Urban Crime, Serial Killers and Fascism - the Legacy of Neuro-Toxic America ("Murderland" Might Have Taken Us a Step Further)

I grew up in a family with a single mom and a brother old enough to seldom be home. That left me by myself at a young age much of the time in the summer while my mom worked as a lab tech at Hartford Hospital. This was in the 1950's when kids wandered to lots, playgrounds or driveways and improvised baseball and basketball games with no intruding adults. When I could not find a ball game I sometimes set my garage on fire for fun. I would pile up newspapers - the Hartford Times, The Hartford Courant and The Daily Worker (my mom and grandma were party members) provided superb kindling. I doused the piles with gasoline for the lawnmower and the flames licked at the garage ceiling with gyrating orange and blue tongues. Then I sprayed the do-it-yourself hellfire with the garden hose. Damp clouds of steam washed over my face. Choking, lead saturated ashy plumes slipped into my nostrils, my brain, my future. The entire garage had been constructed of concrete so it never caught fire - this allowed me to indulge my inner arsonist again and again.

I loved the smell of gasoline and often stuck my nose into the gas can opening in order to savor the powerful whiff of rotting, resurrected, refined organic matter from hundreds of millions of years ago. I never did this as a means to get high, as some kids do. The smell of gasoline was its own reward. Gasoline has a richly unique pungency that I associate with motor boats bobbing at the dock. I still experience a certain wistful, nostalgic bliss when I fill the tank. But lead causes problems for delicate neurons, and childhood lead exposure has been linked to low IQ, impulsive behavior, lack of empathy and violent crime.

Maybe, somewhere in the multiverse a pristine, unleaded version of me exists - I barely graduated high school, flunked out of a college unchallenging enough to allow me admittance, and somehow muddled and bungled my way to a nominally productive life. Even the brain-damaged have a chance at redemption - some of us. For tens of millions of people, however, lead and other neuro-toxins write their life scripts more harshly. Neuro-toxins do not simply dismantle lives one at a time - a neuro-poisoned population mutates collectively into something ugly and treacherous. This is absolutely undeniable and yet the pundit class has been eerily silent on the political and social sequelae that follow after over a century of relentless environmental terrorism waged against the delicate structures that precariously persist within our skulls. Of all the ways that chemically degraded minds push and pull individuals and societies, we, as consumers of excitement, rather love to linger on violent crime, and barely consider the other consequences of mass brain damage. That brings me to Caroline Fraser's bestselling book, "Murderland."

The nexus between lead exposure and violent crime has been a popular theme in some corners of media since Kevin Drum wrote a 2013 piece in Mother Jones entitled, "America's Real Criminal Element is Lead." Drum, drawing on research by Rick Nevin and Jessica Wolpaw Reyes argued that national, regional, and global graph curves, showing atmospheric concentrations of lead over time, correlate uncannily with the rise and fall of violent crime rates. No other variable - demographic age shifts, policing policies and prison expansion - track the nuances of violent crime as intricately as lead levels.

It is maddeningly difficult to link statistical associations with causality, and violent crime can never be correlated entirely with a single variable. Gun murders in the US, at their lowest ebb, will still be four times higher than those of the UK – brain damage alone cannot reach full potential without the “second amendment.” But the association linking lead and violent crime has deeply compelling narrative force. We know that lead exposure profoundly diminishes both cognitive abilities and emotional resilience. More specifically, some researchers hypothesize that lead interferes with dopamine receptors. Lead shrinks the frontal cortex and victims may lose capacity for reason, empathy and objective thinking. Research suggests that lead exposure makes one vulnerable for later addictions. One study showed that opiate users had higher levels of tibial lead concentrations than controls.

The link between lead exposure and anti-social behavior, reinforced by a welter of scientific studies, undergird “Murderland” and allow Caroline Fraser to bypass the narrative impediment of technical details. Passages like this one published in “Science Direct” help us to read Fraser’s poetry without the distraction of gnawing doubts:

“There are several potential mechanisms for the observed relation between lead exposure and antisocial behavior, though further research is needed to fully elucidate these pathways. One hypothesis centers around the disruption of normal calcium signaling, with downstream effects on myelination and white matter structure in the brain (Brubaker et al., 2009, Lidsky and Schneider, 2003, Marchetti, 2003, McNeill et al., 2004, Raine, 2002). There is some evidence to suggest a decrease in white matter integrity in ASPD (Jiang et al., 2017, Waller et al., 2017), CD (Puzzo et al., 2018), and aggression (Hoptman et al., 2002, Karlsgodt et al., 2015). Another possibility is that these behavior outcomes stem from lead-related changes in the dopaminergic system (Jones and Miller, 2008, Rocha et al., 2004). Dopamine signaling plays a key role in mediating addictive behavior (Di Chiara and Bassareo, 2007), and there are important similarities between pathological aggressive behavior and drug addiction – including the activation of internal reward circuitry and continued pursuit of harmful behaviors despite future consequences (Chester and DeWall, 2017, Golden et al., 2019, Porges and Decety, 2013).”

