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| Momism at Work in Arkansas?` |
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| Okay, you explain these murders......... |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, March 25, 1998. I wonder if it is possible to draw any sweeping conclusion from the Arkansas shootings yesterday. Two disturbed children, aided by at least one other, were able to obtain a van with lots of weapons, have their school vacated, and then shoot females as they came out. Not all the wounded are females, those may have been bad shots. The children wore camouflage, will be tried as adults, and seem to be militia wannabes of some sort. Meeting the responsible adults in their life will be most informing, although we can probably describe them now. We want to avoid that. The only really awful thing that happened to me during my travels through the legal system, I think I have told you, was the contact with deep-rooted fear and loathing for women among incarcerated men. There has to be a connection here, but any insight with a tone of truth eludes me. It may be, Charles Baxter writes, that insight with its smell of recently molded plastic is a last stand of belief in a secular age. It is, too often, merely a fable with a pre-tested moral from focus groups. It may be that men really are violent bastards, period, and that’s all there is to it. Surely, there is no conceivable form of rejection that a female can give a twelve year old that would propel a normal person to do much besides snuffle in private. The two murderers were nurtured to this moment. They were primed for it. What is this animosity towards women that could lead two children to indiscriminately kill? In 1942, Philip Wylie wrote a book called Generation of Vipers in which he unloaded his theory about Momism. In short, he said women’s status had changed too quickly for our culture to acclimate; we made women into sex objects, and then turned them into baby machines, a process that allowed them plenty of free time to become harpies and shrews who demanded perpetual guilt-ridden reverence from their children because they received NO respect elsewhere. Wylie pointed out that in the middle of the Second World War, army battalions were used to spell out MOM on parade fields, something no other country would continence or could imagine doing. If true, the vestiges of momism are seen even here in Boulder, where children at soccer games are led in cheers for Mom for taking them to practice and games where they gab in a manner Wylie describes well. Surely, a great deal of gender animosity is inculcated at an early age. But….enough for mass murder by the age of twelve? It will be interesting to watch how this event is covered. We can be relatively certain that it will not be framed and discussed in terms of a sexual harassment, although murder for being a girl might qualify. It will not be discussed in terms of sex at all, although clearly this is a proto-sex crime. It will be discussed solely in terms of guns and children, militias, and declining moral values with the clear whiff of pre-molded plastic insight. |
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