Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, shares sudden folk-herodome this week with Daniel Penny, killer of the mentally ill Jordan Neely. In America heroic compassion won’t get you anything like the devotion for killing someone who is a member of an “out group”. Jordan Neely’s group: untreated mental patients, is a ubiquitous group in NY. They are our biggest product. They are a loud, flailing, urinating indictment of the rest of us, who often turn away in fear and indifference. We just want to get through the day, free of exposure to their tortured humanity. We prefer to devote our money to things other than emergency health care. New York is essentially an enterprise of finance, real estate, and related services supporting those projects. Most of us are in this service. And we hardly think about the poor. Or the untreated mentally ill ground up in a broken medical system. Jordan Neely didn’t exist to make subway riders feel threatened. He just existed. He was a neglected man who somehow adapted to the neglect … and became a glaring billboard for our negligence. And as a society we find it a relief to be rid of that reminder of ourselves and the culture we tolerate or even choose. And so celebrate Daniel Penny.
His co-celebrant, Mangione, also gets some ticker tape for killing a man. It is not hard for us to understand Mangione’s suffering. Our identification with him, another privileged young white man, now identified on social media as “hot”, is unrestrained. Although, he is really the Neely of his story, a person also tortured by a crushing system of profit over people. But in his case, opposed to that of Neely, his situation and looks make him worthy of our compassion. The celebrity media system now crashes into the criminal justice system, taking the truth about this poor wretch, and all the others, even further away from our consideration than before.
