“Don’t talk to me about mental illness! Anyone who does something like that is just a coward!” I was at the park, walking my dog. Excepting my dog, I was the lone solitary walker. Huddled groups of twos and threes trampled the blacktop. The mostly geriatric crews traded thoughts on yesterday’s slaughter in Uvalde, Texas. Some comforted each other, Most traded justifications or vows of revenge. The air was bad; bloodlust hacked from many wrinkled throats. I feared going to work. On days like these in retail, with all the displaced anger, the rituals of hierarchical debasement get worse. I felt horror at the unspeakable, mundane child murders in Texas. But I couldn’t understand the crack about cowardice. It seemed like there were two competing braveries – the world-destroying violence of the shooter, almost certainly consigning himself to death. And the teachers acting as human shields – the parents who literally broke the hold of the cops to run in and rescue their babies.
We’re politically paralyzed with interlocking debates of “gun control” vs. the vaguer “mental health.” I hope politicians take action to make obtaining a gun at least marginally harder. But, if America keeps it real with itself, a focus on “mental health” is more likely. Yet you can’t just throw funding at a mental health crisis on our scale. It’s like spraying a water-gun at a Notre Dame-sized fascist inferno. And we won’t. Focusing on “mental illness” in practice will mean the criminalization of difference. And increased surveillance of socioeconomic and racial groups we all know are most likely to snap because their daily lives are completely fucking untenable. Surplus labor groups of low-status black and white men, caught in the double-bind of stupefying pornographic consumption and no hope for anything like a future. America screws you up. If you show it, or look like someone who would potentially step out of line, well, your name might already be on a list somewhere.
I used to think mass shootings resulted from toxic masculinity or racism. Maybe exacerbated by downward mobility. But in recent years we’ve experienced a perverse democratization of mass violence. The game of anxiously anticipating the shooter’s race obscures the point. Explicitly white nationalist shooters have almost become quaint. Their manifestos are by this point tired, ludicrous; some copy-paste whole swaths of text from forebears, reaching for some ideological ideal. I think many of them are lying to themselves. Their manifestos’ structures are more telling. They want to be interviewed, baby. Endless Q&A’s on the stupidest shit – as if anyone cared about the nuances of their Hitlerian views. Extended lists of their favorite guns, as if future killers might look up to them as an expert. Reading their manifestos has become a widely-indulged taboo. In spite of their self-discursive streaks, though, they don’t have much insight into their own actions.
These killings are largely perpetrated by “incels.” Probably because of this, the killers get granted a haunted, almost sexual mystique. (“Fuck Salvador Ramos” shout the masses, as we pry into every available detail of his private life.) Almost immediately, his Instagram was scoured for signs of perceived perversion. Mass shootings may be the truest expression of American eros. Add a pretty face, like Tsarnev, and you have a cult that’ll last for years. The fascist true-crime genre is certainly part of this. I recently heard a woman say she would be good at viewing photos of mutilated corpses on jury duty, because she loves true crime. (No, you love commodified violence.) But on a secret level we love them because they help us make sense of our lives, of America. With an automatic and a clip of ammo, they recreate in miniscule the daily machination of the country-at-large. “NO LIVES MATTER” reads the fun, quirky Cthulhu bumper sticker. Mass shooters quell disposable populations and – with the mass proletarianization since the 80s – we are all disposable. Mass shootings in America are apotheosis into lesser godhood. They disrupt and demoralize on a local level what the economy does from the top. As young men stare from grimy Lucas Rooms into an uncertain future, they’re nudged a little closer to the edge. At-risk individuals are some of society’s most resentful, forgotten, and maligned. And they have an emergency chute to propel them into ignominious fame. Our libidinal economy is a horseshoe – its arc tends only to further death. All that’s left is mass shootings and the waiting in-between.
White, racist males aren’t the only ones displaced. Always adaptive, capital has shifted from overtly patriarchal, white supremacist forms. Thus, some individual shooters have understood their compulsion in reaction to that. But the tide can quickly shift. With Salvador Ramos and Frank James, we’re approaching something like a negative universalism. Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, seems like the cryptic granddaddy of them all. He floats above with inscrutable expression, reminding us that there really is no point. Extermination is the end in itself. National conservatives (borderline fascists) are today’s only meaningful opponents of neoliberal social mores. But their rollback of civil liberties will only exacerbate the problem. Banning abortion and birth control would in part curb the dopamine rush and cope of modern women. The war on women, though, won’t result in a return to tradition. It will only exacerbate and universalize overriding despair.
For women, the world-destroying impulse of the school shooter often manifests through the cluster of symptoms known as borderline personality disorder. It’s a slow murder-suicide, a lifetime campaign of social terrorism, privately waged in any city or small town. But sexuality is now being either (vertically) politically repressed or (horizontally) made socially impossible. The collapse of sexual distinctions is potentially liberating. Channeled through our societal deadlock though, we seem to be progressing towards a frustrated, asexual homogeneity. Scapegoating “incels” for societal collapse is nonsense. The incel is the ur-subject of the Western world. Fighting psychotic stochastic violence requires fighting the psychotic conditions enveloping us all.
Nasim Aghdam, the Youtube shooter, is the prophetess of impending female despair. As usual with her sex, her intervention hewed closer to the halls of power than men who shoot children and civilians at random. But on its own, psychotic mass violence will never transform into revolutionary action. Elizabeth Bruenig notes that school shootings are no longer just “classic” peer-on-peer violence. They’ve become random terrorist acts against the totality of society. Atomized acts, though, can’t lead to social change. They only reproduce conditions that make such violence inevitable. As Pat Blanchfield writes, the mass shooting is the system working right; the language and rituals of self-enrapt killers are the antithesis of movement-building.
I’m getting frightened to send my daughter to school, like most parents. Important days now seem ominous – could some shooter choose the last day of school to make their splash? But I’m also thinking of how to prepare her to survive in a country where this keeps happening – how to survive the demoralization herself. I want her to resist the dominant norm that human life is expendable or that any of this is normal. I want to say: “Read everything you can, listen to Bach, develop strong bonds, build a self that can withstand the madness.” While self-actualization could probably have helped the shooters, turning all children into NPR Americans isn’t the answer. Restricting guns is a step – even if it means only one more child will return home from school. But America can’t transform itself into some European-style country, comfortable in affluent decline. From the beginning, we’ve always warred with our twin impulses of liberatory universalism and genocide. It may be corny, but I think, even amongst empire’s detritus, America remains a habitus for radical aspiration (if not the world’s last best hope.) There’s no lukewarm solution. The dead haunt each moment of paralysis. Save for a radical response, we’ll lose the ability to imagine anything different. A twitchy, violent slumber with no dreams. For the children, and everyone else already claimed this year, it’s always been too late.