Swamp Rabbit had corralled my laptop and was scrolling through the daily news. “I don’t see nothin’ about Luigi Mangione, the guy who snuffed that millionaire CEO. Did some other killer bump him out of the news cycle?”

“He just got charged with first-degree murder,” I said. “People are still talking about him. You’d know this if you’d been at Clark Park last weekend.”

I was referring to the site of a popular farmers market in West Philly. A bearded guy who looked like Karl Marx was there, hawking a newspaper called The Communist and shouting “Free Luigi! Join the Communists.” He was capitalizing — pardon the expression — on the notoriety of a fellow radical, Mangione, whose memes have been all over the Internet.

Meanwhile, the other vendors were selling fruit and vegetables, poinsettias and little Christmas trees and so on, but business was slow because of the cold. I thought about approaching them to suggest they borrow a leaf from the Communist’s book and use Mangione as a sales tool. I could hear them in my head:

“Free Luigi! Eat your Brussels sprouts.”

“Free Luigi! What’s Christmas without a tree?”

“Free Luigi! Happy holidays! Don’t forget your yams.”

Swamp Rabbit pretended to be appalled. “How can you joke about the killer of a good family man? And so what that he was the boss of UnitedHealthcare, a giant for-profit healthcare company that routinely lets sick and desperate Americans die instead of approving the necessary medical coverage?”

I showed Swamp Rabbit a recent piece in the New Yorker that examined the American tendency to elevate certain criminals to folk-hero status — Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd, et al. — based on the idea that they rob from the rich (and kill) in defense of the poor. This would help explain Mangione’s current popularity.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “Luigi might not be a genuine hero any more than Pretty Boy Floyd was, but he seems to have more moral sense than your average CEO.”

Footnote: I had just listened to Pete Seeger’s live version of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Now, as through this world you wander/You’ll see lots of funny men/Some will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen…

Another: So what is Mangione all about? His reading list indicates he’s far from being a Commie. He’s not a nihilist. He’s not a liberal. Is he merely confused? Some have described his views as “heterodox,” a buzzword for the leanings of those who don’t conform to either the left or right. Your guess is as good as mine.