will be mobilized, yes, many stratagems deployed, but most often this effort will take the form of silence, simple silence, a refusal to discuss the matter, a blank look should you try to bring it up yourself; can’t you see how tactless you’re being, to mention such a thing in polite company? And anyway, that’s yesterday’s news. This great force of silence will be brought to bear upon the memory of this strange moment because it is a moment, like the one that followed the burning of the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct, in which the lie that things must be as we have been told they must be, that there are those whose lot it is to die, and those whose lot it is to kill them, lies bare before the world – or, rather, perhaps, lies bleeding out on a cold Manhattan sidewalk, proven mortal after all. I am writing this to you so you will know that what happened did happen, and that it did mean what it meant, and so that there will be some record of these facts that you can point to, in the long years and days to come, and be able to say, “No, it was really like this. It will be like this again.” I am writing this to you so you will remember.