by VINAY LAL
I recall a conversation that some friends and I were having more than twenty years ago, on the eve of America’s bombing of Iraq months after Saddam Hussein had moved into Kuwait. We all agreed that war was engineered into the American psyche: the country seemed then, as it is now, to be on a war footing. The bombing seemed imminent and thousands were bound to die, reduced to the indignity of being viewed as mere “collateral damage”. Someone then remarked that while the United States was busy bombing other countries into submission, relegating them (as one American official declared with much pride) to the stone age, enough people were being killed on American streets from gun-related violence.
The newspapers carry the story of yet another massacre, this one at a community college in Oregon. Lovely small-town America has had its share of mass killings and the end is nowhere in sight. The killer, Chris Harper Mercer, is now reported to have taken nine lives before being killed in a gun battle with law enforcement officers. Rather predictably, we are now being told that the gunman was a “loner” with quite likely a history of mental illness. A Washington Post headline sums it up, “Oregon shooter left behind online portrait of a loner with a grudge against religion.” The lack of “community”, the inability to forge relationships with others, the desire to go down in glory: all these are the stable ingredients of a story that has been foretold. Thus, we read, “Mercer was a quiet, withdrawn young man who struggled to connect with other people, instead seeking attention online or, ultimately, through violence.” In nearly all such instances—the Charleston shooting, most recently, comes to mind—there is mention of the killer’s real or alleged membership in neo-Nazi groups, or other so-called “fringe” groups which bear a grudge against the de-whitening of America, and the Washington Post is unfailingly true to form in this respect. The article states that “Mercer’s e-mail address referenced an iron cross, a symbol often associated with Nazis.”
Lal Salaam for more