Why the Kenosha Shooting is Not the Jungle Book; or Why Mowgli is Better than Kyle Rittenhouse

 

This is the second in the series of unpublished pieces that I wrote throughout this year. The first could be found here.

This year I wrote, in Arabic and in English, about the Kyle Rittenhouse case. A paper I submitted over a year ago to Radical Philosophy discusses the hierarchization of fire in Western thought, and opens by discussing the shooting scene in Kenosha, wherein Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two and seriously injuring the third. The editors suggested I focus the paper more on the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which was still recent then. I reformulated the paper to centre the argument that the impunity with which Rittenhouse carried out the shooting is rooted in a Western epistemology that entrusts the white man with the advanced forms of fire (the fuller argument can be found in the Radical Philosophy paper, and hopefully in a forthcoming paper on incendiarism and hysteria- perhaps parts of a future book project on fire). About two weeks before the paper’s publication, Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges; the white prerogative to feel threatened, to protect and to wield fire is so enshrined in US legal culture to the extent that a white man, even if underage, can procure firearms, stand vigilant against the incendiary multi-ethnic crowd, open fire and kill two demonstrators with the impunity my paper discusses.

In this context, I likened Kyle Rittenhouse to Mowgli of Rudyard Kippling’s the Jungle Book; both stand at the threshold of mastering fire, which also represents, in their trajectories, the threshold of being man. Both characters fit within an imperialist narrative wherein man through the mastery of fire becomes the master of other creatures.

The British empire, nevertheless, was creative enough to disguise its colonial (at times genocidal) mission in India in the garbs of a civilization mission, at the vanishing point of which Mowgli will master fire and the Brown will rise to the level of his civilized counterpart. The American empire would have been more creative had the gunman been Black. Instead, the gunman is a complacent white kid with no self-reflection or remorse (even worse than Bill the sociopathic white shooter in Falling Down who realizes towards the end that he is the bad guy and punishes himself accordingly).

This is in fact what I found most striking, forsooth most disturbing, in Rittenhouse’s media appearances: a complete lack of remorse, self-reflection, or even pensiveness. Kyle Rittenhouse can very well be a character in a white supremacist over the top propaganda film about how white shooters are nothing but misunderstood idealist kids, or one in an over the top parody of the white shooter’s lack of remorse. Mowgli’s initial display of his mastery over fire, and through it of other creatures, comes with guilt and responsibility: something hurts in his chest—something that did not seem to encumber Rittenhouse as he recounted, as if recounting a casual trip, the details of shooting his three victims. Mowgli, after subduing other creatures with fire, is overcome with a newfound conscience and thinks this feeling is a sign he is about to die; he cries out of guilt “only tears such as men use” according to his panther-companion, Bagheera. Rittenhouse cried, not out of guilt, but rather out of pity for himself (if we believe his crying was genuine and not staged); and whereas his serenity and composure can very well be attributed to a well-rehearsed performance rather than to the absence of a conscience, the smirk on his face every time he comes to recounting the moments of shooting betrays that he is at peace with (perhaps even proud of) what he did.

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, even as it is a racist, colonialist, work of literature, presents a better vision for humanity than popular American culture does.