Worst. Remake. Ever.

Luigi Mangione gunned down a CEO on a cold, early morning NYC street. “Radicalized,” so-to-speak by the mishandling of his own back injury, he had done a deep dive on the healthcare and insurance industries. He had plotted the killing well in advance, catching Thompson unawares and then effecting an impressive escape. Even before his eventual apprehension in a Pennsylvania McDonalds, he was already being hailed as a hero and by the internet commentariat. Pundits have since lauded the act, and politicians have scrupulously avoided outright condemning it. The consensus among supporters seems to be that Thompson reaped what he sowed: he amassed a fortune by preying on those in need, and he stands as a symbol of a hopelessly evil industry.

Of course, Mangione has critics, as well. Right wingers see in this act of political violence and the outburst of joy that followed it evidence of the politics of resentment that drive socialist revolutions. Moderates point to the dehumanizing rhetoric of American politics—Thompson may have been a bad guy, the CEO of a predatory insurance company, but he was also a father, a husband, a son. Violence, they say, is not how we solve political problems.

At first, I was unsure what to think about it. I could empathize with the festering anger of those wronged by the healthcare coverage system. I could see the slippery slope of political violence. Something bothered me about the shooting and the celebrations, though, and I couldn’t quite put into words until now.

Here it is: Mangione’s work doesn’t impress me. It’s derivative. We’ve been shooting jerks in the back since Otzi the Iceman caught an arrow in the copper age Alps. We’ve shot presidents in train stations and music halls. We’ve chopped off the heads of Bourgeois elites, executed “class traitors” in the streets, mailed bombs, taken hostages, and hijacked planes. All to mighty applause from one subaltern faction or another. We likely did it even before we were humans (see the epilogue of Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics for example). The whole affair, from killing to canonization, is all just so…pedestrian.

Mangione had potential. He graduated with honors from an Ivy League university with a degree in computer engineering. He has a masters in computer and information science. His family is wealthy. He’s clearly intelligent, disciplined, hard-working (just look at those abs). All those skills, resources, and gumption and the best way he can come up with for addressing the dismal state of American healthcare is shooting some rich jerk in the back? How deeply unimaginative. This is what makes us cheer?

What about building a company that revolutionizes the insurance industry? He could’ve put those computer skills and those wealthy connections to work to disrupt big healthcare. He could’ve started a nonprofit that pushed through drastic policy changes or worked in the trenches to get people the healthcare they needed. He could have chosen to revolutionize the game, but he settled for being a revolutionary instead. Fucking boring.

Yes, as with many shooters, Mr. Mangione is likely suffering from mental illness. But this is where we have to reorient the conversation toward ourselves. We, as Americans, have skills and resources and gumption in spades, and our answer to this pressing question is to wait around for some hackneyed Batman-type to start poppin’ caps in Patagonia-clad Penguins? I suppose with our penchant for remakes and reboots I should expect nothing less.

Maybe the remake is a good metaphor for our problem. The quintessential remake is a quick cash-grab that plays on the nostalgia of viewers. Update a story that worked before and people will see it out of curiosity or wistful remembrance even if it has none of the soul of the original. Political violence has worked in he past. Though it often ends with the leaders of the “revolution” becoming the elites they deposed. (So we reboot the revolution—we’ll get it right this time.) Increasingly, however, it feels like a shortcut. It takes imagination, hard work, and, most of all, time to change the world. But we are impatient, so we plop out another lazy remake like a streaming service caught in the rip current of content production. “This one has a ghost gun, and he gets away on an ebike!”

I don’t want to be so jaded, however. This is America; we can be creative. We invented jazz. We ended up with a whole stock car racing league because some moonshine runners needed to settle a bet. We connected up a whole nation with train tracks and telegraph wires and then telephone wires and highways and then cell towers. Surely we can write a new story here as well.