by Tom Zoellner
Do communities under stress create their own random bursts of violence, in the same way that mountaintops create their own thunderstorms out of high-flowing air currents?
The question has long intrigued social scientists. The criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling advanced the famous “broken windows” theory in 1982, postulating that the breaking of a single window in an abandoned building encourages the rapid breaking of all the windows because a certain cosmic permission has been given for vandalism.
Social context is a force that influences individual decisions more than we recognize. The riots that plagued Britain’s suburbs in August were blamed on unemployment and government cuts that left young men with no place to work and little hope of finding anything better. People living in Rwanda in the months prior to the 1994 genocide remember an eerie feeling cloaking everything, a pervasive sense that “something was going to happen.”
On the 48th anniversary of the JFK assassination last November, columnist Frank Rich pointed out how embittered the city of Dallas had been in the months before the presidential motorcade ran down Elm Street—and how a fame-seeker like Lee Harvey Oswald might have imbibed the local hate and seen himself as the hero who could release all the built-up civic pressure.
The question of how geography shapes the psyche is worth examining again as the anniversary of the January 8, 2011 Safeway shootings in Tucson, Arizona, draws closer. The months leading up to the attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords were unusually paranoid ones. I saw the tension up close, because Tucson is my hometown, and I worked on my friend Gabrielle’s campaign as a speechwriter, watching as her face was all over television and outdoor ads portraying her as the embodiment of a government that was wrecking the local economy. There was a feeling in Tucson that I did not recognize.
Much has been made of the website put up by Sarah Palin’s political action committee (with target markets over the districts of vulnerable Democrats, including Gabrielle’s) and the newspaper ad for her opponent calling on his supporters to help him shoot an M-16 at a fundraiser. I think these gestures are unimportant in themselves—in dubious taste but certainly not the motivating reason why the paranoid schizophrenic Jared Loughner brought a gun to the Safeway with the intention of assassinating Gabrielle.
What they were, though, were symptoms of the larger causes of Tucson’s unease: a fragile economy, a fear of illegal immigrants, a toxic political culture that favors passion over reason, and the disconnected neighborhoods of newcomers where loneliness festers and lack of concern for one’s neighbor becomes a habit. This is the environment in which the punitive and ridiculous law SB 1070 was passed, requiring local police to demand the immigration papers of anybody they stop who appears to fit a suspicious profile—such as a Latino who happened to dress down that day.
Loughner was suffering from a grave mental illness, but he was not living in a world made entirely of his own delusions. He could still hear and see what surrounded him, and those surroundings helped him formulate a plot against a specific target: Gabrielle Giffords, who, besides the president, may have been the most reviled public face in Tucson that year. The slime was directed at her personally, but it was only a convenient channel for the fear that the American dream was lost and that a crisis was at hand.
Studies of schizophrenics have revealed that their hallucinations are shaped and even governed by the culture that surrounds them. What Loughner saw of public life in Tucson at the nadir of his illness—when he was being kicked out of his community college for bizarre and threatening behavior—was one of general fear and outrage, with one solitary woman, her face in constant media view in sinister cast, being branded as the responsible party for all the misery.
Dismissing Loughner as a random “black swan,” free of all antecedents or influences, is worse than facile or lazy. It is actively dangerous, for it allows us to ignore the contributing human context, which is something we can change.
Small windows were being cracked that year in Tucson. Permissions were being unwittingly given. Gabrielle’s office window was broken out by a pellet pistol in March after a series of angry “town hall” meetings on the healthcare bill. Gabrielle confessed to her husband that she feared somebody would bring a gun to a public event and shoot her.
Ten years before Wilson and Kelling advanced their broken windows theory in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, the literary scholar Rene Girard wrote a more obscure study entitled Violence and the Sacred in which he examined the atavistic forces behind the outbreaks of violence against innocents in otherwise stable communities throughout the globe.
“Girard believes a long series of primal murders, repeated endlessly over possibly a million years, taught early humans that the death of one or more members of the group would bring a mysterious peace and discharge of tension,” wrote the scholar Leo D. Lefebure. “This pattern is the foundation of what Girard calls the surrogate victim mechanism. Often the dead person was hailed as a bearer of peace, a sacred figure, even a god.”
Tucson was abruptly sobered by the bloodshed at the Safeway. Flowers and cards were showered on the lawn outside the hospital where Gabrielle lay, as well as outside the fake Italianate grocery plaza—“La Toscana Village”—where she was shot. The mourning over this chilling, pointless act brought the city together in a way that would have been unfathomable in the ugly days of the 2010 Congressional election. It was almost as if, deep down, we remembered we share a destiny with each other. And we all wondered quietly if we could have somehow done more to prevent our civic air currents from massing into thunderclouds.
