By Wayne Allensworth
I’m trying to keep my head above water in the flood of information about recent events spurting out of mass media, including social media, and here are some thoughts that have crossed my mind:
Judging by what the investigation into the Trump assassination attempt has come up with so far — that Thomas Matthew Crooks was a loner, was bullied at school, posted a creepy message about his planned 13 July “premiere,” and had searched on Trump’s scheduled public appearances and the dates of the DNC online, as well as on suffering from depression — I think I was on the right track in my assessment of who the shooter would turn out to be. I wrote that he was likely much like the Columbine shooters and their epigones (and, indeed, he also searched online for information about Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley), or he was Travis Bickle. He wanted to make a big splash by killing a politician, and which one of the presidential candidates would be the target was apparently a secondary issue. This may foul the pitch of conspiracy theorists on both sides. Thomas Crooks was a product of a sick society, one that churns out alienated, depressed loners as a matter of course. Elections can’t fix that. It will take something far more drastic.
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I watched the closing night of the Republican National Convention and laughed out loud at the spectacle a number of times. Franklin Graham, Lee Greenwood, Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock appeared, followed up by a Trump stemwinder as rambling as I expected it would be. The folks who appeared are a fair cross section of the party’s new populist, Middle American base. Say a prayer, clean your guns, watch wrestling, fly the flag … I can only imagine in my mind’s eye the old-school GOP country club crowd gasping for air if they could watch this now. Old guys in shorts, oxfords, and hose socks practicing their putts in front of the TV set, then clutching their pounding chests as the big one seems to be coming on. I’m sure the DC pod people and their clones in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street were apoplectic. They will double down on the smug irony they adopt as their default attitude.
It was quite a show, and the circus is just beginning. American politics seems like a cross between The Hunger Games and WrestleMania. That’s where we are now. I have to say I was amused by the convention party, and if we can take the GOP’s version of WWE Raw in stride as a manifestation of the GOP’s populist turn on the one hand, on the other let’s not forget the freak show of a zillion “genders” the other side has become. One that advocates castrating confused teen aged boys, can’t decide what a “woman” is, and views abortion as a sacrament. If a sort of tent show Elmer Gantry evangelism animates the one, then postmodern nihilism is the undercurrent of the other. So, what do they have to feel superior about? But they do folks, they do.
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Some more thoughts on Vance: I’ve written that Vance could be a key to hiving off enough members of the elite class to get something constructive done in a second Trump term. Talk of immigration restriction and attempting to mediate an end to the Ukraine war will seem different coming from a polished, accomplished “winner” like Vance. What’s more, maybe Vance’s appearing to prove that one can advance through the Blob’s training channels without becoming a pod person will encourage others whose internal thought crime filtering mechanisms have prevented them from being forthright with their actual views. On the other hand, the pod people see Vance as a traitor to the class to which they thought he had pledged fealty. He will be in for a hatefest that will last more than two minutes. I hope he’s ready for it.
I enjoyed Vance’s speech quite a bit, not least because his story about his grandmother keeping 19 guns stashed around her house resonated with me. My maternal grandmother loved to hunt and enjoyed shooting. We called her “Nanny Oakley.” I still have her and my grandfather’s deer rifles and have used them myself, as has my son. For that matter, my father’s mother watched Houston Wrestling on a local UHF channel when I was a boy. My father told me she had even attended bouts in person at the old Houston Coliseum. Vance understands and has affection for the people he goes to bat for, the little guy–the small-town shopkeeper, the family farmer, the factory worker whose job has been shipped to China. I hope he stays in that populist lane. It’s early yet.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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