Corey Comperatore: Father, husband, hero, citizen

When shots rang out at Saturday's Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Corey Comperatore's first instinct was to throw himself in front of his family.

He died a hero.

Even before he died shielding his family, Comperatore was the kind of everyday hero whose regular, unsung acts of sacrifice and service help uphold American society as we know it.

That's what Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) said of Comperatore at the press conference he gave the day after the 50-year-old father of two was killed.

"Hero" was also the word Jeff Lowery found when a New York Times reporter reached him at home in tiny (population 854) Hyndman, Pennsylvania, to ask him about his friend and fellow volunteer firefighter.

More than a hero

A strange word, "hero." Usually, the people it best applies to want nothing to do with it. They shrug it off, embarrassed. It's what anyone would've done, they say.

Corey Comperatore isn't here to object. But from the precious little we know about him — and will ever know, as our attention moves on and leaves those who loved him to grieve in peace — he was not the kind of man who'd want to be called a hero.

A good neighbor, maybe. A loyal friend. A loving husband and father.

The quotidian details of Comperatore's life reveal a man guided by a firm, yet humble sense of duty. He took care of his family by working at a local plastics factory — next year, it would have been 30 years. He took care of his community by serving as volunteer fire chief and by helping out those in need. He took care of his house, his lawn, his cars, his boat.

He took care of his two dogs. Dobermans. The Times notes that they were "well trained" — a somehow poignant detail when each new story about a horrific mauling points to another dog owner who simply couldn't be bothered.

Comperatore's steady, quiet stewardship of all that he was blessed to have didn't make him a hero. It made him something less celebrated but no less remarkable: an upstanding citizen.

Forgotten virtues

How quaint and corny that sounds. It's been a long time since we've thought of citizenship as a virtue to be practiced. To love and take pride in America, to prefer it over any other country, to understand it as a set of shared ideals and values to honor and to defend is to reject nuance and embrace the parochial. Patriotism as the last refuge of the simpleton.

It used to be easy enough to joke about these rubes. 'Murrica. NASCAR. Mission accomplished. Boomers doing Tea Party cosplay. Then 2016 happened. Suddenly, the civic-minded elites who relish urging Americans to vote lost their patronizing smiles. Yes, vote — but not like that.

The people had spoken, and now they needed to be protected from themselves. The laptop class quickly came up with the "faithless electors" scheme, a painless way to hit ctrl-alt-delete on the whole mess.

It didn't work, although we should never forget that they tried, especially when we talk about January 6. Those protesters may have acted imprudently, but their suspicions that the game was rigged had been regularly stoked since that first pre-emptive strike on Trump's legitimacy.

And which "insurrection" attempt did more damage, anyway? As Woody Guthrie once sang, "some will rob you with a six-gun / and some with a fountain pen." (For what it's worth, only one protester fired a gun that day, let alone pointed one anywhere, and he fired it into the air.)

Why so serious?

At any rate, Donald Trump kept the presidency, and a liberal "resistance" quickly formed. Resisting what? Well, the wave of oppression Trump was apparently set to unleash on women, on Muslims, on gays, on immigrants, on blacks, on Jews. But mainly, the very presence in the White House of someone so tacky and vulgar as to violate the unspoken "norm" of addressing the people with the usual stilted, self-important "false pathos," to borrow a phrase from the perceptive and prolific X poster @FischerKing.

"[Trump] never stares in the camera, expecting you to be moved by some vacuous bulls**t. He lets you in on the joke -- that government is serious, but also faintly ridiculous."

"Make America Great Again," like pretty much all campaign slogans, captures this serious but ridiculous quality. It's no more substantive than "Hope and Change," really. But unlike the latter, at least "Make America Great Again" dares to use the "A-word." It dares to address itself to American citizens.

Not just citizens of a certain race, as the media cynically tried to make us believe. But anyone with a stake not just in their own continued flourishing but also in the flourishing of the people around them: their family, their community, their state, and their country. Trump was the first president in a long time to acknowledge the many citizens for whom America had long since stopped working; that in itself is a breath of fresh air.

Liberals who call MAGA a "cult" flatter themselves that only they can separate empty political rhetoric from a candidate's substance. It's not that the people thronging Trump rallies don't recognize that Trump is putting on a show. His showmanship — and the way it triggers the elites — is part of the fun.

