CAREFUL THE WISH YOU MAKE

'Someone tell the story,
Someone sing the song.
Every now and then the country
Goes a little wrong.
Every now and then
A madman's bound to come along.
Doesn't stop the story
Story's pretty strong.'

'Assassins' - Stephen Sondheim

Ford's Theatre, Washington, Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, the Temple Of Music, Buffalo, New York and Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas are all locations that have long been recorded in the history books as part of the 159 year old tradition of American presidential assassinations, to say nothing of the numerous failed assassination attempts including the shooting by John Shrank at Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 in Wisconsin and a thwarted attempt by John Hinckley on Ronald Reagan in Washington in 1981.

All of these violent flashpoints in American history were ingeniously woven together in a musical tapestry by Stephen Sondheim in his 1990 Broadway musical 'Assassins'. It's a shame America's greatest composer/lyricist is no longer around to add a new scene to his state of the nation piece after Saturday's breaking news of ex-President Donald J. Trump being shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania by one Thomas Matthew Crooks. These surreal and hyper cinematic moments captured in 4k have now become instantly mythic in much the same way as the famous Zapruder cine-reel footage of JFK's assassination has been since 1969 when it was first shown to the public. And if it hadn't been for Trump tilting his head ever so slightly then America would be in an entirely different timeline now and Oliver Stone would be no doubt writing his first draft for the movie version of recent events in Butler. Because Trump didn't get his brains blown out (much to many people's disappointment it seems), the opportunity for everyone to happily meme about the assassination attempt is given full licence (including myself - I especially enjoyed the 'Van Gogh's ear one). But there are serious questions to be raised about many of the responses to the assassination attempt which reveal much about the relentless dehumanising of America's most divisive political figure since Lincoln over the past nearly ten years and how that seems justified in the eyes of his haters who very much believe him to be the next Hitler.

Although the emphasis of Sondheim's controversial musical is about assassins and not presidents, I would have been especially curious to see how the lyricist/composer would have gone about depicting the shocking scenes on Saturday. Would he have put aside his own innate political bias toward the 45th President of the United States to mine even deeper into the greater universal truth about the nature of these political attacks which as we've seen recently with the assassination of Trump's ally, Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan can have truly fatal consequences. In Joanne Gordon's essay 'Something Just Broke' she talks about how staging a production of 'Assassins' during Obama's first term "proved to be horribly insightful as those of us who cherish the symbolism and hope manifest in the election of the first African American President of the United States now live in terror of the violence that threatens." I would like to believe that Gordon would apply the same concern in relation to the attempted assassination of Trump though I doubt it. There is a selective blindness to the rule when applied to those political opponents we demonise. And I'm pretty sure to Sondheim's mind, like so many others, Trump represented the 'Freddy Krueger' of the White House when in all reality he has always been more of a pragmatic 'Centrist Caesar', one who appears to want to return America to a pre 9/11 relative equilibrium of 1990s capitalism rather than the mid 19th century civil war as so many have feared. The America of 'Home Alone 2' probably best exemplifies the America Trump is nostalgic for although the country is so far away from that ideal now as to be more comparable to Bradbury's 'Farenheit 451'. Many, though, have seem to be taken in with the hysterical hyperbole that Trump is a savage nativist akin to Butcher Bill in 'Gangs Of New York' which is quite insane. But then again, Trump has always been a sort of Rosharch test as whoever thinks of him in any extreme reveals something about themselves and their own projections of America, including their hopes or fears, both real or imagined. He is the resident 'bogey man in chief' of his opposition's nightmares which is ironic because for many years between 1989 through to 2009 he had been a frequent donor to the Democrat Party and had stated to CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an interview that he "probably identifies more as Democrat." Of course, none of this ambiguity matters because Trump can only ever be good in the eyes of his supporters or bad in the eyes of his detractors. This is not unusual. Many presidents throughout American history have been famously polarising. The Republican Party's very own Abraham Lincoln was loved by much of the ordinary American public but made many enemies amongst varying factions in the Civil War ravaged country, including numerous within his own party. Much later in the next century, President John F Kennedy also found enemies in his own party as well as many others not affiliated with the Democrats, both domestic and foreign. One of the reasons the folklore around the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' on the 22 November, 1963 continues to compel such fierce discussions and inspire endless conspiracy theories is that Kennedy had so many people intent on destroying him politically (and literally) and so there are more than enough motives to choose from, sort of like an assassin 'choose your own adventure' book.

The events that took place in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas have inspired countless variations on its theme in American culture, including Sondheim's 'Assassins' but perhaps most famously Oliver Stone's 'JFK' (1991) movie starring Kevin Costner and more recently Stephen King's novel '11/22/63' which imagines a time traveller attempting to affect the events surrounding Kennedy's assassination so that the President is saved. Thinking about King, America's national laureate of Horror who spends most of his days on X displaying his extreme 'Trump Derangement Syndrome', I wonder if he might be tempted now to write a sequel entitled '07/13/24' in which the events on Saturday were altered to complete the attack on Trump without a hitch.

