Extra: Something Just Broke

John Wilkes Booth

Yesterday’s events made me think of Stephen Sondheim’s most challenging work, the 1990 musical Assassins. It is an odd, disturbing immersion in the minds and motives of nine men and women who sought to and, in some cases, succeeded in assassinating different presidents of the United States.

Donald Trump’s would-be assassin now belongs in this constellation of misguided souls.

From John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald to Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, these pariahs believed that someone or something was to blame if their American dreams did not work out. They all fought dueling feelings of impotence and entitlement. Sound familiar?

Sondheim’s Assassins shows that threatening ruptures in the American dream existed as long ago as Abraham Lincoln's presidency. The song “Something Just Broke,” late in the show, describes how assassination changes the nation itself forever. 

But the prescience of Sondheim’s Assassins is in the eerie and persistent connection between these nine lost souls and the other lost souls who, later in our shared history, committed mass shootings, attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021—and tried to take out Trump yesterday.

The most persistent criticism of Sondheim’s Assassins is that its subject is not appropriate fodder for a musical. I reject that critique of any art along with its close cousin, which holds that these people – assassins, society’s fringe elements, murderous souls—do not deserve our attention and should be erased. 

In this charged, catastrophic political season with everything at stake, we ignore society’s sick, fringe, outcast elements at our peril. We already know that something is broken in America. Refusing to acknowledge and listen to her lost souls will doom us to January 6th —and yesterday—all over again.