Year of the Plague: Jake Gardner and the Ghosts of 2020

“I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.”  — Frantz Fanon

2020—Year of the Rat. What Nimrod hurled his spear at Heaven? What Pandora cracked the lid for a peek in the box? What rogue planet wandered into our solar backcountry like a rabid bear, bit the leg of Nandi, and put the Pandavas to rout? Did we deserve it? Did we engender it? Did we call it down? Or did it simply happen? And is that distinction also an illusion, a construct of vanity and anxiety, and the childish desire to be both innocent and in control?

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread over the globe, it seemed to many only the outward sign of something more fundamentally rotten and astray in the spiritual life of the planet. The dual-origin stories of the virus (was it a wet market? a lab?) merged on the symbolic level to tell the tale of our original sin, our need to probe, screw, and eat every dirty and sacred thing under the sun. A nightmare year. President Trump hunkered in the White House like some great poisonous toad, infected himself, but seemingly immune, as fires consumed the hills, and riots raged in the cities. Theaters and parks stood empty, and fountains ran dry, their stonework graffiti-tagged and scorched, their statues disfigured or torn out. Enmity soared. Men killed each other in the streets.

It was the year of George Floyd and Kyle Rittenhouse—names you may have heard. It was also the year of Jake Gardner and James Scurlock—names you may have missed. In May of that wretched year, Jake Gardner killed James Scurlock on a street in Omaha and, shortly thereafter, killed himself. Competing narratives sprang up around their deaths. Gardner—a guilty man who had cheated justice; Scurlock—a second George Floyd. Gardner—victim of a corrupt system hounded into suicide; Scurlock—a thug who courted his own death. The civil authorities seemed more than usually confused on the matter, and Gardner’s death foreclosed the possibility of an official ruling.

"...some people came to see Jake Gardner as a symbol of everything wrong with America. It is not a happy story."

Three years later, a veteran New York Times reporter named Joseph Sexton wrote a book called The Lost Sons of Omaha, a carefully researched attempt to sort out fact from fiction and tell the story of these two men. There is one significant piece of the puzzle missing from that account, for the simple reason that no one told Sexton about it. I have kept silent out of deference to an old friend, someone who was close to Gardner and who was adamant I should have nothing to say on the subject. “Pay your condolences, and STFU,” were his less than friendly words, sent in a text.

But my patience for my friend, his reasons, and his ultimatums is finally worn out. He keeps accusing me, among other things, of killing Jake Gardner—or at least of supporting the people that did. Beyond the personal affront, I recognize in his words a strain of terroristic rhetoric that is increasingly being used to stifle free expression. And we must resist it.

Matt, Ben, Donald, and Jake

Ben and I go back to the Bronze Age—by Gen X standards, anyway—and in retrospect, the political tension was there from the start, if only in a naïve, pre-political form. So much of what we call personal politics is rooted in style, in aesthetics and self-image, in how the light of the world first hits our eyes and filters down into the soul. And our early days can be divided into two distinct eras, one centered on my territory and influence, one centered on Ben’s—the Athens and Sparta of our little Golden Age.

I moved into the Mount Tabor area of East Portland when I was ten and promptly fell in with the local crew—half-a-dozen guys who lived close and ran together. Ben was one of them. He lived down the block and around the corner from me. Within a year, the back part of my garage had become a clubhouse, called the Greenhouse for the never-drying green paint we slathered on the unprimed walls. We would meet up there almost every day and hatch our plots, and so it became the mythic center and general HQ. The walls sweated and stank, and it looked like a hideout for goons in a Batman comic, but the ethos was egalitarian. A ghetto Camelot. Republican Rome, built in a day.

But the Greenhouse era of Dungeon & Dragons, poker games, and midnight acid trips, ended when my dad remarried, and we moved across the river. The neighborhood’s spiritual center of gravity shifted then, and the second age began. Ben’s attic became the new HQ. He had become a small-time baller. Enthroned on his vast sofa, usually within reach of a firearm (at 15, he had a 12-gauge shotgun and a 9mm Beretta), doling out green hits and turns at the PS2 according to his moods. Power and status were never far from his mind. When it was just the two of us, we were more-or-less equals—I was just on his turf. The more people showed up, the more he wanted me to kiss the ring.

With graduation, the neighborhood became less a territory and more of an idea, a legacy, but the differences forged across our little fiefdoms followed us into adulthood. I joined the Navy because I wanted to see the world and pay for college. He joined the Marines because he wanted to fight and be part of an elite warrior culture. My scheme went to plan. I did my time in the Gulf and wrote for the base newspaper, then checked out with my G.I. Bill, went to school, and started teaching overseas. Ben made a good Marine but missed his chance to go to war when a back injury kept him stateside. It was probably the worst stroke of luck he could have suffered. Men he had trained with were dying while he convalesced, and he took it hard. He would carry a guilt and a grudge against fate, a stifled violence that would eat at him in years to come.

Still, we got along. We each recognized and respected in the other a certain resemblance in difference, a drive to live life entirely on our own terms. He laid down roots (literally) in California; I studied and traveled. He bought land and made himself a feudal lord again; I wrote stories, got my heart broken, and searched for the Holy Grail. If I was sometimes annoyed by his fixation with hierarchy and his tendency to belittle, my itinerant lifestyle meant I only had to tolerate these things in limited doses. I once quipped that we were “shackled together by friendship,” and it wrung a rueful chuckle out of him.

Twice I went to work for him, harvesting and trimming weed in Mendocino County in northern California. One night, he took me for a ride on his four-wheeler and showed me the secret gully where his money was buried and asked me to get it to his family if something should happen to him. I do not know how much was there, but it was a lot—a plastic bin full of cash, wrapped in carpeting so the rats would not get it. That was how much he trusted me back then. Even more than his Marines.

When Jake Gardner died, I was in Japan. The neighborhood guys were commiserating on a Messenger group chat. I told Ben I was sorry for his loss and said I might write something about Jake, a kind of memorial essay. At the time, I did not realize the political danger of writing anything positive about Jake Gardner, but the offer was made in earnest. Jake was a good guy who had gotten a raw deal. I wanted to help. I asked Ben to send me the video he had of the Scurlock shooting.

“F— no,” was his immediate reply.

That is the way he could be sometimes—cold, abrupt, imperious—but I did not understand why he was being like that now. Had he misunderstood me?

“Do you think I’ll leak it?” I typed. “You’re the one who told me to get the facts.”

“No offense,” he answered, “but you are the wrong guy to write anything about a great man that you met twice 16 years ago. Send your condolences and stfu.”

I had basically lived with Jake for weeks on end. I knew him better than most of the people talking about him online and in the news. STFU, no offense? What was his problem?

The twins, Tom and the other Matt, were reading this, and they jumped on him. 

Other Matt: “Too far, man; you just do not know how to behave anymore.”

Tom: “He’s on Jake’s side, you f—ing d—bag.”

Me, pissed but biting my tongue: “Have it your way. I’ll chalk the insult up to you being justifiably upset.”

Then it comes.

“I love you guys, but Jake doesn’t need support from people that support the mob that killed him. F— Antifa and BLM does not apply to you all.”

(In case I thought he did not mean me.)

So that is how much he trusted me then.

What happened in the years between showing me his buried treasure and basically calling me Judas? Well… Donald Trump happened.