In 2015 The New York Times presented a poll to its readers in which it asked 'if you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it?' 42% of readers confirmed they they would and it went instantly viral on the internet, subsequently becoming an enduring meme. The power of that hypothetical question introduced a new ethical dilemma for the world and with it shifted our perspective on how many now view current living, breathing figures in history as clear and present dangers to our societies. It seems as if we've gone from the retrospective nostalgia of assassinations past, playing detectives with history as is the case with 'JFK', to now speculating about what we can do to alter our present timelines before things get progressively worse. The liberal dream of Kennedy's Camelot has turned into the nightmare gothic horror of Stephen King's 'The Dead Zone'. We're living in 'Bizarro' times where the once individual fantasies of political murder by the assassins of the past have become increasingly absorbed into the collective identity of the mainstream and are openly discussed in chat forums and across social media as well as legacy media where they stand proud in plain sight without apology.

The genius of 'Assassins' is that Sondheim finds the humanity in those disparate loners and losers across a century or more of violence who seek to change the course of history whilst managing not to solely portray them as pure incarnations of evil. Which prompts me to speculate whether he would apply the same standard of moral ambiguity to President Trump as he does to those criminals. He did with Sweeney Todd, 'the demon barber of Fleet Street', whom he helps the audience empathise with by providing the tragic exposition of his early life, losing both his wife and child in unjust circumstances whereby Todd is consigned on false charges to penal transportation. I just wonder if he would have afforded Trump the same humanity because I have yet to see a liberal characterisation or portrayal of Trump that isn't mere parody. Maybe it's an impossible task, as Trump with his 'Owen Meany' way of talking in ALL CAPS convinces most of us that there can be no other side to his character outside of his campaign persona. But I find it interesting that Trump has become the figure where so many creatives and commentators on the left draw their red line, not once considering here is also a husband, a father, a grandfather and not simply a "Cheeto Hitler" 24/7. Again, it's worth re-iterating, here is a man who was practically a lifetime donor to the Democrats.

Back in 2018, Sondheim gave an interview with Richard Morrison of The Times where he made it clear in no uncertain terms how he felt about the 45th President of the United States.

Richard Morrison : So what’s it like to live in America at the moment?

Sondheim : “You know the answer to that question,” Sondheim replies. “Distressing in the extreme. It’s really the end of democracy — a major catastrophe, not a passing one.”

Richard Morrison : Hasn’t the US always contained widely diverging tribes? Liberal east coast sophisticates have always been a long way from Bible belters in their world view.

Sondheim : “Yes, I agree political opposites have always existed in America, but until now these different tribes belonged to one nation. Then along comes this politician who is the standard bearer for divisiveness and hatred, and all consensus falls apart.”

Richard Morrison : On the other hand . . .

Sondheim cuts me off. “There is no other hand,” he declares…

This last wisp of a statement is something I've recognised across the entire West lately. A kind of absolute moral certainty about the way things are that creates a shield of immunity to the charge of hypocrisy when judging the other side. One has to also ask how this so called unified belonging to One Nation was unraveled and by whom exactly? Trump? Or the collective self loathing of America promoted throughout the (political and cultural) institutions of the country itself?

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Obi-Wan Kenobi, 'Star Wars: A New Hope'

I can't think of another political figure in recent times who people have so continually and openly expressed fantasies of killing than Donald J Trump. Even scrolling through the comment section of mainstream social media profiles on Instagram and Facebook the morning after the shooting, I was shocked how many people lamented that the assassin Crooks hadn't finished the job and feverishly expressed conspiracy theories about the entire thing being staged as if it was some sort of Wrestlemania for political assassinations, although to be fair, Trump did play his part in 2004's Wrestlemania XX in the 'Battle Of The Billionaires' storyline with Vince McMahon, but I digress. It's also interesting to see political commentators (many on the left) who often decried conspiracy theorists for so many years now pandering to their own as easily as those they accuse, not seeing the glaring contradiction. You simply can't hold the moral high ground or sustain a type of moral purity if you use rhetoric and engage in actions that are worse and more inflammatory than your opponents.

“We’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye” - President Joe Biden

“If I was Biden, I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security.” - David Aaronovitch of The Times

What's equally disturbing is watching TikTok Zoomers screaming at the top of their lungs about how unfair it was that Trump wasn't completely obliterated from the earth in hysterical viral videos that makes one wonder just how far the country has fallen. Of course, many blame Trump for this decline in tone and have good reason to believe that but I'm convinced it is more endemic across the West in general. Look, for example, at the recent attempted assassination of Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, to say nothing of the brutal murders of Conservative MP David Amiss in 2021 and Labour's Jo Cox back in 2016.

But the mythologising of heinous acts of lone gunmen is a unique feature of American culture that is a fascinating one to behold and seems especially entrenched in the country's still relatively young history. The assassins, whether it's John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald, points to men who seek a sort of darker version of the American dream by carrying out drastic actions that they believe will secure some significance for their otherwise hopeless existence. Sondheim suggests in his typically ingenious theatrical way that these acts of violence are part of a non linear dialogue throughout time in which each of these strangers becomes almost as one consciousness, as if it could symbolically be the same bullet passing through history that is fired each time by these lunatics, just in different eras. And just as Trump has been accused of being a man who loves to be the centre of attention all of the time, so, too, do these assassins seek their own form of fame and immortality regardless of the high price they pay with their own lives in the end. What's also been interesting since 2015, when Trump first announced he'd been running for the Presidency, is just how many celebrities have fantasised about carrying out a similar form of violence on a man who previously posed zero threat to their culture and sense of security and who was invited to share in their parties and award shows.

