I felt so messy standing there. My daddy’s shorts were everywhere. Tenderly, I kissed her goodbye, picked up my clothes… they were finally dry.” from Leader of the Laundromat, written by Lee Julien Pockriss and Paul Vance.

Well, this whole murder thing confuses me.

I had this idea pretty much all my life that murder was wrong. It was one of the biggest wrongs. Arguably, depending upon who’s ox is being gored, it can be the biggest wrong of them all.

So the reaction to the murder of insurance executive Brian Thompson comes as quite a shock. I had thought that people overall were against murder. Well, this explains why Trump was reelected.

Yes, the entire insurance industry is the largest, longest-lasting, and deadliest grift in this planet’s history. People have been dying because of this massive and unlessening scam for many a decade. The insurance industry is completely protected by our laws and, in many cases, getting insurance “coverage” is mandatory: in a great many cases you have to buy it even if you can’t afford it.

Remember that as the Affordable Care Act and Medicare are castrated and Medicaid is destroyed, possibly before this coming Valentine’s Day. I am truly amazed nobody has sat in an insurance HQ parking lot with a semi-automatic and a back seat full of ammunition magazines. I might understand that action — random murder has its charm. However, as noted I remain opposed to outright, deliberate murder, “mass” or otherwise.

Sure, like everything else there are a couple of exceptions to my attitude, but most of those exceptions aren’t in Washington quite yet. But this United Healthcare grand buzzard happened to be the victim and not the culprit. He wasn’t alive when all this shit actually started — none of us were — and he had a whole staff of equally ridiculously overpaid co-conspirators and a board of directors plus a bunch of stock holders who make King Midas look like Jack Haley.

Here’s the big Monday December 9th fact. Absolutely everything UHC was doing on Thursday is still being done today, there’s just another name on top of the letterhead. Well, maybe there’s been one change: I trust some big-ass billionaire corporate executives will now think twice when they decide they could abandon their bodyguard.

It’s true that I have labored in the fields of fictional vigilante justice, but I think there are important differences. First, as labelled, it’s “fictional.” That means no living human beings were purposely put to death in the production or exploitation of comic book stories. Second, you can’t murder characters who are resurrected to life well before the staples begin to rust. Just as the “legendary” stories about small kids putting on red capes and jumping to their deaths is apocryphal, the real-life death count in the broader “cartoon violence” category is quite slight.

While kids seem to understand the difference between cartoon violence and the real thing, many adults seem to forget. Our anti-social media has been overflowing with praise for the killing, if not necessarily for the killer(s) himself. I’d like to see him arrested, although the police already are claiming he left the city. After he went to Starbucks. Seriously.

We probably won’t be seeing that in Starbucks’ next ad campaign. It’s hard to turn murder into a coupon.

Shooting a man who sits near the head of the board of directors table doesn’t make an insurance company act with anything resembling consideration, fairness, honesty, and service. The killer might not have committed the perfect crime, although thus far he’s done a pretty good job. His backpack was found. It did not have any weapons… but it was full of Monopoly money.

That would be both clever and funny, if not for the “murder” part.