Luigi Mangione and the making of a modern hero
He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, is the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, and is an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and were worried about him when he went off the grid a few months ago. His reading and podcasting habits, as gleaned from his Goodreads account and other traces of his online footprint, can be summed up as “regressive conservatism, bro science and bro history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement.” Stoicism, according to Max Read, who He writes About technology and Internet culture. In other words, a typical diet is adequate for a modern computer science guy in his 20s, and certainly nothing to worry about.
He is, unanimously, handsome and attractive. “Holy happy trail, Batman!” said Stephen Colbert excitedly, snapping an outdoor photo of a shirtless, beaming Luigi Mangione, who was briefly the most wanted man in America, and perhaps still is. “You know this guy’s Italian because you can grate Parmesan cheese on those abs,” Colbert continued. (Fellow late-night host Taylor Tomlinson was more succinct: “Is it possible.”) In his mug shot, Mangione, chiseled and defiant, looks ready for his close-up in a reboot of “Rocco and His Brothers.” The hoodie wears well. Monday night, a friend sent me a photo of police escorting A Highly backlit Mangione called for him to be summoned, adding: “Even the police are trying to exonerate him.”
Last week, Internet citizens were making dark and soothing jokes about the deadly Dec. 4 shooting in Manhattan of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, the insurance arm of the world’s largest health care company. Now that Mangione has been tentatively identified as Thompson’s attacker, and has been arrested and charged with Thompson’s murder, the ultimate Internet is decorating Mangione’s photo with glitter and heart emojis, Sharing fancams Mangione scored for Charli XCX’s “Spring Breakers”, and edited Mangione into time-stamped footage to try to provide him with an alibi. (Sympathetic metal band Published to X“They released Luigi who on December 4th around 6am helped us upload our trailer and drive with us to play a secret set in California which is about 1.8 miles from Manhattan and at the show he bought merch from every band except the hoodies because he said he hated them .))
In an attempt to determine the motive behind the alleged murder, authorities cited note Mangione was apparently found when he was arrested at a McDonald’s restaurant in central Pennsylvania. “Honestly, these parasites simply came.” “Reminder: The United States has the most expensive health care system in the world, yet we rank almost 42nd in life expectancy.” The memo also said that UnitedHealthcare’s size and power allowed it to “abuse our country for enormous profits.” Thompson, who became CEO in 2021, increased UnitedHealthcare’s profits by $5 billion in just two years. Between 2019 and 2022, UnitedHealthcare more than doubled its denial rate for prior authorization requests for post-acute care. One of Thompson’s signature innovations was to use a predictive algorithm to evict sick and disabled Medicare patients from nursing homes and rehabilitation programs, causing untold misery and poverty. UnitedHealthcare has increasingly required—and often denied—pre-authorization for any number of mundane necessities: Colonoscopyor Insulinor pain medicine After a major, physical, occupational, or speech operation to treat.
To date, Mangione remains in Pennsylvania, where his legal team fights to extradite him to New York. The support and affection that dominates him online – and the negative image of fear and hatred directed at our health care system – appears to extend to the prison in which he is being held. On Wednesday, Mangione’s colleagues could be heard from Contact From their windows, “Free Luigi!” and “Luigi’s conditions are bad!” Meanwhile, Luigi commodity It’s already hitting the market.
More than forty years ago, Richard E. Meyer, a scholar of American folklore, highlighted the fundamental difference between the outlaw—which Meyer defined as a “distinctive, though not exclusive, American folk style”—and the criminal criminal. He wrote it “The American outlaw hero is a ‘man of the people’; It is closely associated with the general public and, as such, is generally seen as standing in opposition to some of the entrenched oppressive economic, civil, and legal systems specific to the American historical experience. (Italics are Meyer’s.) The outlaw hero character is a “good guy gone bad” character, not unlike oncology patient Walter White, on “Breaking Bad,” who started cooking meth because his insurance wouldn’t cover his cancer. Treatments. To remain in good stead as an outlaw hero, a man’s crimes must be “directed only toward those visible symbols who stand outside the popular group and are perceived as oppressive toward the popular group,” as Mayer writes. In return for his boldness and good judgement,The outlaw hero enjoys the help, support, and admiration of his people“.
In the Reconstruction-era South, outlaw heroes Jesse James and Sam Bass “robbed banks and trains, symbols of the forces that kept the common man in economic and social slavery,” Mayer wrote. Bank robber and murderer Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd, whose crimes spanned Ohio, Oklahoma and Missouri during the Great Depression, worshiped James as a Wild West version of Robin Hood. Floyd took in potential tall tales “about how Jesse and his sons shared their bounty with widows and orphans,” as Michael Wallis wrote in “Beautiful Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd“Fans said that when Jesse ransacked a train, he scanned passengers’ palms and only took valuables from those with ‘soft hands.’ “
Likewise, Floyd shared his spoils with those in need; According to several accounts, Wallis wrote, “When Charlie robbed banks, he would sometimes tear up the mortgage before the banker had a chance to sign the papers.” This generous gesture, although it contributed to polishing Floyd’s legend, would have significantly slowed his escape from the scene of his crime. He hid in plain sight: he attended weddings and funerals, bumped into family and friends, and was treated like a dreamboat celebrity wherever he went.