To me, the best thing about the rise of President Donald Trump was that I finally had a use for the word abomination. And I was pissed at the people who voted for him. Deeply angry. President Trump was so obviously wrong for the job that his election felt like the breaking of a basic compact. President Trump and his supporters did not just have a different notion of the good; they actually wanted to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellow Americans. I could not make sense of it otherwise.

But if President Trump moved me one way, he moved Ben the other. Ben had never been overtly political before. Why would he be? He seemed a good bet to survive in any political environment up to and including the full zombie apocalypse. What did the Elephant and Donkey show have to do with him? His dad was a college professor, his mother a librarian—he did not hate liberals or intellectuals…yet. He was not stupid, or programmatically racist, or any of the things you would assume of the stereotypical Trump voter.

Nevertheless, he embraced Trumpism with frothy alacrity that surprised the old neighborhood (we might have been bad kids, but we had largely grown into decent men). “Trump, Trump, Trump!” he would chant with a sly smile and a trollish gleam in his eye. We would eye him warily and pass the pipe. It is not like we did not know he could be a jerk.

There is some reason to think that he was in it for the obvious deplorable reasons—he jumped on board with the bulk of the MAGA faithful when President Trump started talking Muslim ban and border wall. But, mostly, I think, the devious child in him just liked how the man seemed to float above the rules of decorum. In President Trump, he saw his own unrepentant ego bestriding the world, relieving itself where it pleased. It was almost painful to watch him try to mask his childish sadism behind stilted patriarchal platitudes. The impression was of someone with zero awareness of their own capering shadow.

I imagine this is a common story around the country—the guy who never seemed to care suddenly all in for the Orange Caligula, ambushing his friends with conspiracy theories, transphobic memes, and various other spasms of newly licensed ugliness. This was the sleeper element in the American electorate that Steve Bannon had identified as the key to Trump’s victory. “Monster power,” Bannon called it. Yeah, Benny was monstrous about it. He even flew out to DC for the inauguration in a new, thousand-dollar suit and texted me what a joy it was “to boo Hillary in person.”

And who appears beside him in the pictures he posted to our group chat?

Jake Gardner.

I had lost track of Jake during the Obama years, but there he was, dapper and hale. There is a video of him being interviewed the next day, when the Women’s March descended on the capital. He is dressed in a Trump-Pence jacket and tie, and apparently his dog (not shown) has a MAGA vest on. With his hair grown long about his shoulders, he looks more like David Foster Wallace than Fred Ward, and he sounds like the infinite jester too—self-effacing, soft-spoken, and well-spoken. He speaks generously of the women protesting around him, even as he jokes about the dirty looks they give him. “Everyone loves the dog,” he says, “until they read the vest.”

He is clearly in PR mode here, and yet he exudes the kind of sincerity that few people can fake. There is not a trace of sadistic triumphalism, nothing at all to suggest that cruelty is the point, and this does not surprise me. The guy I knew in California was not a natural dissembler, or closet sadist, or a complex-ridden werewolf with blood under his nails. It is clear to me that the man in the video is the real Jake Gardner, as much as any other moment in his life encapsulates and defines him.

There is also at least one—bear with me—good reason for Jake to wander into Trump Country. Like a lot of damaged veterans–and like a lot of leftists–he had become a critic of American foreign policy, especially the Iraq War. According to Ben (and on this score, I believe the prick), Gardner detested Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama equally for their hawkishness. He thought Vice President Dick Cheney was in a special class of villain. He saw President Trump as the possible alternative, the candidate least likely to spill American blood for a run of corporate profits. One has to squint to see President Trump as the anti-corporate peace candidate. Maybe spin around and knock yourself on the head a few times. There is such a thing as doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, and in this light, even Jake’s complicity in our national disgrace…reflects surprisingly well on him.

And yet, the more Jake’s virtue comes to the fore, the more one feels the undertow of a dark American paradox. We see a man of courage, compassion, and diverse human virtues, yet one whose life is cast under a shadow—the persistent stigma of white supremacy. Google his name with the word "racist," and you will see the accusations fly in, mostly rumors and secondhand reports, and unless one is willing to do the kind of work Joe Sexton did in sorting it all out, it is almost impossible to tell what is true and what is not.

I think neither side wants to hear what I have to say on that subject. I think it is partly why Ben turned so cold to me. But I am going to share something about Jake Gardner that no one, not even Joe Sexton, has reported yet. It will not solve anything definitively—Lord knows the hyper-partisans are unlikely to change their minds. But it will offer a kind of dialectical synthesis of the two conflicting images.

First, I have to take you through the antithesis stage and how some people came to see Jake Gardner as a symbol of everything wrong with America. It is not a happy story.

May 30, 2020

I am not going to say much about the man Jake killed. Not because James Scurlock does not deserve to be known in all his human depth and complexity but, rather, because he does, and I am not the one to do it. I did not know the man. I have not uncovered anything about him that has not already been said. I understand that this one-sided treatment may somewhat undermine my purpose—to encourage a more holistic view of people—but I must stick to what I know and can credibly say. Joe Sexton gives a fine account of James Scurlock’s life and character—I encourage you again to read his book.

As for Jake Gardner, there is one incident in his life that seems especially relevant (Sexton mentions it but does not pursue the implications). In 2004, with his Marine discharge pending, Gardner got into an altercation outside a strip club in Jacksonville, North Carolina. It is unclear how it started, but it ended with Gardner being overpowered—possibly by multiple assailants—pinned to the ground, and "curb stomped." This is an especially vicious form of attack where the victim’s mouth is placed on the curb and a kick is delivered to the back of their head. It is a good way to cancel your ticket. Gardner survived, but his jaw was broken in two places, and he lost twelve of his teeth. Try, good reader, to imagine that happening to you—the pain and helpless terror of it, the long and miserable recovery. Now, some 15 years later, imagine that you are outside a bar in downtown Omaha, and somebody jumps on your back. Only this time, you have a gun.

Here is what happened—the details come from video of the scene, witness testimony, and the statements put out by the County Attorney and special prosecutor involved in the case. I am  assuming the reader is already familiar with the George Floyd killing and the background of the protests that swept the streets of Omaha that night. So, let us start with broken windows.

At about a quarter till 11:00, Jake Gardner was in his bar, The Hive, in the Old Market area of downtown Omaha, along with several other men. They had been alerted to the protests heading their way. Jake texted Ben to complain about having to stand “48 hours’ fire watch.” Jake was not a fan of the Black Lives Matter movement—he had called them a “terrorist organization.” Among his party was his father, Dave Gardner. They had guns.  

The outside video feed shows James Scurlock and his friend, Tucker Randall, throwing objects at the establishment (the second business they had vandalized that night). Jake placed a call to 911 and reported the incident. The Gardner group would claim (plausibly, I think) that they did not know who exactly had broken the windows. Shortly after making the call, they surmised that they were no longer under attack, and they made the unfortunate decision to leave the bar and assess the damage.

The best evidence of what happened next comes from two videos, one shot by a witness standing close to the action, the other from a security camera with an elevated view of the sidewalk and street. Jake is seen talking with some men as his father, Dave, wanders away. Dave, for reasons unknown, shoves a young man twice. Two witnesses recalled Dave using the N-word at the time (though one of them, Tucker Randall, would later retract that statement). Randall, in any case, could not have been very near Dave, because a moment later he is seen running from a considerable distance to hit Dave Gardner with a football check that knocks the 69-year-old man flat on his back. Randall runs off, but the hit draws Jake’s attention.

