Popgun Pussies Listen Up!
|
| st008275@stonebow.otago.ac.nz |
The assassin was once a formidable figure. The men and women who knocked off Tsars were impressive people, well-educated, brave, sane and willing to face prison, even death. Lenin’s brother was typical of the breed: a serious young man of good family who concluded, quite rightly, that the world had too many idiot Romanovs in it. If he and his friends had only wiped out the entire family, Russia would be a far happier place today. The IRA, the finest assassins in the world before they offended the Brits by unilaterally declaring peace, were disciplined, careful men. They waited by Ian Gow’s car for days, and were capable of stalking a target for months before taking him out.
How pitiful by contrast are the assassins produced by contemporary America: a stumbling gaggle of aspiring inpatients, waving their pitiful handguns like those “cries for help” so beloved of therapists. Where are the Ulyanovs? Ronald Reagan will die in his bed. Not one sane American was willing to risk their life to wipe that filthy Cheshire smile off Reagan’s face. Not one! How precious are our little lives to us, to each of us, though not to anyone else. Ulyanov and his comrades were young, healthy, due to inherit high posts in the Tsar’s empire—yet they gave their lives to erase his vampire clan. How much is a middleaged American malcontent’s life worth? How much is your life—my life—worth? American lives go bad quickly: after high school for the blue collars, after college for the whites. After that, it’s the cubicle for you. And many of you are almost finished with your twenty-year stretch inside the cubicle. What’s left for you—for us? A few more years of ill health and bitterness, then the slow, terrifying slide toward a shameful ending hooked to beeping tubes, a drooling feces-machine serviced by wretched immigrant nurses.
Millions of us, facing that prospect, found it so precious that we let Reagan live. Let him sell the forests, bulldoze the Amazon, thin the ozone…. The arctic mammals are all dying now, their whole world literally melting under them, thanks to the American vampire Lords. And yet not one of us has cared to give his wretched life for the great mammals, our finer, more beautiful kin. Not one! How many of us were diagnosed terminal in the Reagan years? And not one of these walking dead invested his last months in ridding the world of a vampire or two.
The only man who took a shot at Reagan did so for a reason so utterly idiotic no satirist could have invented it: John Hinckley decided to kill Reagan… to impress Jodie Foster. At the time, Jodie Foster was the only openly lesbian Hollywood star—the one star who could not possibly like Mister Hinckley. So naturally it was to impress her that Hinckley popped away at Reagan’s entourage.
In other words, America is not bringing its best and brightest to this important vocation. The men (and a few women) who close their eyes and spray the general vicinity of the VIPs are not really aiming to kill a Tsar, as were the Ulyanovs. They are making a ritual gesture, a sort of formal petition for the Tsar’s attention. By now, the ritual is set, and poses no danger to our Tsars at all.
It didn’t take long for the Bush baby to meet his first peasant supplicant. A week after he moved in, Bush was visited by the traditional SSI recipient waving a handgun around. A handgun. It’s always a handgun. Just as the chainsaw is the magical weapon of horror films, the handgun has become the standard means of expressing dissatisfaction with one’s elected representatives. It’s a ritual weapon: all gesture, no power. It must make the power-tie boys happy knowing they’ll be stalked only with popguns, because with an effective range only slightly greater than that of a fist, the handgun can’t reach them, the men on the podium.
The handgun only kills little people. It’s an effective way of registering unhappiness with office life, because those cubicles are only a few feet wide, and even a .22 can penetrate their cheap carpeted sides or pierce the gray plastic of a computer desk to reach the blubbering office manager beneath. And even a .22 will scramble someone’s brains sufficiently to prevent them from issuing any more indignant memos accusing employees of taking more than the permitted 90 seconds per trip to the urinal.
But if you try to aim the damn things upward—at the men on the podium—you have no chance. It’s been tried, and found wanting. The last Lord to be killed with a handgun was Robert Kennedy, more than 30 years ago—and he was only a candidate, not even in power yet. The Secret Service didn’t really feel too gung-ho about protecting the little hippie anyway, so RFK was walking around with a crocheting offensive lineman, Rosey Grier, for a bodyguard. Rosey was three hundred pounds of domesticity, a chambermaid trapped in the body of a pass protector. After Bobby was splattered, Rosey went round the talk shows for years showing off his latest embroideries and crying on cue about how sorry he was for letting the little weasel Sirhan get so close. But it was RFK’s own fault: what did he expect from an offensive lineman? If he’d wanted to live, he should’ve surrounded himself with Raiders defensive backs. Jack Tatum vs. Sirhan Sirhan: now that would’ve been a one-on-one matchup to remember. RFK might’ve emerged from that hotel corridor covered in blood, but it would’ve been all middle eastern. They’d’ve had to dissect Sirhan’s hairy corpse for days to find the pieces of his popgun. Or Sirhan vs. Lester “The Molester” Hayes: one lunge by those stickum-coated hands and Hayes has intercepted the pistol. And then, to quote the Jesus, he sticks it up Sirhan’s ass and pulls the trigger til it goes click… click… click.
