We live in a serial killer factory called, with renewed irony, the United States of America. The FBI is considered Expert Central for all things serial killer, but even the FBI has no idea how many are active at any given time. Estimates range from 40 to 400 and are conceded to be guesses. Suffice it to say there is a surfeit of them, especially in USA.
In BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, Michael Moore pointed out something that would seem, upon reflection, self-evident, namely that violence, especially the kind brought about by weapons, ought not surprise a place that produces weapons. What holds true for Columbine holds true for the nation. USA is the most violent “civilized” country on the gasping planet. Violence of all sorts is its prime export.
While such facts are not a source of pride, they do provide fodder for some interesting speculation. For example, is USA’s excess of sociopathic greed and psychopathic destructiveness a refinement of the human condition? Examining that question leads to curious conclusions.
Serial killers are thought to be as old as mankind, if not older. Certainly we can spot them here and there through history, although the further back we check, the fewer specific incidents are reported. Prior to the 1800s, we tend to hear only about nobles such as Vlad Tepes, Gille de Rais, or Elizabeth Bathory.
Beginning in the 1600s peasants make the historical records. We find 14 year old Jean Grenier admitting to eating children in 1603. His claim that he became a werewolf resonates into even the prehistorical past because tales of werewolves, vampires, and other mythical creatures likely came about as attempts to explain horrific crime scenes of the type serial killers, or lust killers, or sex criminals, tend to make.
It is in such myth that our speculation deepens. As metaphor for rapacious depredation, few match werewolves and vampires. Feeding off the people, living on their blood and bodies, is a good way to describe nobles and the aristocracy. It’s also a good way to construe modern corporations. Bloodsuckers and ravenous monsters are decent descriptions of the corporate mentality current deploying greed like teeth and talons to tear away gobbets of pulsing planet. Lives are consumed in the process.
Imagine, too, how affected history has been by a collective fear of monsters. Banding together in caves does not require a postulated memory of pre Ice Age beasts such as saber-toothed tigers or cave bears when serial killers were always with us, unseen but hard at work feeding off us. Those others among us pass largely unseen, and leave behind spoor the likes of which has fueled our nightmares since before we tried to tame fire.
From our caves we made villages, towns, and cities, thinking to keep monsters at bay even as we provided the monsters among us perfect protective cover. Crowds are best for serial killers; ask Jack the Ripper. Slums and ghettos are perfect hunting grounds. Too many people, too few resources, and desperate competition to survive all provide a crop of victims just begging to be torn to shreds and sometimes eaten.
Even now we see the effect of serial killers on our public policy, which remains fear-driven. We spend more in USA on defense than any dozen other countries combined, yet manage only to make ourselves less safe by providing safe haven for sociopaths and psychopaths, individual and corporate both.
What’s really happening, of course, is politicians using fear to stampede the populace into either supporting pork barrel programs or being distracted from noticing the looting. Either way, fear-driven responses are destroying what was once the USA.
In other words, sociopaths are attacking the nation, now, both metaphorically and literally. From being the world’s leading serial killer factory, USA is now also a victim.
Once again, huge effects flow from these human-shaped creatures. These things in human guise are driving us toward extinction and, so fear-driven are we, so jumpy and kept on edge, that we the people project our terror on imaginary villains such as Al Qaeda, (actually just a data base in a CIA computer), bin Laden, (a sick old coot ostracized from his wahabi family for his extreme religious views and murdered by American SEAL Team 6, now a Major Motion Picture), and vague Them who “hate our freedom” and other ridiculous lies. What other countries hate is USA shoving its way into their affairs and pissing all over them when they balk. What other countries hate is USA killing their populace in the name of enforcing the IMF and underhanded, vampirish, werewolfian big business.
Mountain top removal, fracking, oil spills, clear cutting forests, monoculture, GMO, unrestricted pollution, nitrogen run-off, loss of topsoil, ubiquitous dioxins, radiation leaks, climate change due to global warming… the list of attacks is endless.
No documented attack by wolves on human beings can be found in the historical record, despite what ranchers and Sarah Palin may tell you. So why were-wolf?
First, no question that a wolf’s howl is eerie, especially if one is huddled in a cave by a small campfire at night. Our Troglodyte ancestors, however, knew which animals to fear and which to give a respectful distance, from experience. They likely would have known wolves to be safe if left alone.