He is heard on the tape asking who hit his dad. Someone says, “black lives matter,” to which Jake replies, without a beat, “I totally agree.” In the rumor mill that is the Internet, this exchange would eventually be reported as Jake screaming the N-word and waving his gun.

Beware of what you read on the Internet.

In the best1 video, shot by a bystander with a smartphone, Jake appears calm. His hands are down almost the whole time. The tall man in the hoodie is the aggressive one, and Jake is trying to get him to move along. “Just keep f—ing going,” you can hear him say. “You didn’t hit him [Dave], it’s not your f—ing problem.”

He lightly touches the man’s arm in a ‘go on’ sort of way. I cannot be sure, and I cannot find any confirmation, but I believe I hear the man say, “Did you just f—ing touch me?” In any case, he advances on Jake, and Jake gives ground.

“He knows karate,” taunts the man (it sounds like the one shooting the video). “You know karate?” 

James Scurlock crosses in front of the tall man and shoves another man standing next to Jake. He and Randall had apparently doubled back to participate in the brewing altercation. Gardner, oblivious to Scurlock, continues backing up, hands down, then pointing at the tall man. “I’m telling you…I’m telling you.” He raises his shirt to show the gun. Incredibly, the tall man keeps coming.

Now the man shooting the video changes his tone. “Oh, he’s got a gun on him. This nigga got a gun, bro. That nigga got a gun.” The penchant for repetition seems general this night, as if all the actors know the cameras are rolling and want to nail their lines. Gardner has to know he is being recorded.

Gardner: “Get the f— away from me. Get the f— away from me.”

Man recording: “It’s not worth it, nigga, are you stu—?” He does not finish, but we get it. Are you stupid?

Moving bodies block the action. It is not exactly clear when Gardner draws his gun, but it would seem to be much too late for Fuller’s testimony to be accurate. He does not point it or wave it, just shows it and holds it down by his side—look, I have a gun.

I confess my anger when I read the testimony of Alayna Melendez, the woman who first jumped on Gardner. The Omaha World Herald reports that “she saw Gardner return the gun to his waistband, so she pounced, wrestling him into a puddle.” I had to hunt for another version of this in case I had read a typo. I simply could not believe what I had read. There it was again, in an article by Yahoo News, which interviewed her directly: “…when she saw him return the gun to his waistband, she saw an opening….”

An opening…to leave him alone, right? (Padmé’s smile fades). An opening to leaving alone, right?

Many media sources quote Fuller and Melendez as saying Jake “pointed” or “waved” his gun without any attempt to check those claims against the video evidence, which is easily found online and which shows that Gardner never raised his weapon. By Melendez’s own admission, it was Jake’s de-escalation—putting the gun away—that triggered her attack. 

Returning to the play-by-play, Melendez grabs Jake from behind and is aided by the tall man. During the brief scuffle, a small, darting figure can be seen off to the right, hovering like a point guard trying to penetrate a zone defense. This is James Scurlock. Gardner fires two shots—he will later claim these are warning shots, and frankly it seems improbable that a combat veteran with Jake’s level of control would miss at that range without intending to. As the others flee, Scurlock makes his move. He runs and hits Jake from behind. They go down, Scurlock on top.

A second scuffle ensues, this one lasting some fifteen seconds (it is a long time when you count them out). Gardner will claim that he was in a chokehold (it certainly looks like it on the tape) and in fear of being disarmed, yet you can hear him pleading with his attacker: “Get off me. Get off me. Please get off me.”2 Finally, with his right arm pinned, Gardner transfers his weapon to his left hand and fires over his shoulder, hitting Scurlock in the clavicle.

I have watched it again and again, and despite the grainy footage, one fact emerges clearly. All they had to do…was leave him alone.

A Bad Year

For a while, it looked like Jake’s luck would turn on a dime. The District Attorney and a room full of cops had looked at the videos and agreed that Jake Gardner had acted in self-defense. No charges were filed. He was free to go.

But the backlash was coming.

The day before the incident, President Donald Trump had tweeted, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a statement that did Gardner absolutely no favors, politicizing his actions in advance, casting him in the eyes of the media as a Trump bannerman answering the slughorn. Nor did the rumor mill wait long after the fact. As Alayna Melendez walked away from the scene of the dying Scurlock, she told a bystander, “A white supremacist just killed a black man.” When Joe Sexton asked her about this characterization of Gardner, she said, “I just knew. I don’t know. It’s just what came out of me. If some stupid white f—er came to this protest with a gun, that's what he is to me. And I knew that would grab people’s attention.”

I am sure Jake had been counseled to keep his head down and his mouth shut, but the Internet never sleeps, and the words of others were filling the vacuum. Justice for James signs began appearing in the streets of Omaha, and fresh demonstrations broke out. The Gardners were doxed and threatened. A rash of misinformation appeared online, people claiming some tenuous connection to Jake—a high school classmate and distant cousin—denouncing him as a racist. The owner of the building where Jake had his bar canceled his lease, claiming he had violated their terms. In a move of almost comically petty vengefulness, the pressure campaign got Jake’s favorite band, 311, to publicly denounce him. Innocent or not, he was ruined in Omaha.

The cops suggested he get out of town for his own safety. With his life in shambles, he headed out to California, planning to bum around with his dog and shelter with his Marine buddies. Back in Omaha, Justice for James had effectively become a local offshoot of the George Floyd protests, and County Attorney Kleine was under increasing pressure to reopen the investigation. Activists picketed his home and dragged his office on social media.3

Reading their posts and interviews, three factors seem to be animating the protestors. First, a shaky grasp of (or indifference) to the facts of the case and the applicable laws—a lot of them seemed to be driven purely by the symbolism of the situation as they saw it. Second, a heated rhetoric of oppressors versus oppressed, rhetoric with its roots in academia that treats nuance and case-specificity with contempt and suspicion. And third, an abiding exasperation with the way white men—as opposed to black men—are treated fairly in the system.

If the first two strike me as problematic motivators, I can at least sympathize with the third. Some people have said that if Gardner had been black and Scurlock white, the outcome would have been different. They are probably right. Sexton’s chapter on the Omaha police and judicial system is pretty damning, a case study in institutional racism. It seems highly unlikely that a black man in Gardner’s position would not have been charged with some sort of crime.

There was also a more measured process going on behind the scenes, led by the Scurlock family’s lawyer, Justin Wayne. Wayne sounds like a thoroughly honorable guy. He took pains to keep the case from becoming more of a circus than it already was, turning down offers to appear on national television and rebuffing Al Sharpton when the inflammatory reverend tried to get involved. He was not out for blood; he was not on a crusade. Neither were the Scurlocks. According to Wayne, the narrative that Gardner was a violent neo-Nazi did not come from them but from white Nebraska activists with a savior complex. From the material I have seen, this tracks.

But for Wayne and the Scurlocks, it was not just about Jake Gardner. It was about principle, and it was about justice in a larger context. It was about the root grievance behind the whole concept of Black Lives Matter—the judicial system that treats them as if they do not. To them, it looked like the familiar cast of white cops and prosecutors taking one sniff of a white shooter and turning him loose. They wanted a proper investigation. They wanted the man who killed their son to stand trial and face the scrutiny of a jury. If I were them, I probably would too. 

