"Whomever has the gun, you see, gets to tell everyone else what to do — it’s the American way."

A line in Kurt Vonnegut's 1970 play "Happy Birthday, Wanda June," which is revived right now off Broadway and discussed in "Kurt Vonnegut’s Vietnam-Era Play Lands With a Gasp" (NYT).

“There’s absurdism in the news right now,” [said the director Jeff Wise], “and it’s getting more and more absurd in a very despairing and awful way.”...

“Even in the last few days,” [said the actor Jason O’Connell, who plays Harold, a "Trumpian guy"], “there are elements of the show that played funnier in April that feel a little darker now, and I don’t think we’re doing anything differently with them. I think people are receiving them differently.”...

Night to night, too, sensitivities change. The evening of the October day when 11 people were murdered at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the moment in the show that didn’t work involved Nazis, [the actress Kate] MacCluggage said. At a performance right after a different mass shooting, she recalled, a line that Harold speaks went over like “a stomach punch”: “Whomever has the gun, you see, gets to tell everyone else what to do — it’s the American way.”

"I didn't see evil when I looked into Robert Bowers’ eyes. All I saw was a clear lack of depth, intelligence, and palpable amounts of confusion."

"Robert Bowers probably had no friends, was easily influenced by propaganda, and wanted attention on a sociopathic level... He’s the kind of person that is easily manipulated by people with a microphone, a platform, and use fear for motivation.... I wanted him to feel compassion. I chose to show him empathy. I felt that the best way to honor his victims was for a Jew to prove him wrong... Robert Bowers thanked me for saving him, for showing him kindness, and for treating him the same way I treat every other patient.... The fact that this shooting took place doesn’t shock me. To be honest, it’s only a matter of time before the next one happens."

Wrote Ari Mahler, quoted in "Jewish nurse who treated synagogue killer saw lack of intelligence in gunman and treated him with 'love'" (Daily News).

ADDED: Full text of Mahler's Facebook post:

"Trump Arrives in Pittsburgh as Many Make Clear His Visit Isn’t Welcome."

NYT headline.

Their signs read “Words matter” and “President Hate is not welcome in our state.” Though some people in Pittsburgh have pushed back on the idea that Mr. Trump has fomented an atmosphere of social division, many protesters had no doubt of what one called “the dotted line” between presidential rhetoric and violence....

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leaders, [declined to accompany the President'.

“This is not about a conflict of schedule,” Ms. Pelosi said in an interview. “It is about leaving the people the peace that they need to bury the dead and mourn the loss. I don’t think it would have been welcome for us to go there. I think that when invited, we should respond. When told not to come, we should not... I don’t know that the president understands that his words weigh a ton, and when he says some of the things he says, they fall on ears that are more fragile,” Ms. Pelosi added.

Blame Trump and Trump blames you.

He won't quiet down:

Despite calls for him to cool his overheated rhetoric after the deadly synagogue shooting and pipe bomb mailings, President Trump on Monday continued his assault on the “Fake News Media” by continuing to accuse them of stoking rage.

“There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly,” he wrote on his Twitter account.

“That will do much to put out the flame of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!,” the president posted, just two days after 11 people were gunned down by a man yelling “all Jews must die” at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

The "calls for him to cool his overheated rhetoric" are what I've been calling "civility bullshit" for years. It's always only aimed at the other side. They want you to stop fighting them with vigor, and they have no intention of stopping fighting you. Trump obviously know this and can't be played. You might think just this once — because 11 people were massacred — he'd go presidential, bow his head, and sing "Amazing Grace," but his opponents didn't refrain from closing right in on him and kicking him, and he kicks back.

The horror of efforts to connect the Pittsburgh massacre to Trump.

I will just give one example of the kind of commentary that feels like an immoral elevation of politics over humanity: "Trump’s Response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting and His Obsession with the Word 'Frankly'" by Katy Waldman in The New Yorker. First, overuse of a word, a verbal tic, is not an "obsession." Second, 11 people were shot to death; who cares about Trump's repetition of a word? I like to do language analysis, but 11 people were murdered. What seems like an "obsession" here is the desire to get after Trump with anything and everything that comes up. Can you just stop for one day?

