OT: Apologia

I did a particularly poor job of moderating the comments for Saturday's "Open Mike," and I wanted to apologize to the TOP community for that. I just lost heart for the subject. Didn't want to pass along some of the more problematic comments I received, didn't have the energy to process the ones that needed modification, didn't have the stomach to read more. Mea culpa.

Ed. Note: What follows is off-topic and might be offensive to some. If you come to this site to read only about photography, understood! But don't click through. Your choice.

An interesting coda, however. I was coming home from a Christmas party last night and happened to come across President Obama's Newtown address on the radio. It was a moving speech, and I was duly touched. He's a gifted speaker.

But one thing is blatantly missing from the reactions to this latest massacre of innocents: judgements and condemnations of the perpetrator. President Obama was speaking to the survivors, comforting them. He hinted at the need for political action—speaking to the whole nation, in the sense that we are all survivors. He said nothing to or of Adam Lanza.

It bothers me when people call this a tragedy. Wrong word. It's a crime—if you want something stronger, an atrocity. And of course the mental and moral cripple who perpetrated it has put himself beyond human punishment; but that's no excuse not to address him in our responses to the shooting.

A little story: when I taught high school, one year I made a photographic mural of the graduating seniors. I set up a studio and shot groups of three to six seniors per frame, enlarged the prints, and displayed them end-to-end in a hallway. The effect, of course, was of all the seniors arrayed in a long continuous line. People liked it.

Then some clown defaced it. Crude boobs were drawn on the images of several of the girls, with ballpoint pen, like bathroom grafitti.

I asked for, and received, permission to speak before the whole school. I spoke for about ten minutes (doubtless far less eloquently than the great communicator Barack Obama), expressing my outrage that my artwork had been vandalized, talking about the effort I put into making it, the trust we need to feel in a shared community, the feelings of the people whose pictures were defaced, and demanding that the skulking perpetrator, who had done wrong (I was adamant about that), come forward and apologize for his infantile, insulting, thoughtless behavior.

After the assembly, a pair of lower school teachers approached me. They were virtually sniggering, and I used that word precisely. "You're really naive," one of them told me scornfully. "You're not going to get your apology. Whoever did that is never going to come forward."

I stared at the woman in disbelief. This was an adult, an educator, and she didn't understand what I was doing?

I had little expectation that my vandal would ever come forward. Moreover, I could not have cared less if he did or didn't. I was addressing him, but I wasn't talking to him.

The reason we need to address Adam Lanza—and judge him, and condemn him—has nothing to do with him. It has everything do to with communicating our society's values to the whole society, and, specifically, to address the next school or movie theater shooter...the troubled and morally unmoored individuals who are out there in society obsessing on evil fantasies and contemplating evil actions.

It's politically incorrect to call Adam Lanza a madman, crazy, mentally ill...the feeling being that other mentally ill people, most of whom are not criminals, will feel implicated by association. Bollocks, I say. Just because Mussolini was an Italian doesn't mean all Italians are Mussolinis. Adam Lanza was mentally defective. He was a moral cripple, an evil little troglodyte whose brain was swimming in its own fetid destructive fantasies. It's a tragedy (that word again, maybe a little more appropriate this time) that he was born to a woman of manifestly poor judgement who was a gun nut.

Fantasies of power—which is what many of our popular entertainments are—are most appealing to weaklings. Why does anyone think men beat women? Because they feel weak, and beating a woman makes them feel stronger and more powerful. Strong men don't beat women: they have no need to. Similarly, fantasies of rage and power and domination are only appealing to the ineffectual and the weak, people who don't possess the courage and pride to stand up for themselves in more ordinary ways. Adam Lanza was most likely far too weak and cowardly to stand up to his mommy like a man. He was far to weak to pick any opponent other than the very weakest and most defenceless. That's a measure of true, deep cowardice.

Moreover, though he might have possessed some sort of gloss of intellectual ability, he was deeply stupid. He could have been helped, if he'd been man enough, human enough, to know he needed it, and to face up to the emotions of submitting to it. He didn't understand that his vile fantasies were only fantasies, and that impulses, even horrible ones, are common in humans and do not have to be turned into actions. He didn't understand that whatever stressful, unreconcilable feelings that were torturing him didn't necessarily have to last forever. People grow up. Situations change. Crises fade. He didn't understand that he could have worked his way out of wherever he was in his thoughts, that he could have demanded help and gotten it: help that would have been real, that might have gradually allowed him to feel better.

