I heard about Fort Hood this morning on the radio. One thinks first, of course, about how horrible this is for the victims, for the families of the shooter and the killed and wounded alike. I know there are people here who have family in the military who might be at Fort Hood right now and I am hoping for your sake that they are all OK.

Initially the thing that most surprised me about the story was that the shooter was a psychiatrist. I know it's a cliche that psychiatrists are themselves supposed to be kind of messed up. Nevertheless, one would think--one would hope--that a psychiatrist might recognize the early signs of a 'snap' coming on and seek help before it got to this point.

After that, the thing that surprised me most was that a bunch of American Muslim groups were releasing statements distancing themselves from the shooter and protesting their loyalty to America and how much they love this country, etc. And just as I was thinking, "What a shame that they feel they have to do that," the third thing that surprised me was getting onto the computer and seeing that this shooting was already being represented in the media as a potential terrorist attack.

I guess I may as well say it, since someone's going to: If Hasan had been a white Christian people wouldn't be asking these questions. He'd just be one more American guy who one day 'snapped' and, since he had access to weapons, decided that as long as he was going to commit suicide he would take a couple dozen people with him. The fact that it happened at an army base would fit right into the dominant narrative about this kind of shooting. The search for the motive typically uncovers some sort of frustration or humiliation or other catastrophe--often it's the loss of a job, sometimes it's a divorce, sometimes it's a paranoid fantasy about why the shooter *doesn't* have something he wants and who's at fault for that--which is cited as the cause for the shooter's "snapping" and unleashing this kind of violence. I figure knowing you're about to be sent to Iraq would cause a lot of people to snap. My partner said this morning that she had heard that 3-4 people in the armed forces were committing suicide *per day* these days. But you don't, of course, hear much about suicides--unless they incorporate homicide.

But for the American media, when it's a Muslim shooter, the meaning of "suicide" shifts. I believe we will eventually find out that Hasan's confessional status has inspired the media to make too much of the analogical similarities between suicide-by-shooting-spree and a "suicide bombing." What the two scenarios have in common is an individual at the center of it who has chosen to commit suicide via a method which will deliberately take the lives of an unknown number of other people. The difference is in the explanatory narrative. The shooting spree scenario is typically attributed to an individual psyche under stress. The suicide bombing is typically attributed to an individual's participation in a larger ideological/ethnic/religious war. To me, Occam's Razor says to read the Fort Hood shooting as part of the first narrative rather than the second.

Every time a thing like this happens there's the scramble for a motive. Every time, I feel like no matter what they come up with, it's insufficient. Every time I something like this happens I feel like the same shadowy evil thing has once again poked its head up above the surface of the water and it will soon subside back under before we can see what it really was. But I have to say that my gut is not expecting that this is going to turn out to be anything other than the action of one highly disturbed and highly desperate individual who really, really, really fucking didn't want to go to Iraq.

Why desperation translates into homicide for some people and not others--and why those people are pretty much always men*--I do not know. I will never know, and I am abotu ready to give up trying to figure it out. It just mainly makes me sad for everyone touched by this tragedy--which will probably include a lot of Muslim-Americans who had nothing to do with it but will take shit from other people about it nonetheless.

The Plaid Adder

*On edit, it occurred to me that the only exception that springs to mind is that of women who kill their children before killing themselves. I guess the distinctive thing about the mass-shooting suicide/homicide, apart from the involvement of guns, is that the other victims are strangers.