Living in the Singular Dream World
Livingston, Montana novelist Walter Kirn has been active all week on Twitter, working through his thoughts on the Arizona tragedy. I credited some of this nervous Twittering to his recent attempt to quit smoking, but it's much more than that. He knows this character firsthand from his novel, The Unbinding serialized on Slate a few years ago. We've become a nation of individual isolationists walking around in a dreamworld of our own making, desperately trying to shut out all reality. We're a mosaic, cordoned apart by walls. The more wealthy we become, the bigger the walls we build. We don't know our neighbors and more to the point we don't want to. After all, they could be trouble. Some, tragically, are.
posted by Mark at 12:19 PM
4 Comments:
Well written post Yorkie, evocative and thoughtful. However, it is obvious from his history that Loughner is a schizophrenic complete with delusions and ideas of reference and very likely, hallucinations. More to do with excess dopamine in his brain than anything the internet may or may not have engendered.
That may be, although isolation is complicit to a degree and certainly The Sportsman Warehouse. I would prefer he had to hunt down an illegal gun scalper to buy his weaponry. We do what we can, or should, to make these tragedies as difficult as possible for the sick to accomplish. He didn't go after a Blue Dog or a Republican either. That's no accident.
Isolation from others is often a significant part of Schizophrenia. He didn't go after a Democrat either, he went after a specific person with whom he had been obsessing for at least 3 years. I suspect that there were enough clues to cause him to be committed to a mental institution before the tragic rampage, but he slipped through the cracks, possibly because of his mother's position with the County. I too would have preferred that he not be able to purchase a gun legally, although getting one illegally seems easy enough if one really wants to.
By the bye, Giffords was a member of the Blue Dog Democrat coalition and a former Republican before switching parties as a Google search will confirm. http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=was+gabrielle+giffords+a+blue+dog+democrat%3F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=591c13988e8371da
In a nation obsessed with freedom, committing people even if they are crazy is all but impossible before a crime is committed. Republicans are all for putting nuts on the street. That's what the records show. There has to be a downside to that.
Post a Comment
<< Home