John Wilkes Booth was very handsome. His father and brother were the most famous actors in the country up to that point in American history. Abraham Lincoln was as midwest ugly as they come. I don't think that mattered when the trigger was pulled in Ford's Theater. I do think that J.W. Booth was emblematic of the personality type observed time and again in political assassins: Intelligent enough to identify the seat of power and plan a way to get to the seat-holder and murder them, crazy enough to think that their own politics trump the will of millions of voters. Mental health services could have been useful to any one of the people in history who've pointed a gun at the President and pulled the trigger.
I don't purport to know how to best identify people who are on the brink of committing gun violence. All I know is that I had to smash a small mouse to put him out of his misery this evening and it made me sad and proud of myself and disappointed in humanity. The proud of myself is because, over the years, I've developed a rather intense phobia for rodents. Not just that I dislike them and wish them to be elsewhere, especially out of my house, no, something more.
It derives from experiences with half-dead rats and numerous squirrels and chipmunks killed by my grandparents' cat, the bodies of which I'd discover underfoot while mowing the grass. the sensation of squishy squirrel beneath your Adidas is...unpleasant. Nowadays, my adrenal glands start firing like mad when I see a mouse. When I had to clean up a dead and putrifying opossum in my back yard, I nearly hyper-ventilated and a minute after I disposed of the bloated body, running away from a stench that verged on vomit-inducing, I was so jacked on fear hormones I bashed my shovel into the ground a dozen times, finally breaking the handle.
So tonight, when confronted by a mouse that found its way into our house, I set to work. I reset our spin-traps. I baited them with new peanut butter and waited to hear one of the traps snap. These traps hide the smashed mouse body in a larger housing, so that I don't have to see the little sucker after the kill. Very civilized, indeed. Hoping to take care of the problem quickly I set-up surveillance by the kitchen door. I waited and waited, and still no telltale snap.
Instead, as I surveyed the online clips of commentary and journalism regarding the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six other living souls, I heard a little scratching in my cabinets. Sure enough, my beady eyed tormentor reappeared. He carefully avoided the traps I set, running back and forth between the toe-kicks in my kitchen. Not willing to spend the night with a Beatrix Potter Character, I broke out the big guns. Glue-traps. They are hardly humane, no matter how much anesthetic they might have in the glue. But I did not care.
And just like that, the little feller ran right into the sticky-icky. I peeked my head out and hoped he would expire quickly. He did not. He wriggled and writhed for a minute and I could stand it no more. I got my shoes on, picked up a dust pan, and scooped up Stuart Little in his gluey infernal device.
We went outside, Stu and I, and I apologized to him and told him I was sorry if he had suffered. And then I set him in the snow and dropped a large flagstone on him. I am not proud of killing the mouse, I would have rathered he just left on his own. My pride comes from the fact that I didn't leave him to pull his own arms off and suffer through the night, and I'm glad I put aside my own phobia to do so.
And I thought about this awful, tortured person named Jared Loughner. And I thought about how I'd like to smash him under a rock. Not because I want to exact violence upon him. I do not. My desire to snuff him out under a large piece of limestone stems from a similar place as my desire to keep the mouse from suffering for eight hours instead an eighth of a second. This poor fuck is disturbed.
He is no Booth, a racist, politically-savvy narcissist, no Guiteau, a campier Booth. Nor is he a bi-polar Communist like Oswald and Czolgosz. He is a paranoid-schizophrenic and he had guns and the internet. Gabby Giffords was the target he picked to try to silence his paranoia. And along the way, nobody figured out how to save this guy from himself and get him some help.
Sometimes getting help for the mentally ill is impossible. I have neither the time or will-power to spend hours writing about why and how mental health services need to paid for by the public at large. Why it's an issue of public safety and homeland security. Why our taxes must be used to fund health-care for everyone. All I can say is, humans shouldn't end up on glue traps. They shouldn't be left to pull their own arms off and take their perceived enemies with them on their way to oblivion. Disturbed people can be treated. They can be ushered into the proper programs and facilities before they get stuck in the gooey mind-traps that encircle modern American society. They can and must, for the love of humanity, be kept away from guns. I don't want to feel like we need to put our countrymen out of their own misery before they start killing people. Because that is almost as disturbing as the thing itself.
The poor little mouse is dead, and I'm glad it went quick. This awful affair with Mr. Loughner will not go quick, I'm afraid. But I am most fearful of the idea that, at the end of it all, nothing will have changed.
1 comment:
the mouse, and your wife, are very grateful.
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