In Sexton’s telling, Kleine comes off as a decent enough man, lacking maybe a little of Wayne’s integrity—a sensitive guy with political concerns whom the kindly fates had handed a flaming bag of excrement. Several of the people who had privately endorsed his decision to release Gardner, including the Chief of Police, publicly threw him under the bus, claiming that they had pressed for charges. Kleine’s assistant, Brenda Beadle, was livid and publicly called them out on their double-dealing, but it did not help Kleine. Increasingly isolated, he did a predictable thing: he punted. He said he wanted to restore the public’s faith in the judicial system and convened a grand jury to review the technically still-open case.

That grand jury was to be run by Special Prosecutor Frederick Franklin, a black lawyer from Omaha who had mostly worked on property crime. It was in session for more than three months, delayed in part by the pandemic lockdown. Jake had planned to go to California, but it was 2020, his little corner of the state was on fire, and unfriendly people had heard that he was headed that way and posted ominously about it online. He went up to Portland instead and took refuge with Ben, now retired from his emerald groves and making money in the era of legal weed. I was in Japan by then, teaching English to engineers in a spring factory. My daughter had just turned three, and I was occupied with work and family—happy to be out of the loop.

In August of that wretched year, a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two. Like Gardner, he claimed self-defense. He eventually won an acquittal and was all but canonized by the MAGA Right, largely owing to the promotional efforts of his legal team. I broke with a lot of my liberal friends in analyzing the case—it did seem to me that Rittenhouse had a technical claim to self-defense, and I posted in our neighborhood chat group to that effect. I also said that he was an idiot who brought a gun to a riot and caused two men to needlessly die.

Ben’s reaction to my post was telling. He said nothing about Gardner—he clearly already distrusted me—but he lavishly praised Rittenhouse, filling the chat with trollish memes, hyping the smug little twerp as some sort of Kevlar-vested Gideon before the Midianites. He seemed oddly passionate about it.

If I had known about Gardner and his troubles, I might have noted some key differences between the two cases—namely, that Gardner had stepped outside to survey the damage to his bar, whereas Rittenhouse had posse'd up with his ‘militia’ and traveled 40 miles to play National Guard in another town. Or that Jake’s background (two traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, the curb-stomping incident) put his actions in a very different light than the glory-seeking Rittenhouse. If anything, it seems like an insult to Jake to compare him to Kyle.

But reading back, I can see how my criticism of Rittenhouse may have translated—in the harsh semiotics of a Manichean bunker mentality—into a condemnation of his unlucky friend. Without knowing it, I had set the tone for our eventual falling out.

And Gardner’s luck was about to get worse. In September, the grand jury released its findings, and they were stunning. Four indictments: manslaughter, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, attempted first-degree assault, and making terroristic threats. The case would go to court, and Jake’s lawyers were confident they could win there, but if they were wrong, he was facing up to 20 years in prison.

At this time, he was staying with his parents and Ben up in Oregon, and their reports tell the story of Jake’s mental deterioration. He worried that the defense would bankrupt his family and that he would be killed in jail even before he got to trial. Ben took his gun away, but Jake convinced him to give it back. On the day he was to board a plane to Omaha and surrender, Jake slipped away from the house and went for a drive.

Ben discovered his body a short time later.

Dead Man on Trial

I have long been fascinated by the idea of the Law in all its social, religious, and psychological dimensions. It is a hell of a thing—the more you look at it, the more inscrutable it becomes. A reader of Dostoevsky might see Jake as a failed Raskolnikov, unable to face the bracing Siberian wind and the freedom found in humiliation. A reader of Tacitus might note how easily the law can be corrupted by corrupt men and see Jake as a proud Roman falling on his sword, denying only the Emperor his cruel and farcical trial. And a reader of Kafka might simply be mystified and wonder where God ends and society begins, but pity the poor man caught, body and soul, in the gears of a monstrous paradox.

What if Raskolnikov had been innocent? What if the old moneylender had set upon him in the street and tried to stick him with a poisoned hatpin, and he had only defended himself with his trusty axe? Would Petrovich still have it in for him? Would his nihilistic scribblings be read in court? Would the Christian social conscience, with its superego logic of guilty until proven guilty still hang over him like a curse and drive him mad?

Jake Gardner was dead. His case was closed, but nothing was resolved. Right-wing media exploded with the news—Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter practically foaming at the mouth, railing against Democrats, BLM, the media, and everyone to the left of Ted Nugent. Carlson, straining mightily to tie Gardner’s fate to the upcoming election, blamed “Biden voters” for his death.4 If I was baffled by my friend Ben’s insistence that I “supported the mob that killed [Jake],” it is because I was not watching Tucker’s show. In certain circles, I was on trial too, and I was being found very guilty.

The response from the activist-Left camp was hardly more intelligent. Some sounded triumphant. Others took Gardner’s suicide as an admission of his guilt. Still others claimed he had faked his own death and was being sheltered by Nazis, or feds, or federal Nazis, or something. Even Scurlock’s father believed it, for a time.

Into the center of the hurly-burly steps Fred Franklin, the special prosecutor who presented Gardner’s case to the grand jury and secured the indictments. He emerges as one of the strangest and most frustrating players in this sordid drama. He responded to the news of Gardner’s death by calling a press conference. His stated purpose: to justify the grand jury’s findings against Gardner without revealing any details of the grand jury’s secret proceedings. If that sounds disconcertingly like proof without evidence, you read it correctly. It is rather a wonder he did not warm up by pulling a rabbit-suited Franz Kafka out of his hat.

There has been a lot of talk from all quarters about Franklin’s competence—whether he is a good lawyer or a bad lawyer. To me, he seems competent in exactly the wrong way—a skilled courtroom litigator with a prosecutor’s knack for hectoring witnesses and insinuating culpability. Not the kind of guy you want to face on the stand. In his statement to the press, he employed the lawyerly trick of preterition—insinuating by disavowal. He said it made no difference to the case whether Gardner was a racist or not, but then heavily implied that Gardner was a racist. He hinted, teased, and flat-out leaked the courtroom details in a way that can only be described as prosecutorial. Sexton, with four decades of experience covering legal news, was astonished: “Franklin’s decision to effectively publicly prosecute a dead man felt unheard of to me.”

At one point in his statement, Franklin even seems to falsify evidence, misreporting one of Ben’s Messenger posts to Gardner on the night of the shooting. Ben sent this message as Gardner was sitting in his bar, and it reads, “Can you feel the fire?” But Franklin reported it as Ben asking about Gardner’s “field of fire” (that is, his prospects of shooting someone from his position inside the bar). When Sexton pressed Franklin on this point, Franklin said, “I was trying to make the public understand the nature of the communication. It was crystal clear to me how the grand jury regarded that communication.”

The one he misquoted to the public.

What Franklin lacks—glaringly—is the ability and (or willingness) to objectively present evidence, his job as Special Prosecutor. But if there was an upside to his involvement, it was that it gave Gardner’s parents and Ben a clear target—Fred Franklin and the grand jury transcripts. But what could they do? The family issued their own statement, a thorough rebuttal to Franklin’s with time-stamped references to the video evidence. But the war of words was effectively a stalemate. It looked like that might be the end of it.

