Aesthetics of rage-bait

What was most shocking about the assassination of the right-wing influencer was that when he was shot in the neck, it wasn’t electric sparks and smoke that came out of the gunshot wound, but liquid, consistent in appearance and fluid properties with mammalian blood. At this revelation, the gathered crowd dispersed from the scene in panic, suddenly aware of the possibility that they too were authentic humans and not mechanical replicas of them, and that they, like the victim, could also bleed and die should gunshots be fired in their direction.

A few outliers in the audience rejected this newfound humanness and the life-preserving instinct that came with it. Instead, they treated the murder they’d just witnessed like they treated everything else: as a media event (aka “content”); they live-streamed it in their preferred apps and pleaded with a different and invisible audience to ‘like’ and subscribe.

For lack of evidence, it remains unclear at which point, if any, the shooter realized that the person he shot was human, and that he himself could be, to everyone’s shock, including his own, also human. Seeing the sanguine results of his actions through the rifle’s scope would have been too premature a moment (and too lo-res) for that realization to sink in. Because in the shooter’s captive mind, his crime was, like all else, a sensational media spectacle. He just happens to be in the middle of this one.

By and large, the reaction to the assassination has been a solemn recognition of the victim’s capital-L life, an affirmation that he was, above all, a real human being, and not, despite his media talents, a mere spectacle. It’s an understandable reaction. If anything has the power to drop the pretenses of a spectacular life, it’s death. If you die, it suddenly brings to fore the fact that you lived (which is both a platitude and a fallacy), and all life, specially human life, has value. People really took this to heart, including some of the victim’s critics. They reflected on their own fleeting lives, and that made them feel warm and fuzzy. But here’s the thing. They are mistaken, all of them. Living a real life is not a prerequisite to dying. Who said that it was?

Consider for a moment the possibility that the victim wasn’t real, and neither was the shooter nor the crowd that witnessed the murder. To go a step further, consider the notion that revoking in retrospect the victim’s reality card is the only way to salvage his name and so-called legacy. There’s a good reason why this possibility should be taken seriously. The victim was himself an expert, among the very best in his generation, in the manufacture of variegated and spectacular pseudorealities (PRs). Unlike works of pure fiction, those PRs had a tangible, albeit loose, basis in reality (you know, the shared one that we all presumably live in). They were populated by real people with real lives (allegedly), foremost among them was the victim himself: a loving husband and father, who happened to be, we are told, a principled conservative who liked to debate people who disagreed with him. Other cast members of those PRs were politicians, journalists, media personalities, the victim’s counterparts of other political persuasions (i.e. online influencers to his so-called left), with cameos by Jesus Christ, God, and so on. By far the biggest cohort of actors in this spectacle were the ones doing the spectating: the often passive but highly mesmerized online audience, which included both fans and anti-fans of the victim. As opposed to other purveyors of PRs, a portion of the victim’s audience also showed up in the flesh to play their parts, on account of the live events where the victim’s ’debates’ took place, the last of which being the scene of his tragic murder.

In addition, unlike a film or a TV show, the cast of the victim’s pseudorealities included unwilling participants. Those were the cast members who were most real, and besides the victim himself, they’re the most relevant to the logos of his creations. They were the people whose lives and identities were used to fuel the disdain and hatred of the victim’s audience (who, don’t forget, are willing actors, and therefore, not real), and it was that hatred which gave those PRs their zing; it’s what made them entertaining and ultimately lucrative. They were the black people who the victim claimed lacked the “brain processing power to be taken really seriously", the Muslims who he claimed were a threat to something he called ‘civilization’, the women whose rights he advocated the rolling back of, the Palestinians whose tragedies he used as a punchline, and the transgender people whom he villainized to quite literally his final breath.

One explanation for how he could have shown such callousness to the lives and feelings of those people is that he had become so engrossed in his act that he experienced psychic derealization— transcending all surface-level pretenses (politics, conservatism, Christianity, culture war, etc.) and genuinely beginning to view the subjects of his vitriol as figments of his imagination. If that was the case, then it’s only fair to do his memory the courtesy of pretending that he was a figment of ours: a very annoying and extremely bigoted delusion.

To preempt misunderstanding on your part: the claim here isn’t that the victim was ‘subhuman’ and therefore unworthy of our moral consideration (a belief he himself held about people he deemed inferior). The claim, rather, is that he was not a real human. To be an authentic human, you must behave like one with some consistency. You must act on your own volition from time to time and have genuine motives and desires. Being so relentlessly committed, at whatever cost, to a cause so cynical (like making as much money as possible from corporate sponsors, the raison d'être of those PRs) will strip away at your reality. If you spend most of your waking life peddling fake realities for such a cause, there comes a point where both you and the people to whom you’re peddling become fake as well. The victim made himself a thing, a character, more persona than person, so the human tragedy of an unjust death, being brutally murdered by a deranged, inauthentic inhabitant of the pseudoreality he helped create, will not magically restore him to the rank of authentic humans. He lived and died a fake.

If one cared enough to challenge or dispute this view by asserting that the victim was in fact real—that he meant everything he said, that he understood the subjects of his bigotry to be real as well, that he said those things about them with full knowledge of the consequences, and that his audience also took his bigotry at face value, not as the rambling promos of a pro wrestling heel character—then they should consider whether this is truly a more redeeming view of him than simply stating that he was a counterfeit human.

Another rank of his defenders would concede that the things he said were as real as they were terrible, but that the fact that he merely said them is something he should get credit for. After all, he never took someone’s reproductive rights by force, never chased a migrant across the border in his own vehicle, and so on. He only expressed his deep desire for those things and roused other people to carry them out. Those apologists and free speech fetishists have lived such sheltered and privileged lives that they couldn’t possibly imagine that by some moral codes, and under some conditions, not having the chutzpah of backing up your words with actions is not the virtue they make it out to be.

Had the assassination failed, the victim would have lived long enough to die a thousand deaths by his own hands, deaths of the spirit, effacements of his innate humanness—which let’s presume once existed—by the evil character that he created. Equally tragic.

The dustbin of history is currently full. But we thank the victim for his impressive application and résumé. He is now officially on the waiting list. We’ll be in touch as soon as a spot is open.