These things need to be said too...because that's how you teach and communicate values. Nobody cares about Adam Lanza; good riddance to him. The only sad thing about him is that he didn't just kill himself and leave others out of it. But there are other Adam Lanzas out there. The stick of harsh condemnation and the carrot of meaningful relief need to be held out to those people.

But on this subject, all of our leaders, political, moral, and spiritual, are utterly silent.

That's a tragedy.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Robert Goldstein: "It is entirely possible that Adam Lanza was schizophrenic, which means that he had a biologically defective brain. To such a person, moral will does not even enter the picture, because his picture of reality is so deeply distorted. Thus, it is not possible to shame him into behaving better. The same may not hold true, however, of other potential murderers with less severe mental disabilities. They may be susceptible to social pressure which makes the killing of innocents totally unacceptable."

John F. Opie: "There are too few who are willing to actually speak truth about what happened. Thank you. I was studying psychology in the 1970s (yes, it dates me) when deinstitutionalization started up: the arguments were never convincing, to me, and the sheer arrogance of that profession led me not to follow a career as a psychologist. The real fact is that the murderer (I won't bother calling him alleged) was enabled by the lack of a functioning mental health system that keep people from developing into homicidal maniacs.

"Fundamentally, deinstitutionalists back then argued that society had made these people sick (most specifically, American Capitalism) and that society had to be confronted with the sickness of its own culture and take care of those who would otherwise be a danger to society and themselves. Locking away your society's failures was considered to be cowardly and their success in deinstitutionalizing those who really needed to be in institutions—largely by closing those institutions down—is a major cause of homelessness and violent crime like this.

"The deinstitutionalists were fundamentally wrong and we now see children paying the price. I don't have any pat answers and patent solutions: there aren't any. But the deinstitutionalist path is obviously, fundamentally, pathologically wrong."

Mike replies: I agree. It's one of the worst legacies of JFK, who had a big hand in getting that ball rolling. Functionally, we now tend to wait until mentally ill people commit crimes and then send them to prisons; prisons are now our de facto mental institutions. (Many of the rest, as you mention, are on the streets.) It's ironic that that can be quite rightly labeled a sickness of society.

Eric Rose: "My first wife suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. She had good days and some really awful days. She also would become extremely violent.  Both the health care system and the justice system failed me. Once divorced I took the kids and disappeared (I had full and exclusive custody). Her problems were not her fault and I hold no ill feelings towards her. She had absolutely no control over what she did. The scenarios playing out in her mind were vivid and absolutely real to her. Unfortunately ours and yours mental health systems are severally underfunded. Spouses, parents and in some case siblings are left to fend for themselves when trying to deal with these serious and for the most part uncontrollable situations. To vilify the kid and his mother is a cheap shot in my opinion. While I agree with you that having guns in the house was a major lapse in judgement, I am sure in other respects the mother was doing the most she could given her circumstances. People with severe mental issues can cross the line from just being "nuts" to violent in a blink of an eye. If this is the first time this happened to this kid then there is nothing his mother could have done. Until we find out more I would give her the benefit of the doubt."

Paul Amyes: "It is too easy to blame this incident on mental illness. I worked for almost 20 years in hospitals for the mentally ill, usually in locked facilities dealing with the most acutely unwell. The number of people who act out violently is very very small, the numbers of those who kill is even smaller and the number that go on to kill multiples of people are infintismly small. The mentally ill are us. Sure they may have problems distinguishing reality from unreality, they have difficulty with correctly interupting stimuli, but they are human beings. There is no direct correlation that says if you are mentally ill then you will become a mass murderer.

"Why do these things happen? Well, it is hard to say; there are many things that can push an individual towards this. I have no experience of the U.S.A. so I'll speak of where I do know: Australia, Israel and the U.K. Modern western society is pretty uncaring society. Our politicians frequently talk of winners and losers. The pressure is on from a very early age expecting children to grow up and be successful in everything. The constantant bombardment of advertising of material goods is designed to make people disatisfied and quest after certain brands as they will signify that you have made it, and if you can't afford it somehow you've failed. More and more demands are placed upon people. There isn't enough time in the day to meet work and family commitments.

