In his column in yesterday's NY Times (subscription required), Bob Herbert makes a Freudian reading of violent crime in America:
This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so inexplicable.
But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S. reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade, the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.
Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny and homophobia is a “central component” in much, if not most, of the worst forms of violence in this country.
Herbert then smoothly shifts to this insightful consideration of President Bush's motives in Iraq:
“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” [Dr. Gilligan] said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”
[...]
In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity, “it is tremendously tempting,” said Dr. Gilligan, “to use violence as a means of trying to shore up one’s sense of masculine self-esteem.”
Yet Bush, despite his best efforts to buck himself up and to dominate Iraq through ultra-violent shock and awe, remains just another many-time loser with the country. Indeed, recent reports anticipate that even the suggestively-named "Plan F" for Iraq will succumb to Bush's long history of frustrating inadequacy.
[I removed a paragraph of Herbert's from the original post for clarity.]
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