Then Ben made a move, something ripped from a John Grisham potboiler. He went to Omaha on behalf of the Gardners and asked for a meeting with Don Kleine, the County Attorney who had handed the case to Fred Franklin and the grand jury. Kleine was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, but he agreed to meet by video conference, with his assistant, Brenda Beadle, attending in person.

Ben could not have asked for a warmer reception. Kleine was extremely candid. He was with Ben a hundred percent: Jake had been railroaded. He criticized Franklin’s handling of the case and agreed with Ben that he should be held accountable. He too wanted to unseal the grand jury transcripts. “We believe [Franklin] obviously had an agenda. We have to be able to prove he misled the jury.” Kleine, a Democrat, even announced his intention to switch parties and back President Trump. It is like he was filling out an application to be Ben’s new best friend. 

Which is funny, because, unbeknownst to Kleine and Beadle, Ben was secretly recording it all. And despite everything, I feel a stir of admiration for my old friend at this point, going iceberg-cold and razor-sharp into battle for his Jake’s legacy, not giving a damn for Kleine’s fawning rhetoric, not trusting the slippery sonofabitch as far as he could throw him. Justice for Jake—that is all he was about. It was a ballsy move, one born of loyalty and nerve, and it might have been highly effective if the fruits had been put to better use.

The Gardners had begun shopping for a new lawyer, someone who could pry open the grand jury transcripts and disclose, finally, whatever game Fred Franklin had played. But the Omaha legal community was reluctant to cannibalize one of their own. It is one of those towns where everyone went to the same law school, apparently. Desperate and determined, the Gardners hired a gun from out of town, John Pierce, a lawyer who had contributed to the successful defense of Kyle Rittenhouse. They liked how Pierce had politicized the Rittenhouse case, making it a cause célèbre for the conservative outrage machine. They might have imagined their son receiving the same lionization in death that Rittenhouse now enjoyed in life. If that support only came from the MAGA right, what of it? Jake Gardner was already hated by the activist left.5

Pierce, however, was a disastrous choice. He came in with big promises—the case would be huge, a slam dunk on the left, et cetera, et cetera. Then, he ghosted them. Months went by. Phone calls and emails went unreturned. Pierce’s associate, Lin Wood, with whom Pierce had founded the non-profit Fight Back Foundation (something like a MAGA ACLU), was busy lawyering for President Trump, pitching crazy stories about Chinese infiltration, and trying to overturn the 2020 election. It is unclear how much Pierce was distracted by that treasonous enterprise, but it is fair to say that in the grand hierarchy of the political right, Trump outranked Jake.  

Finally, in July of 2021, Pierce filed his lawsuit for Jake, naming Fred Franklin and Don Kleine as defendants. The suit claimed these two had “conspired” to deny Jake Gardner his right to a fair trial and due process, “implying he was a racist and inflaming the community,” and so forth. Nothing past the word “conspired” really mattered, though.

Adding Kleine had made the lawsuit, in Sexton’s paraphrasing of several lawyers’ opinions, “dubious, or even incoherent.” Kleine and Franklin were so clearly at odds that it was a stretch to believe they were in cahoots, and nearly impossible to prove it. By the time it went to trial, Pierce had further damaged his reputation by representing some of the January 6th Capitol rioters (and reportedly bungling that). Lawyers are like excuses, apparently; a bad one is worse than none.

Did the Gardners’ politics, no less than their grief, blind them to the rather obvious fraudulence of a guy like Pierce? If so, it is a shame, because I think the case against Franklin had merit, and if Gardner had been screwed by the system, the grand jury transcripts might have proved it. But in June of 2022, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, and the quest for justice and reconciliation within the system finally died.

Secret Garden

It is hard to capture in so few words the special quality of that place—the effect on the soul of sunlight and growing things, the hum of insects, the ever-smoking pipes, and the amiable company of dogs and men. We would go out in the morning, either to the lower patch under scrub oak or up the hill where the highest shrubs poked out over the manzanita and camo netting, and we would set to cutting. Such abundance—the emerald queens in their shaded groves! To think how we used to squabble and scheme over the meanest gram of their flower, how we used to pick our carpets for green crumbs and scrape the tar out of our pipes. Here it grew so fat on the stem that the trees were listing and falling over with it. You could lie down on a sun-warmed bag of the rotted and rejected portion and take a nap! 

"...he displayed uncommon human virtue."

It was all Ben’s engineering, and he was in his element. He would move among the plants, selecting some for harvest, checking for bud rot and the flower-fatal hermaphroditism. Stooping to divide a scorpion with his spade, kicking the carcass of a kangaroo rat, admonishing his dog to “Leave it!” Muttering to himself, thoughtlessly preening a bee from his beard, stalking, pruning, gauging; he might have passed in a vision for some wild, frontier anchorite, or the Baptist himself, prophesying in water and soil. It remains my fondest memory of him.

We did the trimming back at base camp, where a spirit of good-natured jingoism predominated, a pride in competence and self-sufficiency. A constant din of rock and rap music blasting the silence. I was fresh out of the Navy, a squid among jarheads. While my longstanding friendship with Ben served as my pass, I would never be part of the Marine brotherhood that bound Jake, Ben, and the several others who ran that outfit. My position was something like the post-service equivalent of the Navy corpsman attached to a Marine unit.

Otherwise, very little divided us. We were all working-class kids with a streak of criminality (more pronounced in some than others). These guys were not Obama voters, I knew, but they did not seem to care much about what was happening in Washington or anywhere else for that matter. Why would they? They had retaken Eden and planted a big American flag in it. But politics, like the serpent, had a way of sneaking in. In fact, I had unwittingly brought it with me. 

As a Shakespeare geek, I had been impressed enough with Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars to buy his other book, Explaining Hitler. Rosenbaum was my kind of guy, relentlessly curious and fascinated with ambiguity, be it that of Shakespeare’s genius or Hitler’s evil. He was as much interested in the narratives we construct out of our discomfort with that ambiguity as he was with the riddle of the thing itself. How do we construct ourselves in the face of what is apparently human but capable of so much more than us?

On my first morning in the camp, I was trimming weeds out on the deck with a few other guys and thinking about this stuff. I had left the book sitting on a bench. Jake Gardner came out of the cabin, saw the book, and became visibly irritated. “Who brought that?” he wanted to know. I nervously confessed. I assured him that the book was not a pro-Hitler text, that it was written by a Jew, that I was not a Nazi, and so on. “Oh,” he said. “That’s alright, then.”

We had been introduced, but I did not know Jake at all. I thought he was a California hippy-type, offended by the mere talismanic presence of Baby Hitler peering quizzically from the book cover. Over the next couple of weeks, I got to know him better, listening to his stories and throwing sticks for Cali and Tito, his two pit bulls. He was a couple of years younger than I was but seasoned—an Iraq vet with a ready smile and a passing resemblance to the actor Fred Ward. He had seen things. Weathered things. Things had weathered him back. He certainly was not a hippie.

Why had he been so ruffled by the book? Something about it just did not fit. On my third week in camp—by then I had a pretty good rapport with him—I asked him about it. The conversation was so interesting I recorded it, more or less verbatim, in my journal.

“I’m a little touchy about it,” he admitted. “I used to be pretty deep into that s—.”