Critics who snipe that Trump doesn't care about these people, or won't do anything to help them, also miss the point. The more rooted you are in your local community, the more you understand that who gets elected president has little if any effect on your day-to-day life. There's a reason it's bad form to bring up politics or religion at the neighborhood barbershop. People whose relationships are mostly in person can't afford to hate each other.

You can disagree — even seriously — about the big-picture issues, but in the end it's more practical to focus on what unites you and your neighbor. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no ideologues in a burning house.

Politics above all

For the last eight years, the Democratic leadership have done everything they can to undermine this uniquely American way of getting along. With the help of a sympathetic mainstream media, they've relentlessly villainized Trump and his supporters as traitors, racists, fascists, Russian collusionists, and any number of other unsubstantiated accusations. They've worked to create an atmosphere in which everybody must prioritize political allegiance over any other concerns.

The widespread rioting in summer 2020 allowed such allegiance to be enforced with violence. As writer Matt Mehan recently noted, Democratic leaders "created a new norm that violent protest is acceptable if it is in the service of certain partisan goals & that peace, law, & order were political spoils withheld from the American people unless they voted the right way."

This campaign to intimidate Trump supporters has been effective on the internet and in certain "high-profile" industries subject to public pressure, but it has failed to gain much traction in the many places where Americans can still speak freely. Butler, Pennsylvania, to name just one. Anyone who's been to such a place knows that partisan mistrust in our country mainly runs in one direction. People might think you're a fool for having a Biden bumper sticker on your Prius, but they won't think you're evil. As long as you mind your manners and your business, you'll be fine.

If only the left would accord its opponents the same courtesy. As a Trump victory grows more plausible, we've seen increasingly heated rhetoric about the existential threat it would pose to the country and the unprecedented urgency of making sure it never happens. This culminated with the depiction of Trump as Hitler on the cover of the New Republic.

Lurid revenge fantasies

The recent calls for moderation ring hollow, to say the least, coming from the same people who have spent almost a decade encouraging the public to indulge their most lurid revenge fantasies. These fantasies have included various humiliations for Trump, ranging from arrest and rape to, yes, assassination.

Most of these fantasies satisfy a particular, sadistic need: the need to see Trump exposed for who he really is beneath the alpha-male, insult-comedian swagger, finally stripped of his wealth, power, and charisma. It's not enough to usher Trump off stage; first everyone must watch to see their hero reduced to a blubbering, pathetic weakling, begging for mercy like Nick Offerman's Trump analogue in this spring's box office hit "Civil War."

If anything could crack Trump's confident facade, you would think almost taking a bullet to the head would. And yet Trump somehow never broke character, having the presence of mind to turn this harrowing brush with death into a victory, both for him and for his supporters.

The image of Trump in the seconds after the bullet grazed his ear, his face streaked with blood, fist raised in defiance, is already iconic. It will no doubt be remembered as long as anyone cares to recount America's history. Say what you will about Trump, his elevation as a kind American folk hero no longer seems so risible. He may not have meant to, but he almost made the ultimate sacrifice in service to his country.

Hero ... and martyr

The public record of Corey Comperatore's sacrifice is far more modest. A reply he made on X stating his plans to attend the Trump rally where he would be killed, the thousands of comments now beneath it forming an impromptu memorial. A few mundane, low-resolution photos from Facebook to accompany the articles about him. An image of Comperatore's uniform and helmet hanging outside his old fire station.

The word hero comes from the ancient Greek hērōs, which means "protector" or "defender." Even before he died shielding his family, Comperatore was a hero of sorts. The kind of everyday hero whose regular, unsung acts of sacrifice and service help uphold American society as we know it.

If the fabric of that society has frayed in recent years, it won't be the politicians who repair it. It will be people like Comperatore, whose simple action of showing up to support his candidate demonstrated an unwavering, optimistic faith in the promise of America. And people like each of us, if we are up to the task.

The family, friends, and neighbors who loved and depended on Comperatore will grieve him in private, in days and weeks and years to come, and in a thousand small ways. We should each aspire to live in such a way that our eventual deaths are as deeply felt. May this brave man's senseless death encourage us to meet the challenge.