Political historian, Victor Davis Hanson expounded on this phenomenon in a recent post on X.

"We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence.

But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.

So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

In a widely reported call to hundreds of donors last week, Biden boasted, “I have one job, and that’s to beat Donald Trump. I’m absolutely certain I’m the best person to be able to do that. So, we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”

"In a bullseye?”

At least, Biden did not go back to the full Biden beat-up porn of the past (e.g., “If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him"/ “The press always asks me, ‘Don’t I wish I were debating him?’ No, I wish we were in high school – I could take him behind the gym. That’s what I wish.”).

But in a wider sense, if the common referent day after day on the Left is that Trump is another Hitler (cf. a recent The New Republic cover where Trump is literally photoshopped as Hitler), then it seems reckless not to imagine an unhinged or young shootist believing that by taking out somewhat identical to one of the greatest mass murderers in history, he would be applauded for his violence?

What do all these febrile fantasies of committing violence say about modern America. For me, it says that the Assassin instinct is now not only exclusively owned by the downtrodden loners and psychopaths of history but is also prevalent amongst the celebrity and media class where we often observe in their fervent desire to protect their fame and careers at any cost that it will lead them to say some of the most deranged and yes, 'deplorable' things imaginable. This clamorous competition to see who can denounce and defame Trump the most brazenly has been a most bizarre spectacle to behold from across this side of the Atlantic. And even here, in Britain, our grandstanding politicians such as the newly appointed Foreign Secretary David Lammy and the morbidly grumpy radio presenter James O'Brien have felt they can say pretty much anything they like about Trump, disregarding any need for pragmatic diplomacy and not once having the self-awareness to see how their rhetoric also promotes political violence. The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking.

"The fallout from the shooting of Trump has given us a grim insight into the moral decay of our cultural rulers. From their low-key gloating over the attempted assassination of Trump to their fretting that it will help to spirit him back into the White House, they continually elevate their own narrow factional fears over the moral clarity this moment cries out for. My question is this: if they can be so cavalier towards this act of violence, what other atrocities might they feel relaxed about? What other terror might they excuse, apologise for, claim has ‘underlying causes’? What level of murder might they be willing to tolerate to restore what they view as their rightful rule? In failing to condemn, clearly, this act of savagery, they’ve sent a signal that sometimes savagery is acceptable. It isn’t only Trump who needs to worry that so many in our cultural elite seem so blasé about brutality." - Brendan O Neill (Spiked)

Re-listening to Sondheim's 'Assassins' this week its potency remains undiminished as a profound statement about America; if anything it has become even more chilling and timeless than ever. And yet still a question remains suspended in the air like a bullet yet to reach its target about what it doesn't say. What do we choose to romanticise about our past and what do we demonise about our present? Where does our moral certainty come from as we live through history? How would we know, if like that hilarious Mitchell and Webb meme, whether 'we might be the baddies?'

We have spent so much time in our culture choosing who are our heroes (JFK) and who are our villains (Nixon) in such binary terms that we forget to explore those grey areas where humanity often finds its greatest understanding. Consider, for example, that in January of 2016 The Guardian reported that Obama in his final year in office was, in fact, responsible for authorising 26,171 bombs, 'dropping three bombs an hour, every day, 24/7' and was nicknamed the 'Deporter-In-Chief' residing over a record amount of deportations in America to say nothing of his enthusiasm for building a surveillance state famously exposed by whistle blower Edward Snowden. The point I'm making is that we need to be careful of whom we lionise and who we demonise. It's never as straightforward as we think. America seems to believe in either fairytales or horror stories but little in-between. Obama was not perfect and neither is Trump all bad.

My late father always liked to remind me "never to pursue an absolute" and as I get older I appreciate the simplicity of that advice. The enemies of freedom are absolutists and their attacks on their opponents is the real fascism we need to be concerned about, the bullet being the wordless instrument of their convictions.

The only answer to this violence is in the grey areas of uncertainty where our doubts should be allowed to express themselves to soften our extremes and where we can reach across the table to break bread together.

It's been a long time since the days of Marilyn Monroe blowing birthday kisses to JFK at Madison Square Garden in contrast to last Saturday at a concert in Sydney, Australia where duo Jack Black and Kyle Glass, otherwise known as 'Tenacious D', openly regretted the failure of the Trump attempted assassination whilst blowing out birthday candles in front of an laughing audience and wishing for the next assassin not to miss next time.

Sometimes we need to be careful about what we fantasise about, for in the words of another Sondheim lyric from his 1987 fairytale musical 'Into The Woods', "wishes come true".

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see
And learn

Careful the wish you make
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true
Not free

Careful the spell you cast
Not just on children
Sometimes a spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you

Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen
Children will listen