What do the Black cops who murdered Tyre Nichols have in common with the mass shooters in California — and indeed all the cops who murder and the mass killers?
They are all men with a disproportionate sense of entitlement and grievance and thus rage at some kind of rejection. They are part of what I call “the literature of rejection,” one with everyone from assassins like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald to dictators like Adolf Hitler to terrorists like Osama bin Laden to mass murderers like Timothy McVeigh. And they share a great deal as well with such fictional antiheroes as Achilles in Homer’s “The Iliad,” Iago in Shakespeare’s “Othello,” Lucifer in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’a “Wuthering Heights.”
What they all have in common is that they are men with an overweening, overwhelming pride that seeks the destruction of everything, and everyone, in its wake. These people, these characters in literature, are not mentally ill, unless you equate evil with mental illness. This is important to understand, for the Republicans would have us believe that these killers are a mental aberration, and that guns don’t kill people; nutjobs kill people.
But most mentally ill people, even those who are suicidal, are not killers. And murderous cops and mass shooters are not an aberration, while guns kill people, and AK-47s kill people most efficiently. We need to ban assault weapons and impose stricter gun controls nationwide, for sure. Yet California has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. This didn’t stop two mass shootings in recent days.
What we need to do is address at last the 800-pound elephant in the room. These crimes are committed by men. Women also experience loss, disappointment, inequality, poverty, rejection and anger. But they don’t respond by picking up a gun or blowing up a building or shooting a political leader. It’s not hard-wired in their DNA. And that’s because until recently they’ve never been in positions of power.
The power dynamic in world culture is at the heart of what we’re seeing in this country and indeed around the world. Men have traditionally held power. And they do not want to lose it, whether they be white men in relation to those they consider to be lesser white men (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view of Ukraine); white men in relationship to men of color; men in relationship to women; or authority figures of any color in relationship to those of color who remind them of when they lacked power.
Power is a most misunderstood phenomenon. People think if they have power — or those things that substitute for it like money, fame, status, brains, talent — then they’re free to do anything. But power is the opposite of freedom. Indeed, those who have power are the least free. And if you don’t think so, ask yourself, How free is new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy? As Randy Rainbow notes in his latest brilliant song parody to “Les Misérables’” “Master of the House,” McCarthy is beholden for his position, and thus his power, to members of the Far Right, who have limited the speaker’s role. It’s they who hold the real power, for they knew his desperation and extracted their demands in exchange for what he wanted. Remember: The person who desires something less than another is always going to be in the superior position. This is the major tenet of every divorce and curiously every world religion.
And this is why power in the end corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, in the words of Lord Action: Power is all about the maintenance of itself. And that is not a sustainable proposition. No one is powerful forever. As Martina Navratilova once remarked, When you’re the No. 1 tennis player in the world, you can only be the No. 1 tennis player in the world longer. There’s nowhere else to go. Getting to the top of Mount Everest is hard. But mountaineers will tell you the way down is just as treacherous if not more so. And the only way off the top is down.
For the men of the world, down is seemingly the future. Women dominate college and postgraduate admissions and soon the white-collar workforce. White people are on the way to becoming a majority-minority. The disaffection of working-class white men and the women who derive status from them lay the groundwork for former President Donald J. Trump.
He and his MAGA faction have played a zero-sum game in which every success of another is a diminution of them. Not only must they win, but you must lose and not just lose but be crushed.
There is another way of looking at this. A win for some is a win for all, the tide that lifts all boats. Or if you must stay on top, do it fairly. Offer the world something no one else can give.
Even so, nothing and no one, as French President Emmanuel Macron said, is forever. Part of having been in power is knowing when — as former Presidents John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have shown — to move on graciously.