In Greek and Roman times, educated people understood myths as metaphor. Only children might have taken them literally, or the most credulous heathen. Werewolves were used to explain why some people did wild, bad things. Wolves, too, suckled Romulus & Remus, remember; the wild offered succor to early Romans, in short.
By latter Roman times, the church had introduced blood to the vampire myth, which in Ancient Greece had referred to siphoning off life-force. Making it literally blood allowed a vivid link both to form between church doctrine and deeply rooted fears. Could a promise of salvation in exchange for obedience be far behind?
By the Dark Ages literalism, largely thanks to the church, ran rampant. Peasants lived poorly and were prey for life’s uncertainties, as well as chattel for the nobles. With priests whispering superstitions into their ears, they created a bestiary of monsters to cower from and, when desecrated bodies were found, to blame. Wolves, gliding through the deep shadows in the thick forests of Europe, caught the bad rap of projected ignorance. Wolves are big, fairly visible, certainly audible, and they run in packs; they intimidate by numbers. People projected their fear on wolves.
Wolves also prey upon herd animals, so domestic sheep and cattle were at risk. This threatened livelihoods and engendered bitter hatred.
This projected, if unwarranted, fear of wolf violence translated when people were found demolished. “Wolves did this,” villagers would cry, when perhaps the deceased died in some other way. Yes, wolf prints and other spoor may have been found; they are scavengers. Found meat is good meat, to a wolf. But wrong conclusions were leapt to, and hidden behind a screen of bloody wolf accusation lurked the serial killer.
This meshed nicely with the church’s rants against man’s “animal nature”, meaning sex and violence. Keeping the peasantry docile and stupid was the church’s role. Nobles supported church efforts in this by arranging wolf hunts to eradicate the scourge. Thinning and cutting the forests eased fears to a degree while fattening the landowners’ purses.
Serial killers were identified only when caught red-handed, a telling phrase. Blood on their hands, these monsters in human form were considered debased, animalistic, and somehow cursed. Werewolves made perfect sense, literally, to too many Medieval peasants.
Only after the Enlightenment had held sway for a couple centuries did we begin seeing instances of serial killers in the historical record handled as mental aberration rather than superstitious evil. Educated people, at least, began realizing there were those among us who did not experience life as most did it. There were, in fact, deeply flawed, inadequate, or otherwise skewed people who lacked the very qualities we cite as human: Compassion, empathy, and conscience.
These subhumans — Italian criminology theory held sway for quite some time, stating that recidivist and serial criminals were atavistic, throwbacks to earlier “types” of human being, essentially calling them animals — were responsible for horrific crimes now and then, and seemed not to care. They could not be reformed or even rendered contrite. If left at large they would simply continue torturing and killing at will, and many would improve their skills and expand their repertoire.
Fear of such beings began to accrue for the public with the advent of Jack the Ripper in London, England’s east end Whitechapel district in 1888. The resultant publicity, the saucy nickname, and the mass media afforded by newspapers made Jack the Ripper our first “modern” serial killer. In fact, he was far from it, but he was the first treated to notoriety of an immediate sort. It galvanized the public, and fear-driven reform resulted.
Today we use the term “serial killer” and other jargon thanks to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit and its pioneering profilers. We pretend as a society to a sophistication our fear-driven behavior belies. Horror movies once got away with Universal style monsters such as reanimated corpses, vampires, and werewolves. Today, our bugaboos have matriculated through radioactive mutants and hidden Fifth Columnists and Communists to sharks and, finally, serial killers.
The killer thriller is basic now. Hannibal Lector needs no introduction and is an anti-hero for our new world. The American Serial Killer Factory keeps pumping them out. Once it was relatively rare to hear of a Black Dahlia or a Starkweather. Then it became commonplace to watch Son of Sam or Zodiac killings unfold. Now, our children take guns to school and arrange ambush in order to keep up the all-American slaughter.
Would a peaceful, peace-loving, genuinely peace seeking nation produce a product like the serial killer? Perhaps, now and then, but not in an assembly line that has only increased its pace and output.
Is such a peacenik society even possible? Even gentle Polynesian islanders often had histories as cannibals by the time they were found by European explorers. Easter Islanders fought a war to near extinction. American Indians had skinwalkers, the equivalent of a werebeast, and the wendigo, and many another metaphor for the beast within us all.
Being unable to gain perspective by escaping our own context, we are sure of only one thing: Serial killers influence society strongly for the worse. Any deeper meanings in this fact await parsing by what ever minds come after us, if any.
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