Oui posted this article today-Taking the Iraq War Home – LAPD Terror.
The opening sentences:
A warrior, unsettled after Iraq duty, goes on a rampage in Southern California. It’s not clear whether he suffered from PTSD or had a Narcissistic personality disorder. Either way, a combat trained Navy Seal is fully armed, dangerous and seeking revenge.
I don’t know what else to say, except:
Malcolm X warned us 50+ years ago. Eventually, the chickens always come home to roost. A nation cannot put its soldiers in harm’s way for no discernibly valid reasons without turning some of them…the too tightly wound, the ones who are living on the brink…into well-trained enemies of that system. This guy has snapped, and there is already hell to pay about it. Do we think that he is somehow alone!!!??? The only one? Please.
We have unbalanced children taking their video game/violent movie/so-called “attention inducing” drug-fueled combat fantasies right through the mirror into real life. We have thousands and thousands of poverty-stricken kids of all races with nothing whatsoever to lose, out there on the streets trying to get over. They have been driven over the edge by the realization that this society doesn’t give a flying fuck about them other than in their roles as minimum wage-indentured servants or disposable soldiers with guns fighting blood-for-oil wars.
I have been saying this and saying this for years here and elsewhere on the leftiness blogs. We cannot maintain our current economic imperialist policies abroad and we cannot maintain our utter disregard for the education of our children and the production of a truly healthy culture in which they can grow. Not if we want to survive.
Both problems are the direct result of corporate control of the country. Corporations have no long view…they are quarterly-driven success machines. If there is a profit shown during a quarter, that’s what they continue to do, no matter if that profit is the result of an unjust war waged on trumped-up charges, financial criminality of mind-boggling proportions or the destruction of a culture by bottom-line productions like that totally bullshit “Grammy Awards” thing that lumbered through the airwaves this week.
Those who support this system…for any reasons, including the fear that it will break down if real reforms are instituted…do so as creatures of that same short-term mindset that drives corporations. Win at any cost and damn the consequences.
Well…I got one of your “consequences,” right here!!!
You made him. You deal wid it.
You think Obama is going to somehow “change things?” Wake the fuck up. Look at the corporations that funded him. Look at the corporations that slanted the coverage of the latest election from the get-go to ensure that he would have no real opposition. Look at the content of the National Defense Authorization Act. He is here to preserve the status quo. Nothing more and nothing less. Does he believe that this is the best we can do at this point? Probably, but that’s no excuse.
We need real change.
When?
Before the main flock of chickens flies home to exact the justice that comes to all oppressors?
Before some other person or group of people light a fire under our ass that will completely disrupt this system?
Before we topple into military rule?
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
Someone to clear our system’s Augean stables of all of the accumulated military industrial complex chickenshit before the main flock gets here and really fucks things up? Someone like that would have to be one hell of a pisser, a true Hercules for our time.
Let us pray.
Or, as the classic cold war line goes, “In case of nuclear attack, bend over, put your head between your knees and kiss your mortal ass goodbye.”
Later (I hope)…
AG
.
As of this moment, there appear to be mixed reports about Dorner’s death. The cabin where he had been holed up this afternoon burned to the ground. Some stations started reporting about an hour ago that what appeared to be his body had been recovered. Others dispute that claim.
NBC’s local affiliate coverage. I would not be surprised if they do find his body once the site has cooled down. Given his set of experiences, he was a time bomb waiting to go off. I don’t see him as a monster or a hero (or anti-hero) as he seems to be portrayed. I see someone who was broken.
and they did. A combination of gas canisters and flashbang/stun grenadeswill ignite and burn down the place.
SWAT officers shouted ‘burn that f**** house down!’ (AUDIO)
But…broken by what?
AG
The million dollar question.
His termination suit against the LAPD was over in October 2011 when the CA appeal court ruled against him. Yet he waited until his 2/1/13 separation from the Navy to target his attorney’s daughter and fiancee.
He requested that if possible his brain should be donated for study — that suggests that he felt something was off.
Well of course he felt “something was off,” Marie.
He wasn’t stupid except insofar as the fact that he spent decades thinking that this system had anything whatsoever honorable left within it. Innocence more than stupidity, I think.
He spent time in the Navy, still looking for some kind of honor I suppose. He didn’t find it…on the evidence, not enough to quell his devils, anyway. And then he went over the bend.
So it goes.
A precis of what will eventually happen to the entire culture if it doesn’t straighten its shit out soon.
Nut City.
One man?
One hundred?
Thousands?
Tens of thousands?
The difference between one broken man amplified by a media foofaraw and the total collapse of a system.
Syria West.
A thousand times heavier.
When?
Who knows?
Let us pray.
AG
In Dorner’s case, we’ll probably never really know precisely what broke him. We can make some guesses based on what he would have experienced while he had been on duty in the military and as a police officer – institutions that arguably are rotten barrels at risk for producing more than a few bad apples (to borrow a phrase Phil Zimbardo likes to use).
Our country has way too many firearms, which has made us an outlier with regard to a lot of violent crimes among other developed nations for a long time. If there is any good news, it’s that gun related violence has trended downward significantly in the last couple decades, and young folks aren’t as prone to gun nuttiness as previous generations. Gun ownership is going downward, which is part of why the NRA is in panic mode. But I digress.
Mental health care in this country is pathetic. Once Obamacare is fully implemented, we’ll see some improvements for the better with regard to mental illness treatment, but it’ll be baby steps. Part of the problem is that although scientists have been saying and demonstrating for what seems like ages that mental disorders are at their root physiological disorders, and hence should be treated as any other bodily disorder, our culture is still stuck somewhere around the time of Descartes (if not still stuck somewhere in the Dark Ages) and views all things mind-related as somehow “nonphysical”. In my more optimistic moments, I believe we might finally catch up in a few decades, probably after I have already died of old age.
We also have a paranoid political undercurrent that has been part of the American zeitgeist for, well, as long as there has been an America. Much of that paranoia comes from elements of the extreme right, but there are a few strands among the left that seem to see Apocalypse as right around the corner. Combine that political paranoia with a lot of firepower and, even without the introduction of extreme stressors from combat or the presence of tangible mental illness, we’re going to be dealing with more violence than our other developed nations deal with.
Clamp down on the guns, get significantly better at mental health care delivery, and we might just see ourselves with practically European-like levels of gun related violence within a matter of a generation. Of course I would want to add to my own wish list getting rid of the violence inherent in being an imperial power, as well as the very real structural violence inherent in the racism, sexism, etc. that still make up the fabric of our particular society to quell the temptation to mass shootings and such even further. I’m more optimistic of parts of that first sentence happening eventually. The rest of it, I wouldn’t count on – maybe the Millennials will tackle some of that once they get a chance to clean up the mess we have left them. Maybe not. I’m no futurist.
Even if the status quo remains, we’ll probably see violence continue to trend slowly downward. We’re nowhere near being Syria West.
As income he received some being in the Navy reserve, this ended Feb. 1, 2013.
Seems somewhat reminiscent of what young people in West Germany were putting on their BMWs back during the early 1970s: “I do not belong to the Baader-Meinhof Group.”