As we remember the assassination of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, Paul Auster’s Bloodbath Nation (2023) navigates through the horrifying history of gun violence in America and what initiated the statelessness of political conditions in the purview of obstructive legislative or executive forces.
It is a blind eye that we turn to the eight and a half-minutes of cold-blooded killing, filmed by a 22-year-old Darnella Frazier, that was eradicated by the Black Lives Matter movement during the vulnerable time of the Pandemic. Ironically, gun ownership has soared from 32% to 39% since COVID-19 spread worldwide. The author pairs his book with the images clicked by Spencer Ostrander, which is accurately named ‘photographs of silence’. He captured the ‘after-pictures’ of thirty mass-shooting spots transforming ‘them into gravestones of our collective grief.’
Why Do We Need A Gun At All?
It was an efficient method when Television showed us a fake gun dangling from the pockets of a young Texan lad, living in the early fifties of the Wild West, instigating young American boys to own cheap cowboy hats and toy pistols. The author first learnt to handle a gun in a sleepaway camp, handling a .22-caliber rifle, pumping bullets into a paper target fixed 25 or 50 yards away. However, for him, the greatest mystery was the death of his grandfather, a cause unknown, never to be revealed by his ostentatious parents. In 1970, aboard a transatlantic flight, a stranger who lived in the same hometown revealed that his grandmother shot him for having settled in Chicago with another woman post-separation. All the children were witnesses to the event. Bloodbath Nation (2023) talks about the devastating broken bonds as well as permanent injuries like shattered elbows, pulverized kneecaps and prosthetic jaws caused by gunshots.
Auster in Bloodbath Nation (2023) draws a vivid picture of the greatest crimes across America, a country created out of the realms of capitalist regime, under the aegis of neoliberal rule. He focuses on the tragic outcomes, inevitable when deterrent laws are not strict enough, and neither is the resource or infrastructure for ambitious living. He adds a poem by Hilton Obenzinger, entitled ‘Let’s Shoot’, which partly reads:
Let’s go to the museum and shoot Art
And then shoot the people looking at Picasso
Let’s shoot Picasso
He’s dead so let’s go to the cemetery and shoot the dead
Lets go to the Halls of Justice and shoot all the judges
Let’s go to the NRA HQ and shoot everyone
Let’s go to the moon and shoot Earth
Let’s get drunk and shoot
Let’s pray and shoot
Let’s go to the hospital and shoot the sick
Violence, Loneliness and Restraints in Bloodbath Nation (2023)
Narrating the several events that caused unprecedented shootings, he included the 15-year-old freshman who killed his closest friends and himself in the cafeteria of Marysville-Pilchuck High School and ten killed in 2015 at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. The impoverished lives are tales of ‘loneliness, unbearable, mind-crushing loneliness’ pushing them towards various forms of obliteration, or ‘deaths of despair’. It is the isolation, ‘one loss after another’, that moved them into thinking they have lost all that they deserved. The involuntary relationship with their demonic forces slowly turned towards an alignment or a service. Prohibition or gun control had begun during the 17th Century, imposing restrictions on the brandishing of guns and open carriage (New Jersey, 1686), carriage of concealed weapons (Kentucky, 1813), sawed-off shotguns, silencers and machine guns (West Virginia, 1925), as well as those laws banning duelling and enabling hunters to secure a license to claim their ownership. Georgia was the first to levy a tax on guns and nearly all states imposed a restriction on usage in public places. It is surprising to know that locations like Dodge City, Deadwood and Tombstone, portrayed as the worst hotspots for one-on-one armed showdowns, Main Street shootouts and saloon brawls, actually had the lowest crime rates due to their strict gun laws. In fact, they were comparatively a lot safer than the present American society.
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How Many Roads Must A Man Walk Down?
It is impossible to know whether the bans would be effective at all, owing to the fact that common people now have access to 3D Printers and DIY kits and the influx through black markets in South Carolina and Virginia. Antonin Scalia, the author of Heller case’s majority opinion, asserted in his 2012 Princeton University speech:
“I have classes of little kids who come to the court, and they recite very proudly what they have
been taught, ‘The Constitution is a living document.’ It isn’t a living document. It’s dead. Dead, dead, dead!”
