Liberal Legacy Media Has Distracted Us For Years

We Were Reading The New Yorker on the Back Porch While Trump Picked the Front Lock

When we contemplate the dystopian landscape at this grim moment - the rotting corpse of liberal democracy, with its gaping death-head of Joe Biden, its confused center that will forever not hold, and its left wing in seemingly terminal internecine conflict, there are a million fingers to point. We can name Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan until we are hypnotically at one with the cosmos, but maybe the fatal flaw is closer at hand - the propensity of the best of us to be seduced by facile, intellectualized, performative sleight-of-hand. The vehicle for our plunge from the cliff might be nothing more than the seemingly benign liberal "legacy media," the stuff that made back porch summer Sunday mornings so indulgently reassuring - stuff like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

Let me take a short, express journey in my time capsule to 2015 - three months into Trump's fatal candidacy, a time when we might have been spared by some sort of butterfly effect. On October 12 of the year leading into our definitive election "extravaganza" Malcolm Gladwell, one of our most esteemed writers of the genre I am accusing, wrote a piece for The New Yorker entitled "Thresholds of Violence."

It struck me, almost a decade ago as boldly counter intuitive, but now I am unsettled by the utter pointlessness of Gladwell's virtuosity - this was, at best, a missed opportunity. The piece, intending to recreate our understanding of school shootings, seems clearly, in hindsight, to have been an exercise in public masturbation. Gladwell might have used his story telling gifts to warn us that the walls of the empire had begun to collapse, and that mass school shootings were not events to consider apart from the wholesale societal implosion that now opened up the bowels of hell allowing Trump to emerge. As a matter of counterpoint here is how David North analyzed the Columbine Massacre (which Gladwell takes to be the prototype of school shootings):

"What is happening to America's kids? This is a question posed by Philip Roth in his provocative novel American Pastoral, which tells the story of a family ruined by a teenage daughter's dreadful and unexpected act of violence. “Something is driving them crazy. Something has set them against everything. Something is leading them into disaster.”

What is that something? Look honestly at this society--its political leaders, its religious spokesmen, its corporate CEOs, its military machine, its celebrities, its “popular” culture, and, above all, the entire economic system upon which the whole vast superstructure of violence, suffering and hypocrisy is based. It is there that the answer is to be found."

In contrast to North’s analysis, there is no cultural or political context in Gladwell's piece about school shootings - instead the issue of student gun violence has been squeezed into the most avidly reductionist corner of academic research. Gladwell examines the distinctly American passion for ritual mass slaughter as if he gazed at a meteorite from the Kuiper Belt. He whittles down the sequential nightmare of US school shootings until it fits neatly into the theory of crowd dynamics proposed by Stanford sociologist, Mark Granovetter:

"In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store."

Gladwell, via Granovetter, rather gratuitously proposes that we take riots to be an abstract representation of group sociopathy – this rhetorical convenience eliminates social and political factors from our field of vison, for riots, originate in the protest movements of the most dispossessed people. In the poetic words of Antonia Malchik, writing in Aeon, "rioting is rooted in the unwillingness to be ignored." Riots, rather than being a heterogeneous collection of people with different "thresholds" have (in conscious or subconscious form) a unifying feature - a collective sense of inequity, anger and desperation.

You can probably guess where Gladwell is taking us in his mangled efforts at sociological metaphor - he proposes that school shootings, beginning with Eric Harris "a classic psychopath," have progressed as "a slow motion riot" to eventually include "righteous upstanding citizens." The righteous upstanding citizen that Gladwell handpicks to fit his rhetorical template is a 17 year old would be school shooter, John LaDue, interrupted by police in the act of assembling his bombs and guns, and rather naively eager to unburden himself to questioning officers.

""He wasn’t violent or mentally ill. His problem was something far more benign. He was simply a little off," we are told.

Gladwell notes that three examining psychologists agreed that LaDue fit the criterion for Autism Spectrum disorder. He acknowledges that LaDue lacked empathy but then qualifies, "But the empathy deficits of the people on the autism spectrum—which leaves them socially isolated and vulnerable to predation—are worlds apart from those of the psychopath, whose deficits are put to use in the cause of manipulation and exploitation."