"Our society glorifies violence. Look at what the average person watches for entertainment. Hollywood pumps out thousands of hours of mass murder a year all in the name of entertaining people. Computer games desensitise kids to killing. The most powerful people in all these forms of entertainment are the ones who kill the most people. As a society we've become obsessed by death.

"Into this toxic mix throw substance abuse. The war on drugs was a complete waste of time and effort. People who have addiction problems need help not punishment.

"So get a big spoon mix all these ingredients together throw in easy access to weapons of mass destruction, because that is what a modern assault rifle is when used against the helpless, and then add an individual who is not able to deal with this as effectively as you or I, and something goes bang.

"Yes it is a crime, it is an atrocity, it a tragedy and the reason why it is so because all those people, and I include the perpetrator here as well, did not have to die. A more tolerant society with easy access to good health care, an education system that looks not only to turn out kids with qualifications but to also help them become healthy well adjusted adults, a reduction in the amount of carnage that young people will witness as entertainment and finally a reduction in the numbers and types of firearms that can be held will start to see thses kinds of events become less and less frequent.

"These killing sprees are the symptom of a sick society, not sick individuals, and it is time that society took stock and addressed the problem."

Comments

[Chris]

"He said nothing to or of Adam Lanza."

I'm wondering if this may have been at the request of the victims' families. I don't know about Newtown, but after the Aurora, CO theater shootings, there was a very strong sentiment that the shooter not be referenced, especially by name. I think it's an outgrowth of the fact that most people still know who Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold are. However most people outside of the Columbine community would be hard pressed to name one victim of that event. It seems like there's a grass roots push to quit giving perpetrators of these crimes the notoriety that must surely play a part in their decisions to commit such heinous acts.

[Mike Johnston]

Chris,
The perpetrator need not be named to get my points across.

And I remember Isaiah Shoels. I read an article about him. I remember his father's abiding anger, and that he liked flower gardening.

Mike

[Roger Botting]

thank you, right on the money

[Alan_A]

I appreciate the sentiment but am not sure about the application. Morality is important and should be discussed, but that doesn't mean that everyone is capable of being a moral actor. My father, for example, at the end of his life spent a fair amount of time exposing himself to my wife and yelling at the other nursing home patients. He had advanced Alzheimer's and the portions of his brain that provided restraint and a moral compass had been physically destroyed. I think we need to wonder whether Lanza was capable of making the kind of decisions you suggest, and if not, determine what we as a society are willing and able to do with, and about, people in similar conditions. This is not a simple matter of letting him off the hook by medicalizing his condition, but it's not a simple matter of holding him to account by de-medicalizing him, either.

[Denis]

There is certainly a measure of truth in your comments. The sane among us need to speak up and voice the standards of civilized people.

[John Krumm]

Mike, I totally agree. We are moral beings, but our morality is highly flexible. I remember my first job at age sixteen, a dishwasher. I was a "do what you are told" kind of guy, and the cooks took advantage of that, leaving unneeded messes in the sinks, expecting me to clean it all up. When I was made a cook I did the same thing to the new dishwashers, until we had a new manager who took one look at what I was doing and chewed me out. I was outraged for a while (didn't he know the system?) but then my behavior changed and it became the new norm.
I believe this nation needs a new norm around guns, gun infatuation, gun fetishes, and gun handling behavior. But it will take a long and thorough chewing out.

[K. Harrington]

Amen Mike...well said.

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Amen, brother!

[Tom H.]

Bravo Mike. Spot on.

[Richard]

Interesting to consider how many people read the comments and whether your effort in editing them is really worthwhile. Maybe you should do a poll. Myself I mostly don't read the comments although I do read pretty well all of your posts.

[Mike Johnston]

Richard,
Do you read the Featured Comments?

