Going Out In Style

The young man who killed eight people in Omaha reportedly left a note asserting that he intended to "go out in style." A friend says the man expressed a desire to "go out like a star." The killer seems to have felt that it was worth losing his life to kill people and thus become famous.

This is, in fact, a quite old sense of fame. The killer obviously did not expect to become a celebrity, as a celebrity is someone who revels in being famous and exploits fame to live a privileged existence. It was apparently enough for him to believe that he would be known by future generations, or more likely by future peers, perhaps as a peer to such famous persons as Klebold, Harris and Cho. But we don't yet know enough about the man to say whether he actually emulated such people, or if his own pathetic little drama was the only thing that mattered to him.

The news from Omaha left me wondering exactly how different people like this are from Muslim suicide bombers. Does the fame that the Omaha killer expected for himself match the terrorist's expectation of paradise. Whatever his rationalizations, does the Muslim terrorist have essentially the same mentality as an American secular shooter? Does he go to die not so much out of a sense of religious duty, as Osama bin Laden might hope, as out of a hard realization that sacrificing his life is the only way he's going to get a chance to kill the way he's always dreamed? When the aspiring martyr says he's not afraid of death, that he loves death more than life, isn't he saying the same thing as any of his American peers, which is that for him, it's become more important to kill than to live? The only real difference that I see is that the Muslim terrorist with his bomb belt seems to deny himself the pleasure of repeatedly pulling the trigger, which the secular shooter seems to crave, in favor of achieving a maximum body count in a minimum of time. Is that a significant or a superficial difference? For the moment, I leave that to the experts.

By coincidence, the President stopped in Omaha this morning for a fundraiser. That makes me wonder whether our shooter was aware of Bush's itinerary. Perhaps not, and perhaps he wasn't truly determined to kill people until he got fired from his McDonald's job earlier today. But what if the wretch had a Travis Bickle moment, had a plan but not the confidence or courage to carry it out, and took out his now even more augmented frustration out, not on another set of enemies as in Taxi Driver, but on entirely innocent people? I'm sure the FBI and Homeland Security are asking these questions, and if there's anything to confirm this notion, I'm sure we'll know soon enough, since it would only help make someone's case for even more surveillance of Americans' private lives. For now, I submit these speculations for amusement purposes only, but I'll be the first to admit that it isn't especially funny.