No one mourns the wicked
“No one mourns the wicked” is sung over and over again by the chorus in the opening number of the musical Wicked (spoilers following). I haven’t seen the new movie that just came out, but I’m looking forward to it based on the good reviews. I saw the stage play as a kid, after a summer of listening to the soundtrack on repeat on an iPod shuffle. The opening is a flash forward to when the Wicked Witch, Elphaba, is declared dead. People are having a huge celebration, because in the original lore of Oz, she basically enslaved a bunch of people, and now they’re freed. Of course, the rest of the play is then subverting those expectations, based off The Wizard of Oz, that the audience has. (In many ways, Wicked is fanfiction, since it builds on another author’s work.) It’s about how she’s actually misunderstood, and didn’t really do the bad things they accuse her of: people are just looking for a scapegoat.
I feel a lot of complicated emotions about the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO. I feel sad, mostly for all the people who are now sharing their stories of being victimized by the American healthcare system. People being denied care, dying slowly, going bankrupt, suffering, denied painkilllers, denied medication. And killing this one person doesn’t change anything about that, but I empathize with those who feel like this is retribution. He didn’t kill anyone directly, just enriched himself by denying lifesaving healthcare to thousands and thousands of people. He probably didn’t think of himself as a bad person. He did the same thing every other CEO did. Is he kind of a scapegoat for a deep systemic issue? Yeah, but he’s no Elphaba either. If anyone should be held accountable for the evil actions of a corporation, it should be the CEO.
If CEOs are scared now, they should be. Rich people let the party of the NRA run the country. What do you expect when millions of disenfranchised people have access to a deadly weapon? Of course, assassins will find a way even in countries with gun control. Shinzo Abe’s assassin, with his handmade gun. Also very “no one mourns the wicked.” My wife is Korean, and her family was directly impacted by the horrors of Japanese imperialism that Abe’s far-right party denies, so I could hardly muster a tear for him. I can’t believe it’s already been two years since his assassination.
Even when the Queen of England died (also in 2022), there were people who celebrated. People in countries all over the world that had been colonized by the British. Is she responsible for the crimes of an entire empire? No, but she symbolized that empire, more than any other living human. I don’t blame people for lashing out like that, when public opinion was so heavily behind her after her death. Some people were acting like she was a martyr, and that was when she died of old age. I can’t imagine how positively she’d be viewed if she’d've gotten assassinated.
Luckily it seems like there’s no danger of the CEO becoming a martyr. I don’t even know his name, and I don’t need to look it up to write this. I am 100% sure my death would’ve been just a statistic to him, so his death can be a statistic to me. If it means anything, maybe it’ll wake people up to how truly messed up our healthcare system is, that it drove someone to do this. And already Anthem has reversed its position on anesthesia in Connecticut, though they’d never admit it was because of the assassination. Maybe my refusal to learn his name is an Elphaba to Wicked Witch situation, but maybe sometimes a dead Wicked Witch is what we need. That’s one way you can interpret the end of Wicked. The Wicked Witch dies so Elphaba can live. The people have their scapegoat, and it’s bittersweet, because she never gets to see Glinda again, and her reputation is never mended. The antagonists never face justice, but everyone is morally gray anyway.