Trump Shooting and the United States of Violence

Trump Shooting and the United States of Violence

Last Saturday afternoon, my wife’s mom called us up.  

She’s 99 years old, and she’s lived through a lot of bad stuff, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War.   She remembers a lot of other bad stuff.  She remembers what she was doing when John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated.  She even remembers when someone tried to assassinate Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman and Gerald Ford (twice) and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

She was calling us up because she knew what bad stuff, really bad stuff, was like, and she wanted to tell us that someone had tried to kill Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. 

I don’t know if she’s a Trump supporter or not.  She doesn’t like to talk about politics and presidents and their policies.  She feels that that kind of stuff should remain private.  Talking about it, especially when you’re talking about it with people who may disagree with you, she feels is just something that is best avoided.

She was calling to tell us about the shooting, not to talk about whether she will vote for Biden or vote for Trump.

She knew that a bad, bad thing had happened and that, if we didn’t know it had happened, we would want to know.

She was right.

My wife Linda and I had seen a lot of bad things happen in America too, and we wanted to know about this one.  We turned on the news and started watching.

The shooting itself didn’t surprise me.  On March 23, 2024, I wrote a column for the Dziennik Związkowy entitled “Bloodbath” about the rhetoric of violence in this election.  The column began by talking about something Trump said at a rally in Ohio: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” 

That quote and similar violent quotes from Trump over the years suggest to me that he understands America, understands America probably better than Joe Biden.

After the attempt to assassinate Trump, Joe Biden appeared on TV and made a statement. He said, “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence. It’s sick.”

The statement from Biden suggests that he doesn’t understand what America is.  My wife’s 99 year-old mother seems to understand America better.  If you ask her, she’ll tell you that the United States is a land of violence.  

I started this column talking about the violence aimed at political figures here in the United States, but the violence, of course, doesn’t stop there.

According to a 2022 study, 7 of the 50 most violent cities in the world with the highest number of homicides are in the United States: New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

And the violence goes on.  In 2023, there were 346 school shootings in the US, the highest number since 1966.  That same year 43,163 people died in the US from gun-related injuries. And according to the Gun Violence Archive, more than 290 mass shootings have occurred in the US so far this year in the US.  More than 300 people have died in these mass shootings and 1,275 people have been injured.  

Yes, Biden is right.  The violence here is “sick.” In fact, I would say that there’s a plague of violence here, and it’s been here for a long time, and it just seems to be getting worse and worse.

How are we going to stop it?  

Biden can’t tell you, and neither can Trump.  No president can stop this violence.

As my wife’s mother likes to say, America is the United States of Violence.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

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My Books

I saw an article this morning about the ten things that guys like to collect.  It was an interesting list because – for the most part – it was stuff I never considered collecting.  Here’s the list: Sports cards, coins, tools, knives, stamps, alcohol, car miniatures, figurines (stuff like action figures and pop icons), watches, and vinyl records.  

Some of these things I did collect for short periods in my life.  When I was a kid back in the 50s, I collected baseball cards one summer.  I also collected pennies for a while.  I tried to get one example of every penny minted between 1900 and 1962.  I was pretty successful.  I think I tracked down about 99 of the 150 different pennies minted in the US during those years.  I don’t know what happened to my baseball cards and the pennies.  Probably my mom swept them out of the house with a lot of the other stuff I dragged in.  

What I really love collecting are books! I’m 76 this year, and I’ve probably been collecting books for 69 years.  I’ve still got comic books I bought at Mandel’s soda shop and toy store on the corner of Potomac and Washtenaw back in 1957.  And those aren’t the only books I’ve still got.  

In my early teens, I became a crazy fan of science fiction novels, reading a sci fi book every couple of days, and then a little later I became a crazy fan of hard-boiled detective novels by writers like Mickey Spillane and Ross Macdonald, and then I became a crazier fan of the Beat writers like Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and then I became a crazy fan of crazy postmodern novelists like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth, and then I became the biggest fan of great Polish writers like Milosz and Sienkiewicz and Szymborska and Isaac Bashevis Singer and so many others.

I not only read these authors I collected their books!

At one point, I had more than 4,000 books.

Some of these books I’ve been hauling around for almost 70 years.  I’ve still got books I bought in my teens and twenties at the Maxwell Street flea market, at dumpy book stores that were here today and gone tomorrow, at down and out second-hand stores in Chicago run by failed rabbis and fired university professors.  

