This is upsetting me more than I expected it to. As I'm sure some of you probably have heard, two days ago an 11-year old and a 13-year old boy dressed themselves up in camouflage, grabbed themselves a few automatic weapons, and hid in the woods outside their middle school. When one of their confederates pulled the fire alarm, the teachers trouped their kids out of the school, whereupon the boys opened fire. Four students and one teacher are dead; six other victims are hospitalized with gunshot wounds. Of the 11 victims, 10 are female.
What will probably shock most people, I suppose, is the age of the murderers. They're too young to be tried as adults, even under the super-repressive anti-juvenile crime laws Arkansas and other states have passed lately. But this shouldn't be what surprises us. If you remember your childhood honestly, you remember that children are cruel to each other; and middle-school-age children are the worst. They're narcissistic, insensitive to the pain of others, and convinced that the world owes them everything. They form packs for the purpose of torturing the weak, and sympathy and loyalty mean nothing to them. Really, the only reason children don't kill each other with more regularity is that they're usually not armed. In this case, they were; and because somehow two prepubescent children had access to automatic weapons, 5 people are dead.
I guess to me what was really upsetting was the fact that almost all of the victims are female. No, I tell a lie; what's upsetting is that I was not at all surprised to hear that almost all the victims were female. Of course they're female, and of course the shooters were male, and of course the only "motive" anyone is suggesting for this killing is that one of the boys had recently been dumped by his girlfriend. This is how mass murder works in this country. The shooter is always a man, who has received some sort of disappointment that deprives him of one or more of the things he feels entitled to. Whether that disappointment has to do with his job or his love life, he then feels that there is some kind of justice in loading up a gun and taking out as many people as he can bring down in retaliation for this injustice that the world has inflicted upon him. Why shouldn't he target women? Aren't the women responsible for all his agony? Isn't it their fault that he suffers as he does? Don't they need to be taught a lesson? Is that not the man's prerogative--to decide where, when and how women will pay for his pain?
It makes sense. That's what bothers me. It's a perfect extension of a logic I'm already familiar with, a logic that's part of American culture. When I taught *Frankenstein* this semester I spent a lot of time on the death of Justine--a minor character who is tried, convicted, and executed for the murder of Victor Frankenstein's younger brother. The reason she's convicted is that they find a miniature portrait the boy was carrying on her--which is there because the creature, who's the one who really killed the boy, planted it there. Why does he plant it on her? Because he looks at her and thinks, "There's another one of these women who won't ever love me because I'm ugly. I'm going to make her pay for all the wrong that's been done to me." As explicitly as the creature's dialogue lays it out-- "Not I, but she, shall suffer"--it was still impossible to get the students to question the logic behind the monster's decision. Why shouldn't he make her pay for everything that's happened to him--even though she's never done him harm, even though most of the people who've hurt him so far have been men? Isn't that how it works? Doesn't that make sense?
Who wrote these rules? When was it settled that women would pay for all the trouble meted out to men? I know, I know, it's an old story--the abused kick downwards, and there we are, the next step down on the pyramid of power. So of course John Salvi takes out an abortion clinic in Brookline, of course five high school girls get gunned down at a prayer meeting in Kentucky, of course two pre-teens shoot 10 girls from their hideout in the Arkansas woods. Naturally. Why not.
We are a sick, twisted place, my friends. It is a bad thing, when things like this become explicable. This shooting will be condemned, preached against, outraged over, and punished as brutally as possible. Anger, grief, desire for vengeance, it'll all be there. But not bafflement, not surprise. We know this story. We've made it part of us.
Forget Kurtz, forget the Congo. I got your heart of d@rkness right here. The U.S. of A. The Big One. Land of the free, home of the brave, proud sponsor of the shooting spree.
Bleagh,
The Plaid Adder
P.S.: For a very intersting analysis of the role race plays in this phenomenon, see Tim Wise's excellent article on Alternet.org.
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
Back to the Adder's Lair