Baltimore Seen From Across the Ocean

I’ve been living in France for almost 30 years, but first impressions last. Baltimore’s still a living presence for me. Admittedly, I can’t say where memory and reality coincide. I still get angry thinking about how beautiful the city was when I was a child, the Mount Vernon Place Flower Mart, city band concerts, the Christmas display in Hutzler’s window, stores everywhere downtown, lots of bookstores, McCormick’s in the Inner Harbor, and what it’s become. Maybe I’m wrong. In any case, whenever Baltimore makes the news, it grabs my attention, and not just mine. The Freddie Gray riots, the collapse of the Key Bridge and now, Luigi Mangione’s shooting of UnitedHealthcare's executive Brian Thompson all made front-page news here and brought back memories of home.

Hearing that a Gilman alumnus was the gunman was like hearing that cinderblocks have started to float. My dad went to Gilman, I grew up in the neighborhood, and knew the campus well. I played little league on Gilman field, where Orioles shortstop Mark Belanger signed my glove. I played tennis on the Gilman courts. I watched lacrosse and high school football games there. It was also strange because Gilman, like so many institutions associated with upper-class social privilege, keeps a low profile.

I don’t condone murder but hearing that an insurance company executive was assassinated made me recall the Weather Underground bombings from the 1970s and the later Unabomber. It brought back images learned from books of bomb-throwing anarchists from the turn of the last century. There was a political-historical feel to the murder, it spoke of a social conscience, sadly misdirected.

There’s the sour note. The Weather Underground members were never caught, they bombed and escaped, outsmarting the FBI, even entering FBI headquarters and destroying evidence. They finally turned themselves in years after their crimes, tired of being on the run. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was completely off the radar until finally turned in by his brother who, when reading Kaczynski’s Manifesto published in The Washington Post, recognized his writing style. These people had thought it out; planned for all the possible contingencies. And there’s the mystery in Luigi Mangione’s actions after the assassination. He didn’t stay out of the public eye. Getting caught in a McDonald’s was strange. What was he thinking? Even a criminal who went to public school knows you don’t shoot someone, have your picture in newspapers and then go eat in public.

Mangione’s apparently not stupid. He did the necessary research to locate Thompson at an investor’s meeting. He could shoot well. He made his way out of New York smoothly. For days there were reports of sightings just about everywhere. All this shows foresight. But at this point his preparations fell apart and in a moment of negligence, Mangione decided to get a Big Mac and fries in Altoona, Pennsylvania.