Folk Hero

I’m on my way from Minnesota back to California for the winter. It is not easy living in two places and today we are in-between. The mercury is plummeting at a rate in keeping with the changes in the headlines. It’s in the twenties this morning but by the time we leave tonight, it will be zero degrees and who knows what will unfold in the saga of Luigi Mangione and the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a Minnesota native. I’ve been preoccupied with Mangione, himself in between obscurity and celebrity, freedom and incarceration, since we first saw the masked photos of him wearing that hoodie.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Solitary acts of bravery or terrorism or nihilist rage capture the public imagination as no conventional political activity possibly can. When a young man, on the loose in midtown Manhattan, assassinates a Master of the Universe, particularly one whose purpose is to deny and delay care to needy sick people, the initial reaction is more like the response to Rosa Parks’ act of refusal than it is to an incident of criminal violence. We are dealing with a dark gray area here. Clearly, we can’t all go around killing people whose behavior we deplore. But it is fascinating to consider the extraordinary public response which seems to be at least forgiving of the killing if not applauding the outlaw perpetrator. This goes beyond public outrage at the wholesale larceny that characterizes the practices of the healthcare industry. The midtown assassin represents a familiar folk hero type, the Robin Hood figure who sets out all alone to fight the bad guys, like every kindergarten kid freezing in a Superman cape on Halloween. At first, it seemed that he was prepared to go to jail for the rest of his life to make a political statement. He captured the imagination of a great many people who themselves already feel imprisoned by the system, stripped of any and all agency. There was the sense that he was striking a blow for all of us who have been stepped on and crushed by corporate greed that reduces us to the sum of our passwords.

This folk tale of the heroic figure acting as a lone wolf is as American as Cracker Jacks. It’s the heart of the pioneering spirit, and so much less cumbersome than democracy. The minute you have to sit down with a bunch of people to discuss doing something, for good or for ill, things get bogged down. Sunday night, just before decamping for California, Frank and I attended the condo association annual meeting. Normally a snooze fest, this meeting was surprisingly animated. The board members, or at least some of them, seemed to think they could just continue to state how much they appreciated owner input while in reality ignoring it completely. Outrage began to surface in the party room and by 8 pm, after several eloquent comments from the floor, the owners prevailed. No one got shot.

The ponderous nature of the democratic process, its sluggish pace overburdened by those annoying competing interests, hearings, and committees, can’t possibly compete with the glamor of the knight in a hoodie taking matters into his own hands. But that was before he was identified and got caught. Now the reality is settling in. We have the spectacle of another familiar story playing itself out, the saga of the person of privilege who renounces class benefits to take a giant risk in order to expose injustice. A Patty Hearst figure. Mangione, like Hearst, the scion of a wealthy family, acted at first as if he’d rather be a criminal subject to incarceration than a criminal out and about in the Hamptons. Is it just me or has anyone else noted the fact that like Trump he’s a graduate of Penn from a family with real estate and political interests. Maybe he just couldn’t tolerate the taint.

This man is going to prison for a very long time. We can only hope that the death of Thompson and the loss of Mangione’s productive life results in some humanizing of our diabolical healthcare system. That would be the best outcome I can imagine when the curtain falls on this blood-soaked drama. Without that result, there would be no point to the street theater and there will continue to be unacceptable levels of suffering and unnecessary loss of life. All that will remain is our moral ambiguity.

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