American Tragedy

A tale of illness, murder and moral confusion

Let me assure you that my angle towards Health is wide, and I will still be writing my usual discursive posts on the Health of the Body Politic, whichever one is in my sights. Starting with this American tragedy about four lives entangled with a dysfunctional health care system, a woke Justice system, and a general moral confusion leading to moral blindness and ultimately, murder.

Consider these four men, all of them recently famous, representing four distinct classes in America: Jordan Neely, a black homeless and schizophrenic man who sometimes did impressions of Michael Jackson on the NY subway, accidentally choked to death by Daniel Perry a solidly middle class ex Marine and student of architecture, plus the CEO of UnitedHealthcare Brian Thompson of the millionaire corporate class gunned down by Luigi Mangione, the educated and successful scion of a wealthy family in Maryland.

It’s Mangione’s story that has eaten up all the oxygen in the room during the last frenzied days, and it hasn’t been a good week for moral clarity. Murder is now not a totally bad thing after all, at least according to the woke Left who began every discussion with ‘yes, Murder is terrible BUT…and then spent the next hour defending the possible motives of Mangione. Elizabeth Warren, once someone you had at least some respect for, earned her stripes as a silly old woman by opining that ‘people can only take so much and then they will act’. But wait. Did she mean to say that the American health care system is so hopeless and useless that the people it doesn’t serve well have the moral right to, well, murder? That’s not only astonishing, it is dangerous as a number of people immediately pointed out. What if all people who felt wronged went and killed in righteous moral outrage? That wouldn’t be a society anymore; it would be Syria. Do we really want to live there?

To complicate matters, Mangione doesn’t fit the neat boxes we would like to stuff him into: he is not woke, slightly right of centre but not extreme in his views, well read, an engineer with a degree from Penn State and judging from his impressive abs, works out, and was known as friendly and smart. That doesn’t sound like the profile of a potential killer, as Mike Solana discusses in what is the best piece of journalism on Mangione I’ve found.

Solana’s takeaway is that we are all potential killers and could be driven over the edge. Which raises the question of what drove Mangione and where to lay the blame. Because he had an extensive online presence, we know that he was experimenting with psychedelics and was likely on opioids before and after a back operation to fix vertebrae that had slipped out of place. Constant back pain is terrible but it doesn’t generally drive people to murder. The question of the deeper motive is still unanswered. After days of reading and thinking about it, this is what I believe:

I believe that not only Mangione but also Perry did what they did because they felt abandoned by the people tasked with delivering order and justice in America. In the case of Perry, that is Alvin Bragg, the woke 37th District Attorney of New York County whose policies of catch and release of criminals and the mentally ill was directly responsible for the Subway tragedy. In Mangione’s case, it was apparently a general sense that the healthcare system was never going to be fixed by the people in charge, like Brian Thompson, so he felt compelled to ‘do something’. Rightly or wrongly, both young men had gotten the message that the State and its institutions were not working, didn’t care and were in fact, AWOL.

I’m pretty sure that this sense of having to keep order in the absence of anyone else like the State doing so, is what drove Perry to put Neely into a chokehold. In one of his rare interviews, Perry said that he wouldn’t be able to look himself in the eye if he had not acted. Though Bragg dragged him into court on a charge of manslaughter, Perry was acquitted. In pronouncing Daniel Perry not guilty of negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, the view that Perry should never have been indicted in the first place, that he deserved a medal, the keys to the city and the profuse thanks of everyone who has to ride the dangerous subway in NY, prevailed. But it was a close call, with the Jury deadlocked until judge Maxwell Wiley, instead of declaring a mistrial, moved the Jury on to the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. Aside from Perry, I think the judge is the other hero in this tangled tale.

Judge Maxwell Wiley

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-york-jury-acquits-former-marine-charged-after-subway-chokehold-death

But as soon as the not guilty verdict was read, all hell broke loose: Perry was openly threatened by the Black Lives Matter people, among others. Not only that, they called for an insurrection in the streets, which is technically illegal. It also unleashed a violent wave of disagreements on social media, in the press and on the streets of NY. People were deeply divided on whether Perry was a hero or a killer. Shown here is Perry as he is: a handsome 24 year old ex-Marine with several awards, and a self-declared people person. According to ABC News, Perry wrote online:

During [my] travels, I rediscovered my love for interacting and connecting with people. Being able to serve and connect with the most interesting and eccentric the world has to offer, is what I believe I am meant to do.

Daniel Perry in Court

I have a habit of asking people sharing the Sauna at the local Rec centre with me difficult questions, like was Perry a hero or a killer? The replies I got, all of them from men in their early sixties were indicative of the alarming moral confusion that seems to be the norm. One man kept repeating that Perry was a killer because he wouldn’t stop choking the man long after he was subdued and people were leaving the subway. He thought that as a Marine, he should have just stood in front of the threatened subway population and shielded them from Neely until the forces of law and order arrived. He didn’t know that Neely was not dead when Perry released him, but the police refused to give him mouth to mouth resusciation because he was likely infected with some kind of disease.

The other man saw it quite differently and said, listen, if it were me on that subway with my wife and my kids, I would personally thank Perry for doing what he did. That man is a hero. Needless to say, there was a standoff and it was getting altogether too hot so I left quickly while insisting that there was some kind of moral vacuum at work here.

This vacuum was most evident in the way the press simply ignore the death of Brian Thompson, he was hardly ever mentioned in the outpouring of opinions. Somehow, his death wasn’t nearly as wrong as that of Neely. Because he was white and wealthy and fifty years old. Being that kind of guy doesn’t get you any sympathy at all. And I find that deeply offensive and immoral. It doesn’t matter that the healthcare system he worked in is deeply flawed, that they overpaid him, that he was multimillionaire: he too was a human being whose life was cut short. He has a grieving family and friends but we don’t get to see them. Meanwhile, Neely’s family is suing Perry for what he did and will likely enjoy huge coverage from the racist press. Perry’s life will never be the same and neither will Mangione’s.

The only positive thing that may come out of this American tragedy is a long overdue and serious public discussion about the practical steps that could in time turn the healthcare system into something that works for everyone. And maybe Alvin Bragg whose term doesn't expire for another two years, will get fired. By you know whom.

Now that would be Justice.