Words of the week: Deny, delay, depose
Some bullet points.
As of this writing, the man who fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a midtown Manhattan street on the morning of Wednesday, December 4, is still at large, having fled the scene on a bicycle.1 Among the few clues he left behind were bullet casings on which, police said, the words DENY, DELAY, and DEPOSE had been written in permanent marker.2
Ordinarily, a brazen killing like this one would spur amateur detectives to enthusiastic pursuit, but in this case, the New York Times reported, “civilian efforts to find Mr. Thompson’s killer have appeared muted.” That would be putting it mildly: When asked whether her community was working to find the suspect, internet sleuth Samantha Sparks told NBC News “Absolutely the fuck not.” Indeed, in some quarters — the quarters in which Big Insurance, and in particular UnitedHealthcare, is perceived3 as a stony impediment to actual healthcare — Thompson’s killer has been celebrated as a folk hero. By midnight on December 4 a cryptocurrency “memecoin” called “Deny. Defend. Depose” had been released.4 On December 7, about 30 people showed up in Lower Manhattan to compete in a gunman-lookalike contest; one of them, said the Times, “had the words ‘deny, defend, depose’ painted on his jacket.”
The three words prompted mordant humor on social media even before their accuracy could be confirmed.
It hasn’t been only left-leaning Medicare for All types for whom the murder was something less than a tragedy. As Jia Tolentino observed in a December 7 story in the New Yorker, “The whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle”:
On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand “laugh” reactions.
Deny. Delay. Depose. If there was a message in those three words, what was it? News reports remarked on the echo of the title of a 2010 book, Delay Deny Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It, by legal scholar and industry critic Jay Feinman.
From the book’s website:
Your insurer’s main objective is not to protect you; in fact, insurers often try to avoid paying justified claims. Today the name of the game is delay, deny, defend: to improve their profits, insurance companies delay payment of justified claims, deny payment altogether, and defend their actions by forcing claimants to enter litigation.
That could explain DENY and DELAY, two of the words on the bullet casings. But what about DEPOSE?
It’s a curious word with a double meaning — a triple meaning if you count one early (and now obsolete) sense: to lay down a deposit of material. An import from French, where deposer meant “to put down,” depose has had the legal meaning of “to take testimony from or examine under oath” since the mid-1500s. Was that courtroom sense the one the shooter had in mind? Had he been deposed in health-insurance litigation, either as an employee of UnitedHealthcare or as someone insufficiently “covered” by the company?
Or was he perhaps thinking instead of an even earlier and still-current sense of depose, dating back to about 1300: to remove from a position of authority; to dethrone. “Shortly after the battle of Hastings, Saxon prelates and abbots were violently deposed,” wrote Thomas Macaulay in his History of England (1849). “Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was deposed in a coup led by his defence minister, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in July 2013,” wrote historian Abdullah Al-Arian in a 2019 opinion piece for Al Jazeera.
Murder — or assassination, as Congressman Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) called it — is certainly one way of disposing of, and deposing, a political enemy.
But why leave messages on the bullets? I kept thinking about the gunman sitting alone, maybe in his spare hostel room, painstakingly writing each letter on a smooth metallic surface: DENY. DELAY. DEPOSE. Where had he gotten the idea to do it?
And then I remembered a precedent. During World War II, fighter pilots wrote sardonic “love notes” (“Happy Xmas Adolph”) on the sides of bombs they dropped on Nazi Germany. One American general even wrote a message — “To Hirohito with love and kisses, T.F. Farrell” — on the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
It turns out the practice didn’t begin in the 20th century but is in fact centuries older. I found a Reddit post that documented the writing of messages on ammunition in ancient Greece. “Astrogator” wrote:
In the 1st century, we find the texts getting a little more elaborate in general. The most famous example is from bullets recovered from the battlefield of Perusia (modern Perugia), where Lucius Antonius and his brother’s (Marcus Antonius/Mark Antony) wife Fulvia were besieged by the troops of Octavian (later the famous emperor Augustus) in 40 BC. Funditores, or slingers, were an elite troop that the Roman army liked to use in sieges, both on the defense and the offense. They were well suited to attacking defenders on the walls with precise and deadly missiles. These bullets contain a lot of NSFW inscriptions.
And the ritual has continued into the 21st century. Here, for example, are photographs of Israeli children in 2006, writing on bombs destined for Lebanon. Their messages were addressed to Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, and read “To Nazrala with love from Israel” and — this one is “signed” by Nasrallah — “I’ve been waiting for this a long time.”
It seems that for as long as there have been bombs and bullets, there has been a human yearning not to let them speak for themselves. Sometimes we need our words to be weaponized, too.
I do not condone murder, even of plutocrats, but it’s hard not to admire the insouciance of this getaway strategy.
“A senior New York City law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said Thursday that shell casings found at the scene had the words ‘deny,’ ‘defend’ and ‘depose’ written on them but police clarified Friday that it was ‘delay’ and not ‘defend’.” - NBC News, December 7, 2024
Not inaccurately.
See footnote #2.
Any expression of joy or satisfaction at Brian Thompson's murder is disgusting. Are we so caught up in our causes that we forget human beings are involved?
The bit about writing messages on bullet casings called to mind Nikki Haley’s political shenanigans this past year — when she wrote “Finish Them” on an artillery shell in Israel.