"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."
It would be foolishly speculative to assign a particular motive to the mass murder perpetrated yesterday to Army Major Nidal M. Hasan. But that hasn't stopped people from their agendas of spin. Such is the way of disaster. People do what they are expected to do, only more vocally. Those who defend Islam against all Americans foreign and domestic, those who do obeisance to the noble sacrifice of the divine calling of soldiering.. all play their roles with amplification appropriate to the size of the tragedy.
But only The Shadow knows.
And of course in this case it is ironically true that it is a psychiatric specialist whose job it is to plumb the hearts of men who knows why he went on a murderous rampage, with two handguns. And now, just like the flashlight on the cover of the dime novel, we're all trying to focus on the killer.
As I have in my middle age been reduced to a shadow of my youthful ambition, I sit transfixed by the messages of the dead. Not just these 12 dad, but the millions of dead in the Fifty Years War of the Twentieth Century AD. Niall Ferguson is my ghoulish tour guide who explains the ruins of the ghosts of wars and financial disasters past. I walk with my head in his books amongst the living, sometimes ashamed that I pay so much attention to the dead. The dead who never knew what hit them. That's most of our fates. We'll stay on the stair climber even as we fight off shortness of breath, chest pains and tingly sensations in our arms because we think we can outsmart death. We look straight ahead on the elevators ignoring one another and counting our bank balances in our heads because we think we can retire in security. We clean our rifles and tie our bootlaces and polish our buttons because we think that with our gear and training we can take death to the enemy before he takes it to us.
Death is not impressed and will not be constrained by human explanations.
The answer Hasan will give is going to be simple. And the only way you'll be able to see how simple it is is if you understand how much death mankind is able to deal out without thinking. It doesn't take much thought or effort to kill 12 people. But most of us don't think long on such calculations. But to go spontaneously barking mad when you have military training doesn't take much doing. In this regard, Stalin was right about killing millions. And if you consider what a lifetime of soldiering could produce, by any standard, an Army Major who only orchestrates the killing of 12, is a miserable failure. But similar to shark attacks and lightning strikes, Hasan did the ordinary thing at the extraordinarily unexpected time and thus becomes famous, but never more dangerous than capricious nature. He'll babble out an excuse, or a reason, or a mute defiance or a jeremiad of conspiracy and then we'll all have our say of 'See I told you so'. Responsibility will be placed in a theory or a policy or a dogma and we'll all be satisfied that Hasan fits a profile - that nothing out of the ordinary happened here. And we'll all be right. Because in a world of millions of commentators, excuse me let me amend that.. in a world of millions of second-hand and third person meta commentators, 12 deaths is a light snack of melioration. Next year Hasan at Hood will be a question on Jeopardy.
But to explain 10,000 dead is something few are called to do, and so I am focused on the greater deed.
It might come to pass that Hasan at Hood becomes some rallying cry to a pogrom we will reflect upon in retrospect as future historians catalog the slings and arrows in this peaceful interregnum between the last and the next time men organized for Big Death. He will be among, perhaps, the thousand points of darkness that eventually sink our boats of hope. I think I heard last week that John Allen Muhammad was finally sentenced to die by lethal injection. He only killed 10, and he had an accomplice.
So we will have 'justice' of words and spin and other nonsense by this time next week. And then Hasan will die, perhaps sometime after 2012. That's the way of peace and we are living in peacetime. It cannot be denied for Hasan is living amongst us. But I suspect that it incrementally raises the stakes and hastens the next time around when death comes from everywhere.


