"Marnie Effect" and the Littleton Massacre.

[Greg Nowell]

After an absence of several days I return to dozens of
messages and read with interest those of Kelley, Doug
(with whom I agree to some extent) and Rakesh (with
whom I  mostly disagree).

Let's take a look at the analytical options.

You can look at the massacre as a specific event with a
specific content, in which case you might well focus on
the racist predispositions of the two characters.  It
can even be tied to a long history of racial violence
in the United States.  The "gist" of Rakesh's argument
is that there is such a tradition in the U.S. and that
it was highly tolerated in the rotten decayed upper
middle class white suburb.  The behavior was not
deviant but "revealing."

You can look at the massacre within the context of many
different school shootings and mass murders in the
United States.  My favorite a few years ago was the guy
that trashed a McDonalds and shot some dozen or so
people.  Not because I want to get shot when I go into
McDonalds, as I do several times a year, usually to
piss when I'm on the road and don't need to buy gas.
But because if one were to shoot something in the U.S.
McDonald's would make a good place to start.  In any
case:   Trying to tie the specific ideology of the
Littleton shooters--and even the suburb that produced
them--to their actions requires dissociating them from
the long string of other shooters in other contexts.
It doesn't get us very far, since the profiles of a
number of these school shooters appear to be very
different.  I don't think we have any evidence of
Nazi-racist objectives in the Arkansas shooters, for
example.

You can make general associative comments: that if you
expose 200 million people to slaughter as recreation
(we do) and make high powered weapons easily available
(we do), every now and then someone is going to go off
their rockers and shoot a bunch of people.     The
question is then somewhat like asking what causes *one
particular* drop of water to trickle down the side of a
glass that we have filled slowly till it can hold no
more.  The answer is that *some one* drop of water
*must* go down the side, and some combination of
circumstances *will determine* that *one particular*
drop of water will go over the side.  But the *why*
resides more in the fact that the glass has been filled
too far rather than in the *particular attributes* of
the water.

The whole notion of a "psychological screen" for
screwed up kids is based on the notion that if we could
identify *the one particular drop* that is destined to
trickle down the glass that we could stop it from doing
so, *even though* we continue to overfill the glass.

You can choose a psychological explanation.  This is
what I term the "Marnie Effect" in the subject line.
It's from Hitchcock's film about a weirded out woman
with a psychological problem which, once revealed and
understood, "explains" very bizarre behavior.  Indeed,
a similar device was used in "Psycho" (as the long
winded shrink explains at the end).  Here we have the
notion that irrational behavior can have rational
roots, and represents some kind of maladaptation to a
"real problem."  We "understand" the behavior when we
see it is a "rational" response to some kind of
provocation.  We don't know what it is that causes
people to commit murder but we "understand" it better
as an aberrant adaptation or delayed response  when we
understand that most death-row inmates were themselves
beaten as children, and often survived massive head
injuries.

You can choose more esoteric explanations, which is,
try to "pour into the mold" some mix of the known
ideological proclivities of the perps (in this case,
the Littleton kids), mix in some psychology about the
parents and all that, and try to figure out how factors
x + y + z = mass murder.   But this will never get you
to a "rational" response.  If you are "rationally" a
racist who wants to kill jocks and minorities, better
you should pay someone else to do it for you.  We need
an explanation therefore which requires the perps to be
rational at the level of causality and planning in the
short term and yet irrational in the long term.

This is very messy stuff.  As one shrink on the tube
pointed out (who had interviewed many murderers in
jail) the person who goes on a killing spree thinks he
(usually but not always a "he") is doing something good
or justified.   But that doesn't meant that the
explanation "offered" really helps us "understand."
About ten years ago, around the time I was getting
divorced, a guy who was getting dumped got a rifle and
flew over Boston taking pot shots.  We "explain" this
by saying he was "upset about breaking up with his
wife."  But what the hell does that explain?  We really
want to know why *this person* reacts to being upset
about his divorce by getting in a plane and shooting at
Boston, when the rest of us, though we might *feel*
like shooting Boston,  go out and have a few drinks or
see a shrink or move on to something else in some other
way.   The "explanation" does not lie in the fact that
"he was upset about his divorce."

Similarly,  when a worker who has been fired shoots a
bunch of people at his place of work it does not really
give us a "critique of capital" nor does the fact of
his being fired "explain" that he reacted by going
home, fetching a rifle, and coming back ready for
blood.   We have to know why *this person* ,out of the
many millions who are fired routinely, reacted *this
way.*  It doesn't matter if the person with the rifle
says, or writes in a diary, "I'm doing this because I
hate minorities" or "I'm doing this because I hate
capitalism" or "I'm doing this because I'm upset about
my divorce."  His words are just that, words which are
part of  "what we know about the crime" but not
conclusive as an "explanation."

In any case:

1.  Racism as a persistent phenomenon of bourgeois
democracy in the United States and elsewhere is
probably not the same thing as racism as a program of
state conquest, as it was among the Nazis.  The
behavior of the individual is contextual within the
orientation of the society.   Racism, to the extent
that it is a factor at all (and this would involve a
decision to eliminate many other "non-racist" shootings
from the analytical pool).    It *does matter* whether
you are diddlying around with shock value symbols
(tolerated or not) versus being drafted into a state
which puts a rifle in your arms and marches you into
Poland to shoot Jews and whomever.

2.  Knowing the particular set of stresses to which
these individuals are subjected does not seem to avance
our "understanding" of why so many different
individuals seem to do this in different places.

3.  Having a "general explanation" like the level of
violence in the media has the merit of being tractable
for social analysis.  Sex and violence are emphasized
in the media because first and foremost the desire of
capital is to sell commodities.  Sex and violence are
two categories of stimuli which provoke near universal
responses.  You can't drape a bikini babe over a
landrover and *not* get the typical male's attention,
at least for a millisecond, to the advertisement.  And
you can't run a show where a bunch of cool alpha males
blow apart their adversaries without getting the
attention of people seeking mindless diversion while
channel surfing.  Even the intellectuals among us, I
might add.  That means that violence, like sex, works
to sell ads.  We may therefore advance the hypothesis
that a 24-hour propaganda machine that pushes sex and
violence will alter some behaviors.  Not everyone, but
some people, will incorporate the values in
non-predictable ways.  But this "measure of
association" between cause and effect doesn't get us to
why certain individuals go beserk.  It does indicate,
however, that the stated reason for going beserk may
not be the "real reason" as to why people are killed.

4.  It is probably true that ease of access to weaponry
facilitates massacres.  Why wouldn't it.  Ease of
access to food facilitates obesity and ease of access
to gasoline facilitates a fossil fuel lifestyle.

5.  But in spite of everything you still have beserk
episodes of the Jack-the-Ripper variety.  A certain
number of Jack-the Rippers will be out there regardless
of whether society is feudal, capitalist, or
socialist.  But it is probably the case that you will
have *fewer* of them who are *successful* in societies
with more controls over weapons and which don't
fetishize violence as much.



--
Gregory P. Nowell
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science, Milne 100
State University of New York
135 Western Ave.
Albany, New York 12222

Fax 518-442-5298