If you’re a reader of this blog, then you know that I’ve developed a theory I call the “literature of rejection,” in which men both historical (John Wilkes Booth, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden) and fictional (Achilles, Milton’s Lucifer, Heathcliff) display a disproportionate rage at rejection, an overbearing sense of entitlement and grievance.
To this we can now add — as if we didn’t know this before — the Uvalde shooter, whom I refuse to name, just as I will not name the Buffalo shooter. Part of the M.O. of these malignant, nihilistic narcissists is their “notice me” moments of manifestos and livestreaming. I’m not going to add to their 15 minutes of infamy.
What I am going to do is refer readers to an enlightening article in The Daily Beast that will demonstrate that what the Uvalde gunman did, while shocking, was hardly surprising. It’s an interview with the shooter’s father and let’s just say that not only did the apple fall near the tree but that the lack of self-awareness is truly staggering. The absentee father — who, according to the article, has a long criminal record that includes an assault and bodily injury to a family member — blames the shooter’s mother, whom he’s no longer with, for not buying the son clothes and school supplies so he wouldn’t be bullied in school.
(Apparently, he was bullied for a speech impediment and in turn harassed and bullied others.) He shot his grandmother in the face after an argument over a telephone bill. He was frustrated by Covid restrictions. Naturally, he just had to go out and kill 21 people. And despite what appear to be straightened circumstances, he had the money to go out and buy a weapon to do this. Somehow, there’s always the money for guns. (Interestingly, the shooter’s sister, who grew up in the same fractious environment, chose to light a candle rather than curse the darkness and joined the Navy. But then she’s a woman and thus not a member of the sex that feels it has inherited the earth, because it has an X and a Y on its 23rd pair of chromosomes.)
However, the literature of rejection is about a lot more than horrific impulse control. It’s about a world view in which the subject is always starring in the movie of his life. Big man with a gun walks into a place and shoots it up. Except he’s not a big man. He’s a little dead man. And how did he die? Well, that’s a story that’s gotten more and more curious. It turns out the local police didn’t kill the gunman, whom they thought was barricaded in the school. (He was holed up all right, with kids he was killing.) A heroic little girl kept calling 911, begging for police assistance. So what part of “this is an active-shooter situation” didn’t the police understand? Finally, federal agents went in and killed him. But not before 19 children and two teachers were murdered.
In an ironic twist not lost on the perceptive — so lost on a sizable portion of the American population — the National Rifle Association was busy meeting in Houston with headliner Donald J. Trump talking about mental health and the need for school safety and how we’re all in this together. (No we’re not. I love how narcissists always want you to share the bad times, but the good times, not so much.) The school shooter wasn’t crazy. He was just another stereotypical man who thought the world owed him whatever he wanted.
But about school safety, how effective were guns at protecting people in that situation? If, as gun enthusiasts like to say, “guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” then presumably people with guns can kill bad people using guns to kill others. But that’s not what happened. The police waited and waited and waited. And while they waited, a smart cookie of a little girl smeared herself with the blood of a dead classmate and played dead so her playacting wouldn’t become a reality in the gunman’s hands. I think of the Israelites smearing the blood of sacrificed animals over their doors to avert the Angel of Death at Passover in the Book of Exodus. Only I wouldn’t treat an animal this way, and the shooter was no angel.
We now live in a country in which citizens — child citizens — have to play dead as part of their everyday lives. Not our finest hour. Apparently, San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler agrees. He’s no longer going to take to the field for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“I am not okay with the state of this country,” he wrote in a blog post. “I wish I hadn't let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you're dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this."
The United States stopped being “the land of the free and the home of the brave” a long time ago. Maybe it never really was. Perhaps our very success, our vaunted sense of exceptionalism, has been our undoing.
“You know, if you’ve been number one for a long time, you take things for granted,” “The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood told “Firing Line’s” Margaret Hoover. “But number one doesn’t necessarily stay number one, especially if it’s tearing itself apart from within.”
Power: The Republicans want to attain it and maintain it at all cost and for that they need their minority base, which is holding the rest of us hostage. Polls show that the majority of Americans want sensible gun restrictions, just as they want abortion to be available in certain circumstances. But we’re going to end up with neither, because a minority has figured out how to game an atavistic system.
We’ve lost something in this country, and I’m not sure we have the will to get it back again.