John Haas, an American historian and regular Current contributor, recently offered some interesting thoughts about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the young man who tried to assassinate Donald Trump last weekend.
Here is Haas:
Kristi Noem at last night’s Republican convention speaking about the assassination attempt: “Evil displayed itself in the very worst way.”
I find what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania last weekend challenging to my conventional views of “evil.”
Obviously, someone targeting another individual, methodically trying to kill them–and with no concern at all for the lives of innocent bystanders–*does* qualify as evil.
But when you read about this kid–he was 20, no longer a child, but far from a mature adult too–it all seems very confused. He’s a sad kid, of a kind I’ve seen dozens of times in my classrooms. I’ve even wondered, sometimes–sometimes fearfully too, to be honest–What’s going to become of this kid? You conclude that you can’t imagine him becoming a conventional “success,” but you hope the world has some kind of a place for them. Not everyone can be motivated, positive, clever, competitive, ambitious, popular, and etc., but for our sake as well as their own, there has to be a place for them, too.
What was going on in his head? You can so easily see a dozen different paths, even with his priors. Such a very dark turn. Did he even know what he was doing? Lord, have mercy.
Sometimes I think we’ll never get closer to an answer than Bruce Springsteen did in “Nebraska.”
They declared me unfit to live
Said into that great void my soul’d be hurled
They want to know why I did what I did
Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world
The song is an accurate retelling of the 1958 killing spree perpetrated by Charlie Starkweather, which started in Lincoln, Nebraska, and ended in Wyoming. Portrayed in Terrence Malick’s 1973 film Badlands, which, if you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend–though you’ll never forget it if you do.