Caroline Fraser's brilliantly written page turner introduces a brand new theme to the association between lead and violence - serial killers. This is not a work of research, but a conceptual leap across barriers that cannot be spanned by scientists. Fraser is after larger truths that cannot be grasped by “meta-analysis.” She leads us deftly, innocently, to the final epiphany - the real serial killers of consequence are not Ted Bundy, Israel Keyes, Charles Manson or Dennis Rader, but people who poison the world limitlessly for power and profit - names like Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Sloan and Kettering. The founders, plunderers and polluters, the architects of the American dream are the predators that cannot be stymied by home security systems and guard dogs. Fraser is a scathing critic of capitalism and corporate amorality who ties together an impressive number of tangential events, while making little effort to specifically link serial murderers to a scientific framework. It really doesn't matter whether there are peer reviewed studies specifically binding the rarified niche that includes Bundy and Manson to specific brain injuries - for every serial strangler there is a smelter, for every bludgeoning killer a smokestack, and for all of them a world enveloping, invisible cloud of tetraethyl dust that you and I (if you are old enough) bought at the pump in 1965 for 25 cents a gallon. The nexus between industrial neuro-toxins and serial murderers has narrative plausibility.

Fraser's book seeks to translate the granular details of corporate mass murder into poetry - more prosaic researchers have convinced us of the theory linking neurotoxins and violence, but few have made inroads into the emotional layers of public distress. In the final paragraph the story dissolves into an incantation:

"In the West, light the light sage smudge and cast our spell by sucking the smoke down the stack and going back, back to the days when girls are dragged away washing their clothes and hitching their rides and sleeping in their beds. Help them back into their bodies. Give them a hand up and out of the green river and the trash and the leaf litter. They don't belong there. For the love of all that's holy, strew their paths with daffodils. Let a girl wake in the morning after rain wearing her plea to Saint Christopher, and keep her door latched fast. Put the baby back in the basket. Unmelt the slag, unbreak the rock, unbreathe the air.

Now and forever, let it be over."

With this stunning prayer, I sense that Caroline Fraser has ended her story too abruptly. The "time of serial killers" is not over - our neuro-poisoned era has morphed into something a million times more deadly, at least. The lead-damaged perpetrators have not gone away - far from it – serial killers have aged out. Serial killing is a young man's game, and Ted Bundy, had he not been finally fried in the electric chair would have retired well before his eightieth birthday. The question is this: what other mischief have we - the brain-damaged masses – stumbled into? If lead poisoned America had merely endured a short spike in urban gang violence, and a few decades of a tiny collection of serial murderers, we might breathe a collective sigh of relief and move on. But there is the staggering matter of some estimated hundred million global tetraethyl lead premature deaths (accumulated across the last century). The Lancet in 2018 still put the count at 412,000 annual US lead-caused fatalities (from pipes and paint, as well as from the ongoing effects of tetraethyl - phased out late in the last century).

Even more terrifying - the social movements of the lead damaged masses threaten to merge serial murder with executive decree. For every Randall Woodfield there are a million disoriented, paranoid zealots, eager to sublimate perverse sexual urges upon something greater than private, fleeting, violent acts. The sadistic fantasies of multitudes can be hammered into a single pointed blade – pooled bad intentions manifest in a psychopathic leader.