Mike

[Eduardo Cervantes]

Definitely Lanza belonged to the lowest human stratus possible. Just imagine how bad he felt about himself. I feel sorry for him, nonetheless I would be the first to give him the maximum penalty but he was just another casualty of the system. As an outsider I should not tell you what's wrong with your beautiful nation because it could generate nationality issues but I'd like to dare a bit and say that this mass murder has "family disintegration" written all over. I was born and raised in Mexico. As a latin american country we usually get mocked by being too family oriented. It's no secret we leave our parent's home much later (if ever. lol) than in more northern countries. Family oriented societies (for good or bad) have more verbal communication, way more physical touch among siblings than in countries that are not oriented, like USA, where other values are heavily impulsed like being independent both economically and mentally. I wish this great nation takes this time the opportunity to revalue their priorities in life. Nothing is sacred, The mere Constitution should be modified if necessary to construct a safer place for your children to grow up and be happy. I think it is necessary to think outside the can for a while. The quest for happiness should more fun, smoother, easier and safer than it actually is. I think this quest has become pretty much demential (no pun intended). I wish you all happy holidays. Take care and keep tighter.

[A. Dias]

Spot on. This was a crime. And even if the crime was committed by a sick mind, his family (who paid dearly) should have taken measures, the least of which would be to make sure this fellow has no access to weapons. Society is very soft on criminals and does nothing to prevent potential disasters from happening when it knows certain individuals are unstable.

[Manuel]

Mike, the tragedy here is that Adam Lanza deprived the victims, their relations, and society, of justice. Not vengeance, mind you, but justice (which are not to be confounded).
You are absolutely right; even if he took his own life, that mustn't blank his guilt. Neither should anyone excuse him because of his mental disturbance, for he knew what he was doing: had he survived, his eventual psychic condition would not be enough for him to be exempted of criminal responsibility by a court.
However, we must also ask how its education and social environment helped him build his tortuous character, because crime is better fought by preventing it, rather than repressing -, and, in particular, whether these crimes would have taken place had gun control been implemented some two decades ago, or (preferably) earlier. I didn't mean to come back to this issue, which you wrote about earlier, but one can't escape the fact that it takes central place in the debate around the Sandy Hook massacre.

[Ken Sky]

No one should mistake advocates for gun control as apologists for the morally defective. It is just a fact of life that we can not look into every mind and predict with certainty which of us is capable of such despicable crimes. Oh that we could. But it is also a fact that guns enable these people to kill in large numbers. America the world is watching in amazement that you value the "right to bear arms" and not criminalizing the possession of types of guns which are designed to kill humans over then life of just one child. Shame on you if you fail to enact meaning gun control.

[Ross]

I remember the faces of the Aurora murderer, the Gabby Giffords murderer, the Virginia Tech murderer and now this one.

And someone out there knows these 'celebrities' too, and wants to be be added to the list. We need to stop the celebrity and the power we give to these turds.

Instead, what if all we knew them by was 'the murderer in Colorodo', 'the nobody from Arizona' and 'the coward in Virginia'. Report the name the first day buried in the middle of the article, maybe a small photo, but after that its not needed.

From now on in my mind and in conversation, this one will be called 'the little shit', and I will not look at his photo.

[G Gervais]

Mike,

You might not be the greatest orator, but that remains to be seen.

But you're a hell of a writer!

You really hit the nail squarely on the head with this one.

Thank you,,

G

[Richard]

I read the featured comments sometimes. But the comments themselves, well there's just way too many, for one thing, and generally speaking, they're less interesting than the original posts, or maybe I'm just not that dedicated. I read a lot of blogs and don't read the comments on most of them either.

[John Cotton]

Mike et al, I am too worn down to read much more on this so I will admit I have not read all the comments from either post. So forgive any duplications here said.

There is a real danger in looking deeply at Lanza. One contributing factor in mass shooting crimes is their copycat nature. Seeing all of the public attention others have received can encourage more. We need to approach any public discussion with this in mind so as to minimize that. How? I admit I don't know. But it sure doesn't mean we should stop talking about the criminal.

I agree with you that he did not "understand" a lot about his life, his emotions, and his options. But that is at the very heart of mental illness or personality disorders. People who are that screwed up by their very nature don't have the capacity to understand or cope effectively with it. And no one could make him make himself get better, short of locking him up which these days means prison.

