I have two friends to whom for days I have systematically sent all the good jokes about Luigi Mangionethe young American accused of murdering health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. I say systematically because I really am verbose, it’s almost like a press mailing: two or three times a day I curate the best ones and send them, without any comment. I do it only because it’s fun, and I don’t see anything extraordinary in that fun, neither in mine nor in that of the thousands who make memes and funny tweets on the subject. The fascination with murderers is ancient. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson are pop culture stars. Nahir Galarza did not even finish his sentence, which already has its own series; and all of them, on top of that, murdered victims that no one had any reason to hate. In the fascination that Mangione generates, two figures are mixed: that of the murderer, on the one hand, and that of the vigilante, on the other. There is no justification for killing anyone, it is true, and the vast majority of people who share Mangione memes know it. But Mangione got involved with one of those people who “profit from people’s health,” who travel on private planes at the expense of a single mother going into lifelong debt due to a work accident. It’s entirely possible that Brian Thompson was a great person, and even if he was the worst of all, those of us who don’t believe in the death penalty think he didn’t deserve to be killed. And yet, Thompson was one of the faces of an unjust, violent and hypocritical system. There is nothing extraordinary or period, I repeat, in the fact that we can talk about it lightly.
There are some aspects of the conversation around Mangione, of course, that are period. First of all, his online presence: a centennial killer had Instagram, he had Twitter, he had Tinder, even Goodreads. That uncontrollable morbidity that the television channels exploited when talking to their friends and neighbors and showing the audience the attempt to understand how an apparently normal person comes to do something so out of the norm today is an investigation that we all have at hand. The Internet is full of Mangione’s traces: we can all play detective and look for traces of the overflow in his vacation posts or his movie review.
#faces #system
