Times of Death and Destruction

I was just listening to a bit of Bill Maher's interview with Charlie Kirk from four months ago. Of course the views on it have skyrocketed. I hadn't listened to it before because I wasn't interested in Kirk. He didn't seem like a particularly big fish. Well, his killer has made sure he is now and will be for a long time. I've already being hearing soundbites from his speeches and talk show appearances being spread around. So martyrdom accomplished.

By the way, the guy I saw in footage yesterday ended up not being the killer, who's still at large. So I guess the cops just humiliated an old guy for no good reason. But shit happens. The cops could've been a little gentler with him but I know they had a job to do in a hectic situation. In the Maher interview, he and Kirk discuss how the Left has demonised cops, which is something I agree with the two of them on. We need cops and they're often painted with too broad a brush. As an artist, I guess, I'm more interested in inevitable human complexity than subscribing to the political convenience of conceptualising whole segments of humanity as soulless blobs.

That said, Kirk comes across as an honest but dopey guy. He kind of reminds me of one of the kids my age who lived on my block when I was a kid. He was a nice guy but he was Mormon and held a lot of opinions I thought were fundamentally daft. But I still played with him. That's just how life was before the internet sorted everyone's social life into vacuum sealed echo chambers, You had to make friends with the people who were in proximity because you had no other options.

I was reading about the riots in Nepal this morning, too. It's not the first time I've heard about the class conflicts tearing apart that country. Before I came to Japan, there was a wealthy Chinese student I was tutoring who went to Nepal and came back telling me how astonished he was at the visible wealth disparity, how he saw garbage and starving people next to expensive cars. I met a wealthy girl from Nepal a few years ago through a mutual friend. We went hiking together and she listened to me ramble about the English Civil Wars. No wonder she found the topic so interesting.

Reading about Japanese history lately, I've been fascinated by how many riots and attempted revolutions there have been in this country famous for its conformity. A man named Oshio Heihachiro led an attempted revolt in Osaka that ultimately failed. Born into wealth and privilege, he was nonetheless angered by the disparity he saw between the lives of the rich and the lives of the poor. He seems admirable in retrospect but I find myself reflecting more on the inefficacy of violence. It's a snake that seems, more often than not, to turn on and bite its master. It's a poor substitute for intellectual development and cultivated compassion.