The opinionated readers can guess who it is determined to address. But one moves over when he is shown that just three days after this Speech, a deranged young man murdered 20 children and 6 adults in a walk-in shootout at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut. The author recalls his friend Frank Huyler’s conversation, wherein he jotted down the various measures taken when a victim turns up in his ER:
“ambulance—or car with guy slumped in backseat
ER
depends on where person is shot
in leg—misses bone—bullet zips through—little hole—send home
hits bone—bone shatters, depending on weapon
shotguns—terrible
rifles—terrible—tissue destruction
pistols—like ice picks
belly—hole—must decide quickly about internal bleeding
blood pressure—IVs—quick assessment of vital signs”
Even Huyler faced a traumatic event when he narrated the tale of a gunman walking into his ex-wife’s office to kill her, only to manage killing three people randomly before being able to reach her. A very small number of cases are usually reported in a mass shooting and the term ‘mass’ denotes four people. The author rightly states – ‘in a dark inner sanctum of
personal grievance, where they go on festering for months, even years, and then metastasize into a universal hatred’. It is often reinforced into a sign of providential measure (forces of the blind) or to prove the guts so as to be embraced by one’s clan. Social media, now, turns out to be a ‘braggadocio’ for citizens awaiting inspiration for drastic steps.
Why Should We Read Bloodbath Nation (2023)?
Paul Auster’s book concentrates on the phenomenon where murdering a mass of strangers has turned out to be a competitive sport, in the likes of contemporary performance art. It is no doubt an estranging perplexity, ‘America’s latest gift to the world, a psychopathic footnote to such previous wonders as the incandescent lightbulb, basketball, jazz, and the vaccine against polio.’ The recalcitrant effects of gun violence move beyond borders to signify the impact caused by the genital mutilation of adolescent girls and the practice of stoning women to death due to infidelity. We are in dire need of proper medical treatment and societal conditions where military expenditures are lowered to provide breathing spaces to the homeless. Auster showed evidence wherein the Aurora multiplex shooter had started dreaming about killing a large number of strangers since he was twelve, planning the attacks in detail. It was so well-carved that opening fire with a semi-automatic rifle, a handgun and a shotgun did not deter him from carrying noise-cancelling headphones. This was simply because he could not ‘bear to hear the clamor and screams those actions would inevitably provoke.’ Similarly, the ex-Marine shooter was thought to have acute PTSD from his Afghanistan battle experiences while the Dayton shooter had a history of threatening people since he was a school kid. He’s supposed to have told his girlfriend about ‘visual and auditory hallucinations and was afraid of developing schizophrenia’.
Auster shows that the maximum number of shootings in churches were carried out by white bigots, contaminating their dark-skinned Others and non-Christian citizens, especially targeting Muslims and Jews. He connects the 2012 Oak Creek Sikh Temple attack to one such misunderstanding, wherein a Neo-Nazi backup vocalist left 15 people dead, following the attack by his own suicide. He may have thought of the Turban-wearing Sikhs as Muslims and gunned them down. Even though fascism and terrorist policies remain the same, fundamentalism and xenophobia against a certain group of people is a truce of hatred that can go any which way.
It is our responsibility to ensure the radical provocation does not reach the extent that the ‘hothouse echo chambers’ magnify beyond a certain point. The NRA dictum, after the Sandy Hook murders, states, ‘The only thing that stops a guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun’. The problem is, however, it is the necessity of a police force to deter the bad guys, so much so that it’s a game of cat-and-mouse. The bad guys, having access to guns, can try their luck instead of eliminating the problem altogether. In Bloodbath Nation (2023), Auster explores the post-election battles with the American Experiment, how the Black Panthers made it an issue beyond central metaphors and over 50 years of central politics revolving around guns. As Israel keeps bombing Palestine, it is never too late to recall the impact of half a million troops in Vietnam, when just across the bay in San Francisco, the flower children declared 1967 as the Summer of Love. The deadliest cities, Detroit, Newark, Boston, Atlanta and Cincinnati have halved their populations in this manner, and it is on us to never forget the ‘Summer of Bloodshed, Fires, and Broken Glass.’
