Family Snapshot

Who Remembers This Haunting Song?

The streets are lined with camera crews
Everywhere he goes is news
Today is different
Today is not the same
Today, I'll make the action
Take snapshot into the light
Snapshot into the light
I'm shooting into the light

Four miles down, the cavalcade moves on
Driving into the sun
If I worked it out right
They won't see me or the gun

Two miles to go, they're clearing the road
And the cheering has really begun
I've got my radio
I can hear what's going on

I've been waiting for this
I have been waiting for this
All you people in TV land
I will wake up your empty shells
Peak-time viewing blown in a flash
As I burn into your memory cells
'Cause I'm alive

They're coming 'round the corner with the bikers at the front
I'm wiping the sweat from my eyes
It's a matter of time
It's a matter of will

And the governor's car is not far behind
He's not the one I've got in mind
'Cause there he is
The man of the hour
Standing in the limousine

I don't really hate you
I don't care what you do
We were made for each other, me and you
I want to be somebody
You were like that, too
If you don't get given, you learn to take
And I will take you

Holding my breath
Release the catch
And I let the bullet fly

All turned quiet
I have been here before
A lonely boy hiding behind the front door

Friends have all gone home
There's my toy gun on the floor

Come back, Mom and Dad
You're growing apart
You know that I'm growing up sad
I need some attention
I shoot into the light

“The song was inspired by An Assassin's Diary, published in 1973 and written by Arthur Bremer, who, on May 15, 1972, attempted to assassinate George Wallace, a Democratic Party politician who supported racial segregation. Gabriel talked about the book in a authorized biography: An Assassin's Diary was a really nasty book, but you do get a sense of the person who is writing it. Bremer was obsessed with the idea of fame. He was aware of the news broadcasts all over the world and was trying to time the assassination to hit the early evening news in the States and the late night in Europe to get maximum coverage. Gabriel stated in the introduction to the song during his concert at the Paramount Theatre, Seattle, that the song is, "partly taken from the writings of Arthur Bremer and The Diary of an Assassin and mixed with a few images of Dallas twenty years ago."

—YouTube comment

I must be traumatized, I can’t bring myself to care about what really happened, or didn’t.

Was it “staged?”

Welcome to 1000 new rabbit holes, theories, certainties, and arguments. All they have in common is a quality of sterility.

Inducing Americans to charge like lemmings after their chosen I-don’t-believe-bullshit theory du jour.

Let’s assume there was a gunman, and he tried to kill Trump, and for some reason the rooftop Secret Service guys waited till Trump was hit with actual bullets to the side of his head, before they “blew the head off” the 20 year old assassin. What else? We’re told he was a “registered Republican” who donated to Biden.

No single fact in all this is worth a PCR Covid test that 3 dogs peed on.

The only thing Americans know for sure is that Americans can’t know anything for sure, except that the lies are getting bigger, cruder, and more disorienting, with each Capstone Trauma Event.

The gunman (do I have to say “ostensible” every other word?) just released the intensely coiled tension of 8 years of engineered Trump loathing, converting it, making its future and growth impossible.

Trump Loathing and Hysteria, I assert, is essentially over.

Those on the murderous “left” angry that the would be assassin missed are ghettoing themselves as we speak. Nobody wants to be that—almost nobody. So: Trump loathing has been burned off in a hail of bullets, whether real or theatrical—it doesn’t matter as much as people think, what really happened.

American Traditions.

Rene Girard said that scapegoating, sacrificing, and worship are part of an ancient sequence.

Example:

JFK was sacrificed, as the best, for we sacrifice the best—and he was worshipped after sacrifice, by the same forces who oversaw his execution.

Same thing here in Granada, with Lorca: Sacrificed and returned as object of worship, but not as he was. (Poet.)

The Obama grandstanding class now have to speak in their frosty, self-important ways of violence as “unacceptable” in the United States, though he and Michelle stopped short of using the word “prayers.”

That struck me as significant.

Do Northern Europeans notice that Americans today, on all sides, are issuing prayers for Trump and his family? Even Joe Biden.

That says to me that we are still a God nation, in some hard to define way. I can promise you Swedes, Germans, Dutch, do not promise to “pray” for a wounded political leader, struck by bullets.

The American esprit is, potentially, putting itself back together.

What was that Tranströmer line: “Our eyes keep wide open beneath the bandages?”

I was surprised, last night, around 3 am here, that when I saw the footage, when I heard the bullets, saw Trump grab the side of his head, I started to cry. The 8 years of immense tension coming un-coiled.

It would become possible to feel something, not only for Donald Trump, but for ourselves.

This is all that interests me, in all this.

“And all of us now have to start looking at each other and saying:”We’re all Americans. We’re better than this.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

That interview is really worth listening to. Maybe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is here to lead us on an expedition to a clearing in the woods where we can grieve, weep, and come back out as something more human that what they had in mind for us.

Maybe the hostage crisis, begun in 1963, is over. It does seem to me that more and more, we are speaking with a more human “collective” voice. The crazies are finished.