MICHAEL MORRIS: Political killings: the abrupt cessation of reason continues - Business Day

Michael Morris

When I read former US president Barack Obama’s warning that the death of Charlie Kirk had created tensions that confronted America with a “political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before”, it struck me that it would be completely unimaginable for any prominent figure in SA to use these words today and mean anything like the same thing.

Of course, there’s a good case for suggesting that SA’s desperate economic condition warrants a more vivid declaration from some of the more complacent among the leaders of the intelligentsia — though we shouldn’t overlook signs that that is changing. 

Yet across the Atlantic Obama was not talking about anything like the counterproductive policy or the corruption, the administrative dysfunction or the racialist lawmaking that are to blame for a stagnating economy and millions being out of work, hungry and increasingly disaffected.

Obama was talking about nothing less than the condition of the American conversation, recently punctuated with grim irony by a gunshot that seemed intended as — and, in a sense, was — the last irrecusable word of a coward, willing to settle his argument with a Mauser.

The shooter always does seem to settle the argument, whether it’s valid or not. That’s what’s fundamentally wrong, in my opinion, with doing or saying anything at all in favour of people thinking that using their own gun may well be a legitimate political gesture.

The gunshot is always the last word. What follows is only deathly silence. Terrorists understand this all too well. Criminals do too. So has every tyrant in modern history. But given half a chance so do a lot of ordinary-seeming people.

In the days after 22-year-old Tyler Robinson’s arrest for Kirk’s murder, Utah governor Spencer Cox said of Robinson and his family: “This is a good family. A normal childhood. All of those things that, that you would hope would never lead to something like this. And sadly, it did.”

It ought to be sobering that Cox’s “something like this” was not an angry argument, a war of words, a shouting match, an unseemly spectacle, but a gun death, the abrupt cessation of reason. 

In all sorts of sad and lunatic ways the cessation of reason persists — the lunacy, I think speaks for itself (the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show comes to mind), but the sadness is that the lunacy is being allowed to reinforce the pathology that visited a devastating public tragedy on two American families. 

Looking on from afar, it is perhaps easier to at least try to be dispassionate and reasonable. But it also seems important to acknowledge something about ourselves, our country as a whole, and the political atmosphere we are all responsible for. 

Is it fair to say that when we see someone brandishing a firearm in public who is not in a uniform we recognise, we immediately assume that we are about to witness a crime, an abnormal crisis? 

This is perhaps not universally true, but I think that even where gangs operate brazenly, or where in some dark reaches of our politics the gunshot does register as an irrecusable last word, it really would be inconceivable for a former statesman to say we had a “political crisis of the sort that we haven’t seen before” and mean anything like the sentiment that moved Obama to speak out.

I don’t know why this should be so. We have more than enough anger and frustration to go around. Yet, for all our terrible deficiencies, we do have our virtues — and a credible self-regard. 

Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.

https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2025-09-22-michael-morris-political-killings-the-abrupt-cessation-of-reason-continues/