Assassination Vacation

Writing is fighting

I was at the fights when news of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump went down. It was one of those bizarre moments of synchronicity that you get used to if you’re involved in any large-scale writing project for any length of time: everything that happens, everything you notice, seems somehow to cry its relevance to the thing you’re trying to write. In my case, it’s a novel about the friendship between Jack Ruby and the boxer Barney Ross. Boxing and assassination: two peculiarly American manifestations of violence in its most controlled and most stochastic forms. That’s the major line of logic, or illogic, that I’m trying to follow in my unfolding novel, in the form of that paradoxical figure, the tough Jew.

Barney Ross (1909-1967) and Jack Ruby (1911-1967).

Last weekend I was in Las Vegas with two of my oldest and dearest friends—we used to meet up there periodically back in the day, but it’s been more than a decade since we last met up there. It’s a fascinating and appalling place, America’s id, the context of no-context magnified to the highest degree. We wandered in and out of air-conditioned spaces in the killing heat, jaws slack at the resources expended to turn a truly inhospitable piece of desert into a feast for the senses. The extravagant spectacle of it all can’t quite conceal the essential sameness of each casino on the Strip, with its celebrity-chef restaurants and slot machines and half-naked dancers and the millions of punters¹ with dazed expressions that somehow mingle gullible bliss with can’t-fool-me cynicism. The crowd is the endlessly renewable resource that the spectacle was built to extract from; you know you’re being cheated every minute and so your imagination works in overdrive to persuade you that you’re getting value for your money. It’s an enormous confidence scheme. Wandering the Strip, sucking down too many gin and tonics, with your eyes dazzled and your wallet growing lighter with every step, must be a little bit what it’s like to be a member of MAGA. It’s an emotional pyramid scheme.

In the old New Vegas I remember, this was signified by the literal pyramid of the Luxor casino; in the new New Vegas the emptiness of the spectacle is signified by the Strip’s newest and most iconic structure, the Sphere. It didn’t actually show the Windows Blue Screen of Death during the CrowdStrike outage, but it might as well have.

This image, like Las Vegas itself, is at once completely fake and emblematic of a profound truth.

I thought I was done with Vegas, but I’d never seen boxing there and couldn’t pass up the opportunity, even though I knew it would be a shadow of the glory days of the sport. What glamor remains in boxing has relocated to Saudi Arabia, it seems, where Oleksandar Usyk prevailed over Tyson Fury this past May in the so-called “Ring of Fire” bout (it was a hell of a match). At the top of the Vegas card was a couple of middleweights, Janibek Alimkhanuly of Kazahkstan and Andrei Mikhilovich, a New Zealander of Russian origin. But when we got there on Friday night, we learned that Janibek had failed to make weight, promoting a lightweight bout between Raymond Muratalla and Tevin Farmer to the main event. That was okay with me; I just wanted to see the action, and to feel what it’s like to be part of a Vegas boxing crowd.

My love of boxing is a perpetual source of surprise, to me and to those who know me. I’m a peaceful dude; I dislike football; I’m a goddamned poet. Nonetheless I seem to have joined the perverse tradition of intellectuals trying to overcome their perceived effeteness by occupying themselves with this brutal, hypermasculine sport. The pantheon of writers fascinated by boxing ranges from early-nineteenth century writers like William Hazlitt and Lord Byron, to Hemingway and the “poet-boxer” Arthur Cravan in the early twentieth century, to the glory days of mid-century when great talents arose both inside and outside of the ring: A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, James Baldwin, and Gerald Early have all written compelling boxing pieces, and at least a few of them, like Plimpton, have gamely strapped on gloves and gotten into the ring (George Plimpton was battered by an obliging Archie Moore). This is a very male list, but women too are drawn to the fancy. Joyce Carol Oates’ On Boxing is maybe the best single book on the topic, certainly more thoughtful and critical than Liebling’s The Sweet Science. More recently, the novelist Laura van den Berg has written about her own training as a boxer. And who can forget, once seen, this photo?

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali writing a poem together.

Moore is better known as a baseball fan, but there’s something about her love of complex syllabic verse that tracks with a feeling for boxing, which my old coach used to call “chess with consequences.” (And then of course there’s this.) Ali, the most important boxer who ever lived, also had a reputation as a poet: it was mostly doggerel, but we think of a poet as a maker and creator then he certainly qualifies, and the line Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee is as immortal as Keats on truth and beauty (even if it was Ali’s cornerman Drew Bundini Brown who actually coined the phrase). Even if he didn’t write poetry, Ali’s life was poetic, profoundly allegorical on almost every level. Maybe one of these days I’ll teach a course on him.

Why boxing? Because since I was a little boy, I’ve had an intimate relationship with violence. (Of what boy, of what American, is that not true?) I don’t mean to say that I’ve been the victim or perpetrator of physical violence, at least not to any great extent. But to grow up a skinny and sensitive boy in the 1970s and 80s, and probably now, meant living every day with the prospect of being beaten up. I wasn’t actually beaten up more than twice that I can remember, but the threat of violence was omnipresent: every school bus ride, every minute in the school’s hallways, every walk home was fraught with potential attacks. More than the pain of a bloody nose I feared the humiliation that came with the confirmation of my low place in the social pecking order and the terrifying revelation of my own fundamental vulnerability. I suspect this fear to be formative in the characters of many, many men, even if most are more successful at masking (masc-ing?) by being good at sports, sticking to monosyllables in their speech, and bullying others.

