Posted on 10/30/2002 3:05:51 PM PST by knighthawk
From the outset of the sniper drama one word has been hauled out repeatedly by commentators to describe him: "loser." In the beginning, the moniker seemed both reasonable and appropriately censorious. For within a culture that venerates bright, shiny-penny winners -- be it the last person standing on Survivor or the guy who tops Forbes magazine's annual "richest" list -- there are few more damning social stigmas than being labeled a loser.
Never mind that the criticism had a smug schoolyard taunt aspect to it, implying as it does that the object of such scorn is of a different strata than the accuser. That too made sense. Of course the demented sniper occupied a pathetic netherworld unknown to the average CNN commentator or viewer who bought into the culturally prevalent view of the loser as a working-class sociopath raging against the system, like the creepy ex-Marine Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver or the laid-off engineer played by Michael Douglas in Falling Down who cracks up and sets off on a deadly shooting spree.
Everyone was looking for a "stereotypical white male loser, unemployed and unemployable and unable to get laid by anybody ..." as Mark Steyn caustically referred to the then-prevailing wisdom.
Now, of course, we know that the experts were in this themselves losers, and that the primary sniper suspect, John Muhammad, is a more complex, dangerous creature -- an ambitious criminal, a controlling parent, a man given an honourable discharge from the army, a man who appeared very able to get laid.
Still, commentators couldn't let go of the loser bromide. "He was just a loser," wrote Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail, providing a list of what made him so: he was a "failure as a husband and a father, a failure as a businessman, an undistinguished military man too. A deadbeat."
In The Washington Post, April Witt and Justin Blum more concisely termed him a "serial loser," clearly missing the point that what really matters now is his role as a serial killer.
The Sunday Telegraph, to its credit, recognized that the loser moniker might be a tad simplistic given that he wasn't the stereotypical loner: "He was a loser," proclaimed one headline "but one kid thought he was the greatest."
Newsweek too acknowledged that the loser label was at odds with Muhammad's relentless quest for control: "It is hard to know just how John Muhammad might have crossed over from being a run-of-the-mill loser, an overbearing father who conned and intimidated his ex-wives, to become a homicidal Svengali who led a teenage accomplice into mass murder."
Whether Muhammad is a run-of-the mill loser or a high-achieving loser is laughably beside the point, though telling of media obsession with personality, with focusing more on who the snipers are rather than what they've done. And, as result, another so-called loser is now part of the psycho-celebrity pantheon in which his motivation is parsed nightly on the news, along with the what-kind-of-breakfast-cereal-did-he-eat scrutiny more commonly accorded society's so-called winners.
But labeling those who commit heinous acts as losers isn't simply sloppy semantics; it has potential legal consequences. Robert Precht, an assistant dean of the University of Michigan Law School, for instance, has just finished writing a book titled Defending Mohammad, about his experiences representing one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.
Precht argues, as only a criminal defence lawyer can, that "a constant thread of the people I dealt with is they viewed themselves as losers." One can see it now: the loser defence in which terrorists blame their loser status for their crimes.
Clearly there have to be more appropriate descriptors for the accused snipers. How about bad? Or even twisted, demented, lunatic? Or, even the currently popular "evil," that non-negotiable personality default?
Ironically, the loser rhetoric was thrown into sharp relief on Friday when non-stop sniper coverage was interrupted by the tragic news of the death of U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, a politician known for often standing alone in his fight for causes such as welfare and health-care reform.
He lost more battles than he won, yet Wellstone, billed by Salon as "The last great liberal hero," was widely admired across party lines as an unflagging advocate for the disenfranchised and dispossessed, terms that in more semantically polite times used to describe society's real losers.
His untimely death was a reminder that not too long ago the loser was not a threat to society but rather someone to be protected by it. And that calling the suspected sniper a loser is not only cheap but wrong. Not only does it minimize his responsibility, it callously dismisses the grief of those who were devastated by his horribly successful hits.
More to the point, calling him a loser even further marginalizes the plight of society's true losers -- those who don't have cars that can be retrofitted into killing machines, those who don't have the wherewithal to bomb buildings, those who aren't the subject of endless analysis on Larry King Live, those who we don't, or chose not to, even see.
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