My father gave me the middle name James — not because it was his own middle name, but because of his affection for an outlaw who died roughly a century before I was born. Jesse Woodson James was a prolific bank and train robber who was shot to death by a fellow gang member in 1882. In the years that followed he would become a uniquely American sort of celebrity: an unrepentant serial killer and Confederate guerrilla whose exploits were nonetheless memorialized in a folk song that recast his crimes as acts of resistance. “Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor/He’d never see a man suffer pain,” ran one version. “And with his brother Frank, he robbed the Chicago bank/And stopped the Glendale train.”
That song, “The Ballad of Jesse James,” was not recorded until about 1919, nearly four decades after the death of the man it celebrated. But it existed well before that as the sort of tune people sang in billiard parlors — spreading, slowly, until it was so enmeshed in popular culture that no one person could claim to have written it. The mythology surrounding James himself likewise had many authors, all converging toward portraying him as a dashing foe of the bankers and railroad barons who had come to represent the inequities of America’s Gilded Age. Consider a passage from the 1939 Times review of the Hollywood film “Jesse James,” which credits an “ingenious” script with making the outlaw “romantically presentable” as “a handsome Quixote, hopelessly jousting with a public utility — a career with which any staunch American who has ever launched an individual campaign against the gas, telephone, or electric light companies, can sympathize.”
How many years had Jesse James been gone before anyone sang his praises in a saloon? I found myself wondering this last month, as a new outlaw myth took shape. Luigi Mangione — the man charged in the Dec. 4 shooting and killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare — was still a nameless, faceless gathering of pixels in grainy surveillance footage when a slice of the internet christened him a folk hero. Soon police released a photo of the suspect smiling at a hostel clerk, and people began to thirst over this modern equivalent of an Old West “Wanted” poster. By the day after the shooting, TikTok had supplied Thompson’s still-nameless killer with a folk song — though it was one unlikely to interest Bruce Springsteen or Van Morrison, two artists who have recorded their own renditions of “The Ballad of Jesse James.” (It’s hard not to cringe at lyrics like “Your claim to life was denied/Billionaires you cannot hide.”)
What made this instant folklore striking was not only its speed but also the order of operations: Instead of hagiography, which idealizes the subject, we saw an idealization that preceded the arrival of a subject. Mangione was cast as a hero, an imagined biography projected onto him, before anything at all was known about his life. His motives were yet unclear and his victim did not appear to have been a billionaire, but it all felt better, in some corners, if those things were true, and so that was good enough.
Occasionally the embrace of Mangione would leap from the safety of the internet into environments where it sat less comfortably.
What followed was a bonanza of memes, especially in the days after Mangione’s arrest. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Some were made from mug shots and perp-walk photos that highlighted how young, handsome and sane Mangione appeared. Others used photos from his social media accounts, like the one that showed the suspect, shirtless and smiling, alongside a text warning: “Friendly reminder that Luigi Mangione promotes an unrealistic beauty standard that will harm the CEO hitman community for years to come.” A few portrayed him as a saintly figure — shirtless before Jesus, who is telling him “It’s OK, they called me guilty too,” or handcuffed and surrounded by police, positioned next to a similar tableaux in the late-16th-century painting “The Taking of Christ.”
This celebration of an accused murderer in memes was not so different from the lionizing of a handsome train robber in song a century ago. Both are essentially passive acts of solidarity, opportunities to telegraph an attitude that most people would have a tough time articulating in earnest conversation. But this does not make either form of expression empty. Occasionally the embrace of Mangione would leap from the safety of the internet into environments where it sat less comfortably — as with a recent “S.N.L.” broadcast, when the mention of Mangione’s name in a “Weekend Update” segment elicited a whoop of approval from the audience. The cast member Colin Jost seemed so taken aback by the crowd’s approval that he stepped on his own punchline by adopting an oddly serious tone. “Yeah, definitely woo,” he said dryly. “You’re wooing for justice, right?”
The Mangione mania reminded me of something most Americans did not follow as closely: the assassination of Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe, who was shot while giving a speech in the summer of 2022. That inspired memes, too, many of them focused on the homemade explosive device used by the killer, which posters compared to everything from jury-rigged vape pens to video-game controllers. But the striking part was the degree to which Abe’s accused killer, Tetsuya Yamagami, succeeded in getting what he wanted. He targeted Abe, the most visible member of Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party, because of the party’s close ties to the Unification Church, which Yamagami resented because of the large donations it had solicited from his mother, bankrupting the family. His hope, apparently, was to make the country inhospitable for the church, and the extent to which he accomplished this can hardly be overstated. Seemingly overnight, much of the population came to a consensus that favored the assassin’s worldview. Politicians faced a reckoning over ties to the church; recently, the scandal contributed to the loss of the L.D.P.’s long-held majority in Parliament.
There are ways in which the aftermath of Thompson’s killing has felt similar, with America’s health care system and the companies that profit from it facing more sustained, ferocious and bipartisan abuse than I have seen in my lifetime. Perversely, there is only one word that accurately describes what the killing seemed to make many people feel, and that word is “hope” — an ugly and unkind variety of it, the sort that appeals to those desperate enough to settle for politics by any means possible. In Japan, no one had to hope that Abe’s killing might bring about change: Newspapers investigated the church’s ties to politicians, scandals ensued, corruption probes began. Instead of wishing for change, people seized it. Abe’s killer wasn’t valorized, though it seems that he was understood.
America might take a more worrisome path. Memes give people license to express things they could not say plainly or earnestly in their own words, without the cover afforded by layers of irony, which can disguise political resentment as idle posting. Sometimes they are low-effort substitutes for taking meaningful actions or committing to earnest positions. They allow us to express what we might otherwise keep to ourselves, but because they rely on the language of popular culture, they can also constrain our thinking about what it is that we want to say; instead of articulating our desires, we fantasize about them. I sensed this recently in a meme sent to me by one of the least politically radical people I know — one in which, for once, the victim of the killing was centered. It was a video shot from the perspective of a person approaching a Hilton hotel, as Thompson was when he was gunned down. The text read: “POV: You’re a grimy CEO on your way to an investors meeting in Manhattan when suddenly … You get a Sopranos ending.” Then, as in the closing moments of the infamous “Sopranos” finale, the screen cut abruptly to black.
Source photographs for illustration above: Kean Collection/Getty Images; Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, via Getty Images.
Joshua Hunt is a GQ correspondent based in Tokyo. He has also worked as a correspondent for Reuters and as an adjunct assistant professor of journalism at Columbia University.
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