Thrill killing

and the dangers of macho counter-posturing

I just flamed someone on Substack. Not because I want it to turn into Twitter. I’m not even predisposed to flaming. It takes quite a bit to get me there, and when I go, it’s stick and move on. Flames, but no flame wars. I will, however, virtually dox the dipshit—his handle is ThatPinkoBookNerd. Why? you may ask. Welp, because he went all gunny. Which is to say, his little online fantasy-man got all swole up and started popping off about fighting ICE with guns. The reason I intervened in a manner designed to cut the little fuck down to size is because we are in a moment when that kind of provocation can stick.

Everyone just watched these fascist ICE thugs commit another cold-blooded murder—this time of ICU nurse, Alex Pretti—on video.

Makes my blood boil, too . . . more than most maybe, because it’s not the first time I’ve seen this shit, and gun violence is a kind of neurological pathway for me. Whatever the mental equivalent of patellar reflex is, when I see this shit, the first fantasy that pops into my head involves my old .300 WinMag with the 16x Weaver scope. It’s a muscle memory. I could drill ten consecutive X-rings at 700 yards on a low wind day. I was once a sniper with 1st SFOD-D (popularly known as Delta Force) and I designed and ran the Battalion Consolidated Sniper Training for 2nd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces. I have a scope scar between my eyes.

When my muscles remember, I see Gregory Bovino, that insufferable, strutting, overcompensating ICE-Nazi dickhead with the little man’s complex. I see Stephen Miller. It’s a reflex—and that’s why my head has to prevail over my heart.

Hatred and violence come easy to me, even after almost two decades of commitment—sometimes hard commitment—to Christian nonviolence. Stanley Hauerwas—the theologian who, more than any other, served as my on-ramp to the cross—once said he was a pacifist because he is a violent sonofabitch.

Right now, I get that big time.

The reason I flamed PinkoJackass is because his kind of Johnny-get-yer-gun-shit—which he’ll never do—might connect with someone, somewhere.

We all get it. The apparent impunity of ICE blooms into fantasies of counter-violence like yeast in a warm bowl of sugar-water. Someone, somewhere—who’s not a coffee-shop Che Guevara—someone with that extra helping of put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is, and maybe some mental issues—is plotting that counter-violence right now. ← This, of course, is exactly what the Trump regime wants. Counter-violence is what they are depending upon to re-consolidate their waning base and provide the pretext for declarations of emergency that will take months of legal wrangling to undo, and may disrupt the midterm elections.

I’ll come back to these strategic concerns, but first I need to explain something about men—not all men, but men with Man issues who are given guns and impunity. I’ll begin with an excerpt from a fiction story:

The Trident Room on University Circle was known for frosty tap beer and savory appetizers. More than a thousand different mugs hung from the ceiling on little hooks. For some of the students from the Defense Language Institute, it was an after-class watering hole. Dale was nursing a beer by himself in the corner and trying not to listen to the animated chatter at a nearby table. Three young Special Forces students, fresh from the Q-Course, half-drunk and ranting about a bombing attack that was in the news. Seven CIA agents had been killed in Camp Chapman, Afghanistan, by a suicide bomber who’d been working with the Americans. A so-called “green on blue” attack. The talk then turned to “fuckin’ rag-heads,” and why the only good one is a dead one.

Dale remembered a Peruvian army officer he’d worked with once who, walking past an Indian cemetery near Huaichipa, told him, “Aqui hay los indios amigos.” Here are the friendly Indians.

“If there’s a rag on its head, it needs to be dead,” rhymed one of drunks to surly nods of assent. The poet was shaved bald with thick black eyebrows and no chin. One of his companions was eagerly tossing him questions about his time in Iraq, where the poet had apparently been a Military Policeman in the Reserves, only later going on active duty and volunteering for SF.

“I was at Camp Bucca, man . . . you always hear about Abu Ghraib, but at Bucca, man, we never got caught. Down in Um-Qasr, by the ocean. We was workin’ with the spooks, the boys across the fence . . . all of ’em. We got this bitch one day . . . maybe fifteen, with a hot fuckin’ body.”

His colleagues hooked into the story, leaned in, and smiled, signifying like they were in the early stages of a tent revival. “Uh-huh.”

