Begin with a question and an order:
- the question: At a meeting of Turning Point USA in Boise, Idaho, on Monday, October 25, 2021, founder Charlie Kirk took questions from the audience. A man asked, “At this point, we’re living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns? “(members of the audience applaud). The man continues, “No, and I’m not — that’s not a joke. I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
I wish someone had asked him, “Who will you kill first? Give us a name.”
- the order: “In conjunction with several units of Bolshevik troops … Stalin authorized arrests and beatings on a broad scale, followed by mass executions.”*
Murder is the fire, and everything burns in these fires, the consummation giving itself the pleasure of consuming itself in lives that have been lived like notes rising from hands playing Bach, notes like those living in this moment inside me and you, then vanishing.
“Who will you kill first? Give us a name.”
When we ease our time into quiet, and when we are able to put aside the vicious and the stupid who dream of murder, we can name some few of these notes — C Major, C Sharp, D for keeps — and honor each with a life and a name and both of those burning in the same air I breathe for now.
“Who will you kill first? Give us a name.”
The value of those other lives disappears somewhere away from our attention and care — those names we do not know, will never know, dissolve in the grip of the vicious and the stupid, these the unnamed dead of every purge, of every climb to power, the myriad victims of bandit joy and utopian dreams and the vapid lies of the rulers.
“Who will you kill first? Give us a name.”
How casual a motion to lift a hand and initial a form, touch some numbers and speak, press send, declare this one enemy, that one outlaw and grind them out like hot coals going gray under the heel of a boot. The embers go cold so quickly — with not one spark to revive one like you or me who might have paused before a window, drinking wine, watching a fox pass under a tree.
*from Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, p. 38
