(RNS) — In the title track to Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” is a lovely, understated song that follows the arrest and execution of Charles Starkweather, the spree killer who murdered 10 people in as many days across the Cornhusker state in the late ’50s. Sung from his own perspective, Starkweather faces the electric chair with a lack of conviction so resolute it almost becomes conviction: “They wanted to know why I did what I did / I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.”
Luigi Mangione agrees there is a meanness in this world. His mercifully brief manifesto lays it out in unsparing detail: “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” he wrote, before declaring that UnitedHealth Group had “simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has [sic] allwed them to get away with it.”
This was his rationale for fatally shooting UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City sidewalk in early December.
As he put it: “these parasites had it coming.”
It was a strange, incredible murder, and a nation with no shortage of strange and incredible news stories was nevertheless uniquely gripped by this one. Mangione’s fury is relatable. That and an impish smile will go a long way toward buying public goodwill, no matter how ghastly the crime.
Mangione was already drawing Robin Hood comparisons by the time police nabbed him in a Pennsylvania McDonalds Monday (Dec. 10). Within hours, doe-eyed meme accounts professed their love, while victims of our health insurance monstrosity expressed, if not full solidarity, then at least a level of cautious understanding. “Honestly, I’m not wishing anyone harm, but when you’ve spent so much time and made so much money by increasing the suffering of the humanity around you, it’s hard for me to summon empathy that you died,” wrote one Redditor whose online profile described her as an ICU nurse.
A poster depicting Luigi Mangione hangs outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
The online fandom that sprang up around him has inspired a lot of tut-tutting from self-appointed cultural referees like Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, who bemoaned “the Instagram posts from nutbag people … crazy. ‘He’s cute’? People celebrating? This is a sickness, honestly, it’s so disappointing, but I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.”
But Ingraham made a swift, remarkable transition: “Up next, the other big news out of New York: Daniel Penny. A lot of people think he’s a hero and tonight, he’s not guilty.”
Penny, a Marine veteran, was being tried for the death of Jordan Neely. Witnesses say Neely — a homeless man who reportedly struggled with addiction and mental health — was being disruptive, shouting he was hungry, thirsty and “ready to die.” Penny approached Neely from behind and put him in a chokehold for something like six minutes, refusing to release his grip even after Neely had gone limp and at least one bystander shouted “you’re gonna kill him now!” A jury reached no verdict on manslaughter and acquitted him of a lesser charge.
“This is the season of hope,” crowed Daniel Henninger in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. “So there is no harm in hoping the Daniel Penny jury’s verdict is the start of a big, needed social correction.”
Praise from respectable figures like Henninger and Ingraham will not receive the same patronizing finger wagging as cutesy memes about Mangione. But Penny’s defense is not so different from Mangione’s. “I felt like the threats were imminent,” Penny said on Fox Nation, “and something had to be done.”
There is a great deal of speculation around Mangione’s politics, which, from the look of things, have the same half-formed, contradictory shape of other podcast-y young men interested in late capitalistic hustle culture. It seems likely his radicalization had less to do with politics than pain, as friends say he suffered from a debilitating back condition that had ruined his professional and romantic life. This may have been Mangione’s introduction into the crueler corners of our nation’s labyrinthine health care system, of which Thompson was both architect and avatar.
Thompson’s role in maximizing UnitedHealth’s profits at the expense of its customer base is well documented, from his role in implementing a faulty AI algorithm that boosted UnitedHealth’s annual rate of claim denials from 8% to 22% to being named in an insider trading case. But, even if it hadn’t, most of us are familiar with private health care companies and how often they act more like expensive riddles you have to solve rather than anything approaching the stated goal of “insuring health.”
It hardly needs to be said, but none of this justifies murder. But perhaps it does need to be said that acting scary on the subway because you are homeless and sick and hungry also does not justify murder. Thompson’s killing is one manifestation of America’s appetite for redemptive violence. Neely’s is another.
“Thou shalt not kill” seems like the most obvious of the 10 Commandments, the no-brainer of the bunch. But you don’t have to thumb through your Bible too far in either direction to find exceptions to the rule, nor celebration of its violations. Before he became king of Israel, David became famous as one of King Saul’s most skilled soldiers. 2 Samuel tells us he was greeted by songs declaring “Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” It’s a startling compliment: “This guy’s a mass murderer, but this guy’s even more of a mass murderer.” Fancams of Mangione set to Britney Spears’ “Criminal” seem a little less unhinged in comparison.
Years later, after David had been made king, God denied his request to build a temple in Jerusalem. “You have shed much blood and have fought many wars,” God tells him in 1 Chronicles 22:8. “You are not to build a house for my Name, because you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight.” David’s violence may have been defensible, laudable, perhaps even necessary. But it came at a cost. God was not about to have a home built by the violent. Instead, God said the temple should be built by David’s son Solomon, “a man of peace and rest.”
This tells us something important about God, even for those of us who aren’t in the temple-making business. We should all strive to be the kind of person who can build space for the sacred. And to be that kind of person, we need to be people of peace and rest.
And yet, here we are, trapped in an economy of personal and structural violence so inescapable it feels easier to pick the least inhumane murderer and root for them instead of breaking free altogether. But this won’t work. The inexcusable cannot be overcome by the unforgivable. Violence will not save us from violence. If we want more houses in God’s name, we will need more people of peace to build them.
There’s a meanness in this world alright, and it’s naturally occurring. Grace, however, comes from somewhere else. It must be wielded with the same conviction as violence. And if we lack faith in grace’s transformative power, it’s only because we haven’t seen enough of it to even imagine the possibilities.
(Tyler Huckabee is a writer living in Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and dogs. Read more of his writing at his Substack. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)