“Me and my boy, guy named Bledsoe, we’re totally in charge, okay . . . we break that bitch in like a mustang.” Hoots of laughter, a bit nervous. “We fuck her twice apiece. Then Bledsoe can’t come the second time, and it pisses him off, so he starts wailin’ on the bitch, and I tell him ‘hold up, dude.’ We can pimp her out if you don’t fuck ’er up.’ So, we start bringin’ in motherfuckers from all over camp — on the down-low, man — and we charge fifty bucks a pop.”

He was slurring his words a bit, teetering between buzzed and bombed, and his story was kind of flowing out of him now. He wore a half-smile, like he was reminiscing.

“We made almost five hundred dollars in a coupla hours. That night, we find the bitch dead. Hung herself in the cell with ripped up clothes.”

“Why’d she do that?” One of his companions asked.

“Dunno,” he replied, appearing to think it over, then smirked. “She was unhappy?”

This cracked the table up, though there was now a kind of edge between surprise, disgust, and admiration directed at baldy.

This conversation was based on a real video clip, which I’ll spare my readers.

I still say we don’t talk enough about probative masculinity, especially in conjunction with war. The first place I witnessed—and even became a part of—this nihilistic spiral was in Vietnam. Once the award of esteem within an all-male group comes to be associated with cruelty, a lethal and escalating mimesis takes hold wherein men begin to try and outdo one another in cruelty, in lethality, in becoming actual death dealers.

The first Vietnamese I saw killed in Vietnam was an old woman who members of my own platoon murdered—partly out of revenge for a recent American KIA, and partly just for kicks. (They perfunctorily claimed—wink wink—that she’d thrown a hand grenade—they threw the hand grenade. Always smear the victim, eh?)

Reputation in this milieu is built on who can become “the craziest motherfucker.” Thrill-killers go to the top of the list. Anyone can kill in a firefight; there’s an element of self-defense. The really crazy motherfucker, though—the one who secures that “edge between surprise, disgust, and admiration”—is the gratuitous killer, the guy who kills with no provocation.

It’s only a matter of time, then, until this probative practice becomes pack-hunting—like those guys from my old platoon, and like those men who murdered Alex Pretti.

This is why I’m quite sure the murder was premeditated. These guys had already agreed in advance that when they found the right victim—in this case the guy who was legally carrying a firearm, which he never pulled—they’d “get the kill.” I promise you, they’re still retelling it over beers in a that fucking jacked-up macho palaver. They were pack hunting. Every one of them. And there are more out there.

Most of the recruits coming into ICE now are already predisposed, because there’s a subculture in American of mostly men who’ve pumped themselves up on the idea that the realest of real men have body counts. There’s a flipped switch in their heads that “goes there.”

Here’s the problem with counter-violence, apart from its strategic stupidity. By and by, counter-violence will “go there,” too. Then everyone remotely associated with it will have lost the moral high ground.

Trump wants a civil war. PinkoShithead—in the theater of his own mini-macho mind—wants one, too. Trump still retains the support of like 37 percent of the populace. PinkoShitHead has 17 subscribers. That’s why I set out to smother his bullshit in its crib.

Shifting gears a bit, I encourage everyone to see a great John Sayles 1987 film titled Matewan. It’s about the 1920 “coal war” between unionizing miners and the Baldwin-Felts mercenaries hired by the coal companies. It has everything we’re talking about—and the provocation to open battle—a battle the companies eventually won—was the murder of a teenage mine-worker. The company mole in the union was the guy who constantly called for guns. Union organizer Joe Kenahan rebutted the provocateur:

“Fellas, we’re in a hole full of coal gas here. The tiniest spark at the wrong time is going to be the end of us. So we got to pick away at this situation, slow and careful. We got to organize and build support. We got to work together. Together! Till they can’t get their coal out of the ground without us cause we’re a union!”

Minnesotans are dong a General Strike. This is the right answer. Not macho posturing with guns. Our hearts my be broken and our wrath inflamed. Which is exactly why we need our cooler, more calculating heads to prevail.

Our real power isn’t guns—guns are a sign of weakness, a horrible sign, but weakness nonetheless. Our real latent power is just what Minnesotans are doing—General Strike.

Keep the moral high ground and keep chipping away at his base. That, and General Strike.

That time has come. We need to take the pain and shut it all down. Not counter-violence, but withdrawal. Wartime sacrifice without killing.

General Strike. General Strike. General Strike.

Peace (I mean that.)