The proximate cause of the Batman massacre identified, with almost 100 percent certainty

James N. writes:

Despite the efforts to make James Holmes conform to a stereotype which would be acceptable to one or another of our current political fever dreams (He’s a Muslim … He’s a tea-party guy … He’s a Democrat … He’s a gun nut … etc.), the truth is almost certainly that he’s a very crazy guy who scared lots of people and who, in a normal and rational society, would have been placed in, and remained in, a state hospital for the rest of his life.

Another Jared Loughner type?

It will come out, I am almost certain, that, like Seung-Hui Cho and like Jared Loughner, Holmes was identified long ago as a dangerous crazy man, that everybody did everything they could, but that in our present insane relativism everything equals nothing, so nothing was what in fact was done. Even his mother, when first told about the massacre, had the reaction: “I was afraid it was him.”

I recall your surprise at the time of the Virginia Tech massacre that “someone” didn’t do “something,” especially someone in authority. The fact is, the options for preventing an impending suicide or especially an impending homicide are very limited and almost uniformly ineffective. [LA replies: Yes. As I remember, I got over my surprise, but not over my shock and horror, when I learned in the course of that discussion that there was essentially nothing that could have been done to separate a Sueng-Hui Cho from society.]

Like many other things, we were much better at this 60 years ago, because we could SEE the abnormal, NAME the abnormal, and then USE DISCRIMINATION to segregate and protect the abnormal (yes, we protect homicidal schizophrenics when we lock them up).

The population of state hospitals in 1954 was over a million. Now, with many, many more crazy people, there are no permanent facilities where they can be housed and immobilized from doing harm to themselves or others.

It is a disgrace.

LA replies to James N.:

I have 3,000 words of comments on the Batman massacre to post; but I’m putting this in its own entry. Not just because it’s good, but because, without referencing my angle on the massacre, it strongly supports it. A society that normalizes and celebrates the abnormal, the transgressive, and the demonic, as shown by the mass entertainments we allow and celebrate, is also a society that lacks the will to identify mentally sick and dangerous people as sick and dangerous and to use discrimination to separate them from society.

LA writes:

I am reminded of the Roman Polanski movie Repulsion, which I saw in 1968 in Mexico City while traveling through that country with a friend. Catherine Deneuve played the lead character, who turned out in the end to be a psychopathic murderer. In the last scene, a photo of the Deneuve character as a child is shown, and as the camera closes in on it, we suddenly see, at the final moment of the movie, that this pretty little girl’s face has an expression of mad demonic evil.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 20, 2012 05:32 PM | Send