Of course, Peterson
saw it coming...The big news of the day, of course, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University. It’s a dark day for the university, for the state of Utah, and for the United States. And a horrible day, an indescribably horrible day, for Charlie Kirk’s family.
On a personal note: This one hit literally rather close to home for me. I live within (long) walking distance of UVU, driving past it on most days, and I served for several years on the high council for a Latter-day Saint stake serving single UVU students and then as a bishop in a singles ward adjacent to UVU’s campus. The security measures that unfolded in the surrounding neighborhood after the shooting even affected a third-generation unit in my family; a non-parental second-generation unit was obliged at short notice to pick the 3GU up early from the 3GU’s school. We’re in Oregon right now, of course, but reading coverage of the assassination and seeing photos from the scene was more than a bit surreal to me.
While broadly sympathetic to some of his political positions — I am, after all, a political conservative of the virtually extinct Buckley/Reagan/Friedman dinosaur tribe, and there is a certain amount of overlap between that point of view and elements of the MAGA persuasion — I was not a fan of Charlie Kirk. I paid virtually no attention to him and certainly didn’t follow him. In fact, I learned most of what I know about him from the excellent recent Deseret News profile of him and his organization that was occasioned by his pending visit to Utah, and which, given the tragedy that happened this afternoon, has now taken on a rather eery quality. Still, I recommend it.
One line in it struck me on first reading and, oddly, immediately concerned me. I think that I actually may have experienced a kind of premonition of something bad to come. Lacking specificity, but striking to me: Charlie Kirk told the Deseret News reporter that he had become “too big to ignore.”
I didn’t like that. It seemed to me ominous, and the kind of assertion that would attract the attention of angry, unstable loons who might want to bring such a Big Man down.
I thought, too, of RMS Titanic being pronounced “unsinkable.” I thought of the Greek tragic flaw of excessive pride or self-confidence, hubris. And I even thought of Átē (Ἄτη; literally “delusion,” “recklessness,” “folly,” “ruin”), the figure in Greek mythology who is known for inducing rash and ruinous actions among both gods and men, the very personification of moral error or moral blindness. (She may, significantly, have been the daughter of Eris, the goddess of strife.) Zeus cast Átē out of Olympus, but she remains on earth, working evil and mischief.
Dan, Kirk's murder isn't all about you.