“S—?”

“Racism. Nazism.”

“Oh.”

“I was raised with it,” he explained. “I was in Haiti after the Aristide government fell….” He shrugged and let the picture paint itself. “That, and…just a series of environmental factors… I still got the tattoos.” He showed me his back: a brace of Iron Crosses below the shoulders, each with the number 14 in the middle.6 I did not know what the number signified. I asked him.

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” he said. “14 words. Adolf Hitler.”

In all the time I worked with him, some five weeks total of daily contact in a place where men spoke freely, I never heard him utter a racial slur or say a hateful thing. He appeared in all respects to be exactly what he claimed to be: a reformed, ex-neo-Nazi who had rejected his old ways and, like a recovering addict, held his former poison in anathema. The kind of guy who would readily agree—as he did on a fateful night some 16 years later—that black lives matter.

Beyond that, the Jake Gardner I knew was a remarkably good guy. I do not mean that in the cheap common sense of being generally well-socialized; I mean he displayed uncommon human virtue. A guy whose warrior friends held in high esteem, a guy you could count on to have your six, as they say. A funny, introspective young man who doted on his dogs and spoke well of people. He was the kind of guy who was good for morale. “Ben-ny, the cry-whore…!” he’d sing to the tune of ‘Frosty the Snowman.’ Cry-whore"—not his coinage—was a term the Marines used to denounce bellyachers. Ben could be a spleenful son of a sonofabitch to work for sometimes, and that was Jake’s way of knocking him off his cantankerous high horse. He had just the right temperament to do it.

One day a front rolled in at sundown, fog and rain dissolving the hill landscape in the falling light, leaving us an island in a murky sea. We had been waiting for something like this. We lit fires in a pair of rusted oil drums, fed them gasoline and sections of two-by-fours until their bases glowed red, and then stuffed them with damp, fragrant loads of our cuttings until arms of smoke poured upwards like the arms of a genie holding up the sky. We were burning chaff, destroying crop waste and evidence under cover of darkness and rain—the only time we could pull off something like that in tinderbox northern California.

But a wildness descended on the camp, like the advent of some primitive religion, something painted on a cave wall. Shotguns boomed from the ridge, blasting away into murky limbo as if to settle some ancient grudge against the damnable obscurity of it all. In the middle, there danced a solitary figure, faceless, headlamp blazing from under his hood like the horn of Moses. It was Jake. Round and round he whirled with double wands of smoldering bract, pouring smoke into the general catenation that would become the world again at dawn. Aristotle held that tragic theater has its roots in the Dionysian mysteries, and 12 years later this dancing man would become the subject of just such a tragedy, a symbolic sacrifice to our divided nation, a bleeding Year King in that infamous Year of the Rat, 2020.

But for now, he danced.

Later we drank whisky in his truck and watched Borat.

Reactionary thinkers have been sorting people and ideas into clear-cut moral categories and scorning the ambiguous remainder. The derision of intellectualism is not just a reflex, but a strategy to undermine the prestige and rival authority of the learned. Tucker Carlson rails at university “elites,” while PragerU makes insipid cartoons about complex issues to convince uneducated people that the world is really that simple.

The intellectuals embraced by the political right distract with incoherent thought salads so abstruse it takes something of an education just to see how shallow they are, how badly they abuse their source material, and what a hash they make of big ideas. Why challenge yourself with all those disquieting passages of Nietzsche when a podcaster can mash him up with some comforting Christian moralism and spit it into your mouth for you? Of course, most are against student loan forgiveness or anything that would make higher education more affordable. We know what happens when people get a liberal education—they stop voting Republican.

The anti-intellectual streak in leftist politics is less pronounced, far less central and programmatic, and resembles an occasional, nervous tic—anti-intellectualism as intellectualism. Often the rhetoric seems less revolutionary than lazy—a cheat code for the mediocre grad student; an instructor’s substitute for an individual pedagogy. Why bother with Kant’s rather difficult ideas about the thinking subject if you can just call out his racism and move on to Schopenhauer’s racism? Liberals and leftists answer the Right’s xenophobia with a complimentary oikophobia, a reflexive distrust of the inherited culture. And when academics get too much into the role of activists, they can sound just as doctrinaire and reductive as conservative pundits.

Either/or ambiguity appeals to us because it is easy. It also offers us a degree of certainty and safety in numbers. Like hoplites in formation, our thrusts become less precise and well-timed as they become more coordinated; the main thing is to aim them in the correct direction, and to bring about this coordination, we develop reflexive thinking.

Both/and ambiguity is scarier and asks more. It means you have to think through the murky, shifting relations that weave the world into the mess it is and maintain a little epistemic humility even as your understanding deepens. It means that the conclusions you come to will always be contingent on your limited information, learning, and imagination. You will never have "The Truth," but only an apprehension of truth, seen through a tinted glass. Worst of all, it means that your ideas and opinions will not synch up with those of large groups, which leaves you vulnerable to attack from all sides or else abandoned to a lonely silence.

To be clear, I am not calling for a retreat from necessary confrontation. I am not advocating political centrism, or passive intellectualism, or moral relativism, or permanent ambivalence. There are absolutely times to take sides and fight with tooth and claw. But I am appealing to the intelligent reader to unlearn your polemic reflexes just a little. I am asking you to do what smart people do best, to privilege thought and empathy—yes, even empathy for the bastards—over righteousness and tribalism. I am asking you to endure the fear of ambiguity as a passage to knowledge and wisdom. I am asking you…to understand Hitler.

Then shoot the sonofabitch.  

Speak of Me as I Am

Was Jake Gardner a racist when he killed James Scurlock? Did he backslide into that sump of ideological poison in the years after I had that conversation with him in the fertile hills of California? What happens when an ex-neo-Nazi falls in with a conservative movement largely built on the rhetoric of grievance? Is it like a former alcoholic taking a sip of wine at a wedding? Does it trigger the downward spiral?

I am inclined to say, as Special Prosecutor Fred Franklin has said (however disingenuously he may have said it), that it does not matter—at least as far as his shooting of James Scurlock is concerned. Self-defense is self-defense, or it is not. Even racists have a right to defend themselves. And truly, I have no idea. As Ben is keen to point out, I did not know Jake in his final years, and Ben will not even talk to me about the stuff I do know, much less what I do not.

"...for tragedy lies at the interface of beauty and pain."

But if Gardner did revert to his old ways, he left precious little evidence. Joe Sexton has done a thorough job of debunking the various online rumors; most of them are baseless, and the rest are not based on much. The Gardners showed him Jake’s autopsy report, which included a list of his tattoos. No mention of the swastika he was rumored to have. It did note a pair of Iron Crosses, but they reportedly enclosed the number 1775, the year Congress established the Marine Corps. Barring the slim possibility that the family tampered with the report, it seems he had them altered. This bolsters my hope that Jake was still climbing towards the light in the latter days of his life, and if so, it only deepens the tragedy of what happened to him.

Tragedy is a key concept in The Lost Sons of Omaha. Sexton questions “whether the notion of pure tragedy existed anymore in America.” In another passage, he laments that the deaths of Scurlock and Gardner have been reduced to “a twisted morality play.” Sexton does not quite define pure tragedy but only says that it requires of us that we “recognize and honor and even draw strength from shared grief.” I would (following Aristotle and at the risk of sounding pedantic) suggest that this is an after-effect of the primary function of tragedy—the production of catharsis.