Since I left Chicago in 1975 to go to graduate school in Indiana, I've hauled these books to 20 different apartments and houses my wife Linda and I have lived in.  I’ve hauled the books from Chicago to Lafayette, Indiana, to Normal, Illinois, to Charleston, Illinois, to Mobile, Alabama, to Peoria, Illinois, then back to Charleston, Illinois, and from there to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to Valdosta, Georgia to Danville, Virginia, and finally to Lynchburg, Virginia.  

Let me tell you, moving these books wasn’t ever easy.  One time when we moved from Mobile to Peoria we decided it was cheaper to mail the boxes of books rather than to rent a U-Haul truck that the 133 boxes of book would fit in.  This was back in the late 1980s and shipping a box of books cost about a buck fifty. 

At one point, just before we moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my wife Linda got a job as the director of the writing program at Western Kentucky University, she persuaded me to start downsizing my collection of books.  

I hated to do it, but I did it anyway.  At least a little.  

And what did I do with the books?

I gave a lot of my books to my students.  Every two or three days, I would fill a couple of boxes with books that I figured I would never read or need again, and I placed the books outside my office door.  By the next day, the boxes were empty.  I also gave boxes and boxes of the books by Polish writers along with the  academic journals I had collected over the years to my university library.   At one point, I even sold some of the rarer books on Amazon and Ebay. 

Despite all of this, I still have too many books today, enough to fill 8, 6-foot tall bookcases. I’ve dropped from 133 boxes of books down to about 30.  

Mostly, the books I have left are the ones that meant the most to me, the books by authors who reflected who I was and shaped who I have become.   And I walk past these books every day, and I stop and sit in the room the bookcases are in, and I read a chapter or two from one of the books that have shaped me and remember how important these books are to me,  and I wonder what will happen to them when I’m gone.  

I know my wife and my daughter and granddaughter know how much these books mean to me, but I also know keeping them and cherishing them because of how they shaped me so many years ago isn’t going to happen.  Perhaps my wife and my daughter and granddaughter will each take a book or two, but the rest will go where old books go.

To libraries or garage sales or Goodwill industries.

MURDERTOWN

Last week, I received some great news.  My third Hank and Marvin mystery novel was finally published and became available in bookstores and on Amazon.  This made me very happy because I love writing the Hank and Marvin novels.

Why do I love writing this mystery series set in a Polish American neighborhood in Chicago?

The answer is easy.

I taught creative writing at Eastern Illinois University for almost 30 years, and when I taught it, I always told my students that the first and principle requirement of all good writing is that what the student writes has to be important to him.  It has to be so personal that every word the writer writes is a word that means something to him.

I feel this way about the Hank and Marvin mysteries.  I don’t appear in these mysteries, but pieces of my life do.  The houses we lived in appear in the novels, the stores and restaurants I grew up around appear in them, my school and my parish and the park I loved playing in all appear in the novels, and my friends and neighbors and family members (even my mom and dad) appear in the novels.  Writing these novels is like visiting the past, like a vacation in the world I lived in in  my teens.

But mystery novels are more than just a vacation in the world I lived in in my teens.  There’s got to be something to those novels, some crimes at the center of those novels, and crimes there are, plenty of them, and they’re crimes I knew as I was growing up in my Polish-American neighborhood in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Let me give you a few examples.  

The first Hank and Marvin mystery is entitled Suitcase Charlie, and it’s about the fear I felt as an 8 year old because of some murders that happened in Chicago.  Three young boys were coming home from the movies when they were kidnapped and murdered.  Their bodies were found naked and dumped in a ditch.  The murderer who did this wasn’t captured until decades later. The fear I felt of someone doing this to me or my friends is central to Suitcase Charlie, a novel about a series of brutally murdered children showing up in suitcases on street corners in Chicago.

The crime that’s at the heart of Little Altar Boy is also one that’s central to my life.  The novel deals with a pedophile priest in a Polish-American parish near Humboldt Park and a series of crimes that develop around him.  Much of the novel takes place in and around St. Fidelis Parish, my parish for a long long time. It had two priests who were pedophiles, sexually abusing children in my grade school.  I didn’t know this at the time.  I found out years later when one of my friends told me about how he was abused by one of the priests.  When he told me this, I started writing the novel.

Murdertown, the most recent of my mysteries, is probably the most personal.  My family lived east of Humboldt Park for more than two decades.  We loved the area.  The park was always beautiful, and the neighborhood was a community that always spoke to us.  It was full of Polish-Americans like us, people who survived the concentration and slave labor camps in Germany and came to Chicago after spending years in the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany.  When my dad went down Wasthenaw for a beer, he knew he’d see people who had struggled for years to survive the camps.  When my mom went shopping on Division Street, she always ran into women in the bakeries and butcher shops who, like her, had seen their families killed by the Germans.

