Conservatism, Racism, Misogyny, Financial Vulnerability, and Guns: Another Perfect-Storm Winger Murderer Makes His Mark by KTK

The story is breaking now of yet another mass-murder/suicide shooting by a right-wing whackjob with a bag full of guns and a desperate need to destroy other people to vindicate his own failures. Yesterday, some useless winger creep named George Sodini marched into his gym in Pittsburgh carrying a duffel bag with at least 6 guns, specifically sought out a women’s aerobics class that included his “ex-girlfriend” [UPDATE: See below], and shot up the room, killing three women including the girlfriend, wounding at least five others, and then killing himself. He left a note making it clear he had planned the whole thing long in advance, and had specifically targeted women. Even more frighteningly, he had a Web site – apparently publicly accessible – with a blog-like diary on which he had detailed his growing obsessions and his detailed plans for the killing, and on which he had pre-stated both the date of the killing and the date of his own death: Tuesday, August 4, 2009.

Sodini doesn’t fit the obvious stereotype of the asocialized Taxi Driver psychokiller: he worked as a computer admin for a major law firm, made a decent salary, and reported his own net worth at over a quarter million dollars. In pictures, he appears good looking, fit, and well-dressed. In other ways, however, as revealed on his blog, he was obviously miserable and vengeful: 48 years old, he wrote that he had lived through “25 years of no fun”, had not had sex for almost 20 years, and was a complete failure with women. But there is much more. He states he conceived of his plan for the killings last summer, before the Obama election, but decided to hold out to see how things turned out. (Coincidentally or not, the day of the murders was Obama’s birthday.) He rants on the blog about the new black president, and about the “bruthrs”, “The Black Man”, “Amerika”, and, inevitably, “the liberal media”. In the same paragraph he complains that “dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes!” and his belief that white women in college all have sex with black men and that is part of the reason he couldn’t get laid. He anguishes that “there are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one”. He rails against his “ex-girlfriend”, and also describes his anxieties over layoffs at his job. He says he has nothing in his life except his paycheck and he feared that would be taken from him, too. He also states he was in part enabled to commit the crime by his knowledge that God’s grace is granted by faith, not works, and “Christ paid for EVERY sin”, so he’d be OK; he touchingly expresses his comfort in the knowledge that he would be with God and Jesus in heaven just as soon as he got done killing a bunch of people who undermined his view of himself and his world. He’d been accumulating guns for 10 years or more, but apparently acquired more recently, after he concocted the murder plan.

In other words, he was a perfect storm of conservative insecurities: race, and black ascendancy; the political implications of the Obama election, particularly for white Americans; miscegenation, and black men invading his sexual territory; women, and their refusal to have sex with him; and the particular woman who had thrown him over. He was anxious over his financial security, notwithstanding that he had retained his job after coworkers were laid off, was well-educated and well-paid, and had considerable assets (like many right-wingers, he was apparently surprised to find that he wasn’t guaranteed always to be among the economically advantaged, or that having his fate tied to corporate largess could be any kind of a problem). He clung to self-justifying religious beliefs that not only ratified his exalted view of himself and his perquisites, but endorsed and enabled his use of violence to take revenge on those who challenged that. And his devotion to guns was, obviously, closely tied to his penchant for using them to shoot people to death to avenge his personal discomforts.

He was exactly what we expect from people who harbor the beliefs, values, and fears that he exemplified. And he was not “crazy” in the sense of having “diminished mental capacity” or an inability to tell right from wrong: he was highly functional in a technical job in a buttoned-down law firm, right up to the weekend before the killings. He had planned this for at least a year, had attempted it once before (but backed down), and had done a “practice run” the day before the actual event. No one knew the truth about him, but no one suspected anything wrong. He had been building up these resentments for almost his entire adult life, but they had never obstructed him from completing college, pursuing a challenging career in a demanding environment, and becoming highly financially successful. He was a perfectly functional, educated, at least reasonably intelligent adult with a long history of successful engagement in the world and a successful career, who also had the logistical capacity to plan his killing well in advance, change plans according to circumstance, stockpile guns for the purpose, and practice his plan before executing it. And the bizarre obsessions and fears that drove his impulse to kill were themselves not abnormal, at least on the right wing. The political and racial bits were the standard fodder of mainstream wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, while the sexual obsessions, misogyny, and lack of real-world competence at inter-gender relations are basically the definition of the patriarchal right wing. These are the beliefs that made him rave about race, sex, and gender; they are the beliefs and values that made him finally hatch a plan to commit a mass killing of the women he hated (in general) because they did not conform to his sexual/social desires. But those beliefs did not make him crazy – they just made him a conservative.

