A man in New York was recently indicted on murder charges for killing the delivery driver from a Chinese restaurant in Queens. As reported in the New York Times last week, a dispute over a takeout order escalated into a full-blown pattern of harassment and threats by the defendant. According to prosecutors, Glenn Hirsch, 51, of Briarwood, Queens, fatally shot the delivery driver, Zhiwen Yan.
What was the trigger that unleashed this mayhem? According to the DA’s office, Mr. Hirsch was triggered by a shortage of duck sauce packets when he went to pick up his his order from Great Wall restaurant on Queens Boulevard. Even when workers handed him more duck sauce, he insisted on a refund. The police were called and Mr. Hirsch stormed out of the restaurant.
That was last November. For months afterward, Mr. Hirsch harassed employees, slashing the tires on one man’s vehicle and confronting the same employee later, approaching him as he shoveled the snow outside the restaurant. “How’s your car?” he said. “Remember me? I will kill your entire family.”
A reminder: the original grievance here was duck sauce.
It’s hard to believe anyone would carry out a five-month campaign of harassment, threats and intimidation over duck sauce. But that appears to be what Mr. Hirsch did. On April 30, he drove by the restaurant seven times — presumably the evidence was gathered from his phone or vehicle data — and then followed his victim on his delivery route before killing the father of 3. To be clear, Mr. Hirsch has entered a not guilty plea but, based on the above, it’s not hard to see why he is the prime suspect.
It would be too easy to dismiss this as the tale of one lone psychopath with extremely thin skin (Mr. Hirsch was married; he dropped his wife off at work before killing his victim). Some will chalk it up to the effects of the long isolation during Covid. Others will speculate that the defendant harbored a racist animus toward Asians (there has been a recent spate of Asian hate crimes in the New York region).
But most of us would probably say, “There must be more to the story.” Could a single incident of duck sauce supply chain disruption cause a man to carry out a vendetta? Perhaps the restaurant had been short-changing him on duck sauce for months. Maybe he overheard the employees calling him names that rhyme with “duck sauce.”
Or maybe, just maybe, this really is the whole story.
Molehill without a motive
On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd below from the window of his 32nd-floor suites in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas. He fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and wounding 411, before killing himself.
For months afterward, investigators searched for a manifesto, some clue to the gunman’s motive. They interviewed dozens of people and combed through the wreckage of his life. After all, isn’t this how we make sense of the senseless? In the end, however, no clear motive was ever established.
The Duck Sauce Killer had a motive, presumably, but it’s so flimsy — and almost comical in the measure of vengeance exacted in proportion to the original slight — that it would be laughable if it didn’t end so badly. It’s as if Larry David wrapped up each of his one-man-against-the-world battles by killing his antagonist.
Revenge is a dish frequently prepared, seldom eaten. At least, that used to be the case. In a disturbing pattern seen more and more, recipes for revenge are shared daily, mostly by right-wing fear mongers who constantly fan the flames of grudgery, urging their followers to act, egging them on to exact vengeance, crush their opponents, stand your ground, take back your country.
Is it any wonder they’ve wound up a nation of ticking time bombs, primed to lose it over the smallest offense? One Duck Sauce Killer is enough. One Uvalde shooter is one too many. But as incomprehensible as it is to confront the idea of mass murder as little more than a final fuck you to the world, it’s even more disturbing to stare into the abyss and contemplate the possibility that we have collectively entered a state where everyday annoyances and grievances — getting cut off on the freeway, slow service in a restaurant, the neighbor’s barking dog — are the final straw.
No wonder then that the phrase, “This is the hill I die on” has been trending upward for years. Often used facetiously, as in “This chocolate cake is the hill I die on,” it’s just as frequently used as a hyperbolic rallying cry for any number of petty grievances and crusades against enemies, real or imagined.
During that existential crisis known as the War of the Vaccinations, one-time bounty hunter, rapper and minor-league pundit, Stew Peters, declared in a tweet that you would find him dead, surrounded by spent shell casings, before he would allow anyone to administer the Covid-19 vaccine to him. “This is the hill I die on” he said, as if he were fending off Sauron’s army.
