In May I took my mother
to Italy for a week to spend time with her hospitalized sister. I have written
some things about that trip, but those focused on family. This is more about
the world.
We left on May 22nd.
While we were at the airport, I heard about the bombing in Manchester. There were flight delays for different
reasons, but while in line to fix our itinerary issues I had just been talking
to a man going home to Manchester. I immediately thought about him and his wife finding out that they
would be going home to that, and all of the thoughts and worries they would
have while still thousands of miles away. It cast kind of a pall over the trip,
but that was about to get worse.
On May 27th I logged in
and started seeing alarming tweets about Portland and TriMet and that's when I found out about
the stabbing the day before. Now we were the ones thousands of miles away. It's
not like I would even have been able to do much being home, but it does
increase the feeling of helplessness.
I tried to catch up on
everything when I came back. There was one article that quoted former FBI agent
Joe Navarro and mentioned his book, Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and
Protect Yourself from Harmful People.
Even though I questioned
some of his conclusions about the suspect, I decided to read the book. It was
disappointing, but that was okay because when I looked it up the library
suggested another book, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Bancroft Lundy, and that was really good.
The problem with Dangerous Personalities was that it gave a checklist of 120 or so
traits for each of four personality types: narcissist, paranoid, unstable, and
predator. If a person had more than 60 of the 120 for any of the types, they
were probably a dangerous personality.
If you think those lists
would get tedious to work through, and wonder if it wouldn't be easier and more
accurate to just work with the Hare checklist for psychopaths, yeah, I thought
so too. Navarro can spot a dangerous person, and can be an effective agent, but
it felt like he did not have a deeper understanding of why everything interacts
the way it does. I think that's why he needs such long lists.
The original article
talked about the stabber's history, and what led him to this point. Navarro and
another author, David Neiwert (who writes about far-right extremism) both
talked about mental illness, especially relating to paranoia.
Navarro said that it
would be a mistake to reduce the crimes to an outgrowth of mental illness. I
agreed with that.
There was a lot in there
about the stabber's life path that showed a pattern of low achievement: high
school dropout, menial jobs, living in a friend's basement for a couple of
years. He was into comics and mythology and metal, but those are positives for
a lot of people, even if they show up with people who are less positive as
well. (Tattoos showed up on all of Navarro's checklists.)
Navarro and Neiwert both
acknowledge the appeal of groups and special knowledge, which can make certain
groups more attractive when they embrace you (like white supremacists).
However, there was nothing in the article about how sometimes there is such a
dearth of anyone embracing the low
achievers except for white supremacists. There was nothing about how society
pressures men to win, or what that does for someone who seems incapable of
winning in any other way than violence.
I'll tell you something
else: when you look at those backgrounds, the Trimet stabber sounds a lot like
the Charleston church shooter, or the person who ran over
Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. They would sound a lot like the Vegas shooter if he didn't have money,
but maybe that's why he needed to be such an overachiever with his plans.
No, I am not using their
names. I am also not trying to stir compassion for them necessarily, but I do
think we need to try and understand. That doesn't come from shrugging our shoulders
at mysterious lone wolves, not when they seem to be coming off of an assembly
line. It will not come from talking about mental illness if the symptoms they
exhibit are not aberrations from the societal norm but rather exaggerated
reflections of it.
Now we are talking about
toxic masculinity.
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