Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

We must keep saying the names of killers

There was, as David Carr pointed out in The New York Times, a sickening predictability to the aftermath of the theatre shooting in Colorado last week. Even the mistakes and rumours felt familiar.

But there was one element, this time around, that felt new: the pleas, especially online, for the victims’ names and stories to be remembered. For that we can thank, primarily, two remarkable people: Jessica Ghawi and her brother Jordan.

Jessica, who also used the surname Redfield, was one of the 12 people killed in the theatre. She became a media focus largely because of an eerie twist of fate: She narrowly escaped the Eaton Centre shooting in Toronto in June, and wrote a thoughtful blog post afterwards. That coincidence, combined with her vivacious personality, her work as a sports journalist and her online presence, instantly made her real even to people who never met her.

Her brother Jordan kept a rolling, heart-wrenching account on his blog in the hours and days after the shooting. At one point, he wrote, “Going to continue to give interviews until the victims names are remembered and not the coward of a shooter.”

Peter Burns, a friend of Ghawi’s, tweeted, “This f***ing coward doesn’t deserve his name uttered or picture shown. Give zero publicity to this monster.”

It’s completely understandable that friends and family of a victim would feel that way, and they have every right to express their grief and their opinions. But the beautiful and important effort to humanize the victims can go too far, into dehumanizing the perpetrator. The rest of us don’t have to give in to that impulse.

On Twitter, others took up the theme, as many tried to make the hashtag #RIPJessica “trend” instead of the accused killer’s name.

“Remember her & the victims and NOT the perpetrator,” tweeted Marlee Matlin.

Jennifer Plott tweeted, “Think of the victims, not the victimizer.”

The writer Neil Gaiman tweeted, “Perhaps mass murderers should have their names & faces removed from the history books/newsworld, thus guaranteeing they would be forgotten.”

The reasoning seems to be that if mass shooters are seeking notoriety, we can, as a society, refuse to give them the satisfaction. Maybe we can even deter other narcissists from seeking fame through violence.

It’s possible, but it strikes me as too pat and presumes a rationality that may not be part of the makeup of these criminals. The young man who is accused in the Colorado shooting reportedly said something along the lines of “I am the Joker.” It may be that he wants to see his name in headlines, but it’s also possible his perception of reality is so skewed that it won’t matter what we call him. He might even prefer a nickname, like a cartoon villain. If we stopped saying the real name of the accused, James Holmes, we’d likely drop into the habit of calling him something else. I hope we’ve evolved past inventing something sensational, like Jack the Ripper, but even the most innocuous shorthand — something like the Colorado Killer — can quickly acquire capital letters.

If we stop using the names of accused or convicted killers, we run the risk of cartoonizing them. They become a little bit more like the monsters they set out to be, instead of the pathetic human specimens they are.

In the Harry Potter books, it’s only the people who are terrified of Voldemort who refer to him as He Who Must Not be Named or You Know Who. It’s an old instinct. Think of the euphemisms people once dreamed up for the fairies, or the devil. Refusing to say someone’s true name is a sign of fear. It turns the unnamed force into something eternal, even supernatural. He Who Must Not be Named is the Enemy. Tom Riddle is just a cruel narcissist.

James Holmes, the man accused of the crime, is a real person, with parents and a past. He is emphatically not a victim, but he represents one family’s tragedy. And he represents our collective failure to identify these individuals before they act, and either help them, or at least try to prevent them from obtaining the means to kill and injure dozens of people.

To go back to that Carr column in the Times, this is the central question: “A lot of young men head off the rails for one reason or another, but we still have no idea why a very small, but brutally efficient, number of young American men decide to express their disaffection in wholesale bloodshed.”

We have a duty to try to understand why. Even if we never manage to answer the question, we must keep asking.

That will inevitably involve people tossing around half-baked ideas and extreme positions on everything from trench coats to theatre showtimes. If we keep our focus on the facts, it also gives us the opportunity to have some thoughtful discussions about mental health, guns and violence — if we’re willing to remember that the perpetrators are human beings, with names and stories. They didn’t come from nowhere.

Yes, we have a duty not to glamorize violence. Yes, we should celebrate the lives of the victims, learn their names and look at their faces. But ultimately, trying to understand why killers kill is the most profound way we can honour their victims.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Kate Heartfield

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