Luigi Mangione is America’s Everyman The rogue elite has become a folk hero

The assassination of a prominent figure in America always ends up being a riddle on the order of the enigma the Sphinx poses to Oedipus: “What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” The national attempt to understand the assassin’s motives instantly becomes an attempt to understand America itself. In a country whose original promise was the “shining city on a hill”, the search for meaning unfailingly plunges toward the nation’s darkest recesses. What is the American meaning of this American creature who you will find, in Saul Bellow’s words, “lying down to copulate, and standing up to kill”?

The apprehension of 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in a Pennsylvania McDonald’s on Monday offered the uncanny feeling of American murder adapting to the latest American moment, the way music or fashion update themselves as society and culture change. Just over a month after Donald Trump stunned liberals by sweeping the White House and the Senate, thus proclaiming the triumph of “regular” Americans over “elites”, here comes this scion of a wealthy Baltimore real-estate family. Mangione is the product, as both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal declared in banner headlines, of an “Ivy League” school, as well as having been the valedictorian of an exclusive prep school. His victim, Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, was, on the other hand, a regular guy, the product of a public high school — where he was also a valedictorian, but to the media’s indifference — and a state university. Depending on your perspective, the moral advantage goes either to the Elites — Mangione struck a blow for the common man — or to the Regulars — a decent-seeming father of two was cut down by the misguided morality of an addled Elite.

That Mangione was caught in a working-class Pennsylvania town, sitting in a McDonald’s, where he was recognised by a customer and reported to the police by an employee, seems the stuff of well-rounded tragedy. Both Harris and Trump, if you recall, laid claim to working at McDonald’s, Harris solemnly, Trump archly, in order to (absurdly) demonstrate their working-class bona fides. And here was a rogue Elite doing the folk-hero work of Regulars, turned in by a Regular, as if to remind the Elites — not to mention the burgeoning new elite of vindictive Regulars — of good old-fashioned law and human decency.

“Senseless” is an epithet almost invariably attached to “murder”, but not in the case of an assassination, which is, by definition, not senseless. The victim of an assassination is a public figure whose public status rests on a public significance. Still American presidents have often been assassinated, or attempts have been made to assassinate them, by proverbial “loners” and “outsiders” who don’t seem guided by a coherent purpose, à la Oswald, Sirhan, and Hinckley. Indeed, the template for the insoluble enigma of an American assassination remains the murder of JFK, an event that encompassed the Mafia, Fidel Castro, the CIA, the KGB, the Dallas underworld and, well, you name it.

Mangione’s alleged murder of Brian Thompson seems, on the surface, to be perhaps the most rational assassination in American history. To the extent that Mangione is now, ghoulishly, being celebrated as a folk hero, the motive for his killing, declared by Mangione himself, seems to be simple and, in the manner of a folk hero, humane. In this view, Thompson presided over a healthcare company that denied life-saving, or at least, precious life-enabling care to thousands of people. As Mangione put it in a Goodreads review — a first; an American assassin writes book reviews — of a book by Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber: “When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.”

You recall the finale of The Insider, that dazzling movie about Jeffrey Wigand, the whistleblower who brought down American’s tobacco companies. Wigand’s vindication, his triumph over both the tobacco companies and the craven corporate captains at CBS who wanted to suppress the airing of his story, is portrayed as happening just as the FBI is moving in to arrest Kaczynski in his remote cabin in the Montana wilderness. The movie’s implied message seems to be: either you permit people like Wigand to speak the truth or, not allowing that form of communication to prevail, violence will come.

“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive.” Ukraine. Gaza. Lebanon. The coming apocalypse in Syria’s recently liberated charnel-house. These are places where people pray for history’s violence to stop. In American pop culture, however, there is no happy ending without violence. Consider the Wicked Witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. Crushed as she is by, as it were, America’s falling housing market, all that is left is her shoes. And now consider the current Wicked, in which the Wicked Witch of The Wizard of Oz becomes uncomfortably humanised as a sort of domestic terrorist battered and bruised into a fighter for social justice.

A vigilante, if you will. Not unlike Mangione or, for that matter, Daniel Penny, the ex-Marine whose trial on a homicide charge in lower Manhattan ended in acquittal just as Mangione was being captured. Mangione allegedly murdered Thompson as revenge for heartless healthcare policies. Penny, a jury concluded, accidentally killed a black homeless man on the subway he was restraining because Penny believed that the man was about to harm, or kill, passengers on the train. No one seems to be in charge in America. So Penny takes charge. Mangione takes charge. As for the rest of us, we assert our own control by telling ourselves, and each other, conflicting stories about who is responsible for what.

And so we try to give Mangione a story. He has, it turns out, an uncomfortably humanising context that might help explain his turn toward social isolation and murder. It was chilling to learn that he suffered from an excruciating back condition. He allegedly shot Thompson first in the calf, where back pain often radiates to, and then in the back. Was that his cruelly symbolic way of taking revenge for his healthcare company? Or, perhaps, along the lines of the narcissistic personality that is the dominant psychological type of our day, he could bear his pain only by making another person experience it.

The back pain, according to the owner of an exclusive Hawaii hostel where Mangione stayed, prevented Mangione from having intimate physical relations, for a lengthy period of time anyway. He was lovelorn. His first doom came in the form of a flirtatious smile with a desk clerk at a hostel in Manhattan, a smile for which Mangione fatally lowered his face mask, thereby giving police a crucial picture of him. His second doom was that pair of striking, entirely distinctive eyebrows, two saber flourishes above a Cyrano nose. A true cold-blooded revolutionary would have radically trimmed or dyed them, in order to thwart attempts to identify him. But those eyebrows seemed to mean more to the young Mangione than corrupt power, social injustice and starting a revolution put together. When the police approached him in McDonald’s, they reported, the Goodreads fan of Kaczynski turned pale and began to shake.

“We are what we hide,” said Malraux. Mangione, the most handsome, sensual-looking, socially and professionally successful incel in America. The truth is, no one will ever understand why Mangione killed Thompson. Least of all Mangione. As for the manifesto the police found in his backpack as an explanation of his crime, when has anyone’s explanation of their own motives borne the slightest resemblance to their true motives?

Between wanting to kill someone and actually killing them is a wilderness made of impenetrable human matter. Just as no person or entity, poet, philosopher, scientist or AI, will ever figure out how brain became mind, no one will ever know why someone, Ivy Leaguer or social outcast, becomes a killer. “But that’s no matter—,” as Fitzgerald wrote in the concluding lines of Gatsby, “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning…” Americans will keep searching for the meaning of America in the actions of every American assassin in hopes that one fine morning they will find it. But in the same way that the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx is another perplexity— “a human being” — the disturbing answer to the riddle of America posed by America’s highest-profile murderers will always be another riddle: a killer.