By now we can assume that there are few people in the nation who are unaware of the Dec. 4 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — on his way to an investors’ conference at the New York Hilton in Manhattan — and few people who are unaware that feelings are running about nine to one in favor of the shooter.
UnitedHealthcare is infamous for its rate of claims rejection — about one-third, more than other insurers — and the internet soon exploded with comments that ranged from embarrassed schadenfreude from those who knew the murder was morally wrong but couldn’t help feeling as if some strange justice had been served, to savage glee from those who hailed the shooter as a folk hero worthy of protection, obfuscation and, should he be caught, charged and tried and found guilty, jury nullification of the verdict.
Let’s be clear: Feeling are feelings. You can’t help how you feel. In themselves, feelings are neither here nor there. In this situation, they are buttressed by the frustration, suffering and heartbreak of those who are ill and saw their claims denied. Having had both good and bad experiences with UnitedHealthcare, I have compassion for these people, as should you.
It’s one thing for the shooting to dredge up painful experiences and emotions, however. It’s another to celebrate a murder and be willing to become an accessory to it. Think about that: This man was gunned down in cold blood for no other reason than he was doing his job, although we’ll get to possible motivations in a minute.
The key word in the preceding sentence is “think.” This is a country that does precious little in the way of critical thinking in part due to a lack of education, which develops the critical thinking skills parents should also help impart. This lack is related to a deeply antiintellecutal streak that is tied to a resentment, suspicion and all-out hatred of the rich and so-called “elite” that goes back as far as the colonial period.
Over the years, Americans have celebrated as folk heroes those who stick it to the man, including some murderous types whose popularity with the masses is underscored by their romanticization in some newspaper accounts, fiction and, especially, Hollywood movies where they are always played by handsome stars. Think Tyrone Power’s — and later Colin Farrell’s and Brad Pitt’s — Jesse James; Paul Newman’s Billy the Kid; Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow and Bugsy Siegel; Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger, to name a few. This is not to mention the fictional gangsters based on real figures that played across the silver screen during the Great Depression in performances by James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni, culminating in the 1970s and ’90s in “The Godfather” trilogy.
Now the internet has cast the handsome shooter, nicknamed “the Adjuster,” as Jake Gyllenhaal or Timothée Chalamet. Let’s talk about that face — attractive, briefly unmasked and smiling for the female clerk at the Manhattan hostel where he stayed (ah, the male appetite for a female audience), seemingly healthy. Not exactly the internet’s grief-stricken, angry portrait of someone whose claim or that of a loved one was denied.
Then there are the clues — those bullets inscribed with the words “delay,” “deny” and “defend”; the backpack filled with Monopoly money — surely this is pointed commentary on an insurance industry whose chief tactic is to run out the clock on any claim to boost profitability? Except what is Monopoly but a game — one that the shooter is playing with the police (discarding the backpack where they could find it but excluding the weapon, zigzagging Manhattan in ways that tantalize yet also promote anonymity) but also toying with the emotions of a mindless American mob worthy of ancient Rome or the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.
This isn’t a bereft individual who storms a stockholders’ meeting or Congressional hearing to decry an injustice and gets carried away, but a calculating individual who views murder as a kind of performance art, a kind of theater. And make no mistake about it: Once someone has killed it’s like turning a key in a lock and walking into a room, as a former London cop told me about Jack the Ripper. Once you murder someone it’s just as easy to murder a sympathetic admirer who may get in the way. When it comes to murder, in for a penny, in for a pound. Let that sink in.
Much has been made about how much the victim made — as if his multimillion-dollar compensation was in inverse proportion to the worthlessness of his life. Also coming in for castigation — a police force that the internet mob said would not be expending this effort on, say, a murdered Black child.
But in its lack of critical thinking, the intenet mob misreads what it means to have an occupation and that is you do your job, whatever that job is. Should the police let the shooter get away? What about the shooting of someone you may like or admire? And just because Thompson made millions, that doesn’t mean the money will now be going to us. As we did not have his responsibilities, including the death threats, so we do not have his perks. In order to have what he had, we’d have to be him. And who among us would choose to be dead unmourned on a cold New York City street?
The only way to effect change in our troubled health-care industry is through patient, time-consuming, thoughtful reform — but time and thought are the great enemies of adolescent America. Easier to pick up a gun — particularly when your motive is ambiguous, allowing the mindless mob to read into it its own anxieites.
If this were an Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle novel or a PBS “Masterpiece Mystery!” episode, the detectives would discover that the shooter’s actions masked the motivation of another party. That may yet prove to the case.
In the meantime, the shooter has proven Donald J. Trump’s famous boast — about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and getting away with it — to be prescient.
The shooter has shown you can slaughter someone on Sixth Avenue and — in the mind of an internet mob at least — become a star.