A Lonely Boy Hiding Behind The Front Door

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania, there has been a lot of talk, on both sides of the false dichotomy that declares itself the whole truth of American politics, about how crimes like this are the “result” of the alarmist and life-or-death rhetoric that characterizes political speech today, the only debate being over which side is responsible for this dangerous tone. It is certainly true that both sides can make a legitimate claim against the other with regard to irresponsible talk; each half of the uniparty, at least since Trump took over the GOP half, has made it a central theme to warn its voters at every turn that if the other side is not stopped immediately, the country will be lost and tyranny instituted within weeks. (Calm down, everyone. Your country was lost years ago and tyranny has already taken hold, so no election will fundamentally change anything.)

Aside from the dubious and trivial efforts at cause-effect reasoning entailed in these exploitive talking points from the two parties, it became apparent very quickly in this case that this assassination attempt, like most other such attempts on famous people, was not a political statement or the mad action of a twisted ideologue. On the contrary, and as per usual, it appears to have been nothing more than the desperate folly of a broken soul, which could have happened at any time, under any political conditions. (Whether the secret service and other law enforcement agencies handled the threat properly is another question, one for which the answer, given what we know now, is an obvious and emphatic “No.”)

As soon as I saw, yesterday, a video clip of the criminal, Thomas Crooks, receiving his high school diploma at his graduation ceremony, I felt quite certain that I knew who he was well enough, and that for all the media’s eagerness to hold the public in rapt attention for profit, the real answers about this boy would be pretty simple. Crooks was a school loser, one of those boys who are described as “loners” by the few people who remember them at all, because they have few friends and spend most of their days — correct that, most of their weekdays — feeling lost and terrified in their teenage social milieu. If you want to play the “root causes” game, you could at least put away the political posturing and “violent rhetoric” finger-pointing, and point your finger for once at a genuine villain in such cases: school. Compulsory mass schooling. The slaughterhouse of souls that we laughably pass off as “public education.”

Thomas Crooks alone is guilty of his crime, and worthy of his fate. He willfully killed a man, and tried to kill others. But no one is born for that, or born to that. Things happen to us. Forces shape us. Habits of the mind begin in response to needs. Sensitivities are either moderated or heightened by one’s circumstances and interactions. We are ultimately, as rational beings, responsible for our choices, but those choices are made from a list of options that is drawn up in our minds by experience, sorted and highlighted according to tastes, hopes, fears, and hungers cultivated in a context. Crooks’ context, from what I can see, was that of a boy who was told, repeatedly and mercilessly, that he didn’t belong and was undesirable, in the midst of a daily (weekday) environment that exaggerates belonging and likability to the all-encompassing status of cardinal virtues. 

Thomas Matthew Crooks was a half-baked assassin, who was killed ten seconds too late. But the oven in which his identity was baked, I would guess, was primarily public school. To be clear, I am not talking about a bad teacher, or a mean bully, although I am sure Crooks encountered plenty of those, as most of us do, particularly the sensitive outsiders, who are more inclined to see and feel such everyday monsters for what they are. No, I am talking about the social institution of compulsory schooling, which has hypnotized an entire civilized world into the delusion that putting all of a society’s children through twelve or more years of artificial intellectual limitation and emotional torture will somehow lead to positive social or political outcomes. No. It will lead to a wide range of disastrous outcomes, not the least of which, to put it mildly, is the current moral and political climate of the advanced world, which is in no way more clearly defined than by considering the psychological and educational condition of the era’s leading nation, which has sifted itself out to a presidential election — for a second time — between two men as inept, ignorant, and inane as Joe Biden and Donald Trump. 

Occasionally, a young man assailed by monsters, and lacking the fortitude to hold out and survive the onslaught, seeks his revenge on his torturers by becoming them. (Marcus Aurelius: “The best revenge is not to be like him.”) One such young man, it seems, was Thomas Matthew Crooks.

I am sure I am far from alone in this, but as Crooks was identified, and the first scant details and pictures made public, I was immediately reminded of Peter Gabriel’s stellar psychological drama-as-song, “Family Snapshot.” Begin with Gabriel’s lyrical acuity in outlining, with insight and pith, the mind of such a criminal — 

Four miles down, the cavalcade moves on,
Driving into the sun,
If I worked it out right,
They won’t see me or the gun

That rhyme of the Icarus-suggestive “into the sun” with the earthly reality of “me or the gun” comprises an inspired crystallization of the character’s thoughts and intentions. But more importantly, Gabriel and his talented musicians go well beyond mere “serious subject matter” to create a strikingly complete and often jarring musical entertainment. Rather than pare down the music to somber basics in order to highlight the “seriousness” of the lyrics (as even this singer himself in his later pop star/activist style would tend to do), Gabriel produces a mini-operetta of mood changes, antithetical details (the jazzy, smiling saxophone lilting along in the middle verses as Gabriel sings the shooter’s ominous words of self-encouragement, “It’s a matter of time, a matter of will,” is actually unsettling, in a manner so unthinkable in today’s pop music wasteland of profiteering algorithms), and words that do not simply follow the melody, but rather seem to create it. A prime example of this latter element — a characteristic of the best musical theater — comes at the end of the song’s opening section, the internal monologue prelude to the narrator’s assassination attempt, in which the melody’s emotional climax is reached on the word “I,” repeatedly held in Gabriel’s uniquely raspy-earthy voice, in a tone that is half singing, half primal scream, making the spiritual essence of the character’s pained cry for recognition simultaneously the essence of the tune.

I’ve been waiting for this,
I’ve been waiting for this,
All you people in TV land,
I will wake up your empty shells,
Peak time viewing, blown in a flash,
As I burn into your memory cells,
’cause I am alive.

In a manner impossible to imagine in today’s pop music, in which autotuned, smoothed out, predictably droning mass-market mass-production is all there is  — glorified white noise for a world that can no longer stand the silence of self-reflection — Gabriel, in perhaps the best song from his third solo album, uses every trick in the book to give the listener a full experience, rather than a boringly catchy hook and an easy chorus to hum in the car. Depicting a broken soul — not a “broken heart,” that fake and flatulent cliché that fills the “empty shells” of today’s kitsch-laden denizens of “TV (and internet) land” — with empathy and wit, “Family Snapshot” infuses its dark psychological portrayal with genuine moments of beauty and even delicacy in the midst of horror and sadness. Perhaps nothing exemplifies this juxtaposition of the blunt and the beautiful more impressively than the great John Giblin’s fretless bass during the penultimate verse, as Gabriel brings the violent action to a sudden standstill in dreamy silence, and then sings the following accompanied only by Giblin’s contemplative bass solo:

All turn quiet, I’ve been here before,
A lonely boy hiding behind the front door,
My friends have all gone home,
There’s my toy gun on the floor.

In any case, I am quite certain there is much more of Thomas Crooks in that song from forty-four years ago than in all the news media exploitation and political ranting that is being spewed at us about his actions this week.