Escape From New York (1981)

 

Welcome to the Season of the Leopard Man

What I’m about to write about concerns acts of violence that have erupted so recently that any factual statement I make may be proven false in only a few hours. Though I write knowing I’m facing the risk of forced retraction, I wish to express my thoughts none-the-less.

In the last 48-hours there have been three significant (apparent) acts of terrorism in the USA. All three (probably) were the acts of Lone-Wolves, without any organizational affiliation. In the two cases that the ideology of the perp is (believed to be) known, the ideologies are as radically removed from each other as they are radical in-of-themselves. In two cases the perps are dead, in one case there was an additional innocent killed, and in all cases there were multiple serious injuries to the innocent.

In the attack with the most serious potential (but also the only one wherein no one died) was the bombing here in NYC. The perp in still at large, and his identity seems to be a total mystery, and we hold our breathe waiting for the next incident he must be planning.

Daesh (or ISIL if you wish) has claimed responsibility a different one, the mass slashing in the Minnesota mall. Though I’m confident that no connection exists between the organization and dead and still unnamed perp, but I’m equally confident that they are indeed responsible. Daesh has cultivated a special evil genius, they can reach out to the disappointed, disaffected and valueless through social media and inspire the service of these lost to commit acts of random violence -- to a cause that the perp has only the most tenuous connection or even understanding of. As Daesh begins to lose in the real-world map of the Middle East their power in the virtual map of the internet seems to grow. Though the perps in the horrific Paris attacks seemed to have a relationship to the Daesh’s chain-of-command, most murderers and would-be murderers in the West that claim to be their soldiers (like those responsible for the horrific mass shootings in Florida and California months ago) seem to be more like Daesh's windup toys where somehow the toy itself reaches behind its own back and turns its own key.

A comparison that I think is illuminating: Adam Lanza wasn’t a terrorist (because terrorism is a crime defined by motive) but Dylan Roof was. Daesh seems to know how to speak to a potential Adam and know how to turn them into full-blown Dylan (who was inspired by the slick & sick social media of the CCC as so many others have been inspired by the slick & sick social media of Daesh). And the perp and the group seem to never need to touch, they often aren’t even involved in a two-way conversation. It terrifying that words alone can have so much evil power.

I don’t think there has even been anything quite like this since the first decade of the 20th c, when bomb-throwing anarchist non-groups and quasi-groups unleashed an international wave of terror that needed only commitment to the faith that if there is an idea than there must also be a deed. Barbara Tuchman brilliantly argued that they were part-and-parcel of the cultural erosion that sent the world head-long into WWI, a conflict that the anarchists, themselves, had no real role in when it finally arrived.

Once upon a time, all across the continent of Africa, but most notably in the now-countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria, there was a folklore of the Leopard Man, a lycanthrope that killed with incredible savagery after being motivated by social crisis that may not really be related to the actual victim (like a crop failure). A dark aspect of this folklore is that the beast of myth seemed to have crossed over into the world of the real over and over again.

The killings seemed to increase, or at least were better documented, in the wake of the disruptions of traditional life that were brought about by colonialism in the 20th c, with notable strings of murders erupting in the years following the end of WWI until almost the 1950s. The murders would begin and then end suddenly, and then there would be another spate some time later, far, far, away, with no apparent connection between the spates of bloodletting except that the crime scenes seemed to reflect the savagery of the folklore.

Most English-language historical literature available on this phenomena comes from the writings of Christian missionaries, and often the end of the spate of deaths is attributed to colonial or tribal authorities crushing “leopard cults”; there was also a quasi-political conceit that the cults were enraged with white rule. But there seems to be remarkably little evidence of these cults’ actual existence and very few cases where perpetrators were identified; moreover, the victims were generally poor and black, so targets of opportunity, not obvious ideological selections. The very few trials I have read descriptions of were bizarre in the extreme, kangaroo courts where you can almost hear Major Strasser declare, “Round up the usual suspects!” Despite the ritualistic similarities, there seems little reason to view these killers as a coherent group or really anything much different than our culture’s serial killers.

So now we have the phenomena of the Lone-Wolf terrorist, and I see them as a reincarnation of the Leopard Men. Some new fad in the expression of our inner demons in an era where our Better Angels have been notable in their expression for now a long, long, time -- violent crime, in almost every category, has been steadily dropping almost everywhere in the USA since 1990, and longer still in Western Europe. Even in to midst of the horrific crime-wave now gripping Chicago we must remember that it is a city of 2.7 million plus people has not had a year with more than 600 homicides since 2002, while before 2002 the homicide tally bounced up and down between more than 600 and more than 900 since before I was born.

I would argue that the Lone Wolves and Leopard Men are victims of a culturally transmitted form rabies – a language virus if you will.

How to you inoculate against a language virus?

I have no brilliant solution, but I do know that we have to stop talking like the disease itself.

Though America abounds with propaganda, we probably should admit that we are no longer especially good at it. We only seem to know how to propagandize effectively in service of Confirmation Bias: we speak only to those who already half-agree with us and through half-truths outright lies and make them angry enough to stop thinking about what we want from them.

But what happened to the America that could inspire faith and win-over an opposition?

I quoted “Casablanca” above, one of the greatest propaganda films of all time. It was deliberately crafted to coincide with expected signing a major multi-national agreement (still being negotiated while the film was being made, and though those negotiations were officially secret they were being chatted about in newspaper Op-eds) wherein Heads-of-State with no great love for each other would band together against a greater evil.

We are not going to end the spread of this virus by declaring war on any of our own, or any other sovereign nation’s, peoples (though removing certain very specific disease vectors with extreme prejudice would not be a bad idea). We need to get each of our fellows and our foreign neighbors to believe in us again.

Confirmation bias feeding rage in the other side’s game, because what they need is random acts of mostly senseless violence. As we need exactly the opposite, we must reject that language virus and find some other potent speech.