The plotless lives of underground men
On assassins and the limits of biographical meaning.
My first memory of a would-be U.S. assassination has long slipped from public memory, but it’s one of the earliest TV news reports I remember watching at home. On the afternoon of Oct. 29, 1994, a 26-year-old hotel upholsterer from Colorado Springs named Francisco Martin Duran stood outside the White House for an hour. Two kids near him spotted and called out a man on the grounds who looked like President Bill Clinton (but who was actually the fashion designer and Clinton fundraiser Dennis Basso). Duran pulled an Norinco SKS 7.62mm semiautomatic rifle out of his trench coat and sprayed 29 rounds at the lookalike, missing. When Duran stopped to reload, a brave bystander tackled him. A bystander had filmed Duran cantering along the fence firing shots, and this footage of Duran’s strange gait and his strange, foreign-made rifle stuck in my memory. This was my introduction to America’s long and often culturally suppressed record of political violence.
The facts of the situation, at least in terms of what happened, seemed simple: Duran was trying to kill President Clinton. But the story of assassins throughout history are tales of underground men (they’re almost always men) who emerge to lay hands on history, only to puzzle society’s meaning-makers with the plotlessness and pointlessness of their own lives. Duran’s immediate trail of evidence showing premeditation also indicated the classic clues of the bizarre:
Searching his truck after his arrest, agents found one of the rifles Duran had purchased en route to Washington, several boxes of ammunition, nerve gas antidote, a letter in which Duran had written "Can you imagine a higher moral calling than to destroy someone's dreams with one bullet?," a road atlas on which Duran had written "Kill the Pres!," a cover torn from a telephone book bearing a picture of President Clinton, which Duran had defaced by drawing a circle around Clinton's head and an "X" on his face, a handwritten document with the heading "Last will and words," an order form for the book "Hit Man," and several books about out-of-body experiences. When they searched his house and office, law enforcement agents found a business card on the back of which Duran had written "Kill all government offices (sic) and department heads" and assorted other pieces of antigovernment literature.
Although Duran told the arresting Secret Service agents that he wish they’d shot him, they hadn’t, and his public defenders argued that this man was obviously a suicidal paranoid schizophrenic attempting suicide by cop. They argued he should be found not guilty because “Duran shot towards the White House, not with the intention of killing the President or anyone else, but with the intention of killing an ‘evil mist’ that his paranoid schizophrenia made him believe was hovering over the White House.” But his coworkers testified for the prosecution that Duran "really hated taxes and basically the government” and “didn't want to have any government official telling him what to do.” The insanity defense was rejected. Duran was convicted of the attempted assassination, a grand crime against the republic.
I thought about Duran and his attempt on Clinton’s life after the extraordinary and horrific assassination attempt of Donald Trump at a campaign event in Butler, Penn. yesterday. A bullet pierced the former president’s ear, and an attendee, firefighter Corey Comperatore, was killed, with two others critically injured. Secret Service counter-snipers killed a man with a rifle on a nearby roof, whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Penn., a dietary aide at a nursing and rehabilitation facility.
Immediately after the shooting, many of Trump’s supporters quickly concluded that the left was to blame. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” U.S. Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and a Republican vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance posted, collecting more than 25,000 retweets. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.” Journalists and investigators will tell us more about Crooks in the coming days. But of what can be said of a dead man, one signal of an underground world of the unexpected has already emerged: The would-be assassin of the Republican nominee for president was a registered Republican. A classmate told the New York Times that Crooks seemed “slightly right-leaning.”
In the first 24 hours of the shooting, many journalists, politicians, and citizens, incapable of processing the violence in terms other than its impact on an upcoming election, have applied a traditional horse-race analysis to a fundamentally absurd situation: Public sympathy for Trump, and his canny decision to raise his fist in the air after surviving by the grace of mere millimeters, is good for Trump’s chances, right? These are the coping mechanisms of an alarmed, confused and temporarily incompetent public trying to get a hold on itself under impossible circumstances, working with the best that its collective sense-making organs can make of an intrusion of disturbed private forces into the public arena. If you feel certain about anything in our future, I simply don’t believe you.
