Realm of Violent Dreams

Castor, Realm of Violent Dreams, Third Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E.: Yesterday, following the observations by Rebecca Solnit, I pointed out that the ISIS-affiliated man who drove his truck into a crowd in New Orleans on New Year's Eve, killing 15 and wounding more, fit the profile of a mass murderer. No, I'm not talking about his Islamic faith. I'm talking about the fact that he was a male, ex-military, and with a history of domestic and marital problems.

As if to prove the point, it's now been revealed that the person who blew up a Tesla truck in front of the Las Vegas Trump hotel - after killing himself, apparently - on New Year's Day was male, Green Beret, and had just had an argument with his girlfriend. He also had contacted several previous ex-girlfriends in the days before the bombing.

As Laurie Anderson once said, "Oh boy, right again."

For those of you keeping track at home (i.e., no one), my cumulative walking mileage for 2024 was 910 miles, or the distance from my Atlanta home to Foxborough, Massachusetts (home of the New England Patriots). From here to Minneapolis. A circle with a 910-mile radius centered here would intersect the northern part of the Yucatan peninsula, yet doesn't quite reach the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas.

       

Premature Immigration

Betelgeuse, The White Fleet's Landfall, Second Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E.: In his initial reaction to the New Year's Eve mass murder in the French Quarter of New Orleans, before the suspect’s identity had even been disclosed, Donald Trump falsely implied that the attack had been carried out by an immigrant and that the attack proved his political message about the need for a border crackdown.

Early this morning, Trump labelled the United States a “disaster” and a “laughing stock,” blaming the attack on the negligence of law enforcement agencies that he said had been too busy conducting criminal investigations into him than in protecting the people. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “This is what happens when you have OPEN BORDERS, with weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership,” he claimed, despite the fact that the suspect was born in the US.

He used the events to renew his rhetorical assaults on the FBI and other agencies, calling on the CIA to get involved, even though the CIA's mission is to deal with foreign rather than domestic intelligence. “The DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors have not done their job,” Trump wrote. “They are incompetent and corrupt, having spent all of their waking hours unlawfully attacking their political opponent, ME, rather than focusing on protecting Americans from the outside and inside violent SCUM that has infiltrated all aspects of our government, and our Nation itself."

“The USA is breaking down - a violent erosion of safety, national security, and democracy is taking place all across our Nation. Only strength and powerful leadership will stop it.”

Oh, domination again ("we will dominated the streets").

While Trump and the far-right media outlets are making much of the Texas-born perpetrator's ethnicity and religion, Muslim and immigrant mass killers are in fact rare. But as author and activist Rebecca Solnit points out, the perpetrator does belong to a number of other groups responsible for a disproportionate amount of violence in the U.S.: 

• Men: A huge proportion of all violence is committed by men, and most mass shooters are white men or boys. According to a 2013 UN study on global homicide, 95 per cent of homicides on the global level are perpetrated by men, a share consistent across countries and regions, regardless of the homicide type or the weapon used. 


• Military veterans: Many of the people found guilty of violence were veterans,  According to Mother Jones magazine‘s in-depth database of mass shootings, of the 55 mass shooters who have struck since 2012, 14 were military veterans, or more than a quarter of that group - an outsized percentage given that vets are less than 10 percent of the total population. 


• Perpetrators of family violence: The thrice-divorced perpetrator of the New Orleans violence had a restraining order against him taken out be his last wife, but fortunately didn't murder at home first unlike many other mass shooters. However, he apparently considered it and made statements about his divorce(s) in the videos he recorded on his way to New Orleans.

Intimate partner and family-related homicide disproportionately affects women - two thirds of its global victims are female and only one third are male. Almost half (47 per cent) of all female victims of homicide in 2012 were killed by their intimate partners or family members, compared to less than 6 per cent of male homicide victims. 

The experience of war and combat training can apparently warp and traumatize veterans. Of 195 mass shootings since 1966, 50 involved suspects who were veterans or people with military training. To be clear, only a tiny fraction of people with military backgrounds become mass shooters. But military experience or training is something a disproportionate share of attackers have in common. In addition to the New Orleans murderer, other suicidal attackers have included a former Marine who opened fire at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California in November 2018; an Air Force veteran who massacred churchgoers in rural Texas in 2017; and an Army vet who gunned down five Dallas police officers in 2016. The perpetrator of the 2016 shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando had trained to be a prison guard.

Whether the New Orleans perpetrator's relationship with ISIS was anything more than an avenue with which to express and justify his disaffection and rage is still an open question, one that likely may never be answered. But as stated before to counteract assertions made during the last election cycle, immigrants have a lower incidence of violence than US-born Americans, and the perpetrator was a US-born American military veteran.

A New Year

Atlas, Way to the Deep Meadow, First Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E.:  This year, 525 of the Modern Era, will be the Year of Domination.

"We will dominate the streets," Donald Trump promised in 2020 at the height of the Georgia Floyd and related protests. To prove his point, he had peaceful protestors tear-gassed in D.C. and then posed for a  photo op in front of a church holding up a bible, now the iconic image of a white Christian nationalist crusade. Now, he's been reelected and has far fewer guardrails and safeguards surrounding him. 

“To be a man is to dominate others,” wrote Ben Tarnoff in the New York Review of Books. Masculine domination is the trait that allowed Elon Musk take over control of the U.S. government. It's present in Israel's continued genocide in Gaza, in Vladimir Putin’s unabated brutalization of Ukraine, in American women once again being forced to bear children against their will.

Tarnoff wrote that as a boy he learned that "masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it."

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, the poet Mary Oliver once wrote. We will be known as a culture "that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."

How should we respond to this meanness, this hard-heartedness, this domineering masculine control? Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me and inventor of the term, "mansplaining," said "This might seem like a subtle difference, but it's an important one: you can wish harm to your opponents, or you can wish they cease to be able to harm. I like to think a lot of what I hope for is the latter if I cheer chaos and setbacks and scandals."

A lot of quotes today, I know and apologize, but I've been exposed to a lot of podcasts and memes the past few weeks and one quote led to the next, and so on.  I hope but can't guarantee that this trend will extend into the new year.