The audience comes under fire

THE word “audience” comes from the Latin audientia – a hearing. People gather to listen, and an individual or group is given the opportunity to be heard. It is basic democracy.

But more fundamentally, it is an instinct of our species. Homo sapiens is a social animal. Culture, the systematic transmission of experience, is how humanity has survived from prehistory to the age of the iPhone. Not even the most reclusive could last in a vacuum.

The people who gathered outside Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino for the Route 91 Harvest Festival came to listen to country music. They were united by a shared sensibility, their differences bridged by guitars, 10-gallon hats and a little down-home swaggering.

What some might dismiss as mere recreation is actually what builds a common reality. Without myths, collective dreams and the inherited traditions of artistic expression, humanity would have stayed in clans. Blood ties rather than stories and songs would determine group membership, shrinking our horizons to the property line. Art – high, low and smack in the middle – extends our social identities.

Jason Aldean was performing when a rapid-fire weapon unleashed its percussive fire. A 64-year-old man, holed up in his room on the 32nd floor of the hotel with a stockpile of guns, rained ammunition down on helpless spectators. President Donald Trump called the massacre “an act of pure evil,” and for once my Twitter feed wasn’t arguing with him.

The growing list of attacks at nightclubs, concert venues and movie theatres has made me more aware that at any instant a madman – and invariably it is a man – could turn a glorious communal ritual into a bloodbath.

But nothing could prevent me from going out. I refuse to let terrorists – my definition includes domestic, foreign and the lone-wolf variety – dictate the terms of my life. Seeing a play, or listening to a concert or strolling through a gallery is as necessary as going to the market each week to buy groceries. We feed our minds and spirits as well as our bodies. The attack on that Las Vegas audience was an attack on civilisation. If we can’t gather for a concert without fear for our lives, we are doomed.

So, lawmakers must act. The right to bear arms can’t continue to supersede “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.” The right, in other words, to be a citizen in a functioning democracy. To be an audience. To be free to listen to music without the spray of bullets. To be one, safely, among many.

To be, in short, a human being in a civilised society. — Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service