#30 DEATH OF A TEDDY BEAR

Craig Robertson in his home.

“The pure products of America
go crazy—”

               –William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie”

While his name may live on in militant rightwing bunkers on the internet as a martyr to government tyranny, most likely most of us won’t remember his story a day later.  Americans have extraordinarily short memories (people in India will remember–and fulminate–over some sectarian bloodshed 800 years later), and after all, there’s far more blood-spilling on the way.  But I want to stop and mark Craig Robertson’s passing, shot at his Utah home by FBI agents August 9^th.

Once upon a time, the Republican party stood for values of law and order and respect for law enforcement—I mean the prominent faces in the party.  They didn’t want someone to assassinate the president, even if he was a Democrat.  But some while ago now they threw their lot in with the most paranoid wing of their party, whose fervent belief is that leftwing extremists run this country (to be clear: no leftwing extremists have EVER run this country, and certainly not the fucking FBI).  (J. Edgar Hoover must be kicking the coffin in his grave.)  It melds with the “small government” doctrine Republicans are supposed to espouse.

The demonization of–and shrieking, slavering attacks on–perceived enemies of America covers anyone who’s not white, Christian, male, & Republican.  In other words, if there’s someone who might ally with the Democrats against them, they must be betraying America.  Daring to transgress the nature and structure of democracy, they assert themselves as genuine patriots and the only legitimate governance, spewing 24/7 through their media campaigns that the violent overthrow of the government has already happened and the Democrats did it.

RULE OF THUMB: Whatever Republicans accuse someone else of, they’re doing it themselves.

Robertson, geared up for battle.

Our fellow American, Craig Robertson, threatened on the internet to kill President Biden, Vice President Harris, the Attorney General, and two of the district attorneys prosecuting Trump.  A military veteran, he owned and displayed at his home many guns in the form of automatic weapons.  It seems screamingly obvious why the FBI had to show up: Biden was due for a speech in Salt Lake the next day.

In the reality created by rightwing media, threatening the president with death is an inviolable First Amendment right, quite unlike how both law and law enforcement might see it.   They pumped their hysteria directly into Craig Robertson who becomes pumped up with outrage, shooting his mouth off, and believing every word of it.

But here’s what gets me.

His family and neighbors saw a completely different guy.  They actually call him “a big teddy bear.”  Military.com reports that “he would ask about neighbors’ children and offer to drive people home from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ meeting house near his home….[A neighbor] said Robertson was…kind and played with kids in neighbors’ yards.”

You see his goodness in these descriptions:

“After living next to this guy for six years, he’s just like this super sweet grandpa for the most part. Yes, he has rants and opinions,” [she] said. “I can’t speak to his online life, but he had a peaceful, religious, community-centered side to him. That was how he presented himself in everyday life.”

His family didn’t believe he ever meant to truly take action, and they simply didn’t think he, at 75, could do it physically.  Military.com: “The salient point is that he was never actually going to hurt anyone,” family member Julie Robertson said in a text message. “He didn’t even leave his house on the day of the presidential visit.”

When the FBI came to his house, in their yelling back and forth, Robertson raised his gun pointed toward the agents.  A half dozen bullets later, he lay a corpse on the floor.  Was the FBI justified in lighting him up?  Thus far, it’s a little hard to tell if they could have refrained from firing, if they got jittery, if they simply fired following established policy?  Nonetheless, isn’t a more accurate reading on the whole situation that the ensuing confrontation and the way it played out derive directly from rightwing gun worship and romanticization of SWAT teams?  Robertson swallowed the whole thing, and it came to live inside him.  On the other side, the FBI has its gun culture and law enforcement mystique and maybe itchy trigger fingers.  The whole mantric cult of excusing violence and pounding the paradigm of deep state conspiracy convinced Craig Robertson of all its conceits, and thus, he acted them out, at least in his digital fantasy world.

The FBI gunning down the good-hearted, kindly, church-going man in his own home came as a direct result of the rightwing brain-washing cult.  But I can guarantee you that not one leader or power-broker among national Republicans or the black magic media machinery gives a shit that man lost his life.  (How much of his day do you think Donald Trump will spend on Craig Robertson?)  If they can make him a martyr, then he still has some value to them in death.  Otherwise, he’ll mean as little to them as the average American’s ability to remember who he was.

Of course, Craig Robertson himself bears ultimate responsibility.  Those were his choices, and they came back to him accordingly.

But what if the rightwing rhetoric still functioned tethered to reality?  What if it wasn’t this ferocious aggression harnessed to distorting discussions of common concern?  Would Craig Robertson still be the sweet grandpa type, still doing his wood-working?  The rightwing saturates its message in hatred while trumpeting traditional values of family, home, patriotism, and religion.  They don’t care about Craig Robertson’s humanity or his neighbors, but if they can use it to fatten the conduit of power and money, why wouldn’t they?  He’s the grist for their mill.

We have to endure routine displays of faux Christianity from “pious” Republicans, but the last person they want in the conference room where they’re settling on their current talking points would be Jesus.  His message of love and forgiveness does not comport with their strategy of stoking fear, hatred, and divisiveness.  Maybe if they in any way took Jesus seriously, Craig Robertson could have died in bed surrounded by his family, rather than shredded by bullets in a war that in the end wasn’t his anyway.