Tinderbox Times

An Assassination Attempt

This edition of The Quarter Inch is arriving early, given events over the weekend.

Dear Friends,

We came within one inch of catastrophe. What I take to be a subsonic round fired from a suppressed AR-15 clipped former President Donald Trump on the ear. One inch to the right and he would not have been injured; he would have been dead. No in-between. We are living in Tinderbox Times, and the twenty-year-old assassin’s failure to zero his optic properly (or perhaps inability to account for wind) saved us from a civil convulsion unlike anything we have seen in living memory. The country, not just Donald Trump, dodged a bullet.

Others did not. Corey Comperatore was killed while trying to shield his daughter from incoming fire. David Dutch and James Copenhaver were wounded and remain in stable condition. Lord, have mercy.

The rest of the weekend represented arguably the ugliest days in social media history. Instant “hot takes,” bitterness, acrimony, blame-casting, and pure hatred flowed through our nation’s electrical circuits and Internet servers with nothing to restrict—not good taste, humility, or any other virtues designed to produce reserve. As it was destined to be in our polarized times, there were only two opinions:

Left: Aim better next time.

Right: He took a bullet for us.

Vilification and Glorification caught in a demented dance. We are in a societal suicidal death match, a spiraling negative feedback loop of mutually assured destruction. It is always and forever, for Left and Right, a zero-sum game of “Us” versus “Them.” In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln pleaded with a nation on the brink of civil war:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It is not clear that there are any “better angels” of our nature. And there certainly does not seem to be a Linconesque figure ready to lead us toward one another. Talk of unity and “bonds of affection” is dismissed as treacly “Boomer” stuff. But if magnanimity and grace, along with patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control represent a “Boomer” mentality, then, by all means, count me proudly among the Boomers.

What is happening? Peter Leithart provides an impeccable theological interpretation of our times:

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Now for some more specific thoughts about the state of things, in no particular order.