Catharsis, that psychic purgation7 we learned about in AP English. We experience it when we witness a dramatic tragedy and recognize it as a mirror of life. Or when we witness a real-life tragedy and lend it, by virtue of a properly acquired tragic worldview, the special dignity of the drama.8 These two moves are the same move in two directions, for tragedy lies at the interface of beauty and pain. But it requires us to identify with the tragic figure, to see ourselves in them. In our polarized political climate, we are increasingly averse to doing this, and the notion of honoring our enemy’s pain and seeing their beauty seems like foolishness, like weakness. It says enough that we consider so many of our fellow Americans our enemies in the first place.

At the risk of getting even further into the academic weeds, I would posit two competing visions of tragedy and two types of catharsis, and they break along the types of ambiguity cited above. There are either/or tragedy and both/and tragedy. Their effects—on the emotions, on the mind, and arguably on society—are very different.

In an interview with Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson gives us the first vision, as exemplified by the Crucifixion of Jesus. “You cannot write a more tragic story,” he says. “It is impossible. It is the aggregation of everything that people are afraid of.” He then enumerates the torments of Jesus, the pain of betrayal, the society turned against you, and the suffering on the Cross. So far, it is a compelling argument, though why I could not write these same elements into another story has yet to crystallize. Then he comes to it.

“Plus, you’re completely innocent, and everybody knows it.” There it is. Christ as the perfect victim, the sinless martyr who dies not despite his innocence but because of it, because everyone else is guilty. Notice how this plays on the simple, absolute dichotomy of guilt and innocence—the essential sinlessness of Christ, the commensurate guilt of fallen mankind.9 In a slightly diluted form, you have got your literary martyrs, your Christ allegories, and archetypal virgins, such as John Proctor, Billy Budd, Tom Robinson, Gretchen. The virtue of such a person lies primarily in their profound decency, their humility, and their utter lack of self-importance. There is certainly nothing outsized or monstrous in their character, and very little ambiguity. They wear their goodness on their sleeve and it goes right down to the bone.

We may identify with the victim’s suffering, or we may identify with the guilty party (“His blood be upon us!”), but at the level of tragedy, we are stuck hanging—as on the Cross—in tension between those two irreconcilable opposites. Catharsis, the release, does not come until the Resurrection, or some analogous, redemptive event, which raises the question of whether this is tragedy at all. And there is a marked tendency among the audiences of this sort of tragedy to identify with the victory of the innocent martyr while distancing themselves from the guilty killers (the Jews did it; those crazy Puritans did it; those racist southern whites did it). This dubious form of tragedy, in other words, tends to reify the basic dichotomy of us (the justified) and them (not).

The second type of tragedy is probably what most people think of when they think of the word tragedy, that, classical tragedy and its legacy. It unfolds to us the essential tragic worldview, in which people are constantly scaling the heights of human potential and cutting dazzling, noble figures, only to be undone by fate and their paradoxical nature and fall into the dust. It seems to be the mark of great and noble beings, what Aristotle termed great-souled individuals, that they carry the seeds of their undoing in the very dynamic tensions that energize their greatness. And there is a mystery in that, the unknowable and disquieting depth of the incommensurable. No one is just anything, but always that and something more, something which passeth show.

The ambiguity here is not either/or, but both/and. Othello is undone as much by his own jealous nature as by Iago’s manipulation, but he would not have committed his great crime if he were not deceived. Oedipus is judged by gods and men for killing his father and marrying his mother, and yet he did these things without knowing that he did them. Fate does to Oedipus what Iago does to Othello—it manipulates him into committing his crimes so that his guilt becomes an unsettling moral riddle instead of a salient lesson. Like Othello, he is guilty, but he is also a victim.

There is no happy ending with this second form of tragedy, no last-minute save. Shakespeare teases us sometimes—Desdemona seems to revive, Edmund has a change of heart and tries to save Cordelia—but it only serves to drive home the inexorable cruelty of fate. One could argue that this vision is truer to our real human suffering. At the very least, it forces us to find catharsis in the tragic moment itself, in full identification with the paradoxical tragic figure. Othello dies by his own hand, steeped in his guilt, but not before reminding us of his noble nature and his service to the state. “Speak of me as I am,” he says.

Speak of him as he was. It seems a small thing to ask, and yet we are so often loath to do it. For all the talk of religion’s decline, it is not the religiously inspired vision of martyrdom and Manichean dualism that has fallen out of favor in the popular mind. Sexton is right; it is the second type of tragedy that seems to miss us when we talk about who we are. “He’s completely innocent, and everybody knows it,” pretty well sums up what James Scurlock’s partisans believe about James Scurlock and Jake Gardner’s own believe about Jake Gardner. Both sides view and represent their guy as the martyr and the other as the villain, and anyone who complicates this picture is reviled by both camps. 

Maybe I am being naïve; maybe politics is a zero-sum game, and I am philosophizing in the middle of a rock fight. The right might tell me the tragic worldview is an elitist luxury that good people can ill afford. The left might tell me it is a privilege good people should ethically abjure. Maybe both sides are willing to close one eye and sacrifice that stereoscopic vision to draw a bead on their version of the greater good.

But not me. I am prepared to die on this hill, with or without the resurrection.

I believe that, in canonizing these men, we actually do them a disservice. If we hide the fact that Jake Gardner was, at one point in his life, a white supremacist who gouged a hate symbol into his flesh, then we deny him the heroic moment when he threw off that vile ideology and became a better man. If we believe, as Scurlock’s family does, that Scurlock was trying to prevent a shooting when he jumped on Gardner but also deny that he was behaving like a vandal up to that point, then we miss the moment when his nobler side got the better of him. In reducing one another to moral caricatures, to angels and devils, we lose sight of who we really are and arguably the best part of any of us—the capacity for self-overcoming.

For, as Virgil reminds us, facilis descensus—the descent into Hell is easy. So is innocence, up to the point of meeting experience, and beyond that point it becomes a pose and a self-deception. The difficult thing, and the only true index of our power and nobility, is to fall into the pit and to climb back out.

 Eulogy to a Friendship

Ben was texting me from across the ocean, and it was not to wish me a happy Year of the Snake.

It was February of 2025. President Trump was back in the White House. I had thought Ben would be a happy little troll after his big win, like he was the first time—Get in, losers, we’re making America great again! Instead, he seemed angrier than ever. He sounded like nothing so much as a vindictive loser himself.

“You guys owe me an apology. You guys owe America an apology. Truly. Love you, man, but you guys f—ed up.”

You guys meant me and Tom. Tom was a diehard Obama Democrat (a signed campaign poster hung in his home office), and I had been tending toward the Bernie Sanders camp of Democratic Socialism, but, as far as Ben was concerned, we both took our orders via Ouija board from Chairman Mao and Comrade Stalin. He had had a blowout with Tom, and Tom was not talking to him, so now he is pissing on my doorstep instead.

I had already told him several times to screw off. Again, I told him to “stop busting my balls about politics.” We—Democrats, liberals, advocates of the open society—had lost, and unlike President Trump and his core of election deniers, I could deal with that. I told him I was tuning out for a while, getting back into my books, focusing on my wife and kids, my health, and my writing, and letting my crazy country get on without me.

