Footnote No. 3: Cautionary Notes on Dehumanizing Perpetrators

Abstract

Footnote No. 3: Cautionary Notes on Dehumanizing Perpetrators Timothy K. Snyder Since December of last year, I have been closely following the events that unfolded in Newtown, Connecticut. At the time, my interest was centered around the public responses and practices of memorialization found on social media. While I continue to be interested in how repertoires of memorialization overlap with religious discourses and practices, I have now turned my attention to a more existential question: How are perpetrators remembered in our public memory of such tragedies? This essay explores how public narratives of December 14, 2012, account for Adam Lanza, the young man who shot and killed twenty children, seven adults, and, ultimately, himself. In particular, I consider how public narratives often minimize mental health as a contributing factor to such tragedies. By maintaining a social imagination which considers mental health in an atomistic paradigm, such public narratives remember perpetrators in simplistic and dehumanizing ways. This essay resists such narratives by framing mental health as a social problem, one shared by all in a responsible society. I begin with a media narrative which tells the story of Eric Mueller, a fifty‐nine‐year‐old art teacher at a nearby local school, and the roadside memorial he constructed within hours of the shootings. His story is an instance of the personal becoming public. I then turn to a more official narrative: the report of the State of Connecticut's Attorney. This official, public narrative testifies to what the state's investigation learned about the events that led up to the shooting and sheds light on Adam's troubled mental state. In the fifty‐page report, Adam Lanza's name is mentioned only once in the third footnote which reads, “Throughout the remainder of this report Adam Lanza will be referred to as ‘the shooter’.” The remaining two hundred and eighty‐seven references names him only as the shooter, the perpetrator. In doing so, it also codifies a social imagination of a single perpetrator, solely responsible not only for the crimes committed on that day but also his own mental health. The essay concludes with several cautionary notes that complicate the official narrative of the state's attorney and raises questions about the implications of such dehumanizing storytelling. The artist On the afternoon of December 14, Eric Mueller, a fifty‐nine‐year‐old art teacher at a nearby high school, hammered wooden stakes into the ground on a hillside outside his Newtown home. Attached to each stake was a wooden angel he had made earlier that day. As the media descended on his town, some stopped to see what he was up to. “How many angels?” asked a reporter. “Twenty‐seven, not 28,[sic]” Mueller replied. “I wavered on that. If the sentiment went that way, I could entertain that.” Mueller had stumbled upon what Hannah Arendt knew when she wrote that in storytelling, our private experiences are made “into a shape to fit them for public appearance.” This basic but profound insight from Arendt suggests that in the act of telling a story, the storyteller must negotiate between the private and public realms. In his impromptu memorial, Mueller not only sought to do something personal in response to such unbearable suffering, but he also contributed to an implicit public conversation about who's death can be counted among “victims.” Clearly, the children, teachers, and school workers who were killed that morning were victims, yet it was less clear whether the American public would accept the possibility that Adam Lanza was a victim of any sort. It is not clear what Mueller meant by his comment that he might have entertained such a possibility had others been willing to go there. But it raises the central question of this essay: How will the American public remember perpetrators like Adam Lanza? On the one hand, it is easy to answer this question. Within mere hours of the massacre, Mueller was able to discern for himself what the verdict would be: there were twenty‐seven victims on that day. On the other hand, answering this question testifies to Arendt's notion of the world as a public which is shared. Arendt writes, “To live...