Some hump days sneak up on you. This past Wednesday I woke up early and spent the morning finishing a draft about America’s most recent geopolitical folly — an own goal that pushed India closer to China and Russia. I was feeling pretty good, so I went to yoga, which was grueling. After yoga, I still felt good, but I also felt a rumbling in my belly, so I walked to the corner to grab a taco. OK, I grabbed three tacos. And a water. Hydration is important. The day was going so well. But by the time I returned home, showered, changed, and got back to my desk, things had taken a turn. On Slack, I watched in real-time as my colleagues shared the news:

Charlie Kirk had been shot

People on social media were saying he was dead

The AP and NBC News confirmed that Kirk had been killed

Slack went quiet after that and work basically came to a stand still. I turned on the news, but there wasn’t any news — only speculation, rage, grief, wild speculation, scapegoating, calls for civility, scolding, performative grief, spin, pearl-clutching, blame, calls for vengeance, hand-wringing, commercials for drugs that treat conditions I do not have, and a consensus that America was in a dark place and headed somewhere even darker. I turned off the news.

The internet wasn’t much better. Actually, it was worse. I saw all the same stuff that I saw on the news, but with more vitriol and typos. I logged off. Then I wondered if there was any new information, so I logged back on. After a few minutes of fruitless surfing, searching, and scrolling, I realized that it was just the same old misinformation. Also, a troubling question occurred to me: What was fake, and what was real? Technically, that was two questions. Nevertheless, the more I ingested, the more I felt myself becoming lost in the sauce. To paraphrase a prescient New Yorker cartoon, on the internet nobody knows you’re a hallucinating AI-generated dog spewing nonsense. I logged off again.

Eventually, it was time to make dinner. As I often do, I turned on a podcast. As it happened, it was an episode of The Rest is History about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Uplifting.

Actually, no.

But it was grounding, in a way.

One thing I learned about John Wilkes Booth was that he was a mama’s boy. He spent the Civil War talking a big game about the Confederacy. When the news was good, he’d annoy everyone around him by praising the South, the righteousness of its cause (slavery), and the bravery of its soldiers. When the news was bad, Booth drank. At one point, his sister asked him why he hadn’t quit acting and put his own ass on the firing line? Answer: He’d promised his mother he wouldn’t enlist in the Confederate army. Talk about the cowardice of your convictions.

The thing about assassins is that they’re losers. As Dominic Sandbrook, co-host of The Rest is History observed, most of us come to terms with the fact that we won’t make it into the history books, but assassins can’t seem to accept being left out of the history books.

What is undoubtedly true is that John Wilkes Booth feels himself to be a failure and is motivated by a thirst for fame. He says to friends again and again, ‘a man could immortalize himself by killing Lincoln.’ He says, ‘I want to do something that will mean that I’m remembered for all time.’

Mission accomplished, I guess.

The thing about assassinations, however, is that they invite historical counterfactuals. If Serbian nationalists hadn’t assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would there have been a world war? If Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t shot JFK, might America have avoided the social and political upheaval of the 1960s? If Booth hadn’t killed Lincoln, might Reconstruction have gone better? The answers to these questions are unknowable. Historians avoid counterfactuals the way vampires run from daylight. Still, we think in stories, and so it’s natural to assume that an assassin’s bullet is capable of ripping a hole in a narrative that might’ve been.

I think that’s one reason why I’ve been a history buff all my life. I’m wary of easy answers, of reductive thinking that says, “but for X, Y would’ve been different.” I’m also wary of alternative history’s myopic cousin: determinism. An economic catastrophe, for example, doesn’t necessarily lead to authoritarianism, although it’s difficult to tell the history of the 1930s without connecting those two things. The point is, what happens today doesn’t dictate what will happen tomorrow. History does not repeat itself, historians like to say, but sometimes it rhymes.

How did abolitionists in 1865 receive the news of Lincoln’s death? I’m sure they were sad, but as Dominic and Tom at The Rest is History podcast point out, abolitionists and radical Republicans weren’t exactly Lincoln fans by that point. Many believed he had taken too long to free the slaves, that he was too conciliatory, too much of a political animal to be counted on to do the right thing. At the time of his assassination, they saw Lincoln as a centrist who would likely go too soft on the South after the war. Some of them even thought Andrew Johnson would be a better vehicle for their Reconstruction agenda. They got that one wrong.

In moments like this, when everyone seems to have a grim take on what comes next for America, it’s good to remember just how bad humans are at predicting the future. It’s also good to remember that people who speak with certitude in these moments often invoke history without bothering to grapple with it. Here’s an un-fun, inconvenient fact I heard from Dan Carlin (if you know, you know) about political violence in America:

In a single eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972 the FBI counted an amazing 2,500 bombings on American soil, almost five a day. Because they were typically detonated late at night, few caused serious injury, leading to a kind of grudging public acceptance.

Think about that fact the next time you hear a talking head, or an influencer, or some internet take-jockey say something like, the level of political violence we’re seeing in America now is unprecedented, or we haven’t seen this much political violence since the Civil War. Fifty-three years ago, America experienced nearly five bombings per day, on average. In other words, there are people alive today who know, from personal experience, that the talking heads, influencers, and internet take-jockeys are full of shit.

The good news? History will reveal them to be fools.

The bad news? Most of us won’t live long enough to see it.

But here’s what the news won’t say: We have agency. An assassin’s bullet can’t change the course of history because the course of history is only visible in retrospect. History is the residue of the present — a product of our actions (and our apathy), the past tense telling of what we do now.

What comes next?

That’s up to us.

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I chatted with my friend about The Golden Child, then I wrote a post for my other newsletter, Slacker Noir, about the connection between the 1980s Eddie Murphy film and Raymond Chandler. Listen to the conversation here, and read the post here.

Not Safe for Work is a slacker noir murder mystery set against the backdrop of the porn industry at the dawn of Web 2.0. Like everything you read here, my novel is based on personal experience, funny as hell, according to many readers “surprisingly insightful.”

Not Safe for Work is available at Amazon and all the other book places.

*The ebook is .99, so you can’t go too far wrong. Just sayin’.

Are you listening to The Rest is History, or do you prefer to live in blissful ignorance? No wrong answers.

What happens next? Wrong answers only.

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