I'll just quote the fifth of the five paragraphs in the linked piece. Was this worth saying? Does it even make sense?

Before opening fire on the Tree of Life congregants, Bowers posted a message to Gab, a right-wing social network that, like other online forums for extremists, casts itself as an embattled bastion of free speech. “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist,” Bowers complained on the site. “There is no #maga as long as there is a kike infestation.” The gunman’s accusation evoked a riff-cum-vocabulary lesson from Trump’s rally in Houston on Monday. “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much,” the President explained, before asserting, “I’m a nationalist.” The “frankly” in this case—meant to expose the dirty truth about globalists, and to preface Trump’s oath of fealty to tribal politics—reads as far more honest than anything the President said on Saturday. He is frankest at his rallies and on Twitter. There is a difference, of course, between saying what you mean and saying what is true. Trump is not practicing frankness when he deplores hatred. He is being frank when he foments resentments that are phantasmal. For him, falsehoods carry the weight of facts, whereas reality is “truly unimaginable.”

You can connect anything to anything if you want, and when it's that hard to do, you must really want it. Did Katy Waldman look back on that paragraph and think, God, am I smart. What a language master I am, unlike Trump who keeps saying "frankly"?

"He is being frank when he foments resentments that are phantasmal" — I can't believe she didn't get out the thesaurus and find a synonym for "resentments" that began with an "f" sound. Let me try... He is being frank when he foments fuckeries that are phantasmal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Amadeus 48 said:

A frank assessment of the functional flim-flam of this over-exposed flunky writing for that fortress of fatuousness, fripperies, and follies, the New Yorker, fatigues and, frankly, frightens me, fragile flower of fortune that I am.

A frank fermentation of the functional flim-flam of furious florid flunky Flair flicks...

"Gab’s affiliation with Mr. Bowers has already cost the company dearly."

"On Saturday, the company’s web hosting provider, Joyent, moved to shut the site down, according to an email posted by Gab on Twitter. The payment processing platform Stripe, which Gab has used to receive fees for its paid Gab Pro membership level, and which froze Gab’s account this month for violating its terms of service, said it was suspending transfers to the company’s bank account pending an investigation, according to another email posted to Twitter by Gab. PayPal, another payment processor, canceled Gab’s account, saying that it had been closely monitoring the site since before Saturday’s massacre.... Gab... was started in 2016 by a conservative programmer, Andrew Torba, who was fed up with what he saw as Silicon Valley’s left-wing censorship.... [T]he platform’s intentionally slim rule book attracted a crowd of extremists, including white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who had been banned from other social platforms. Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart writer whose harassment campaigns got him kicked off Twitter, signed up for an account. So did Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer, and Richard Spencer, the well-known white nationalist. Within months, Gab had become a last refuge for internet scoundrels — a place where those with views considered too toxic for the mainstream could congregate and converse freely....  Despite its claims of pan-partisan appeal, Gab’s most popular posts espouse far-right ideology... Posts by the site’s members in recent days include a torrent of anti-Semitic cartoons, conspiracy theories, and denunciations of liberal censorship...."

From "On Gab, an Extremist-Friendly Site, Pittsburgh Shooting Suspect Aired His Hatred in Full" (NYT).

"Bowers Said on Gab That He Did Not Vote for Donald Trump Because Trump Has Allowed Jewish People in His Administration & Among His Supporters."

From "Robert Bowers: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know" (Heavy).

Bowers was an active poster on an alternative version of Twitter, Gab, which is popular with white supremacists, white nationalists, members of alt-right groups and others who have been kicked off of mainstream social media sites....

In a post a few days before the shooting, Bowers wrote, “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a k*** infestation. #Qanon is here to get patriots that were against martial law in the 90’s to be ones begging for it now to drain muh swamp. But go ahead and keep saying you are #Winning.” That same day, Bowers wrote, “amazing amount of division on gab today. glas the overwhelming jew problem has been solved so we can now fight with each other.” In another message, Bowers wrote of Trump, “For the record, I did not vote for him nor have I owned, worn or even touched a maga hat.” Bowers is a registered voter but is unaffiliated....

The Pittsburgh massacre.

President Trump struggles to speak about the murders: