Death, but No Fame

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, February 01, 2022

 

A few days ago, one of our nation’s many mass school shootings came up in conversation, and I started to share a thought about the perpetrator — but I couldn’t quite remember his name.

 

He was famous, for a minute. But not now — now, he’s just dead.

 

In fact, I spent a couple of minutes thinking that maybe I had this killer mixed up with another one. There have been so many. (Too many.) We all kind of remember the Columbine killers, because that episode put school massacres on the map for many Americans, though it was neither the first nor the worst of them. (Most Americans do not know that the biggest school massacre in our history was a bombing in Michigan almost a century ago, perpetrated not by a lonely social failure at the school but by a failed local politician.) Yet even so, I’d bet that a fair number of Americans couldn’t name both of them or identify the year in which that infamous crime happened.

 

These homicidal spectaculars are meant to be assertions of personal power and individuality. One of the sensitivities of a free society is that anyone who is willing to simply violate the rules — and willing to pay the price for doing so — can impose his will on a school, an office building, the Las Vegas strip, or some other representative of American public life for a few minutes or even a few hours. It is the old Luciferian trip: Better to reign demonically over the local shopping mall for 20 minutes than to persist forever in obedient obscurity.

 

But justice really is poetic at times: Because we have endured so many of these pageants of cruelty, the perpetrators have all begun to run together for many of us. (Of course, the experience of those who were intimately affected by these crimes is somewhat different.) We do not remember the guy at the Colorado movie theater as a dark angel of vengeance or even as the comic-book villain so many such killers seem to aspire to be. We remember him as another example of the same species of thing that killed those children in Connecticut: stupid, immature, ugly, sexually frustrated social failures, terrible for five minutes but ridiculous for the whole of their lives before that and ridiculous for the whole of their lives afterward.

 

It probably wouldn’t do any good to try to explain this to the mental and moral defectives who carry out these attacks, but the truth is that they do not achieve their goals. There is power in fear, but these attacks do not inspire long-term fear — the fear is momentary and brief, and in the long term what we feel about the perpetrators is disgust and contempt. These murders do not immortalize the murderers, and the crime scenes do not become monuments to them. Instead, the killers join the increasingly faceless ranks of a particularly piteous and repulsive category of human failure. They become part of a lump rather than violently liberated individuals, and their crimes are simply one more failure in a long life of failures, underlining their powerlessness and personal deficiency rather than unfettering them from these in a hail of bullets.

 

Some of them die at the scenes of their crimes, either at their own hands or at the hands of police. But in how many of these cases can you remember with any confidence which is which? Some of them are dead, some of them are imprisoned, and all of them will be forgotten. Even the anniversary commemorations fade over time. For a while, the first thing people thought of when they thought of Waco, Texas, was that burning cult compound — and, now, it is Chip and Joanna Gaines, cult figures of a different and happier sort. Say what you will about American consumerism, its powers of assimilation — and its related powers of forgetting — are formidable.

 

Forgetting is a blessing that we do not always appreciate as much as we should. There are many men who deserve to be forgotten. And, in that much at least, a measure of justice is being done.