We can’t unlock what’s behind his eyes

— “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.” — widely attributed to Goethe

I can imagine the most horrible things.

I can imagine the bubble of serenity that might engulf the armed and armored man strolling the aisle, popping off rounds at whatever moves in the dark. I can imagine the sense of calm finality that might have settled on him. I can imagine that whatever nervousness he’d felt in the hours or months leading up to the moment evaporated as he pressed again and again the trigger.

I can imagine that he never considered the possibility of an aftermath, that he expected to die in his boots. I can imagine that, having screwed himself up into nihilist reverie, he thought he would welcome being ripped apart by SWAT team rifles. I can imagine his Nietzschean swagger.

Yet, when the time came for him to die, he did not. He stood by his Hyundai, holding his guns. He surrendered.

I can imagine he was afraid. I can imagine that he was ashamed, not for what he had done but for what he had failed to do. For failing to die like the anti-hero he imagined himself to be.

But that is just what I imagine. The reports we are hearing about the suspect contain few discrete facts—and much of that is contradictory. I’ve heard James Holmes described as “brilliant,” and I’ve read that he was a mediocre student who was probably in over his head in the neuroscience doctoral program in which he spent a year. A guy who owned a gun range knew he didn’t want the kid around his place as soon as he heard Holmes’ “bizarre” voice mail greeting. A neighbor claims Holmes was good with her kids and she never got any peculiar vibe off him.

But it is in our nature to seek meaning, to try to piece together a narrative that satisfies our human need to name our monsters, to distinguish them from ourselves. Holmes is sick—or evil. Whatever he is, he is not like us. Is he?

The truth is that I do simply do not know. I don’t know anything about why someone would do what Holmes is alleged to have done—why anyone would choose to kill and maim strangers. So I assume he must be insane—by which I mean I believe he does not share the consensus perception of the world. That he was somehow crippled or incomplete, that he’d been deprived of something—love or oxygen—essential to healthy development. For me, his crimes are prima facie evidence of his sickness.

It is easy to say he’s just crazy. But that’s an oversimplification. It is impossible to arrive at a satisfactory explanation as to why any one of us suddenly goes so wrong. We only know that sometimes we break. And sometimes when a young man (for it is typically a young man) breaks, he acts out one of these martial fantasies in a public place.

We can’t know what precipitates these events, whether its moral exhaustion or delusion or the erosion of empathy by the wearying contact with human beings. There are thousands of stray ethers that may make you sick, that may cause you to believe in untethered voices, that may impel you to violence against others and yourself. It all gets crushed together in the skull’s crucible—a mash of dread, adrenaline and hopelessness.

We can’t pick through the ashes and recover the impulse to arson. We can’t unlock the head of bright boy turned to murder. There are things we can’t know. And yet we can’t quite not know, either.

I believe Timothy McVeigh could have been saved by a good girlfriend. I don’t know about Holmes. Maybe doctors will find something physical pressing against a weak spot in his brain. Maybe there will be something that cycles out in the next few weeks and months to explain him. I kind of doubt that, but it might happen.

I don’t think, in the end, they will find much that makes him different from you or me. I think that it’s wishful to think that Holmes is in any way extraordinary.

I think we have a switch inside that can be forced off by will.

I think we are all capable of cruelty. I think we can train ourselves to be callous, to indifferently observe the agony of strangers. I think we do this for fun, when we shoot pretend zombies in a video game, when we snark at the silly wannabe celebrities in some stupid reality show. I think every failure to be kind, every little meanness, accretes and hardens, and makes it just that much harder to access whatever reservoirs of empathy we might possess.

I think we can turn ourselves into monsters, by believing a little too much in the myth of our own specialness. We are eager to accept the flattery of the opportunists who tell us we are aggrieved and persecuted and that it is our right to surround ourselves with machines designed to kill, quickly and efficiently, across a crowded room.

I don’t know a thing about James Holmes, but I know about myself.

And I can imagine the clinking of spilt shells, and the satisfying clunk of metal fitting together within tight tolerances. I understand what Leonard Cohen called “the beauty of our weapons.”

Maybe the worst thing about America isn’t that it is a violent country, but that it is an irrationally fearful one where a lot of good people seem to genuinely believe there are forces clotting in the shadows that mean them harm. We are a nation of secret superheroes.

We should all understand by now that we are soft creatures, liable to be torn apart by flying metal or blasted into pink foam. We have devised ways in which we can wink each other into oblivion—how much does it cost to press and hold a trigger? A calorie or too, maybe whatever you have left of your humanity. It’s not nothing, but there are people willing to pay that price.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Read more at

blooddirtandangels.com

Perspective, Pages 74 on 07/29/2012

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