Deranged People With Guns

What’s next?  An animal rights suicide bomber at the Bronx Zoo?

Our tendency is to try to read some larger meaning into the bizarre story of James Lee, the paradoxically anti-human humanist—saving us from ourselves by making sure there aren’t any more selves—who held hostages at gun point. His target? The Discovery Channel! His goal? Games shows designed to get the message out: no more children! Weird.

David Weigel posted good analysis of the way in which we tend to filter craziness through the lens of the culture war.

His conclusion, however, doesn’t ring entirely true: “In 24 hours or so, a few articles will be pitched and sold about the political meaning of the story. Everyone else will forget about it and feel vaguely dirty for having thought so hard about it at all.”

I agree that we often wrongly impute too much significance to the bizarre behavior of lunatics. Crazy people do crazy things, and for the most part their craziness explains the crazy things they do. But there is something about our current social and cultural climate that makes terrorism, hostage taking, and other acts of political violence an attractive medium for craziness.

Why?

Is there something about modern political theater that, like a shiny coin, catches the eye? Have we tended to idealize the revolutionary? Does our culture long for apocalyptic change? Have bombs, guns, and violence become vivid, cinematic parts of our imaginations?

I don’t find myself feeling vaguely dirty as I think about how to answer these questions. Confused, but not dirty.