Society has always had its freaks. Maybe this goes deeper.
Let two samples suffice. Easily, they could be multiplied.
Example number 1:
Alex Jones, a radio talk show host, denies the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. No children lost their lives. It didn’t happen. It was a hoax, or was staged by the government. Whatever. Take your pick.
We shall not dwell on the legalities. Jones claims free speech. He has been sued by two sets of parents who each lost a six-year-old child in the shooting — sued for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. A Texas judge last week issued default judgments against Jones for failing to follow court-ordered requests for documents and information.
Judge Maya Guerra Gamble said that Jones has consistently shown “flagrant bad faith and callous disregard for the responsibilities of discovery under the rules.”
Dangerous as abuse of the legal system is, it is hardly the greatest danger within society that Jones reflects. Even the judge’s references to Jones’ being “callous” do not capture the danger. He cannot simply be simply dismissed as an oddball, a provocateur, an extremist, a conspiracy theorist. Even within each of these appelatives a kernel of legitimate complaint, however small or warped, can usually be found.
Twenty children were killed at Sandy Hook. Six educators were killed. If there is some epistemological doubt as to whether this happened, the same can be said about whether George Washington was the first president of the United States. No human communication exists without some level of assumption of correspondence between reality and description. George Washington was our first president, even though none of us were alive to see him. Sandy Hook happened, even though very few if any of us were there.
This brings us to the crux of the matter: To deny Sandy Hook is sheer cruelty. “Infliction of emotional distress” may be the appropriate legal term for Alex Jones’ denial, but it does not come close to capturing his sheer meanness. Alex Jones is the symbol for the death of compassion. He is, we fear, a symbol, not a loner, even if the purity, so to speak, of his cruelty is not matched by others. Alex Jones is not just weird. He is a danger signal — of segments of society sliding to mental isolation, to disconnection, to distance from empathy, to dehumanization, to hermetic solitude even amidst mass communication.
Alex Jones, as the obverse of the mass shooter, is more dangerous in this sense: the mass shooter is easy to recognize as evil. The denier of a mass shooting of children can be classified under some uncomplimentary label — provocateur, conspiracy theorist, what have you — and then dismissed. Of course, Jones is not evil on the level of the shooter, but Jones is more dangerous in that his cruelty can effect far wider circles than the number of dead in a shooting. Jones can insure potential mass shooters to the evil of their intent.
Jones signals this danger: the causes of mass shootings are not to be located strictly in the warped childhood, demented hate or psychological illusions of the shooter. The solutions are not to be located strictly in more comprehensive mental health services and legal safeguards (such as red flag laws). Jones demonstrates that the danger can be cultural, deeply embedded.
Example number 2:
It may well seem sacrilegious to put this in the same category of Alex Jones and the denial of mass murder, but bear with us. We refer to Danish artist Jens Haaning and his $83,000 painting.
The painting is nothing. It is blank canvas. It has not a scrape of shape, form or color. It is white. It is titled, “Take the Money and Run.” It was actually bought by a Danish museum for $83,000 and hung on its walls.
Again, put the legalities aside. The museum claims that the artist broke its contract to produce two works with framed piles of money. If the artist does not produce, the museum will sue, it says. No matter. The museum is hanging the empty canvas as is. It’s up for all to see. The museum’s director is quoted as saying, “The smart Jens Haaning cheats the bigger museum director — it is a story that is also funny.” So we begin with the appelatives: funny, trickster, stunt, provocateur.
Obviously there is no cruelty here, no replica of Alex Jones. Which is precisely the point. From an entirely different vantage point, a similar danger emerges, signaling a broader attack on social coherence.
Call this painting — and its acceptance by the museum that commissioned it — a perfect symbol of the vacuousness, the sheer emptiness, that migrates from the cruel or demented mind to the axis of normal existence. Hardly could there be a greater distance than that between the denier of evil and the connosieur of art, but when the “art” is sheer emptiness, white on white, saying nothing not by intent, not to make a point, but merely to collect a commission without doing a thing, then the common danger emerges: a society bereft of moorings. A morality in which everything from murder to beauty is no longer understood.
At a certain point, the “weird” migrates to the center. The seedbed of everything from hate to vacuity rises to the surface, undermining discernment, value and aspiration.
Call us overly fearful or ridiculously focused on the fringes, if you like. As we see it, there are too many weird social phenomena out there to be dismissed as collectively harmless.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