We loved the neighborhood and then something happened that made that love impossible.  Gangs moved into the neighborhood, and the crime rate exploded.  I saw friends beaten so often that going outside the house was considered dangerous, but that wasn’t the  worst of it.  There were also murders.  A grade-school friend of mine was murdered, one of the tenants in our apartment building was murdered, one of my parents’ oldest friends was murdered in a bar on Division Street.

Then houses in the neighborhood started being set on fire.  The house my parents loved and lived in for 17 years was burned down completely.  The houses on either side of our house – houses my friends lived in – were also destroyed by fire.

The search for who caused all of this violence and chaos and brutality is at the center of my novel Murdertown.

Like I said earlier, writing these novels is like taking a vacation into the past, but sometimes even the best vacations have their dark moments. 

FIRST AMAZON REVIEW OF MURDERTOWN

First Amazon Review of Murdertown -- the 3rd Hank and Marvin mystery 

Review of my novel is by David Rabin, award winning mystery novelists

5 STARS -- A Lyrically Written, Absorbing, and Deeply Affecting Police Procedural

In 1975 Chicago, police detectives Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz are up to their ears in homicides in the rapidly deteriorating neighborhood of Humboldt Park—a small-time gangster, a child walking home from a grocery store, an elderly Polish war hero and many more. Are these murders random? Or are they connected by some inexplicable motive? In this third installment of the Hank and Marvin series, Guzlowski paints a vivid picture of urban decay, political machinations, and the efforts of decent people to carry on amid the senseless violence surrounding them.

The investigation of the crimes will keep you quickly turning the pages, but it’s only part of the story. This book transcends the events that propel the plot by showing us how the crimes affect the people who investigate them. Guzlowski takes us into the psyches of Hank and Marvin, who, after three decades of police work, are struggling to retain their humanity and empathy despite the understandable urge to surrender entirely to cynicism. Every day brings additional reinforcement of the knowledge that brutal crimes will plague innocent people no matter how hard and long the detectives work, and the central theme of the book is why they continue in the face of futility. Guzlowski ultimately answers this question with a metaphor that gives us hope for humanity.

Amazon Link

May 3, Polish Constitution Day

 May 3, Polish Constitution Day

May 3rd was always a big holiday for us when I was growing up in the Polish Triangle in Chicago in the 1950s.  There were parades and parties and my parents and their friends singing the old songs they sang in Poland, the songs of hope and Polish honor and the beauty of the trees and fields beneath the Polish sky.  

This is a poem I wrote to commemorate that day.   It's in my book about my parents and the war, Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

Poland 

They’ll never see it again, these old Poles 

with their dreams of Poland.  My father 

told me when I was a boy that those who tried 

in ‘45 were turned back at the borders 

by shoeless Russians dressed in rags and riding 

shaggy ponies.  The Poles fled through the woods,

the unlucky ones left behind, dead 

or what’s worse wounded, the lucky ones

gone back to wait in the old barracks 

in the concentration and labor camps

in Gatersleben or Wildflecken

for some miracle that would return them 

to Poznan or Katowice.  But the world

wasn’t listening or its hands were busy 

somewhere else.  Later, in America

these Poles gathered with their brothers

and with their precious sons and daughters

every May 3, Polish Constitution Day, 

to pray for the flag.  There was no question 

then what the colors stood for, red for all 

that bleeding sorrow, white for innocence.

And always the old songs telling the world 

Poland would never fall so long as poppies 

flower red, and flesh can conquer rock or steel.

Who Would Jesus Vote For?

WHO WOULD JESUS VOTE FOR? 

I don’t know if you remember this, but one of the big questions during Donald Trump’s last run for president in 2020 was “Who Would Jesus Vote For?” The question kept coming up again and again in White Evangelical Christian communities and on their social media because – as we all know – these Christians were very much interested in Trump not only back in 2020, but also in 2016. 

So why do people wonder about who Jesus would vote for?

Nobody has asked me, but I’ve been thinking about it.

