Bad Moon Rising

"The antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow."

By JOHN LEAKE

This morning, while I drank my coffee and tried to wake up, I found myself (for no particular reason) scrolling my Twitter feed.

I’ve never understood how Twitter works and why my feed is populated with some images and stories and not others. I suppose the content is generated by people who I have, over the years, elected to follow. Dr. McCullough’s posts invariably pertain to medical scholarship, but there are loads of other posts of videos—shot in cities and towns all over America—of young people attacking each other in classrooms, looting Walmart, shooting each other, smashing up stores and gas stations, yelling obscenities, and generally acting like total lunatics. An especially disturbing video showed a boy (dressed up like a girl) walk into a filling station convenience store carrying an axe and then subsequently—with no apparent motive—attacking two customers with it. I’ve never seen anyone struck in the face by an axe before, and I found it extremely disturbing.

CORRECTION: After I published this post, a reader told me that the axe attack did NOT happen in the USA, but in Australia. The reader included a link to a news report about the attack, which described the assailant as Evie Amati. The report states:

She was sentenced to a minimum of four and a half years behind bars, after her lawyer argued her transgender operation caused her immense pain and contributed to her later trying to kill strangers.

The U.S. is a huge country populated by over 330 million people, and most of them are carrying phones equipped with video cameras. This produces a high probability that any dramatic and violent act will be filmed and posted on the internet. This new technological state of affairs has given us a view of violence and chaos that we never had before, so we should be mindful of the possibility that such scenes are NOT representative of what is going on in most places at most times.

It’s been a long time since I looked at any per capita violent crime statistics, and I know that towns like Chicago have always had violent neighborhoods and violent periods of history. Nevertheless, I also know from talking to longtime residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York that these cities have, in recent times, experienced a dramatic spike in property and violent crime.

Statistics aside, the violence and chaos documented on my Twitter feed this morning struck me as having a different quality from crime video footage I’ve viewed in the past. What is particularly disturbing is the lack of apparent motive. When I was growing up in Texas in the eighties, it was very common for boys to get into fistfights, but these were ritualized, pecking order confrontations in the schoolyard or playing field, and they almost always ended when one boy got knocked down and gave up. The ferocious classroom assaults that are now being documented appear to be downright homicidal. In my day, such assaults were unthinkable.

Likewise, what is the motive for the totally random acts of violence that are now being videotaped on American streets? Such crimes appear to have no motive, which gives them an eery similarity to serial murder, for which “no apparent motive” is often a hallmark.

My Twitter feed this morning reminded me of Edmund Burke’s famous sentence in Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he describes what happens when a society’s institutional order breaks down, and humans return to their archaic, tribal, and warlike animal state. When this happens, a once great civilization lapses into what he called:

The antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.