We have the graphs and statistics - the age demographic exposed most to high levels of tetraethyl lead, Gen X, also overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Gen Xers have a disproportionate number of lead related psychological and medical afflictions, and they voted for their lead-addled proxy more than any other demographic. Donald Trump grew up in the shadow of the smelters from the Flemm Lead Company in Queens, NY. Impulsive, with the attention span of a toddler, functionally illiterate, Trump fits the profile of a lead exposure victim to a T. Strikingly, Trump is an indicted suspect in serial sex crimes, and famously incapable of expressing either empathy or remorse – even as a matter of performative theatrics. We lack childhood blood levels of neuro-toxins for Trump, and there are no studies of his residual bone and teeth lead levels that I know of. But we have no such analysis for any of Fraser’s killers either. Perhaps Trump’s Gen X acolytes intuitively recognize the commonality of lead injury in his bizarre rhetorical quirks and primitive, angry thoughts. Ted Bundy also aspired to run for political office, and Trump’s signature pop diagnosis – pathological narcissism - has been a commonly observed feature in serial murderers. Scott Bonn, writing in Psychology Today noted the pompous bragging and preening of the “BTK” killer, Dennis Rader, whose manifest ego frighteningly resembles that of our fascist president.

Then there is Hitler- born in Braunau am Inn in upper Austria, he would have been subject to a number of nearby lead smelters. German military ambitions were tied to armaments manufacturing, and the buildup to WW I filled German and Austrian skies with the smoke from factories making lead bullets. The generation that propelled Hitler to power in 1933 would have been comprised of WW I veterans and youthful Nazis whose parents labored in the German war industry making rifles, tanks, submarines, planes and artillery. These workers would have arrived home covered in toxic dust. Fumes rained down from smokestacks, and, in the 1920’s, tetraethyl smoke would have entered the mix. WW I battlefield sites, to this day, feature toxic levels of lead residue.

Hitler and the Nazis created a truly bizarre story of Aryan glory and Jewish corruption - a tale that would have died a quick and merciful death were it not for the shrunken frontal lobes driving a manic, expansive, narcissistic vision. How can we imagine that neuro-toxins animate a small collection of disconnected serial murderers without also tainting the mass psychology that drives political movements? Is it odd that so many of the most zealous Nazis grew up in Austria – in proximity to the Fryderyk Works in Upper Silesia that produced 178,000 tons of lead by 1886? One of the world’s greatest lead smelters continued in operation until 1936, pouring vast clouds of lead dust across the centers of Nazi development. We have the names – Hitler, Eichmann, Karl August Hank, Franz Stangl (commandant of Treblinka, and the subject of Gitta Sereny’s famous book, “Into That Darkness”), Amon Göth (the notoriously sadistic monster who ruled over the Krakow Plazow concentration camp, featured in “Schindler’s List”), Maximillian Grabner (in charge of torture at Auschwitz). All came of age in Austria huffing lead laced emissions from nearby smelters.

If scientists have concluded that lead exposure causes injuries to the brain that sometimes result in deficits in empathy, why stop with street murders and serial killers? Fascism is, among other things, a mass movement centered on cruelty, violence and lack of empathy. Is this association not obvious? If violent rage and lack of empathy significantly result from lead exposure (in even small doses) then how might lead injuries shape a political movement?

Who, other than serial killers, hunt down and kidnap women and children while wearing masks? ICE agents are MAGA rock stars, the proxy actors for US revenge fantasies, the vicarious representatives of the lead poisoned hordes from Gen X who, almost single handedly, rallied for Trump. Fascism is serial killing with the official sanction of the state. Sometimes people murder in rogue fashion and sometimes we join as patriots to commit more glorious crimes. I am suggesting that fascism originates with environmental degradation, a view that binds the environmental/climate movement to the cause of anti-fascism. A study out of Duke University asserts that the US has lost “800 million cumulative IQ points since 1940” due to lead, perhaps leaving us with limited cognitive means to defend ourselves against malicious politicians.

Fascism is all about the environment – the tens of millions of climate refugees inspiring nativist fears, the deregulation of environmental protections, the political movements running on platforms of militarism, fossil fuels and mass deportation, all reflect an ongoing state of neurotoxic distress.

I enjoyed every page of Caroline Fraser’s “Murderland,” but after the final incantation, I still wanted more - the story leaves us hanging. We now have more neurotoxins than ever – lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, organophosphates, chlorpyrifos, atrazine, tetrachchloroethylene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polybrophenated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), dioxins, glyphosphate, glyoxalates – forever chemicals that float eternally in the wet substances of voters and political leaders. Are we worrying about the future of a civilization manifesting symptoms of acute brain damage or are we worried that life on earth will be overwhelmed by our chemical habits?

Political hack, James Carville, famously opined “it’s the economy, stupid,” to delineate voter priorities, but reality is more stark, if human survival rather than election results are your gauge.

It’s the environment, stupid, might be the phrase to define the priorities of activists. “Murderland” by Caroline Fraser is a must read to solidify that conclusion, but she did not finish the story.