Gladwell is making a series of extraordinary conceptual leaps without the detailed research rigor required to make his case – that, over time, “normal” kids have, like the hundredth rioter to grab a camera from a broken storefront window, emerged as willing participants who plan and carry out school massacres. As a prominent contributor at the New Yorker, Gladwell could have consulted with any number of “experts” in the field of autism who would have told him that Autism Spectrum Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder are not mutually exclusive diagnostic categories – individuals can be diagnosed with both afflictions. LaDue, who planned to gun down his sister, his parents and his classmates in an elaborate, well organized act designed to remedy the botched aspects of the Columbine massacre, clearly lacked empathy in the manner of an irredeemable psychopath, and not as an aspect of his alleged Asperger’s Syndrome. In fact, people on the Autism Spectrum do not notably lack empathy, but struggle to comprehend social cues and the complexities of non-verbal communication. In other words, Gladwell needed to circumvent clinical realities in order to make LaDue fit into the Procrustean Bed of Granoveter’s threshold theory. Thus, he strikingly concludes:

“But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

Gladwell is a gifted writer and clearly aspires to think outside of the box, or, at the very least, to appear to do so, but he is running on fumes in this particular piece. Most writing in the legacy media has devolved into a formulaic exercise in political evasion. As a subscriber to The Atlantic (I confess this with a tint of shame, for most Atlantic pieces are shallow and predictable) I encounter the wearisome practice of including brief quips from interviews with experts as an obligatory flourish, and Gladwell’s use of Granovetter’s threshold theory has the air of a media script written with a yawn. Why on earth should the succession of school shootings be conceptualized as a slow motion riot? Both school shootings and riots in the US link to the dissolution of the US empire, both reflect a shrinking, depressed, moribund society, ever more uncertain and violent. What possessed Gladwell to consider that violence in the US should be understood as reflecting, rather than the specific vicissitudes of US militaristic culture, abstract rules of human nature. Riots occur all over the world – school shootings belong exclusively to the US.

I rather see school shootings and riots as opposing responses to US implosion – shootings are an effort to surrender, rioters attempt to fight back. School shooters seek to end it all in a paroxysm of destructive, suicidal rage, they create a mocking, distorted mirror of the society that made them. Rioters, on the other hand, symbolically claw at the rotting institutions and corrupt officials that torment us when there are no means of legitimate redress.

I had suggested in the beginning of this essay, that Malcolm Gladwell’s piece might be thought of as creating a “butterfly effect” – a tiny turning point as our nation shifted to an exit ramp toward fascism. Trump and Hillary Clinton – the yin and yang of the US death cult were both simply candidates in October of 2015. There was still a tiny window of escape, but Malcolm Gladwell unwittingly shut it.

He might have written that school shootings were a harbinger of Trump and his fascist death machine. Who are Eric Harris and Donald Trump other than conjoined twins sharing billions of blood vessels, organs and the exact same DNA. Would it have been too big an ask to expect that Malcolm Gladwell and other stars of legacy media ought to read the tea leaves on our behalf, and see the parallel lines speeding toward a bad end?

Gladwell might have plunged neck deep into the uniquely US culture of school violence – a culture not merely reflecting gun fetishism, but made up of underfunded classrooms, looming Middle Eastern warfare for young men, a massively powerful, privatized system of state school testing (that assured that every school day would be in the service of tedious, bureaucratic routines) and the quasi eugenic subdivision of school-rooms into holding pens for the US class structure.

Eric Harris – the patron saint of school massacres - displayed grandiose, narcissistic, psychopathic tendencies that led him to a sort of perverse immortality. Harris imagined himself presiding over a global massacre with only a few survivors of his own choosing. Columbine was to be the spark to light Harris’ personal Armageddon.

And now we have an older, slightly more grizzled Eric Harris – a school shooter transformed into an elder statesman, more or less. Donald Trump also aspires to burn it all down, sterilize the half burnt planet and choose a few billionaire survivalists to represent the human race while hunkered down in underground bunkers. Would it have been too much to expect from the legacy press – to connect the dots?

Now that Trump is here and turning the entire planet into a Columbine crime scene, with students (immigrant college enrollees) hiding, and shooters (ICE agents) hunting them down, pundits from the legacy media now tell us that Trump materialized out of the blue. We continue to be gaslighted.

Peter Wehner recently wrote in The Atlantic:

“Not too long ago, many Republicans proudly referred to themselves as “constitutional conservatives.” They believed in the rule of law; in limiting the power of government, especially the federal government; in protecting individual liberty; and in checks and balances and the separation of powers. They opposed central planning and warned about emotions stirred up by the mob and the moment, believing, as the Founders did, that the role of government was to mediate rather than mirror popular passions. They recognized the importance of self-restraint and the need to cultivate public and private virtues. And they had reverence for the Constitution, less as a philosophical document than a procedural one, which articulated the rules of the road for American democracy.”

Publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic have long been waging war against reality. There is no laudable past to comfort us during Trump’s dystopian reign, no time when we enjoyed the rule of law, overseen by honorable Republicans and Democrats. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine during the presidency of Bill Clinton. We have travelled long and obliviously to get to where we are now, and the legacy media has kept us staring at mirages for a long time. We ought to hold them accountable.