'murder will solve everything': the imagined thoughts of luigi mangione
i'm convinced that the best solution to america's complex health-care problems was for me to randomly murder a stranger in charge of a health-care insurer
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this week saw the arrest of luigi mangione, the 26-year-old accused of carrying out the targeted murder of unitedhealthcare executive brian thompson. mangione had been at large for several days until he was spotted at a pennsylvania mcdonalds. in addition to finding a “ghost gun” on his person, police also seized a manifesto allegedly justifying thompson’s murder as a political act. in dear diary, the national post satirically re-imagines a week in the life of a newsmaker. this week, tristin hopper takes a journey inside the thoughts of luigi mangione.
monday
these days on the lam have given me ample time to consider the complications of american health care — an institution with which i am now permanently associated.
on the one hand are the raw numbers; we spend the most per-capita on health care while our generalized health outcomes lag much of the developed world. however, unmentioned in these broad figures are that we’re fatter, do more drugs and demand a more expensive level of care than the global average.
and although there is a uniquely american problem of patients being denied approval for procedures they assumed were covered, we must also consider this drawback in an international context. a socialized single-payer system would ration that same procedure, often with markedly similar effects in terms of health-care access.
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and yet, against all these competing and sometimes contradictory factors, i still maintain that the most viable solution was for me to randomly murder a stranger in charge of a health-care insurer.
tuesday
alas, my weakness for fast food has been my undoing. in hindsight, there were any number of more dimly-lit establishments — such as arby’s — where my presence may have gone undetected.
i can sympathize with the motivations of the individual who reported me to law enforcement. after all, i am an armed suspect wanted in connection with a pre-meditated murder; this individual could have rightly believed that my being in custody would prevent additional killings. they could have done it in the interest of community safety, fearing that the accused murderer in their midst posed a clear and present danger to other patrons. or, they may have been tempted by the reward money; am i to begrudge an average american collecting the equivalent of a year’s salary for serving their government?
all these factors aside, however, i still think it would be most appropriate for me to murder the informant, his girlfriend and the ceo of mcdonald’s. or, at the very least, a mcdonald’s regional manager and also his dog.
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wednesday
today marked my first meeting with my defence team, where i must say i was impressed by the myriad complexities of the american criminal justice system.
it’s not like the movies. there are jurisdictional issues at play, given that the alleged crime occurred in new york and i was caught in pennsylvania. although the killing was premeditated, it only meets the threshold for second degree murder under new york law – unless prosecutors can argue it constitutes act of terrorism. and on top of everything, there’s an entire latticework of factors that could mitigate criminal responsibility, such as whether my impulse control was affected by mental illness or my abuse of psychedelics.
my options were far more nuanced that i could have ever assumed. but against all this, i suggested that the simplest solution would be murder the prosecuting counsel, the judge and possibly one or two of the bailiffs. this remedy was rejected.
thursday
as my identity and background becomes public knowledge in the wake of my alleged crime, the public may be noticing that i come from a rather privileged background with deep ties to both the health-care industry and the political system that enables it.
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and i know what they’re thinking: shouldn’t the scion of a wealthy family — with untold resources and connections at his disposal — have better options to effect systemic change rather then perpetrate the cold-blooded murder of a ceo he didn’t like? shouldn’t luigi mangione have the self awareness to realize he’s ending the life of someone not much different than himself? the beneficiary of a flawed but complicated system? after all; my victim actually worked his way up from obscurity in an iowa small town, instead of expending his youth on leisure activities subsidized by family money.
these are all good points. but i do think the people making them should probably be murdered. or, at least, we should murder some executive with loose connections to whatever platform they’re using to circulate those arguments.
friday
there’s a possibly apocryphal story about christopher columbus in which he challenges his friends to balance an egg on its tip. after they all fail to do so, columbus flattens the egg with a spoon and easily stands it upright. the point of the story is that a seemingly insurmountable task — such as discovering the new world — becomes obvious once its solution is demonstrated.
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similarly, i often wonder why it has fallen to me, luigi mangione, to devise the seemingly obvious innovation of solving complex political problems via murder. all across america, i see people trying to solve our various social ills via protest, books, political drives, non-profits, ad campaigns. and the answer this whole time was “find someone peripherally connected to an issue that concerns you and kill them.”
it baffles me that nobody has ever thought of this before. by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, we could reach a perfect utopia free of scarcity or discord in less than five years if we only had the political will to murder between, oh, 650,000 and 715,000 people.
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