Notes From the Land of Violence

The Sunday Read processes a grim week. Plus: The Awards Squad sums up Toronto.

Dear Wags,

“Triggered” has become a mockable expression. But it lands with grim precision when reckoning with the murder of Charlie Kirk. The assassin pulls a trigger, and it spurs a million reactions, a fresh cascade of horrors. Here come hellfire threats of retaliation, half-baked conspiracy theories, and the scramble to react to all the reactions. We scroll through the feed, looking to be jolted in one way or another. We police the comments section, searching for somebody to punish. The killing is replayed endlessly across social media; another atrocity becomes algorithmic chum.

Away from screens, most people are appalled by a terrible crime, even if they may be ambivalent about the victim. A human being—loved as well as hated, a husband and father—was gunned down on a university campus. But there is nothing particularly engaging about these facts. Without a trigger, you will not keep looking. Every feed is clogged with a million little affronts, most of them emanating from anonymous agitators. To describe this thunderdome as a virtual town square shows how detached its designers are from the genuine article. Our digital realm is the most blighted neighborhood on earth.

Are we surprised that the suspect in Kirk’s murder is another lost boy from an average American cul-de-sac? That this churchgoing straight-A student, this scholarship winner, reportedly withdrew from the world and spent hours on his computer? That so far the histrionic search for political motives—those self-soothing efforts to tie the shooter to a grand conspiracy spun by the vaporous “Radical Left” or to a false-flag operation by sinister Fascists—has yielded something more pathetic and depressing? We needn’t decipher arcane gamer code scrawled on bullet casings to recognize this dirge: the ballad of a thwarted loner with a gun.

America is a collision of toxic ecosystems. There is the byzantine digital anger-sphere, with its endless warrens of fabulists and zealots, and there is the lawless reality where more firearms, in all their ingenious variety, outnumber people. Utah, where Kirk was killed, has some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation. On the same day, a 16-year-old opened fire at Evergreen High School in Colorado, critically wounding two people before turning the gun on himself. There have been more than 300 such incidents this year alone. According to The Denver Post, the shooter was “radicalized online,” where he shared antisemitic and neo-Nazi views. What a grim cliché. In Europe, assassins at least find twisted camaraderie in political cells. In America, they bowl alone.

Kirk, it has been amply pointed out, defended the Second Amendment to the point of accepting a mountain of collateral damage as the price of liberty. The compulsion of online critics to go for the easy, posthumous dunk is met by chilling cries for retribution from powerful quarters—aimed at an amorphous culture-war enemy that can never be clearly defined and so can never be defeated. In this murk, Democratic politicians who condemned Kirk’s murder are cast as being in league with Antifa. Within hours, trolls on opposite extremes compared the assassination to the Reichstag Fire—cheering on the worst possible outcome, the death of liberal democracy itself. If ideas cannot be contested peacefully, the experiment is over.

Political violence is chilling, not least because it spurs a political response. There were moments in our national life when the impulse to mutter live by the sword, die by the sword was suppressed by shared horror. Official unity was reinforced by mass media and by elected officials—from presidents on down—who at least said the right things about healing and respect, whatever our differences. At times like these, we are reminded that leadership sets the tone. There is a correct official response to an assassination, and that is not an attack on the tribe we support or oppose, but an attack on us all.

In the vicious and addictive digital realm, none of us is fully human; we are only enemy aliens to be zapped. Technology has so numbed us to cruelty that its real-world manifestations are just another show, part of the endless scroll of grotesqueries we never finish. Feeding amorality and callousness at scale is a crime for which no one is prosecuted. The builders of rage-inducing silos make their billions and cloak themselves in sanctimony about free speech. Kirk was shot in the throat, in the middle of a debate about gun violence. What does that say about freedom of expression?

If the shooter meant to silence objectionable ideas, martyrdom tends to have the opposite effect. Rage has become the Great American Default, with plenty to go around. Free individuals are entitled to think whatever they want about Kirk’s legacy, but the compulsion to pounce on incorrect responses and punish those who voice them says as much about us as it does about him. This is the pan-ideological allure of what, only a minute ago, was called cancel culture. And if we took Kirk at his word, he opposed it.

Still, he would have understood the reactions. Kirk became a figure of influence by harnessing the digital scrum for his political ends. His most incendiary quotes are there for anyone to see. None of them carried a death sentence. The ability to speak one’s mind—online or in the real world—is an increasingly dangerous act. A long and growing list of targets, from Salman Rushdie to the slain Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman to the president, attests to that.

