Those who see killers of CEO and mentally ill man as heroes have a lot in common | Opinion
Is there any difference between hailing the ex-Marine who kept a mentally ill homeless man on the subway in a fatal chokehold for six minutes as a hero and purring in delight over the murder of someone at the top of a very bad business?
You do know there isn’t, right?
Those posting what a shame it is that some “snitch” in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, called the cops on Luigi Mangione, who has been charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, probably don’t think they have a lot in common with those toasting the acquittal of Daniel Penny, who ended Jordan Neely’s life on the F train last year.
They do, though.
As if intent on proving Donald Trump’s mad desire for retribution perfectly acceptable, some of the same people who were rightly appalled by the sick jokes we heard after an 82-year-old Paul Pelosi had his skull beaten in with a hammer are now squealing with little yips of enjoyment because two kids in Maple Grove, Minnesota, have no father.
That part, they allow, is of course regrettable, but oh how courageous of Mangione to sacrifice himself to make a point about the leeches who stand between us and decent health care! To me, all that happened is that someone in pain has made others suffer, too. Which is a tragedy for two families in particular, and is no more going to strike a blow against corporate greed than the murder of George Tiller, by someone who said he believed in ”justifiable homicide,” stopped abortion.
And those of us who are not exhilarated that the witch is dead? Well, we need to stop being so tedious. Lighten up, we’re told; where’s our sense of humor? Obviously, we must never have known physical pain, or have been made to suffer by a profits-before-people insurance company. “Enough with the pearl clutching” — a sexist cliche’ I loathe, though that’s hardly a top-tier concern here.
OK, but when we presume to know who deserves to keep breathing just as surely as Trump thinks he knows that Gen. Mark Milley should be executed, who needs the rule of law?
Every terrorist sees an avenging angel in the mirror. But how the rest of us see vigilante justice, no matter what we think of its individual target, does shape our world and how we live in it.
I keep being told by those lapping up Luigi’s alleged acts that of course they would never murder anybody, so where’s the harm in smiling along?
Same as the harm in laughing at Trump’s violent rhetoric about all of those he sees as “vermin.”
“Frankly these parasites simply had it coming,” Mangione reportedly said in his mini-manifesto.
The coast-to-coast fury over the way the insurance industry controls both access to health care and the politicians who prevent any real reform from happening is righteous. But to see a man’s death as a giggle is to cross over into the moral numbness that only makes cruelty more common.
We live in a culture so confused that kids compete in the sport of urging other kids to harm themselves. Now AI chatbot companions have been loosed on the vulnerable, too.
Last year, after so many lauded Daniel Penny for what he did in that subway car, I wrote that If Flannery O’Connor came back to life, she’d have to put her pen right back down again, because the grotesque has become ordinary.
One of the many angry responses I received said Penny should be knighted for his “chivalry.” Who knows, maybe our future king will oblige. Neely “was insane!’’ said another reader, and so had to be put down. Many others said that since Neely had a history of punching and threatening people, Penny deserved only our adulation. His on-the-spot application of the death penalty was courageous, they said, and my dissent from this view made me “a piece of garbage.”
I’m sure my view that CEOs are people, too, will be no more warmly received.
But to me, the only distinction between justifying violence against the most powerless and the most powerful is that different people are doing it.
This story was originally published December 12, 2024 at 4:04 AM with the headline "Those who see killers of CEO and mentally ill man as heroes have a lot in common | Opinion."