First, it’s an interesting question because Jesus seemed to imply that he wasn’t much interested in politics.  There’s the famous encounter in Mark Chapter 12 where some Pharisees ask him if they should pay taxes, and Jesus says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”  

Another famous passage suggesting that politics isn’t something Jesus is interested in appears in Matthew Chapter 4. That’s the moment when Satan tempts Jesus in the desert offering to make Jesus the King of the whole world if He gives his devotion to Satan.  If you know anything about Jesus and the New Testament, you don’t need me to tell you how Jesus responded to Satan.  Jesus said, “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’” According to most Biblical scholars, both stories imply that Jesus isn’t interested in the political stuff going on here on earth.

Second, let me say that I doubt that if Jesus were alive today he would be able to vote in the US Presidential election.  He probably would be living in what Trump in 2018 called “shithole countries,” little-bitty, starving, chaotic nations like Haiti or Burundi or South Sudan.  The most likely residence is probably the last-named country.  South Sudan is the poorest nation in the world with a population of about 11 million, 9 million of whom are starving.  If Jesus were alive today, he wouldn’t be living in Hollywood or Las Vegas or New York and eating in fancy restaurants.  He’d be living in South Sudan, sitting on the side of the road waiting for someone to come by and give him a piece of bread.  

So it’s pretty clear that Jesus would probably not be interested in voting in the 2024 election, and even if he was interested, he probably wouldn’t have the right to vote.

So why are people still asking, “Who Would Jesus Vote For?”

It’s politics.  

Somehow Trump has been able to convince White Evangelical Christians that he, in fact, is  God’s pick for president.  Trump recently posted a video on his Social Media network Truth Social.  The video begins with these words: "And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, 'I need a caretaker.' So God gave us Trump." 

The White Evangelical Christians apparently believe this.  According to Pew Research, 77% of White Evangelicals supported Trump in 2016 and 84% supported him in 2020.  The number of Christians supporting Trump in 2024 will probably be higher.

Why?

Time magazine makes a pretty strong case that the White Evangelical Christians support Trump so strongly because they are convinced that the “barbarians are at the gates” and that Trump – despite his attempt to overturn the last election, despite his proven sexual philandering, despite his criminal activities – is the only one who can save America from those barbarians.

And who are the barbarians?  

They are the Black Christians, the Jewish voters, the Arab American voters, the Hispanic Christians, the White non-Evangelical Christians, the “woke” guys and gals who support the Democratic party.

The White Evangelical Christians hope that Jesus will vote for the man the White Evangelical Christians support: Trump. 

I’m praying that Jesus doesn’t support Trump.

Happy New Year

 Happy New Year

My parents loved New Year’s Eve.

They loved dressing up in their fancy clothes. For weeks, my mom would search the department stores and dress shops on Milwaukee Avenue and Chicago Avenue looking for the most beautiful gown and shoes she could afford. For days, my dad would polish up his shoes again and again and make sure his best suit was free of any wrinkles and tears. They wanted to look as fancy as the Americans they dreamt of being.

They loved the spectacular ballroom they went to on New Year’s, the one in Wicker Park, on Wood Street just north of Division. They loved spending a long evening celebrating the coming year with their friends. These people – like my parents – were survivors. They survived the German invasion of Poland in 1939. They survived the years in the German slave labor camps. They survived seeing their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends killed by the Germans and the Russians. They survived the hardship of coming to America with nothing more than a wooden trunk filled with the few possessions they were able to gather together in the years they spent in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany waiting for some country like Canada or Australia or the United States to say finally, “Sure, we’ll let you come in, but it won’t be easy on you.”

My mother loved to dance the evening away. My father never learned to dance growing up, and so my mother would dance with anyone who looked like he or she was in need of a partner. She danced polkas and waltzes and tangos. She loved to hear the band on the stage play the old songs like “To ostatnia niedziela” and “Ada, to nie wypada” and “Dobranoc, kochanie” as she swirled around the dance floor with her friends and even strangers. Dancing, my mother would once again be the little girl who loved to dance with her sister Genja. My mother would once again be the girl she had been before the war killed her sister and ended all of her childhood.

And while my mom danced, my dad would sit at his table with his friends and talk about the war. They would talk a little about what they themselves suffered, but that wasn’t at the heart of their conversation. Whatever suffering they experienced was nothing compared to the suffering of those who hadn’t survived. 

My dad and his friends would sit at the table drinking their drinks and talking about the friends they had lost in the war, about Andrzej and Piotr and Janus and Antoni, about their suffering and bleeding and dying.

And dancing and drinking and sharing stories, my parents and their friends said goodbye to the year that had passed and embraced the year that was coming.

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Read more about my parents in my book Echoes of Tattered Tongues, available at Amazon and most bookstores.