That is the legacy of the global platforms erected by the technocracy. The ability of anyone to project their views into the ether has elevated bomb throwers while chilling discourse at the same time. Say what you will—and take the consequences: social banishment, loss of employment, a SWAT team crashing through your door in the dead of night, even a bullet. Beneath American rage lies the disturbing realization that an endless, digitally driven war of words has become something all too real.

We have always been a violent country, swamped by shocking images, battered by fighting words. We have grown dulled to what someone once called American Carnage. Mourn Kirk or condemn him, that is the greater tragedy. When a fading newsmagazine publishes the headline Enough, we all know it will never be enough. Violence, above many other sins, is our shame. We excuse it. We glorify it. Most despicably, we have allowed it to become the national condition.

Yours Ever,

M.V. Fenwick

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Letter from the Annex

What a strange Toronto Film Festival it was! One of the hazards of being Canada is getting cast as the anti-America, a role that diminishes both countries. If you’re looking for a more “liberal” version of the U.S.A., there are shaggy zip codes south of the 49th parallel. To frame Canada this way is to reduce it to an adjacency—a fantasyland for demoralized NPR listeners. Soar-y, but Canada is knottier than that.

Even if some UT New College leftists would love to staple this country to Scandinavia, Canada is stuck with a wild and crazy Southern sibling forever. Imagine being a humble accountant from Guelph with a flashy, much-divorced sister in West Palm Beach. Sometimes the relationship is placid; sometimes that sister rings in the middle of the night, zonked on slushy margaritas, full of threats and demands. You want to cut her off, but you can’t. She’s still your sister, and she makes such a scene.

We’re in the middle of one of those scenes, the worst since Vietnam—or maybe the War of 1812. The fringe benefit for Canadians is that the Americans who schlep to TIFF are the apologetic kind, going on endlessly about how awful things are south of the 49th parallel. This makes Canadians quietly proud, and also uncomfortable about being proud, but then quietly smug about being the sort of humble country that doesn’t like too much praise. Americans, being Americans, make this all about themselves. Poor dears: they don’t know about Canadian serial killers, Bible-thumpers, racists, and needle parks. They’ve never heard of the Meech Lake Accord, or endured Yellowknife on Saturday night.

This is at least one trade deal in Canada’s favour. TIFF’s 50th anniversary opened with Maple Leaf pride, the premiere of John Candy: I Like Me, an American documentary about a Hollywood Canadian who died in Mexico and is buried in Culver City. Candy was beloved on both sides of the border, but the son of Newmarket holds a special place in the northern heart. Ryan Reynolds, of Bedford and Tribeca, turned up in a Maple Leaf T-shirt. Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced the film and cast Candy as a national metaphor: “In many of his movies, there would have been a scene where John would pivot, having been pushed too far…don’t push a Canadian too far…[like] someone richer, someone more powerful, someone more arrogant.”

Who could that be, eh? Somehow, Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles became a metaphor for a country—cuddly, sincere, a bit oafish, always being hectored by a high-stress travel companion. As more than one Canuck pointed out, Candy’s speech to Steve Martin in that picture, in which he declares “I like me,” sums up the national mood. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, Mr. Prime Minister, because another thing Candy liked, to the point of trying to enlist in the U.S. Army, was America. Like many gifted Canadians, he flocked south to sunshine, palm trees, and possibilities. Wherever you turn in the Great White North, from Scarborough to Saskatoon, you run smack into the States.

Amid all the bristling at Trumpian arrogance (as much from Hollywood Yanks as the locals) is a profound longing for things to return to something like normal, for a complex sibling relationship to revert to familiar and reassuring patterns. Americans are generally admiring of Canada, and most Canadians are uncomfortable with anti-Americanism. Canadians have had a significant impact on Hollywood since the days of Mary Pickford. TIFF may be a global event, but it is first and foremost a binational one—a tentpole for a North American industry that needs shoring up on both sides of a very long and still undefended border.

Most of the year’s prestige pictures have already premiered elsewhere, even if some, like Chloé Zhao’s weeper Hamnet, also screened here. The good news is that TIFF remains a Canadian platform for splashy American pictures. The bad news is that Hollywood, like an agitated Steve Martin in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, never quite knows what to do with affection. It should take a note from Candy and learn to like itself. Meanwhile, here’s some of what we liked north of Lake Ontario.

—Bud B. Boomer

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Christy

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