Photo: hawkeyeinnovations.com
After Donald Trump’s ear was shot at the rally last Saturday, one of the uniformed men rushing onto the stage shouted, “Hawk-Eye is here!” and I felt the thrill I used to feel as a child when a wizard or a powerful fairy arrived to set things right. Later I learned that Hawk-Eye is not an individual’s name but a computer program originally used to track the trajectory of a baseball. Now it’s used to track the trajectory of a bullet.
My thrill reminded me of how prone I am—and perhaps all of us are—to vibrate emotionally at the appearance of a savior, inevitably male, physically robust, leaping into a mass of wrongs to make them right.
I can’t afford this thrill. Nor I think, can any of us, except perhaps the few who believe in a heavenly savior. This thrill depends on the appearance of a strong man—or a man who can persuade us he is in all ways strong.
Hawk-Eye left a twenty year old boy, hardly yet a man, dead, as well as another man, and two spectators seriously wounded.
So instead of continuing to write about Hawk-Eye or my mistaken thrill, I will write about this white boy with a child’s open face, this Mr. Crooks—so shortly before his death, Master Crooks.
About all we know about him at this point is that he was according to a school mate “quiet, but not lonely,” good at math and fond of video games. His father bought the gun young Mr. Crooks, a registered Republican, used in his attempt to assassinate Donald Trump.
He was not too young to be denied due process, not too young to face a judge and jury rather than a sniper’s bullet.
I doubt if anyone will mention that. But as we respond with shock and horror to an attempt to murder a political man, surely we can pause a moment to consider the murder of young Mr. Crooks.
Did he know when he got up last Saturday morning, showered—no shaving, he hadn’t yet grown a beard—put on his jeans and ate his cornflakes that he would be going to his death later on that day?
Perhaps he only felt the thrill of offering a solution, of being the savior some of us have been waiting for. He may not have been mature enough to imagine the inevitable consequence. He was a slip of a boy, not the strong man some of us seem to want.
But wrong as his murder was, Mr. Crooks did not die in vain. For the first time, the Trump campaign has decided to replace its rhetoric of violence with a plea for unity. This comes after years of vitriol, with the Biden campaign contributing its measure. The appetite for violence as a cure for frustration is deeply rooted in this society, and a few sentences advocating peaceful resolutions to conflict won’t go very deep.
But it is an attempt, and it would never have been made without a twenty year old’s death.
Bravo, Mr. Crooks. Ignorant of the outcome and ignorant of the futility of violence you probably were, but you put on your jeans and ate your cornflakes and went like one of the girlish looking knights of old to right—as you saw it—a wrong.
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