Rubin: The political fury factory keeps churning – and we keep buying

An hour after Donald Trump was shot by a disordered 20-year-old in Pennsylvania, a police chief I like in Michigan posted online that "Trump just shrugged off an ANTIFA assassin's bullet."

About 20 hours after that, I read a wholly unrelated quote from singer Rhiannon Giddens that referred to music but could apply to most anything.

"Music is always striving to the best thing. And the best thing is the mix, you know? It always is," she said. "All the strengths multiply and become this beautiful thing."

That used to be us, in this country. Working together, blending, concocting, figuring that alloys can be better than the individual metals that make them. Maybe waiting for the ambulance sirens to fade before attaching Antifa to a reportedly lonely shooter whose last known political registration was Republican, and who never seems to have belonged to anything but the Clairton Sportsmen's Club.

It's not that we didn't have rabid politics before — historians love 1835, when former U.S. Rep. Davy Crockett accused presidential candidate Martin Van Buren of wearing women's corsets — and not that we have always found ways to skip in a circle holding hands.

It used to be preferable, though, and honorable, to try to get along. To compromise, and likely improve. To disagree over policy and then debate where to have a beer or a meal.

And there wasn't such an obvious profit motive in division.

Now a bullet fired from some 400 feet drifts 2 inches from the assassination of a presidential candidate, and blame outraces facts to social media. One spectator dead, two injured, Democracy bloodied.

The shooter died, too, located and cut down within seconds while the scrum of Secret Service agents still lay atop Donald Trump.

I called Thomas Matthew Crooks disordered because a rational person doesn't do what he did, and because in many ways he still seems to have been a child. Two years ago, in the final semesters of what seemed to be a forlorn tenure, he might have opted to shoot up his high school instead.

In a photo for his yearbook, with braces showing in his smile, he wore a patriotic gray T-shirt with Mount Rushmore superimposed on the American flag. Then, from just outside the Butler Farm Show Grounds, he fired at an ex-president with either unfailing faith in his skill or no apparent concern for the civilians in his line of fire if he missed.

We've not learned enough to know who to blame, other than Crooks himself. Or whether there is anyone.

What we do know, though, is that most everything connected with politics has become toxic. That what could simply be spirited discussions, be they between legislators or neighbors, are almost encouraged to become mean-spirited.

You don't get your talk radio show syndicated to 500 stations by saying "on the other hand." Anger sells, and then T-shirts sell, and then voters start pulling the levers for candidates who all but promise not to say hello to members of the opposing party in the hallway.

The fury factory keeps churning, we keep buying, and the factory adds a second shift.

We're the willing consumers, until we're appalled that a young man with his dad's rifle took a cluster of shots at one of those things we've always held to be self-evident: the notion that we're better than that.

We should be, certainly. We could be. But the production line at the rage mill won't slow down until we tell it to.

Reach Neal Rubin at [email protected].

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Aftermath of Trump shooting shows the fury factory is running overtime