Shrugging at calamity: America is reacting in strange ways to our chaotic times | Francine Prose

‘As a nation we have become so overwhelmed by the rapid succession of brutal and unnecessary deaths that we simply can’t process the horror and the grief.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/ReutersView image in fullscreen‘As a nation we have become so overwhelmed by the rapid succession of brutal and unnecessary deaths that we simply can’t process the horror and the grief.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/ReutersOpinionWhite House correspondents' dinner shootingShrugging at calamity: America is reacting in strange ways to our chaotic timesFrancine ProseThe reaction to the Washington DC shooting shows that Americans are swinging between outrage, exhaustion and numbness Tue 28 Apr 2026 05.00 EDTShareIn the early hours of Sunday, I awoke to check the time on my phone and learned that there had been a shooting – apparently, an assassination attempt – at this year’s White House correspondents’ dinner, an event held annually to honor the journalists who cover presidential politics.I stayed awake just long enough to read that the attack had been thwarted and that no one had been killed, and then I went back to sleep.By morning, my social media accounts and email inbox was filled with entries that began with some version of the phrase, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist but … ” Even as they distanced themselves from crackpot takes on current history, some Americans were suggesting that the assault had been orchestrated to distract us from the war in Iran, the struggling economy, the Epstein files.Several news sites reported that the word “staged” had appeared in more than 300,000 posts on Tiwtter/X.This new attack, people were claiming, was no more credible than the 2024 shooting from which Donald Trump emerged with a wounded – and almost miraculously undamaged – ear.And, many across the nation wondered, didn’t it seemed suspicious that the president seemed so unruffled by this new eruption of violence that he pivoted almost immediately to explaining why this event demonstrated the urgent need for the ultra-high-security White House ballroom that he has been so passionately planning to construct?Within a few hours, we learned that the shooter had been caught and identified as a 31-year-old Californian with an engineering degree who had allegedly sent his family members a “manifesto” expressing his anger at the president and the members of his administration.But his capture did little to neutralize the fears that, it seems to me, the story has inspired.The first and most obvious of these concerns is that many Americans, including myself, have grown so accustomed to being deceived that we no longer know precisely whom we can trust and what we can believe. As a consequence, we’ve become inclined to doubt everything the government tells us.Again and again, our political leaders and cultural figures have been caught in lies ranging from the trivial to the catastrophic, exposed for misrepresenting the truth in ways intended to conceal previous misrepresentations.Most of us know that we are not hearing the full story about the war in Iran and that the true villains in the Epstein scandal have remained unindicted. We’ve watched present and former cabinet members – Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Robert F Kennedy Jr and others – refusing to answer direct questions during congressional hearings, inquiries that would have led to the exposure of a wide range of purposely orchestrated and deeply disturbing cover-ups and distortions.We’ve seen high-ranking officials deny behaviors…

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