I compensated for my vulnerability with grandiose fantasies of violence (Star Wars-style space battles and lightsaber duels) and invulnerability (I was in pure love with Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Superman and watched those movies over and over). One might even say that I became a writer because of my need to imagine alternative worlds in which my flimsy and uncoordinated body would no longer be under threat and my verbal intelligence, which had made me a target, would be converted into an asset. There seems to be an inverse relationship in the American mind between language and toughness: women and effete men chatter, real men are strong and silent. I was a chatterbox, an inveterate reciter of dialogue from comic books and Monty Python skits, and I talked like a book. I loved words and wordplay, and I read a lot of English novels; by the time I got to junior high my vocabulary was extensive and outré, making me eminently punchable. Of course I fantasized about punching back: 80s movies like Back to the Future and Three O’Clock High taught me that if I would only just stand up to the bullies they’d respect me and leave me alone. This proved not to be the case.

When as a a young adult I first heard about Barney, I was fascinated. Without realizing it, I had internalized some anti-Semitic notions about Jews: that we were scholarly but scrawny, pushy but pusillanimous, sex-mad but far from sexy. Nor had I realized how closely my ideas about myself as a head without a body tracked onto such anti-Semitic tropes. Growing up in Eighties New Jersey, anti-Semitism seemed a relic of the past; a fearful relic to be sure, one with a direct bearing on my own family, since my maternal grandparents had survived the camps and my mother’s earliest memories were of the postwar DP camp in which she lived before emigrating to America in the late 1940s. Our Jewishness was cultural rather than religious; probably the most significant Jewish figure in my life was Woody Allen (the hilariously anxious and self-deprecating Woody of the 70s and 80s, not the pedophilic creep. Maybe they aren’t really separable, but I’ve already digressed enough). Crucially, unlike most American Jews of my generation, I didn’t grow up with any special feeling for the State of Israel, and the image of the tough Israeli had no reality for me. It was startling, therefore, to discover the existence of Jewish boxers, or their prominence in the sport before World War II—not to mention the fact that I was related to one, however distantly. A Jew who could fight, a fighting Jew—extraordinary!

Boxing contains, quite literally, the violent impulse. There are rules. Each boxer has people in his corner to guide him and help him, though it is the most solitary of sports. The drama of boxing is in the confrontation between two fighters (usually but not always men) who alone understand the fear and the stakes of the moment, though a fight must have spectators to be a fight, only some of whom appreciate the technical skills on display. The rest of them bay for blood, or more charitably are there for the the shock of the aggressive impulse stripped bare. Certainly that’s what I felt in Las Vegas, particularly in the thrilling penultimate bout between featherweights Sulaiman Segawa and Ruben Villa. Both fight southpaw; Villa was the favorite but Segawa proved the more tenacious and effective fighter, and he won by unanimous decision in an upset. These are little guys, like Barney was, but in the ring they assumed an epic scale. And of course it’s always satisfying to see the underdog (in this case, twelve years older than his opponent) win.

Between rounds we were on our phones, trying to track the chaos in Bethel, Pennsylvania and what it might mean for the future. Already the iconic image of a bloodied Trump was everywhere, while information about the shooter and his motives was (and remains) scant. Only later did I realize the odd confluence of events, as though they’d emerged from the novel I’m writing, in which Barney’s heroism (in the ring and as a Marine on Guadalcanal) contrasts acutely with Jack Ruby’s infamy as the assassin of an assassin. The hero versus the cipher; the man’s man versus the nebbish. It is happening again. It always seems to be happening.

Violence can never be wholly contained because it’s inside us, men and women alike, each differently defined by their relation to it and their sense of themselves as potential perpetrators and victims. If there’s a path out of toxic masculinity it has to follow the path of aggression restrained, of sublimation or redirection, of strength in reserve: They that have power to hurt and will do none. I am very glad that the Presidential election has been suddenly transformed from strong man versus weak man into old man versus a woman bursting with vitality. Kamala Harris is uniquely well positioned, I think, to redirect Trump’s flailing aggression back onto himself. He cannot dominate her the way he appeared to dominate Biden, and in our culture of images, that may well prove decisive.

Poetry used to be my exit, my alternative to power, whether that meant wielding it or being hurt by it. I now understand no such exit is possible, or desirable. By writing, I hope not only to organize my loneliness, but to transcend it, to connect all the different parts of myself with all the parts of the world I’m capable of loving. That means, among other things, loving men, and the potential of men to channel their aggressive impulses toward care and creativity. That’s why I love the Aubrey-Maturin books so much, because its heroes contrast two opposed modes of manhood while discovering how much they need each other to be whole. Their friendship is literally underwritten by war—there’s no whitewashing that, just as there’s no pretending we can will away the aggressive impulse. But we can turn it into power, and only power can make real change possible.

1. Is there an American equivalent to this incredibly useful British word? Tourists doesn’t begin to capture it; chavs comes closer, but that’s another Britishism.