Before ending, let us note that there are oddities here, too: the woman he [reportedly] targeted is repeatedly described in the press and by bloggers as his “girlfriend”, but, if what he writes on his blog is true, it’s obvious that they never had sex and apparently had dated only a few times. He thought he had some claim on her – a claim powerful enough not merely to control her life but to kill her at his whim – simply because he wanted her; the most trivial and temporary relationship was enough to move him to kill her for the crime of ending what any normal person would see never actually existed. But the press implicitly endorse his view of her by referring to her as an ex-girlfriend. [UPDATE: There were such references in the press, but they appear to have been mistaken. The press is now reporting that he did not personally know any of the shooting victims. He wrote specifically, before the attack, about targeting women, and had circled the women's aerobics class on the gym schedule in his possession, but apparently did not know the individual women he killed.]

Another thing is the way the various commenters on the incident insist on seeing it through a narrow and prescriptive lens. “Jack and Jill Politics” makes the incisive – and shocking – observation that, although the bizarre racist sexual rants quoted above appear at the very top of the homepage on Sodini’s Web site – the very last entry, in which he explicitly stated his intention to commit these murders the following day – they are not mentioned in any of the press accounts of the story. The obvious fact that he harbored perverse and psychotic delusions about black sexuality, and fears of black sexual competition, in immediate conjunction with his similar obsession with Barack Obama and black political power, simply does not appear relevant in the mainstream media! But they are not alone. CNN quotes some of his complaints about failure with women, but none of the racial angle. The admirable PZ Myers, outspoken atheist and scourge of religious cranks, focuses entirely on the final paragraph on the blog, containing Sodini’s Christian excuse-making for murder and misogyny (this is indeed noteworthy and quoteworthy, and one of the many lessons to be drawn from this incident, but Myers’s lack of interest in any other factor betrays an obsession with religious wrongdoing that is a bit myopic even by my standards!). And “Above the Law” – a law-firm insiders’ Web site – reaches an absurd height by failing to mention any of the above issues, but instead puts the whole thing in the context of the current trend of layoffs at big law firms.

This incident – “shocking”, “staggering”, “inexplicable” as it will inevitably be called – explains itself, all too clearly. A perfectly typical winger finally walked his talk – the exact same talk that drives a major political party and much of its constituency. He did nothing more than what people like him do; he differs from his fellows only in the extent of his nerve, or of his feeling that he had nothing to lose. But every single commentator on the incident that I have seen so far refuses to see his obsessions and fears and hatreds as part of the whole that has been blaring at them from every AM radio and Republican press release for 30 years or more. Each spins some single aspect of it as an example of his outlier status: he couldn’t get a date; he was afraid for his job. But those explanations are not merely inadequate, they don’t even make sense. People who just want to date women don’t kill women; men who hate women kill women. People afraid for their jobs try to protect those jobs, or find better ones; they don’t take a scheduled day off work, shoot 8 people at random and then commit suicide. Nothing about wanting a date or fearing a layoff makes you rave about sex-crazed black men and the white “hoez” who “dig” them – being a racist misogynist asshole does that. And what is there that explains being, simultaneously, a racist, Obama-hating, sex-fearing, woman-hating loser who pulls out his stockpile of guns to murder a woman because she refused his demands, and other women randomly because they were sexually inaccessible, while claiming God approves? Conservatism.