Celebrity Killer Culture: When Grandiosity, Privilege And Entitlement Turn Attention-Seeking Into Violence

Let me tell you a story. It’s a story inspired by the tragic events of Wednesday morning, of yet another shooting in which two innocent people were killed followed by the gunman shooting himself, all grotesquely documented on social media.

But it’s not a story about this morning. It’s a story about the 19th century.

We all know the story about the first presidential assassination, John Wilkes Booth assassinating Abraham Lincoln in 1865 in order to avenge the South. Much is made of Booth as the first of the neo-Confederate reactionaries that would form the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, the legacy of insurgent white supremacy he left behind.

But what’s less emphasized is that Booth was a troll. He did what he did not because he had any concrete plan for re-igniting the Civil War but because he wanted to plunge the Union into chaos and fear. He was an accomplished stage actor, the equivalent of a movie star, the younger brother of Edwin Booth, called by some the most distinguished Shakespearean actor in history. He arranged Lincoln’s murder to be as theatrical as possible, to occur immediately after the act break in the play so that he could heroically leap onto the stage shouting words of defiance, “Sic semper tyrannis” and “The South is avenged!”

He did it, above all, for the attention.

The only difference between our Internet term “troll” and the scary real-world term “terrorist” is the scale of the attention-seeker’s ambitions.

Which is why I want to talk about the second presidential assassination in history, the assassination of James Garfield by Charles Guiteau in 1881. I can think of no clearer demonstration of Karl Marx’s aphorism that history repeats “first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Tour guides and history textbooks tend to gloss over the kind of man Charles Guiteau was by calling him a “disgruntled office seeker,” just like the sanitizing use of the term “disgruntled” about this morning’s murderer, as though murderous violence were a normal response to workplace disgruntlement.

Charles Guiteau was never a serious “office seeker.” Whether or not he had a diagnosable mental illness — something people argued about then and still argue about now — he was a screwed-up human being whose lifelong screwups stemmed from a constant feeling of entitlement to others’ attention and unwillingness to do anything worthwhile to earn it.

John Wilkes Booth was a talented actor whose talent wasn’t enough to grant him the notoriety he craved to push himself out of his famous brother and father’s shadows. Guiteau was a man of no discernible talents who dropped out of school to join autopian cult, only to be kicked out of the cult and end up trying to found his own competing cult and sue the original cult for ownership of their ideas. He then got a law degree and turned to spamming Republican political candidates with endless copies of pamphlets he wrote that he believed would be essential to a Republican political victory.

When the Republican Party refused to reward him with official recognition or a civil service position (he wanted to be Ambassador to France), he went out and bought a gun and shot the president.

He went on to be happy as a clam in federal custody, testifying frequently and ramblingly on his own behalf, giving interviews to everyone who asked, publishing an autobiography, planning a lecture tour and, when he was finally sentenced to execution, writing a poem to recite on the way to the gallows.

Unlike Booth, Guiteau had no clear political cause to hitch himself to, no noble “movement” he was defending — he tried to claim that he shot Garfield, a “Half-Breed,” on behalf of the “Stalwarts” in the Republican Party, but even a cursory look at his life shows him to be a total outsider to the factional intraparty politics he was invoking.

The only side Guiteau was on was his own side, and the only cause he had was getting people to pay attention to him and say his name. And it worked. People were buying up fragments of the rope used to hang him, and they had to put his corpse in a museum just so people wouldn’t dig it up for souvenirs.

It all sounds very modern, doesn’t it? The only things that aren’t modern about it are that Guiteau had to make paper copies of his political rants because there was no freerepublic.com or townhall.com to post to, and the auction of the gallows rope had to be done in person because there was no eBay.

But all the pieces were in place for the “celebrity killer” — the existence of a fast-moving national news media powered by the telegraph and its associated wire services, the attendant transformation of trials into public spectacle as witnessed atthe trial of Booth’s conspirators, the script already written into people’s minds of ritually denouncing the crazy man while obsessing over his freakish eccentricities.

Charles Guiteau had, by watching John Wilkes Booth’s example, come up with a formula for fame. It’s one that wouldn’t appeal to most people, who prefer living freely if obscurely to notoriety from inside a jail cell or beyond the grave.

But there’s always people who seem to want to be important, to be significant, to bepaid attention to more than they want anything else. They’re willing to give up everything for it, to kill others and to kill themselves, as long as people say their name. And the world keeps obliging them.

You see this pattern over and over again with history’s other famous killers. The sheer theatricality of the planned atrocity. Lee Harvey Oswald passing out pamphlets for his supposed Communist Party cell (founded by himself, with himself as the only member), being ignored by both the actual Communists and the US government until he took matters into his own hands. John Hinckley, Jr. hoping to get into the newspapers so his Hollywood crush Jodie Foster would notice him — patterning his behavior on Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver.”

Timothy McVeigh comparing his bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building to the Rebels blowing up the Death Star in Star Wars, and having William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” read as his final statement. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s career as dedicated early-Internet edgelord trolls who cited McVeigh as their inspiration for their own blaze of glory. Seung-Hui Cho making a rambly incoherent video manifesto posing as Choi Min-Sik from “Oldboy” and piecing together bits and pieces of dialogue from dozens of cinematic “bad-boy” antiheroes.

People piggyback on all kinds of causes. Supporting extremist Islam. Opposing extremist Islam (and Sikhs who happen to look like Muslims to the shooter).Opposing feminists. Opposing socialists. Opposing local zoning regulations. Doing a bad impression of a Hollywood/comic-book version of anarchism. Even in 2015, we still have folks like Dylann Roof fighting for the same cause as John Wilkes Booth, the Lost Cause of the South (and of Rhodesia and old South Africa) and legal white supremacy.

And then you have Bryce Williams/Vester Lee Flanagan, who sent a 23-page fax to ABC News piggybacking on Dylann Roof’s notoriety — just as Dylann Roof piggybacked on Trayvon Martin by mentioning him in his own manifesto — by calling his shooting payback for Roof’s shooting. He then, somewhat confusingly, invokes as mentors Seung-Hui Cho, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, even though Eric Harris is on record as being an admirer of Nazism who planned the Columbine shooting to coincide with Hitler’s birthday and taunted his victims with racial slurs.

The issue of high-profile mass murder is complex. It’s almost always men who do it. It’s usually white men — and, disproportionately, Asian men — and it happens far more often in America than anywhere else in the developed world. The killers are disproportionately people of privilege, people from the suburbs, people who are attending college or have college degrees — in some cases, like the case of BMW-driving Hollywood-studio-party-attendee Elliot Rodger, they come from great wealth.