Everywhere there is violence

Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2023 © Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty Images

My mornings have become ritualized in a routine that begins at exactly 6 am. That’s when both dogs begin stirring, with the little one licking the first face that shows a sign of wakefulness. Even though my wife will have been awake and reading for an hour her ability to play possum in these crucial moments when I am trying to squeeze out 4 or 5 or 15 more minutes of sleep is supernatural.

When I do start stirring Mabel is ready to play, and my wife has already read and ranked the morning insanity that will shape The Warning’s commentary throughout the day.

Sunday morning began with news of slaughter against Jews on the first day of Hanukkah in an Australian Beach town that was stopped by the courage of a Muslim man who was shot twice by the terrorist murderer, a member of ISIS.

It was a weekend of violence in America.

Two people were killed and nine injured at Brown University. One of the survivors was on her second mass shooting, like the kids do these days, apparently.

The adults don’t seem to care.

Despicably, there was no mention of the 13th anniversary of the Newtown massacre on Bari Weiss’s appalling Christian nationalist power hour of grift, performative grieving, political posturing and gauzy extremism on CBS News.

There were no questions for Gen Z Serena Joy. Erika Kirk preaches a gospel of collective guilt against the nefarious “ they and thems,” millions of Americans who share in the guilt of Charlie Kirk’s murder, from one side of her forked tongue, while spreading a dogma of intolerance, racial supremacy and MAGA idiocy from the other.

There was no deep probing of this memorable Charlie Kirk idiocy by Bari Weiss:

I think it’s worth it. It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That’s a prudent deal. It is rational.

There was no question about the moral rot of a society that can’t remember the deaths of 20 first grade innocents and seven adults, which took place 13 years ago at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

There have been hundreds of thousands of deaths in America since then.

All of this makes me think of the Yeats poem, “The Second Coming:”

I shared this Yeats poem two years ago, in 2023, as Donald Trump was surging ahead of Joe Biden, and Democratic Party bosses were playing pretend, as opposed to resolutely facing an obvious crisis:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I thought about the Yeats poem when watching Bari Weiss interview Erika Kirk on Saturday night.

So far as interviews go, Bari Weiss managed to touch a dimension of grotesquerie that would make an honest propagandist blush and wonder if Leni Riefenstahl had a secret Jewish daughter — a lesbian, no less — living on the upper west side of Manhattan.

Watch John Oliver completely destroy Weiss (and here is the full commentary for your viewing pleasure):

CBS News and David Ellison can spare me the moralizing, preaching and insufferable corruption of their so-called journalism. It is a national misery. It is the wind to the acid cloud of Bhopal.

Any journalist worth their salt would be investigating the deep corruption at the nexus of the news and billion-dollar mergers, where the children of Trump’s oligarchs perform as moguls on strings, odd-looking puppets with hands up their backs, boys with toys fronting for men with boundless ambition and no mercy. These are the ruthless men to whom Franklin Roosevelt once referred as “the selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.”

It was a disgusting weekend, and I put my phone down early.

The routine repeated this morning.

“Rob Reiner and his wife Michele are dead,” my wife said.

“What?”

“Speculation is that their son murdered them.”

I saw Rob Reiner twice in the last six weeks. The last time I was leaving his home the roses in his garden were in full bloom.

They were magnificent.

Rob told me about the history of the rose garden, which was planted by Henry Fonda.

We had been talking about politics inside his study, but outside in the rose garden, we talked about baseball and the forthcoming World Series between his beloved Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays.

I saw him a few weeks after that at a party for a mutual friend. His World Series Champions Dodgers cap was on his head, and we talked baseball for a minute.

Rob Reiner was a great American patriot and a very fine man.

Frankly, I’m at a loss for words.

Everywhere there is violence, and it’s just getting started. America is sick, and it is getting sicker.

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