Dear Friends,                                                                            How to kill a crocodile

Géza Róheim, the founder of psychoanalytic anthropology, has a nice story from the time he spent doing fieldwork on Normanby Island (Papua New Guinea) in the late 1930s: “One of my native friends on Normanby Island once gave me an incantation for killing crocodiles. (It was, he felt, a very effective incantation.) Then he described how he killed the crocodile with an axe.”

So what’s the point of the – very effective – incantation? The point is that the incantation gives him the knowledge that he is able to kill the crocodile, wielding the axe does the rest. Róheim uses the story to show that Freud’s two “principles of mental functioning”, the pleasure principle, which seeks the eternity of pleasure; and the reality principle, which shows us the cold reality of the outside world, cannot enable us to act in the world without a third, which Róheim calls magic, irrational and necessary.

Magic brings the pleasure principle into the world so that the world may be, might be, warm and embracing, my world; and through this it shows me the possibility of action in the world revealed by the reality principle.

Ok, this may all be getting a bit too Freudy for you (even though I left out the part about infant and mother). Still, the idea that the incantation is what makes it possible to carry out the action is powerful. Feel free to come up with your own explanation. Why talk about this now?

Because it gives me the only way that I can think of not to forgive, I don’t forgive them, but to find a way for Republicans and reactionaries to make their prayers for the victims of mass shootings something other than shame. Róheim and his friend just possibly might give them a way to make their prayers effective.

I’m not optimistic, it requires them to acknowledge both that their retreat to prayer is a lie, and that to stop lying means facing up to the reality of guns in the US, the whole catastrophe. But let’s give it a try.

If all you have to offer after a mass shooting are your prayers; and then after the next, your prayers; and after the next … what are your prayers? Where is the power of prayer? Nothing has changed other than that the number of guns has increased.

Are you satisfied with that? I don’t want to lecture you, I’m not a Christian, but at my Anglican school we used to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers!”. Yes, this is getting tricky, the last thing I want is a horde of Christian warriors planning to restore the Kingdom of Jerusalem. But the idea that you don’t just pray and then you’ve done enough can stop short of that: “Praise God and pass the ammunition!” is a start.

So after the prayers, think of what might possibly help God in answering them – how might you actually kill the crocodile? And, of course, now we get to the difficult part.

So, pulling the band-aid off in one stroke: you’re going to have to give up on assault weapons. They just don’t have a place in the defense of the 2^nd Amendment. You’re going to have to come out against the ridiculous Marjorie Taylor Greene rhetoric about AR-15s being necessary to defend us against tyrannical government. The 2^nd Amendment is to maintain a well-organized militia, an instrument of the state, so that it can “execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” (Article 1, Section 8).

Then, go back to District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), because I realize that you’re not going to be able to acknowledge what you know to be true, that the 2^nd Amendment does not grant a right to private ownership of arms for private purposes. Heller was the decision that declared for the first time that it did. An obviously corrupt decision, nonetheless, Heller recognized necessary Constitutional limitations on the “right” to own arms for private purposes:

 “Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”

In obiter dicta Antonin Scalia (who wrote the decision) gave examples of restrictions that were “presumptively legal” under Heller (see 2nd Amendment: Heller, 2008; Gun Control Proposals, June 2022). These correspond to Democratic proposals for common-sense gun laws. Scalia was not being honest, he made Heller deliberately restrictive, so that it could get through and then be the thin end of the wedge. And it worked. Nonetheless, Heller is the basic law, the founding precedent for a constitutional right to private ownership of arms for private purposes.

Think about it: if you stand on Heller you can show that you are true defenders of the 2^nd Amendment. You can also begin to make good on your prayers. You joined with the gun industry and the fanatics to create the horror we live today; you have a duty to bring back reason to “support” for the 2^nd Amendment. You know this, you feel the same anguish that all the rest of us feel with every new mass shooting, every new list of children dead. 

Stand for the 2^nd Amendment while explaining that common-sense gun control laws no more attack the private ownership of guns than do laws requiring drivers’ licenses and car registration attack the private ownership of automobiles. Gun violence increases with the availability and number of guns. The overwhelming number of guns, greater than the population, is the reality of the American nightmare. Everyone knows this, you know this.

Please, can’t you take this tiny step not against your constituents – they want common-sense gun control laws – but against the gun industry, their puppets in Congress and the “Executive” Branch, including the puppet in chief. Please. Before anything else, every new death by gun violence happens through the ever increasing number and availability of guns. Guns become more available and numerous every day. So pray, and believe in your prayers. Prayer, as our Normanby Island friend knew, can have power.

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby

Note: I began to write this before a number of mass shootings and the murder of Charlie Kirk. Unfortunately, they only reinforce what I’ve written, they don’t change anything. So I haven’t mentioned them here. I will in later posts.