Charleston and Roanoke: “We have met the enemy”
And into my mind, from a very long time ago, arrived a memory of a now-famous Pogo cartoon in which the possum says,
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
This week I received an email from a good friend, commenting on the shooting of two reporters in Roanoke, Virginia. It contained the type of descriptive phrase I have come to expect; this particular shooter was “another crazed angry person with a gun.”
During the period of media frenzy in response to the shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17th of this year, Facebook—and, I’m sure, all the national media—provided example after example of this same reaction. I was fairly active on FB at that point and found I just could not read one more report about the event and especially one more thread of comments, most of which boiled down to “another crazed angry person with a gun,” or “how can this sort of thing happen??”
And into my mind, from a very long time ago, arrived a memory of a now-famous Pogo cartoon in which the possum says, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
On Facebook, I immediately deleted every report with all comments. I eventually did my own brand of ranting about the terrible thing that happened in Charleston, until I realized I was repeating myself and getting nowhere. It was as if I were speaking a different language—and not just different, but unique; I was apparently the only person in the world who spoke that language. And that language, for me, expresses only two imperative thoughts: As the actual violence, or at least the media coverage, have intensified over the last few decades, we seem to have two predictable responses-neither of which I understand:
We react to each shooting, each death, each mass murder, as if it is the very first, has never happened before, and is utterly foreign and incomprehensible. We are shocked every time, horrified, caught off guard. We are appalled and outraged and we just cannot believe “something like this” could happen–in spite of the fact that it happens pretty often.
We immediately identify the perpetrator as someone who is, at the simplest, just plain crazy. An aberration. Someone who is perhaps seriously mentally ill and not taking medications, probably the victim of a violent childhood and the emptying of mental institutions. A loner. Someone who harmed small animals or set fires. Someone, like the act itself, who is foreign and incomprehensible.
From a wide variety of publications in the wake of the Roanoke shootings:
“What is wrong with people??”
“Murder goes hand in hand with mental illness”
“It’s very sick and disgusting”
And on the day of the shootings in Charleston, the city’s police chief is reported as saying,”It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church while they are having a prayer meeting and take their lives.”
South Carolina’s Governor was sure that “we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.”
On The Daily Show the day after the killing in Charleston, Jon Stewart pointed out that the “society” in which these apparently inexplicable shootings took place is a society in which the Confederate flag flies over the State House and the roads on which these slain citizens drove every day are named for Confederate “heroes.”
When I watched the video of Jon Stewart’s show, I felt not so alone. Pretty hopeless and discouraged, but not the only one.
Stewart, speaking of “already hearing the nuanced language of lack of effort,” also said:
“We have to peer into the abyss of depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal. . .and we still won’t do jack shit. That’s us”
“Nine people shot in a church. What are you gonna do? Crazy is crazy.”
“One guy lost his mind.”
“We are steeped in this culture. We’re bringing it on ourselves.”
We have met the enemy, and he is us
In, “Sentimental Journeys,”her 1991 article in The New York Review of Books, essayist Joan Didion–incidentally, an important influence on my own writing and on my teaching of writing–wrote about the brutal beating of a young female jogger in Central Park, ““Stories in which terrible crimes are inflicted on innocent victims have long performed as the city’s endorphins, a built-in source of natural morphine working to blur the edges of real and to a great extent insoluble problems.”
“Another crazed angry person”
“Some guy lost his mind”
In last week’s New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote in “The Critics: Out of Bethlehem,” that “Didion thinks that this is why the press latches on to stories like the Jogger’s. It’s not because those stories tell us who we are. It’s because they don’t”
It is an old tradition, going back at least as far as ancient Israel when the chief priest would symbolically load up the sins of the community on the back of an unblemished “escape goat,” and send it off into the desert, carrying the sins away for another year (Leviticus 16).
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY, AND HE IS US
Pogo, Earth Day, 1971