[Ruby]

I always read featured comments, and will read all the comments if a topic particularly interests me. I did not read all the comments on the gun control article because I didn't have the heart. I get enough exposure to the "cold, dead fingers" crowd where I live.

[Jim Bullard]

While I agree with much of what you said I would remind you that the majority of people with mental illness are not violent and that wholesale institutionalization is an irrational overreaction on the scale of interning all people of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor.

[Dean Wight]

Atrocities are by definition shocking. Since they are understood by all moral persons to be wrong, in our shock and disbelief we may not immediately speak condemnation. And we may think that a perpetrator is deranged or so lacking in morality that the horrible may actually be attractive. Will our condemnation deter such people?

I agree with your condemnation, but I'm sickened and confused by these events. I appreciate the thinking and comments from TOP readers.

[Player]

Mike, I expected a lecture on gun control, but not one reference to guns. Congrats to you for transcending the typical knee-jerk response although it didn't look promising in your previous blog.

[matt]

Well said. I think it’s about time we stop blaming everyone/thing else for these peoples actions. But part of the blame as to also be put on his mother. I am all for the 2nd amendment, but if you are a parent of a child like him with is "difficulties" you cannot have firearms in the house. I’m sorry you need to pick another hobby lady.

[J.]

Hear hear.

[Chris Y.]

I'm very surprised at this..... Seems to me that anyone could see that this kid was mentally ill. You can't reason with mentally ill people, tell them to pull their socks up, get their acts together, or just me a man about things. Anyone who's dealt with a close friend or family member suffering depression, narcissism, paranoia, or any other severe, painful, debilitating psychotic condition has learned that. If "everyone's an amateur physiologist" these days it's just because there aren't enough real ones to go around. Blame the people who should know better - the mom "gun enthusiast" who left an arsenal laying around the house, the overburdened sign-blind heath care professionals who rubber-stamped him through school, the NRA-supported politicians who call this some kind of "freedom"... but this kid? How could he not be sick? I know it's hard to conceive, but I don’t see how he's not as much a victim as anyone.

And for de-institutionalizing people, since when was that JFK's fault? I was a teenager then, but not dumb, and I don't remember it even being on the radar. It wasn't until Regan's first term that I saw obviously unwell people shuffling around the streets talking to themselves... it seemed to happen overnight.

[dan]

Even mentioning his name gives him more fame than he or his sick ilk deserves. Not only was the president right to leave him out of his comments, the rest of the so-called news media should be chastised for the fetishistic level of detail they are putting out. They are giving this self absorbed sociopath just what he really always wanted. Attention.

This turd joins a long list of "ones whos name should not be mentioned"..a non human who committed an inhuman act.

[Stephen Gillette]

Calling this killer out, posthumously, might make us feel better. We can't bring back the victims, but we can curse the memory of the perpetrator.

Sadly, as has been mentioned, the unintended consequence of this might be to spur on other deranged individuals to act on their fantasies, too.

We are nearly one-third of a billion souls, we Americans. We are also awash in guns, awash in images and accounts of violence, and impoverished in regards to abundant and affordable mental health care. Given a small but predictable percentage of sociopaths that will emerge from such a population, a clear path to eliminating the possibility of these events does not seem likely. Not soon, anyway.

[Steven House]

Children there and children there ... http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/us-killings-tragedies-pakistan-bug-splats

[Mike Fewster]

I don't think Adam Lanza should be pigeon holed as an aberration. I think more attention needs to be given to the media and culture from which he emerged. Take the comments of the Texas senator yesterday who defended gun ownership as necessary to prevent a tyrannical president from seizing power. The underlying message is that if one has a problem with authority, it's OK to reach for an armed response. Popular culture encourages the dramatic action of the individual but rarely encourages the considered trust in the institutions. Bit by bit the authority of institutions of government are eroded. Our trust, our belief in the supremacy of our democratic processes is being destroyed. Combine the cult of the individual with the gun laws of the USA and you have a toxic mix. The actions of the individual were undoubtedly a crime but it isn't too difficult to see how the individual might develop a perspective to take such actions and feel better about themselves by doing so.
Society cannot pre-empt this kind of action by identifying all the likely individuals in advance but it can do something about gun controls and it can do something about the way it discusses issues and its institutions. Once the genie is out of the bottle however it is very difficult to reverse these realies.