Of course, one man’s Thermopylae is another man’s poke in the arm. But opposition to vaccines isn’t the news here; it’s the way the issue becomes life-or-death, a matter of honor, in the minds of the aggrieved, that must be met with defiance and bullets.
How else can you explain the epidemic of airline passengers going absolutely ballistic — fighting with flight crews, unleashing a litany of abuse on everyone around them, before being physically dragged off the plane, presumably to jail? Or why melees have broken out at the drive-thru lane, the fast-food restaurant, and mall parking lots? Restaurant workers, in particular, have been heaped with abuse since cities lifted restrictions on in-person dining. This great unraveling, where we cast aside everything we learned in kindergarten, and picked up our AR-15s, has been well documented.
“I’m mad as hell and I don’t know why!”
When Howard Beale exhorted his viewers to open up their windows and shout, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” he wasn’t talking about duck sauce. Today, that scene, where the wild-eyed prophet Beale uses his pulpit to exhort his viewers to fight back, is about the only thing most people remember about Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s masterpiece.
But the legacy of the movie has taken some strange turns since its premiere in 1976. Forty years afterward, the election of Donald Trump was seen by some as the logical evolution of the prophet who rails against everyone and everything. Howard Beale as president. But Beale’s angry man persona has already been appropriated by a whole host of talking heads on the right, from Glenn Beck to Bill O’Reilly to Tucker Carlson (Chayefsky must be spinning in his grave).
What are they angry about? Well, you name it. Disney, Deep State, Joe Biden, gas prices, caravans, groomers, CRT, communists, windmills, baby formula. What are they happy about? Not much. It’s all bad out there. The country is in terrible, terrible shape. Our armed forces are woke. Our economy is in shambles. And everywhere our freedoms are being snatched from us.
If this was the rhetoric of an election campaign, it might be understandable. But it’s been the always-on, always-angry rantings of the right for at least 20 years. Wherever you turn — talk radio, Twitter, FoxNews, Telegram — all you hear is duck sauce. Americans have a lot to be angry about — gross inequality, rising crime and gun violence, health care costs, failing infrastructure, unaffordable housing, undertaxed corporations — but our new Howard Beales are fueling our anger mostly for ratings and trash talking.
They may not have any solutions, but the outrage machine is effective at keeping a significant portion of the population wound as tight as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s hair bun. I used to see this anger vented only on Twitter and other forums. More and more, I’m seeing it daily, in the line at the local supermarket, in a screaming match at a red light, and it’s starting to feel like everyone is ready to die on that molehill, all the time.
We seem to be experiencing a collective psychosis, where we’re not only strangers to one another, but enemies regarded with distrust, even contempt. The prolonged isolation of the Covid-era lockdown has played a role, to be sure, but for many Americans, it served only to turbocharge the dark thoughts already churning in their minds.
The 1850 census revealed just 74,000 adults living alone, representing less than 1 percent of the U.S. adult population at the time. Today, approximately 36 million men and women now live alone, representing a record high 28 percent of all U.S. households.
Living alone doesn’t necessarily turn us all into Travis Bickle’s. Taken alone, guns don’t walk into classrooms and mow down children. Video games and violent movies aren’t the root of all evil. Social media isn’t all bad. But taken together with the daily dose of goading from Tucker and company, it’s a lethal brew. Not every one of the 36 million Americans who live alone are ticking time bombs, but a growing number are acting out their anger in public, retweeting bizarre conspiracy theories, alienating themselves from their families and threatening strangers.
Turns out social isolation, lockdowns and political polarization are rich soil for sowing discontent and disaffection. The thin veneer of civilization has been rubbed off and what lies beneath ain’t pretty.
We all really should have a hill we’d die on. We all have a hill we need to climb if we’re going to survive climate change and the economic upheaval and social unrest that comes with it. But we all need to get a grip and don’t allow demagogues to get us worked up about duck sauce. There’s so many bigger things to get angry about these days — and we’re not going to change anything unless we put aside our differences, real and imagined, and start working together.