By contrast, Mangione lasted a full five days and apparently did not redistribute any of UnitedHealthcare’s revenue. However, on the other hand, he fits comfortably into Meyer’s typology of antiheroes. The health insurance system in the United States is considered “unfair” and “private” in its essence to America, as it is the only developed country in the world that does not provide universal health care. It has been widely speculated that Mangione’s alleged descent into violence may have been prompted by a debilitating back injury and subsequent spinal fusion surgery. A healthcare CEO with $10 million in annual compensation would likely be ineligible for membership in a “grassroots group,” and another memo written by Mangione suggests he does not want to jeopardize that group. (“What are you doing? You’re fooling the CEO at the annual parasitic anti-bean conference. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t put innocent people at risk.”)
Like Floyd, Mangione may also have a knack for myth-building. The bullet casings left at the crime scene bore the words “denial,” “defense,” and “isolate,” inspired by the obstructive nomenclature of the health insurance industry — as if its bureaucratic weapons were pointed against one of its own. Although Mangione’s pursuit came to an ignominious end, he hinted early on at being a more savvy evader, as when he left the perfect gift for the NYPD in Central Park: a backpack full of Monopoly money.
One fascinating artifact of the Mangione case is the appearance of the health insurance-related murder song on TikTok and elsewhere. (Sun Most popular (He uses “deny, deposit, defend” as a refrain.) This emerging subgenre flows directly from Woody Guthrie’s collection of murder ballads, which gave the worker’s lament an infusion of anti-hero glamor. The subjects of Guthrie’s songs included Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Charlie Floyd, and in a song about Floyd the Dust Bull’s lyricist drew the clearest line between outlaw and oppressor: “Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen / And as you travel through your life / Yeah, As you wander through your life / You’ll never see an outlaw / Drive a family from their home.
Most notable among the new murder ballad singers is local folk singer Jesse Willis, whose style and persona takes John Prine’s brash sympathies and adds a tinge of Brian Jones’ sinister charisma. for him “United HealthHe dispenses with Thompson’s death in record time (“The ingredients you got bake the cake you get”) and manages a history of the titular company within a single verse (“Way back at seventy-seven/Mr. Richard T. Burke started ‘buying HMOs.”) . He also neatly sums up the economic logic of for-profit insurance: “There’s an office in a building and a guy sitting in a chair/And you’ve paid for all of it even though you may not know it/You’ve paid for the paper, you’ve paid for the phone/You’ve paid for whatever they need to deprive you of.” Of your entitlements.
Much has been said and written in the past week about “roughness” of American society, which is supposed to be embodied in the imitation of Mangione and his alleged crime. Speaking only for myself, if I have been ‘rougher’ lately, I do not think the proof lies in the way I laughed at the unprintable things friends sent me about Mangione’s Thirst Traps, but in how much solace I felt was taken in this new canon of earnest, literal, direct protest songs.
In 1992, at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready, of Pearl Jam, procedure Dylan “Masters of War”. The song is not a direct murder song but rather a fantasy murder song, simple and extreme at the same time. It’s basically a D minor chord played over and over again – no chorus, no bridge, just verse after verse of the young Dylan, Guthrie’s artistic heir, finding more and more images and epithets to express how much he despises and denounces the death merchants of the Cold War-era military-industrial complex. The song was then nearly thirty years old, and in the early stages of a decades-long folk renaissance sparked by Dylan’s electrifying and largely incomprehensible song. Delivery of him at the Grammys in 1991. But it was new to me, and Vedder’s version was disturbingly clear, unadorned, and realistic in its fury. Every word was clear:
Music critic Greil Marcus written About how “Masters of War” is at once “bad art, bad song” — “awful,” even — and a timeless classic, and how its greatness depends on what one might call its roughness. The song is repetitive and relentless. He has one thing to say, and he says it again; It continues to strike the same tone of hate, but stronger. Die, die, die, dead. What appeals to listeners about “Masters of War,” according to Marcus, is “the way the song goes further, to the limits of freedom of expression.” Dylan “gives people permission to go that far,” Marcus continues.
Mangione allegedly took human life, which is despicable. This act did not justify itself. But the act also gave people permission to go further — to acknowledge their legitimate hatred for our corrupt health care system, and even to conjure something funny, absurd, or joyful out of that hatred. The folk hero is a folk hero precisely because he does what we would never dare. Most of us have felt something like hate in our lives; Most of us would never dream of hurting anyone. Hate corrupts the soul, but the smallest sip of it, every now and then, can be intoxicating. It can remind us that we are still alive. ♦