In the 30 years since Sirhan juked Rosey and got to the quarterback, nobody’s scored with a popgun—or even gotten close. In fact, handgun attacks on men in power have become ritual demands for increased medication rather than serious attempts to delete anyone: “Give me Stellazine or give me death!” In the mid-seventies, when American life had so ebbed that Elton John passed for a popstar and Gerald Ford passed for a president, two crazy ladies who passed for assassins tried to kill Ford. They both used handguns, and both fired from the middle of a crowd, up at the podium. If you’ve ever actually fired a handgun, you know that—contrary to what the movies tell you—the damned things can’t be aimed at all. They’re magic fists, like those boxing gloves on extending hinges—that’s all. If you try to hit a target more than a few yards away, you may as well use harsh language. In fact, that’s more likely to hit the target and do real damage. The two crazy gals were entertaining, in their way—one was the illustrious Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, overseer of the Charles Manson harem, who was supposedly trying to blast Ford to get Manson’s sentence reduced. “Parole Charlie!” Blam-blam, no thank you ma’am; Charlie still sits in Folsom. And Ford went on fronting for the thieves, unscathed and actually imbued with something like dignity—the status given those who are shot at without result.
Since then, only two men have even gotten close to killing a Lord with a handgun. The first is Saint Mark: Mark David Chapman, conqueror of the Worm, John Lennon. Chapman’s deed was magnificent in every way, down to the ritual of asking Lennon for his autograph before blasting him. The sweetness of it! Playing the humble non-celebrity peasant, the groveling fat nerd, then turning on the Lord who, according to press reports, “graciously” gave his autograph before unwisely turning his back. But Lennon was not protected by the Secret Service. Like RFK, he was one of the gentle vampire barons, committed to walking at street level, without bodyguards, on the way from his limo to the Chelsea Hotel. It was at that point—between the limo and the Chelsea—that St. Mark waited with the other aging groupies for Count Lennon to appear. This offers no guide to the killing of the more robust, Prussian-style Lords, who feel no need to play the slouching minstrel on the way to their eyries.
But what about Hinkley, who came so close to ending the Reagan era eight years early? Hinckley did some sensible things. He waited for the moment at which the Lord is vulnerable: the walk from the door to the limo. He waited, another puffy white 30-year-old nobody, the saddest and most contemptible of American peasant types. The Secret Service jocks gave him the briefest flicker of a stare before identifying him as the sort of nerd asshole they used to use for a punching bag in PE. Then they resumed their idiotic scan for more cinematic villains. And as they scanned, the grinning nerd Hinckley took out his little handgun and started popping Reaganites. He got the Press Secretary, Brady, in the head. By sheer luck, that bullet enacted a very sweet poetic justice: James Brady, professional liar for the meanest clique of vampires this side of Bathory’s servants, found that area of his brain which controls emotion totally destroyed. From that day on, Brady cried and giggled like a child, incapable of the least dissembling. For that alone, Hinckley deserves some credit.
And, one might argue, the handgun deserves credit as well. After all, he used a handgun and it nearly worked, didn’t it?
No, it didn’t. In fact, he was lucky to do as well as he did. For starters, he used a .22. A .22 only kills if you hold it right up to the head of the victim. It’s useful in that sort of killing, because it makes very little noise and doesn’t usually exit the skull. Instead, it rattles around in there, rearranging memories and other systems applications. It’s designed to kill people in cars and elevators, not on the street. Hinckley shot three people: Brady, a Secret Service agent, and Reagan. Not one of them died. He hit Reagan in the torso, where a bigger bullet might’ve killed the doddering vampire. But with a mere chip of .22 ammunition in him, Reagan not only lived but wheezed out lame wisecracks on his way to the hospital. If Hinckley had hit Reagan with a bigger bullet, recent American history might have been different. Maybe not better, but different—and how could it have been any worse?
The small-caliber handgun is the signature of the fake assassin, the proof of his frivolous intent. Because there’s a better way: the hunting rifle. A magnificent weapon, going to waste. Remember Lee Harvey Oswald? A little man who grew into a giant with a few shots fired from a cheap mail-order hunting rifle. Why has he had no imitators? With a decent hunting rifle, anybody who can see well enough to get a driver’s license can hit a target the size of… oh, say the size of a cantaloupe… at well over two hundred yards. Do the math: as the radius around a target increases, the number of potential hiding places increases exponentially. At two hundred yards, the number of vantages from which a sniper can fire is enormous. The helicopters may hover; the SWAT guys may strut on the roofs in their backward baseball caps, reliving their Al Bundy glory days—but they are mere bluff. No security force on earth can cover all potential sniping locations. And the muzzle velocity of a bullet from a hunting rifle is such that, before the sound of the first shot has reached the podium, before the minds of the vampires sitting in the roped-off seats can register that the speaker’s head has turned into moussaka, the second target—a grinning oligarch who sits on the boards of ten tobacco companies—will suddenly find his own thoughts subject to the most direct and lasting critique: several grams of superheated lead.
And the beauty of the whole tableau is that the men on that podium will have devoted a good deal of their adult lives to making sure that any aspiring Ulyanov can get hold of a hunting rifle with minimal interference. No fuss! No waiting! Get caught a quarter gram of speed in your back pocket, and you’ll do serious time—but purchase a hunting rifle complete with sniper scope and you’re keeping democracy strong. In fact, the eXile feels an obligation to bring to the attention of potential Ulyanovs this fantastic offer for a free scope, offered by the venerable Remington Corporation to purchasers of its 710 rifle:
Special Introductory Offer: Free Bushnell Scope w/ Purchase
Introducing the Remington Model 710.
|
Look around the cubicle. Imagine your slow, expensive death in an Arizona convalescent home. How many people will attend your wretched funeral? Will there even be three cars?
Now imagine your glamorous life in a maximum-security Federal pen. Women sending you adoring letters. Cons fighting to smuggle you drugs. Interviewers lining up to hear your every word….
And Jodie Foster, impressed at last, coming to chat as she did with Hannibal: face to face, only the glass between you. Surely the choice is simple.