I know why we do it. I do. I get it. We say that horrible, criminal, scary events are senseless because it gives us a break from the unrelenting reality of them. Of course, they have only the same reality as happy events, but they hurt, and we recoil.*
2012 was so blood soaked, so many were shot in so many places, that no matter how long I stopped watching TV, the news, every time I tried to check back in, there was another mass shooting. It just hurt, and it hurt in a freshly deep and miserable way in December.
However, that recoil is a huge, huge mistake and one that adults cannot keep making, nor be allowed to make.
And all the "un-talked-about" topics got some Facebook and Twitter and news cycle time: guns in general, assault weapons, extended cartridges, gun control, the pernicious weirdness of the NRA, cognitive disorders, mental health care's blazing dearth in our totally depressed America.
The shootings (or the gang rapes, but that's another, not unrelated, post), however, are not "senseless" violence.+
I submit to you that they are anything but senseless. They are screaming at us with meaning, replete, overwhelming, ontological clusterfucks of meaning. They are a sick America bottoming out over and over, and over again in the loop of helpless thrall that is Refusing to Deal. Their meaning is too big and too deep and too real and way too normal and way too about US (not some monster other) to deal with.
But, we are grown ups, we are supposed To Deal. Because when we deal, we get Better.
Pick your guru, Jung or Buddha, Tony Robbins or Jesus Christ, ... Kant ... no matter. You gotta deal to get better. That shadow ain't going away on its own.
So let's try to examine some of the screaming meaning of these shootings.
Larger, more diffuse, harder to argue for meanings also howl from this abyss. American life, by which I mean the "vibe" here, the general tenor of our civic and cultural life, has intensified in the last four years. Now, this connection is a bit more tenuous, but give it a little slack and see what you think.
We have reminded ourselves that American politics has always been a caterwauling brawl. But we used to have what we called a "loyal opposition." We had two parties dedicated to the health of the Republic and to the experiment of democracy. We differed often wildly about who counted as a full citizen (still do), about policies concerning the economic and civic health of the republic (still do), and so on. We don't agree about what's best. That's as it should be. But, what has gone awry is that we no longer have a loyal opposition. We have a fairly conservative Democratic party, a few moderate Republicans, and a most disloyal opposition put in place by a small cohort of The 1% and who seem to believe in a heady cocktail of Christian-hypercapitalized-militarized-anarchism.
The continued taking-hostage of the whole economy, government, and large swathes of civil society can't help but add to the constant low-grade freak out that is the American vibe these last four years. In a contextual soup of which this is a key ingredient, even the stock, we should expect more shootings than usual. The free floating tension, the lessening of our ability to listen to each other in regular life,++ these things do not assuage the egos of the sorts of men who go out in public to punish the world for hurting them or preventing them from becoming The Man.
You need an investigative reporter with some time to explore gun culture in the US, the way that tools whose sole purpose is death are a hobby, are a source of status. Most of us don't see how the gun enthusiast magazines/websites are full of soft porn images, and some of the consumer uncatalogued as well. The link between the gun, the penis, and the hot girl is not subtle in this pages. One does not need a a degree in cultural studies come to this observation. The gun is prowess, status, power, and in no small measure a really big loud cock. So, something very powerful and basic and important about guns, the possibility of violence, the glamour of controlling a tool of death, and sexuality and hetero-masculinity is also screaming at us in these events. One, admittedly perfect, example is Guns and Lace, “Guns and Lace features gun reviews, beautiful girls with guns and just a bit of lace.” Pretty classy, for what it is.
The shooter in Jonesboro AK in the 1990s targeted only girls and female teachers. He was in middle school. He did it because a girl he had asked to be his sweetie had said no. He got the guns out of his grandfather's house. Unfortunately, this boy did not grow up to become a responsible citizen. Clearly the counselling and social support he needed in order to cope with his violence and his actions has not been available to him. We could go back a few shootings from this year to Pennsylvania in 2006, another gendered act of violence. There’s so many instances of the deep connection between gender, sex, and gun violence, there’s just no way to present all the evidence, given that so much of it takes place in the home.
Masculinity could find its consolations and homosocial pleasures in other hobbies. A man could accrue the prowess, etc, including all the soft porn, by rebuilding classic cars. Cars that people don't often drive drunk and that kill almost no one at all, ever.
America is living another extended moment of intense insecurity. Threats real and imaginary blare out of our televisions and radios and podcasts and streams 24/7/365. We can be saturated in our economic fears. We can’t pretend that we don’t have an oppressive foreign policy, and we can’t any longer avoid worry over its blowback. We are all existentially aware now of our refusal to genuinely put people first, and of our climate's total willingness to abandon us to our fate.
In this moment in which all is intensified and most of it tastes of acid, the truly mad, the neglected, the angry, the laid off, the ignored, the narcissist, the--usually middle class, educated, white male between 18 and 40 with low social connection--will, from time to time, decide to take his fear, or angst, or pain out on the rest of us.
When these boys and men, these white boys and men, no longer have access to assault weapons and high capacity magazines, they will still be angry or unbalanced. They will still want externalize their phallic angst, to hurt women, or anyone who happens to be in the theater or mall or mosque or grade school. But, they will have to work much harder to inflict their pain on others. The will have to get closer, maybe look their targets in the eye. They will have to risk injury. They will be easier to stop.
So, yeah, SENSELESS is the wrong word. These shootings are, once we look past the surface, replete with meaning. They mean us. They mean our collective life is out of whack. They mean that we have lots to do in order to be a genuinely thriving people. You gotta deal to get better.
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* 9-11 was "unimaginable" and "senseless" and each of these shootings has been "mad" and "crazy" and "senseless." First, our imaginations are way powerful enough to get to 9-11, obviously; and see above for my refutation of all the latter.
+ I am swimming against the current here. A google search of "shootings senseless" returns just over 5,000,000 hits.
++ Last year was politically intense. Many posts on Facebook had political, and often agressively political, content. In response a meme went up asking people to stop it so that the poster of the meme would not have to block, mute, or unfriend the politically minded. I suggest a more judicious editing of Facebook settings. After all, when we claim to be friends with someone we do claim to be interested in their values and beliefs and not just the entertainment value they bring to our newsfeed. An instrumental view of relationships is part of the problem of isolation and violent aggression I'm writing about above.
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