When John Hinkley failed to assasinate Ronald Reagan, I was working in a midwestern university library, and still young and stupid enough to blurt out a “joke” about sending a boy to do a man’s job. (This was so long ago, kids, all our spontaneous stupidity had to be delivered in the meatspace.) Since the head of the department was the widow of a minister in the short-lived Republic of Biafra, another librarian had left Hungary in early 1957, and a third’s earliest childhood memories involved fleeing Latvia with her parents in 1941, I was immediately educated that “nobody is happy in a place where political arguments are settled with machetes.”
Charlie Pierce at Esquire‘s Politics blog brings up a certain piece of Texas Republican history in connection with Ms. “Tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama”:
… Every president has to live with the notion that any random nut can buy a gun and stand a pretty good chance of getting the job done if the random nut doesn’t mind getting ventilated in return. Presidents get briefed on this stuff. But, as is the case in so many things, this president is different. History has made him so. An attempt on this president’s life would resonate, in history and in memory, far beyond Ford’s Theater, and Union Station in Washington, and the Exposition Grounds in Buffalo, and Dealey Plaza. It would resonate, in history and in memory, back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and to an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and to 2332 Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where the blood of Medgar Evers still stains a driveway, and to a hundred dark roads, and to a thousand ghastly trees, freighted down with so much more than Spanish moss. Some bullets make history. A bullet fired at this president would gain its power from a history that we all have worked so hard to pretend never really happened before, and really could never happen again.
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It would blow apart the illusions. It would shatter the carefully designed latticework we’ve thrown up around those parts of this country’s bloody past in which the government was not only helpless, but actively complicit. We had state violence against black citizens in this country all the way up into my lifetime. We had the local respectable gentry sponsoring it from the shadows almost as long. It did not erupt, the way sudden murder does. It was a steady, foul pulse through the country’s politics, as mainstream in some places as Republicans and Democrats were.
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My god, nobody would ever believe it was a nut. It would be a harder sell than Oswald has been, all these years, and the polls indicate that the official explanation for John Kennedy’s murder is no more believable now to most people than it was in 1964. This, to me, always has been a remarkable thing. The American people have chosen to believe that their president was murdered in broad daylight, and probably with the connivance of elements of the government he led, and they have spent nearly 50 years walking around believing that, and the only concrete result of it all is that Oliver Stone got rich. There would be no official explanation possible for an attempt on the life of this president. There is nobody who would believe it. There would be too much damned history arguing from the other side.
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I mention all this only because we’re coming up on November 22 again. There will even be a Republican debate in Washington on that day. On November 22, 1963, there was a newspaper advertisement that accused President Kennedy of treason. It had two photos that looked like mug shots. It ran in a newspaper on the day of the president’s visit. In Texas. The president came home in a box.