Tom Zoellner is the author of A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America. He is an Associate Professor of English at Chapman University.
Buy the book: Skylight Books, Powell’s, Amazon
*Photo courtesy of Doctress Neutopia.
Loughner may have been influenced by something, but it was hardly the “Tea Party” movement, much as many on the left would like to think. He was a devotee of the 9/11 truth movement and a fan of the film “Zeitgeist”, not exactly right-wing fare. Had he not shot Giffords, he would have probably been camping out with Occupy Tucson at Armory Park this fall. (Not unknown for attracting marginal elements). Yes, there’s lots of uncivil, explosive elements in the political spectrum. Pinning the incivility on just certain elements on the right, while ignoring a multi-decade history of leftist rhetoric about revolution and paranoia about the US government (which is probably Loughner’s strongest influence), is dishonest.
This is an interesting and, to me, totally believable proposition, i.e that we are each a product of our environment and are each hugely influenced by the whole. When tensions run high, something has to “give.” I don’t hear your article as “blaming,” but rather as asking that we consider, each of us, “claiming” responsibility for our individual thoughts, words, and deeds, that we each recognize that what we think, say, and do has consequences, often in surprising and tragic ways. Equally, the thoughts, words, and deeds of each of us, when motivated by kindness and a willingness to listen to our neighbors, contribute to the creation of a peaceful and harmonious environment, one in which we can all prosper and live happily. I recently heard a shocking statement by someone who visited Arizona. He said that “everyone there was so ‘polite’ because ”
everyone in Arizona knows that the other person might be carrying a gun.” The shock was that this man believes that fear and intimidation is the way to peace when the reality is that true peace is created by all of us (and each of us) working together in an atmosphere of kindness and respect.
It’s already been established that Loughner did not shoot Giffords at random, nor was it because she represented the government. He specifically targeted her, not because of right-wing radio, but because he had a specific grievance against her. In his opinion, she had not giving him sufficient attention when he asked her a question at an event she held in 2007. He held a grudge, he snapped and he acted on his impulses. It had nothing to do with the “political” environment. The guy was living in his own fantasy world and didn’t pay attention to the “human context.”
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message
Anyone trying to tie it to anything political is being disingenuous and completely lacking in integrity.
People who complain about the ‘toxic’ political polemics of today generally have no knowledge of democratic polemics of any other time.
“Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”- Mao Zedong
Democracy is a way for citizens with irreconcilable differences to resolve them with a minimum of violence, while it is messy and sometimes violent is the least violent and most reasonable way humans have yet come up with to exorcize these demons. Attempting to ‘tame’ democracy by restricting thought and action has historically been used by the demagogue to overthrow the system and seize power.
Well-written article. I would be very interested in comparing and contrasting the many variables of Loughner to other modern American political assassins – Oswald, Dan White, Byron “Low Tax” Looper, Sirhan Sirhan, Timothy Johnson in Arkansas – amongst others I’ve missed.
I would agree with half of what Mr. Hank Y Sr. said above. John Wilkes Booth did shoot Lincoln because of his political positions. Leon Czolgosz did shoot President McKinley for the same reason. They were specific targets, but they were assassinated because of their political positions.
I still believe that a saint and a serial killer could grow up in the same neighborhood. Things like emotional environment, education, nurture, knowledge, attitude, spiritual bearing might elicit a different response from one than from the other. Blame Tucson? It’s really more important to grow and heal through “the examined life” than to just place blame. But the society in which awful things happen is also not totally “blameless.” The violence in our American society is not random coincidence. We are a violent nation compared with many others. Our murder and violent crime rate is shocking. We need to look at ourselves and learn lessons. The same people that so easily engage in braggadocio about guns, “lock ‘n load,” “protected by Smith & Wesson,” and such vote for things like the Texas right to carry a concealed weapon in public places! We are a horrifically undisciplined society motivated by resentment and a lot of “I’m gonna get mine, to hell with everyone else” attitude. And yet we want to give tax breaks to the super wealthy and cut educational and arts funding and leave people “high and dry” when it comes to health care, etc, etc and do everything we can to dehumanize immigrants and others. I love the African greeting that says “I see you!’ and to which the response is “I see you!” We need to see each other and respond with compassion and respect and obligation. We’ve let the political and social rhetoric get out of control. We took fairness doctrine away from the public airwaves and opened up slogan warfare on those with whom we disagree. But some of those listening are armed, or are on a collision course with insanity and violence. Are we enables? Or are we peacemakers?
Loughner did not become a schizophrenic overnight. Where were his parents? There had to be signs. What did they overlook? What did they deny? Did they look for help? Was there any? I wasn’t there, but they were and have to be held accountable too. I am pointing a finger; they can’t be erased from this picture.