In my own past work as a reporter covering the public violence of mass shooters and terrorists, I saw that the emotional and propaganda impulses of the political arena almost always seek clarity at the cost of accuracy, indulging a tendency to look away from the inevitable chaos of biographical truth: The killers have narrative, in a sense that the events in their lives follow one after another, but frequently lack plot. The James Earl Ray who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 was a racist, it’s true, but that’s almost giving the real Ray too much coherence. It was Dr. King who was one of the great and inevitable Americans, the Hegelian world-historical figure hauling us toward to our republican destiny; Ray was a small-time criminal and a drifter interested in hypnosis who was thinking about going into the pornography business. What’s ridiculous is that we ever had to know who Ray really was. The biographical limitations here are that the more you learn, the less you really understand.
Making sense of the plotless is easier for literary rather than journalistic or political modes of understanding. The novelist Don DeLillo has spent much of his career wrestling with the underground man and his distorting effect on the rest of us. “The 20th century was built largely out of absurd moments and events,” DeLillo said of the John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. “In time we had to invent an adjective, European and literary, that might encapsulate the feeling of impending menace and distorted reality and the sense of a vast alienating force that presses the edges of individual choice. These things are Kafkaesque. In America it is the individual himself, floating on random streams of disaffection, who tends to set the terms of the absurd. A man walks into a diner and shoots 11 strangers. What city was that, and who remembers the shooter’s name?”
In a 2013 essay after the Boston Marathon bombing that I’ve revisited many times in these moments, the writer Chris Cumming wrote that DeLillo’s art, which prefigured the dread and conspiracism of the post Sept. 11 era, reflected a memory of the underground forces we’ve purged from folk memory:
DeLillo seemed prescient not because he predicted the future, but because he focused on history that has all but disappeared from American cultural memory: the terrorism of the 1970s, the red armies and brigades and the various liberation fronts that bombed planes and hotels and gunned down tourists in America and across Europe, the Baader-Meinhof gang attacking embassies, the Irish Republican Army shooting cops, abductions and assassinations by Marxists splinter groups. DeLillo’s work preserved the atmosphere of that time, and so seemed to foreshadow a later period of pervasive menace; in a similar way, Dostoevsky’s foresight in anticipating the Bolsheviks is more impressive if you’re not familiar with the Russian revolutionaries of the 1860s and ’70s who influenced his work.
The sorts of political groups and movements implicated in these attacks, which had a conscious sense of their own history and direction, did not necessarily yield an equivalent sense of coherence from the lives of their historical descendants. In the 2000s and 2010s, this seemed obvious from the kind of dupes and sad-sacks who got seduced by Al Qaeda or the FBI into signing up for trying their worst. Then there were all the mass shooters without even the pretension of some social agenda, just their own spectacles of nihilism. “By introducing conspiracy and chaos into the world, a terrorist hopes to make himself equal to the overwhelming world surrounding him,” Cumming concluded of the pathetic Tsarnaev brothers. “The idea isn’t to change history but to enact one’s dream life. The person who blows up the Boston marathon instantly becomes the equal of his act. What other mythic ambition can a loser instantly achieve, just by deciding to do it?”
What ends up feeling most empirical about the lives of these loners and losers is the frequent coincidence of domestic violence and substance abuse, organized into a social reality where many of them could walk into a gun shop and purchase a handheld death machine. When the unthinkable becomes the inevitable, the public grasps for some kind of meaning, and confronting the lack of one, turns toward more responsive parties who failed to predict and respond presciently to the absurd. Perimeters are hardened; security personnel are reviewed for incompetence or cowardice; family and coworkers are asked if they noticed the warning signs. The story ends with the underground man slipping back into the shadows. The paranoia remains, littered among the survivors like shell casings.