[Fazal Majid]

Ancient Rome, and Venice, has something called "damnatio memoriae", where specially heinous criminals' names would be expunged from public mention. This might deter copycat killers, but it is debatable how practicable it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

[Anthony]

Perhaps the answer is to offer gun nuts the opportunity to trade their weapons for a camera or hi-fi system to fetishize over instead.

[Paul P]

Well said, thank you.

[xfmj]

Maybe this has been addressed already--- I'm catching up on the comments but am moved to post my response to Richard, above:

I'm one who very much does read the comments on this blog, enjoy them immensely, and even go back to older posts to see what new things have been appended. This site, for me, is one of the rare forums where I generally find the comments of its readers to be thoughtful, nuanced enough (though--- let's not be too serious--- with a nice mix of the tossed off and the rolled from the cuff), and regularly provocative.

Whether it's a testament to Mike's editing, his stewardship, or the example he sets with his writing (and as a result, that of his readership), I'm not sure. It's probably all these things, and really that we're seeing the result of a lot of care and attention, and time, on Mike's part.

I'm sure many of us would give anything to have a site like this for all of our myriad other interests and obsessions.

Speaking of this kind of talk, Mike, would you put up an end-of-this-year/start-of-the-next kind of post that provides a place where we can contribute a voluntary subscription amount?

'Tis the season.

[Steven Halpern]

Another take:

http://www.sfgate.com/newtownshooting/article/Mom-of-mentally-ill-son-I-am-Adam-Lanza-s-4122492.php

[Careful, though--it doesn't take much digging to find this. --Mike]

[Stan B.]

FWIW- This guy was sick beyond his control, sick beyond any measure or manner of reason or humanity- and that's not meant as an excuse. His brain, its processing, reasoning and reaction totally defective.

That said, and as you've alluded to- we as a society do nowhere near what we should to help treat or offer these people alternate environments which would minimize harming themselves, or us. We then compound that situation by allowing these people easy access to weapons of considerable destruction. This guy was sick beyond his own comprehension, the environment that allowed his depravity to manifest is a responsibility shared by all.

Facing this head on requires money and commitment. We'll get neither. What we got is yet another pretty speech, and maybe another cosmetic assault weapons ban down the road. Cosmetic because all the last one did was change the rifle stocks while the actual weapons remained the same, as did their acquisition.

They'd be seizing the bull by the horns right now if they were serious. Ban any and all weaponry that can be converted to fully automatic, require serious background checks, safety classes, and waiting periods, ban all selling at gun fairs. And most importantly- initiate, fund and deploy proper, comprehensive mental health programs nationwide.

Expect more of the same cosmetic and ineffective legislation, more smoke and mirrors. Expect more deaths...

[Jay]

Nothing should be off limits in describing a crime as horrible as this one. Condemn the criminal by name. Investigate everything about him, so we can learn to stop such people in the future.

As this is a photography site, let's talk about the role of photography. Photography can honor the victims by telling the truth about what happened. Showing press conferences and memorials is not enough. Show the bodies at the crime scene. Show the funerals. Show the tears and the horror. Not to sell newspapers, but to tell the whole horrifying story. Let everyone see it and be terribly discomforted to their core, and then see if the laws don't change. If photojournalists can show such scenes from other countries, why not from at home?

The gun lobby are quite happy that we don't see the consequences of their lobbying; that makes it much easier to move on to the next news story. Photography can shock the conscience and move the public, and shame politicians that enact stupid laws that allow Bushmaster rifles and 30 bullet magazines.

[Peter Barnes]

Player wrote "not one reference to guns. Congrats to you for transcending the typical knee-jerk response"

We simply do not know enough about how the human brain works, and how it malfunctions, to do more than speculate about the sort of health system, the sort of moral admonishments, the sort of society needed to prevent this sort of crime.

But this is not speculation: if that nutter/criminal did not have access to weapons designed to efficiently and quickly kill many people he would not have been able to kill those kids and teachers in the way he did.