He was not having it. He thought I owed him an apology.

He had been getting worse and worse over the years. Spiteful. Fetishistically masculine, policing maleness in the tedious, half-queer manner of Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Morbidly obsessed with transgenderism—really working towards giving himself an aneurysm because some library had a cross-dressing corner for curious teenagers. F—ing Freudian case study with a safe full of guns.

And he thought I owed him an apology.

Look here, prick—I sent him a picture of the Capitol riots, Trump’s Uruk-hai hanging off the balcony and storming the halls. I did not expect him to apologize for it. I had mostly left him alone after Joe Biden won because he was my friend, and I sensed his rage, and I had no desire to salt his wounds. Now he felt sufficiently vindicated by President Trump’s win to demand an apology. He ladled on some nonsense about January 6th being “orchestrated by the left” and some more about Chelsea Clinton getting $260 million from USAID.10 Finally, he got to the bottom of it.

“You hold onto January 6 for dear life. I’ll remember the real riots that took place in the months prior to that. The ones that you supported. The ones that cost my best friend his life.”

Gardner. That is what he wanted me to apologize for. The left had driven his friend to suicide, and I was part of the left.

Justice for Jake ended with my personal mea culpa.

I think on some level I realized this was it. His trauma from that day back in 2020—looking for his friend and finding him too late—was tangled up with his crazy political awakening, which in turn was rooted in deep, poisoned wells of bigotry and self-doubt. I was not arguing with a man so much as I was arguing with a snake pit of complexes and unfocused resentments. He would never drop it. He would always demand the ritual atonement and turn nasty when I refused to play along. And the anger I had smothered out of respect for his grief all came roaring back.

I told him never to throw Gardner’s death at me again if he valued our friendship. “You know who killed Jake Gardner?” I said. Jake Gardner. You need to accept that and let him go. Then I told him it would be another test of our friendship whether he could STFU and let me have the last word that day. I guess I wanted him to give me one last reason.

I am not going to reprint all he said, but here is the elided gist of it.

“…you take no accountability… Jake Gardner did kill Jake Gardner… don’t love America… Marxism…f—ing commie… Jake Gardner killed himself. But you and Tom and all the chickenshit liberals were OK with everything that happened and killed him first, motherf—er. Bunch of cowardly little bitches. The lot a ya."

“Good luck, buddy,” I said, and blocked him.

He had been his best self out in the California woods, up there with the dogs and plants and the ancient harvest spirit. I had found a pretty good version of myself out there too—we all had. But I had found it in other places too—in the Czech Republic, India, Thailand, and Japan. I had left depression and anxiety in the blackened ghee of the ghats; I had seen bodies burning on the shores of the Ganges and crossed myself with the polluted water. I had read Milton in the dazzling Moravian Spring and thought long on evil and Auschwitz and the poetry that must come after. I had meditated on violence and manhood while boxing in a Muay Thai ring and lost my big fight but won a better knowledge of myself. I had embraced the world. And I had watched an old friend, someone I loved, slowly succumb to his own worst impulses and baser nature and choose his dead friend over his living ones, until I finally cut him loose.

It is not just me. Most of our old friends from the neighborhood have stopped talking to him too. The reasons vary by case—it is not all political, and some of those guys have issues of their own. But he is out, is the upshot. He has taken his football and gone home. In a way, he is as much a casualty of that wretched year as Jake Gardner and James Scurlock. In his mind, those specters are still fighting in the street, and everything else is part of that struggle.

Recently, he has taken to writing songs, built himself a recording studio, went to Nashville, and made some industry connections. He fancies himself a late-blooming prodigy, the voice of a generation. I was not lying when I wished him luck.

He reminds me somewhat of the brawling, happy warriors of the Icelandic sagas, how they would sometimes—and sometimes in the heat of battle—break into song, praising an ally, throwing the dozens at their enemies, and framing an action or an episode in a way that pleased them. He has a knack for that sort of thing, those chest-out, short-form bursts of wit, for holding down the corner. He could not, I think, write the larger epic which ensconces those bright little gems.

For that sustained encounter with art, you need empathy and equanimity and a theory of other minds. You need to put down your sword and fly up over the field, see the faces of the enemy, and recognize the faces of your estranged kinsmen. You need to swoop down, then, and see yourself through their eyes. You need to lay aside childish notions of good guys and bad guys and pass through the gloomy gates of Dis, where they are all waiting for you, saying, As you are, we were. You need to go down into the tragic lands and even into the pit of horror, and through its middle, climb back out and up the other side. You need to enter the forest where all is dark and the right way is lost and go and keep going until you reach the edge of the world with horns of light beaming from your head. And you need to come back and tell the tale.

Then, you will have won a victory no reversal can take from you.

Only then, my friend.

Matthew Chabin is a writer from Portland, Oregon, currently living in Japan with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.

1 The videos can be found online.

2 Some people, including the special prosecutor assigned to the case, have claimed that Jake’s ability to speak disproves his claim that he was being choked. This is dumb. George Floyd said “I can’t breathe” more than 20 times as Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck and squeezed the life out of him. There is also something called a blood choke, which doesn’t compress the windpipe but is quicker and more dangerous than asphyxiation. Anyone who has messed around with jiu-jitsu knows the feeling of being lucid one moment and blacked-out the next. If the guy wrapping you up knows how to do it, it is very fast, and if he keeps doing it, you will never wake up. 

3 Again, I can only give a perfunctory account of how this backlash came about and where the misinformation came from. I refer interested readers to the Sexton book, which goes into more detail.

4 It really should go without saying that radical BLM/Antifa types have little love for conservative Democrats like President Biden. I have raised this point many times with Ben, and, while he never contests it, he never seems to grasp it either. His brain seems to be chockful of antibodies that eat such information before it can get into the neural pathways. The maintenance of the simple dichotomy—us and them—comes first.

5 Can they be blamed if they never thought of appealing to the reasonable middle? The thing about the reasonable middle is they tend to not be very visible in these things. You will not see them picketing anyone’s house or joining an online dogpile. They have other stuff going on. They are often mistaken for inveterate fence-sitters, but they are well represented among judges and juries, i.e., the people who end up making important decisions. And when they rule against the position of one or the other extreme camp, the reaction of that camp is not to reconsider their extreme position but to lump the decision makers in with the opposing camp. This is why liberals—properly so-called—are so mistrusted by the left and the right. According to those camps, the middle ground does not really exist; it is just another face of the enemy. Extremism depends on maintaining the unambiguous binary.

6 It was widely circulated online that Gardner had a swastika tattoo. If he did, I never saw it.

7 The term originally meant physical purgation, literally the elimination of poison or excrement.

8 I realize, of course, that not everyone is educated this way. That might be part of the problem, though.

9 I would point out that Dr. Jordan Peterson has conveniently forgotten the ending. Christ rises from the dead, becomes the King of Heaven, his enemies wither and lie in the dust, and so on. The perfect tragedy cannot have a happy ending. It just cannot. That is why Dante called his great work The Divine Comedy. This is probably beside the point, except as an example of how either/or thinking is a Procrustean bed that lops off whatever does not fit. It is revealing that Peterson’s self-help book, 12 Rules for Life, is subtitled An Antidote for Chaos. That’s not far from A Cure for Ambiguity.

10 Need I say it? She did not.