Cultural Life 4
A story about the Sandy Hook shootings quotes a local resident on the shooter’s mother (for some reason, that sentence below was in the print edition of my local rag, but omitted from the online version):
Indeed.
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December 22, 2012 at 3:30 pm
That was such an accurate but profoundly weird story on so many levels. The shooter “slithered around the hallways.” The hard drive totally destroyed, everyone bamboozled by what the general American condition has wrought. :”Live free or die!”? In a house four times the size of many, on a quarter of a million in alimony pay a year, in an upper middle class development. People really just can’t see how twisted around things have become, living in it so long they have only the context very near to them.
December 22, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Tangentially related, see this letter: http://hamptonroads.com/2012/12/we-need-see-his-face
December 23, 2012 at 12:32 am
No one’s ever going to figure out what made Adam Lanza tick, someone with zero facial affect and no voice. The mother cannot now answer why she got him involved in shooting, nor can anyone else, not the brother or the father. When you get down to it, even the mother was isolated to the point of destruction despite the tale of going to the bar on weekends. Well, I know bars from being in a rock band. You can be in them every weekend and still be totally alone. It seems to me movies and novels have been written about being isolated behind invisible walls in a crowded space.
December 23, 2012 at 8:20 am
What’s that word from sophomore soc? Anomie.
You are right. And one of these days someone will get rich from an In Cold Blood style retelling of the story that purports to make the senseless sensible.
We are driven to find the why, but sometimes the only why is that evil is real.