Esteban Santiago and the unending narrative in the literature of rejection

January 8, 2017

When news broke of the murder of five people and the wounding of eight more at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, TV anchors were quick to note that we did not know the motivation of the alleged shooter, Esteban Santiago. This was to damp down the rampant speculation that has inflicted the digital age, in which what is said or written is considered true by virtue of the fact that it is said or written.

Admirable as such discretion is, I’m afraid we knew Santiago’s motives even before knowing his story. ...

The Orlando shooter, mad men and the literature of rejection

June 14, 2016

When tragedy occurs, it’s always best to think before acting or speaking. (Right, Donald Trump?)

And yet, you knew what the profile of Omar Mateen would turn out to be, and I’m not talking about his religious and ethnic profile. He was a man. He was a young man. He had anger management issues. He demonized others – particularly women. And despite all the conspiracy theories, he appears to have acted alone.

In other words, he was a loner and a loser. Sound familiar? Plug in the names of the Charleston/Newtown/Columbine/Boston shooters/bombers, throw in Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh and John Wilkes Booth, now add Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler and it’s always the same narrative – someone with a disproportionate rage at rejection who focuses it on some group or groups in a lethal way. Whether they act alone or in groups or even as the heads of nations, they have an aggrandized sense of themselves that they see as aggrieved. They are so profoundly disturbed that they must explode else they’ll implode. ...

Christopher Harper-Mercer and the literature of rejection

October 7, 2015

The latest American mass-murderer – Christopher Harper-Mercer, who gunned down nine people and injured nine more, two critically, at Umpqua Community College in Roseberg, Ore. Oct. 1 – is also the latest example in what I call the literature of rejection, someone with a disproportionate rage at life’s inequities and disappointments who decides to take it out on others. The cast of characters includes mass murderers (Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden), dictators (Adolf Hitler) and assassins (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald).

In Harper-Mercer’s case, he had been rejected by a firearms’ academy – too immature and entitled, what a surprise – and he didn’t have a girlfriend. This would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly. ...

Charleston and the literature of rejection

June 19, 2015

Well, one thing’s certain: Dylann Storm Roof – really? That’s a name? – is no Rachel Dolezal.

One couldn’t do enough to embrace black culture. The other couldn’t do enough to destroy it, allegedly gunning down nine people at Bible study Wednesday night in Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, uttering the particularly lunatic thought, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” ...

The literature of rejection, continued

April 8, 2015

In the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play,” troubled star quarterback Quinn Novak attends Stanford, where he encounters swimming legend Dylan Roqué (one of the heroes of my first novel, “Water Music”) in the wildly popular seminar “The Literature of Rejection.”

The first semester of the course is about literary antiheroes with a disproportionate rage at rejection – Achilles in “The Iliad,” Lucifer in “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” They are among the most attractive characters in literature but then, that’s the beauty of fiction. It isn’t real.

The second semester is about historical figures who share the same self-aggrandizement, including John Wilkes Booth, Adolf Hitler, Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden.

To that roster we can now add co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who killed himself and 149 passengers and crew members aboard a Germanwings’ plane. Here’s a passage from Erica Goode’s April 7 New York Times’ piece about men – they are invariably men – like Lubitz that stopped me cold.

“The typical personality attribute in mass murderers is one of paranoid traits plus massive disgruntlement,” said Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist in New York who recently completed a study of 228 mass killers, many of whom also killed themselves. ...

The literature of rejection

November 22, 2013

In a Nov. 17 New York Times’ story on the Zapruder film – part of the media’s extensive commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – film critic A. O. Scott quotes novelist Don DeLillo’s observation about the role that different media, specifically film and television, played in capturing the fatal shootings of JFK and his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.