Charlie Quoti
Yet another American murdered by an another American
“No one knows who Charlie Kirk is, again.”
Sometimes you come across pieces that hold up but that never got published. This one of those and we are offering it as a subscriber-only bonus early in the New Year.
The bulk of what follows dates from the day of Charlie Kirk’s murder and maybe 48 hours afterward, with a couple of added details like when Kirk’s wife started fundraising off his corpse that came along a tiny bit later. You’ll have to take my word for it when you read stuff that with hindsight proved to be astoundingly accurate.
Three explanatory notes:
The working title was Charlie Hebdo, a play on the name of the French satirical weekly, but adjusted to use an abbreviation of the French word for daily (quotidien). Everyday Charlie would be an English translation, implying that this guy was run-of-the mill for Americans.
What follows is a draft. Huge chunks of it don’t fit together easily or could stand alone as a different aspect of the same issue. That’s likely why I killed it off: it just became more and more work than it was worth.
BUTTON is an editing marker for me. It shows where a subscribe or share button would go or where some other break would fit, like an image. You can see different sections, some repetition but overall, there was no theme to carry you from start to finish. There’s no ending for this, which is what that lack of a unifying thread means. In some sense, that just fits with the overall theme. If this were a radio or television program, we could just fade out as the voice continued.
The result is a piece that has a couple of threads in it, all of which offer different value even now.
Most of all, though, the basic points, just proved to be true from the outset.
Just start with the opening sentence.
