Mary Ann and Kathy are drinking decaf while sitting next to one another on the living room sofa in Harold’s and Kathy’s four bedroom triplex on Evermore Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s a Saturday evening in January of 1973.
“I’ll tell you what, Mary Ann, at least there’s not going to be all this sex going around any more.”
Mary Ann lit a Virginia Slim. “What do you mean, Kathy?”
“Well, Nixon, of course. Now that he’s been re-elected there won’t be any more sexual revolution. He’ll get rid of those damn birth control pills and the dirty hippies won’t be able to fornicate like wild monkeys any more.”
I used to be the president of the United States of America. Now I’m a serial killer. I consider it an upgrade even though my body count is minuscule compared to the deaths I caused while president. Why is it an upgrade then, you ask. I didn’t know at first, but then I realized that I, like all of you, had been duped into believing that numerical counts of things such as murders meant more than the personal aspects of murders.
When you hear about Ted Bundy you learn he’s a serial killer and that he killed X number of women. You know nothing of the women he killed, though. The story is about Ted Bundy. That is the narrative provided by the media. I know the name Ted Bundy, I know some aspects of his life, I know he killed women, I know he was caught and put in prison, I know there was a television interview with him hours before he was put to death, but I don’t know the names of his victims or anything about their lives other than that they were women.
Why should that be? Because killing is more interesting than being killed? I suppose that’s true. I’d certainly rather kill than be killed. That was one of the reasons I became a serial killer. But there’s something more to it than that. It’s also that the exercise of power is what fascinates humanity. That’s why the media tells the stories of the powerful, including serial killers, rather than the stories of the powerless, such as victims of murder.
It was the same when I was president. I was talked about by the news media related to the bombs I dropped on civilian targets. “Accidentally,” of course. But there were no stories about the tens of thousands of people I killed. No individual stories, anyway, no personal stories. There were just reports, often conflicting, about the numbers of people killed. That was to my advantage as people have difficulty becoming enraged by numbers or, really, having strong emotional responses to numbers as a matter of course. That’s because humans are more interested in the personal. If you combine that with a proclivity for favoring stories about power, whether it is used for heinous acts or for beauty and kindness, then it’s easy to understand that dropping bombs on people will result in stories about numbers of victims and stories about the person in power who created numbers of killed persons.
That’s why I got off easy and won a re-election. I didn’t completely understand at the time, but I eventually understood what had happened and why. To an extent, at least, an extent certainly not known by most people, or if any really. Well, it’s never been discussed publicly, anyway. Not to my knowledge. Which is incomplete, naturally. But I think I’m right about this and I’m going to trust my experiences of not having seen nor heard such insights in reports or discussions.
What’s important, though, is that I eventually understood and this gave me an even greater power, especially because it was a power that others didn’t realize existed, the power of personal stories over stories about numbers. By making myself the story, I elevated my status above the numbers which, unaware though they were, persuaded people to believe in me, to have faith in me, to trust me. I used words instead of numbers, words to define myself and create a story that fit the templates of personal importance that most people carry within themselves, within their worldviews, within their identities, within their meanings. Could be analyzed as neural networks or psychological makeup or cultural norms or whatever labeled lens one might want to use to explain such a phenomenon, but that’s inconsequential for my purposes.
My purpose, of course, was to not be blamed for things I did, but to be celebrated for the things I might have done but didn’t do. The numbers of the dead had no radio or television panel interviews and the images of the catastrophes were not seen except as dust and smoke from explosions. The images of body parts were rare. Photos and videos me, my body, my posture, my gestures, and my facial expressions were of a human being, smiling at times, weeping at others. I had “humanity” attached to me through these visuals. Then there was the audio, on radio, TV, the Internet. I spoke with sadness when it served my interests, with confidence when I deemed it necessary, and with whimsy when making others feel light-hearted was to my benefit. My weeping, my laughter, my solemn stare, these all worked to make me a person in a way that no number has ever been or ever could be.
I had a researcher find out how many times I was shown or heard in various media formats compared to the number of times images of bombs exploding or detached limbs were shown as well as the number of times “death counts” were cited. The ratio was nearly 10,000 to 1 in my favor. It’s easy to win the storyline with odds like that. I was clearly the main character and the dead were extras who weren’t even credited at the end of any of the stories. Who weeps for extras?
And yet, here we see numbers being of importance in providing information about the story, about why I was the main character and the dead were inconsequential. Such information is useful when making reasoned decisions or coming to intellectual conclusions. But I was the only person who knew these numbers and their meanings in terms of explaining my dominance of the story. Well, my researcher knew as well, but I killed him and destroyed his research so that no one else would ever know. Being a serial killer can be very useful.
But there’s the thing about being a serial killer. I don’t care about the number of people I kill. I care about the killing. That’s what interests me. I like looking at the fear in a person’s eyes and seeing the sweat form on their brows. I like being aware of their awareness of my total power over them and I like finishing them, ending their lives in painful and gruesome ways once the thrill of dominating them begins to ebb. There are always more people available for killing.
But those who follow serial killers, who hear about them and are fascinated or horrified by them, they always want to know the number of people killed. They want to hate or glorify the killer and somehow the number of kills provides the fuel rather than personal information about those killed. However, the numbers alone are not enough. The portrait of the serial killer combined with the number of kills is necessary to round out the story. And a critical part of those portraits are the methods used for killing. You can see a person’s eyes light up or perhaps cringe in horror when he or she learns that 13 women were strangled with electrical cords or 28 children were dismembered by meat cleavers.
The only personal aspects of the victims that come to light or are made to be important in stories—whether books, television, or other media—are things like hair color (“He only killed redheads”) or professions (“All of Mr. X’s victims were prostitutes”) or age (“He only killed children under ten years old”) or gender and sexuality (Dahmer chose only gay men as targets) and so on. So even when something somewhat personal about the victims is discussed, they are pointed out only if there are shared traits with other victims which further depersonalizes them.
The fascination the public has with profiling of criminals, serial killers in particular, leads them to look at victims through patterns (categorizing, similar to numerical measures in their own way). It’s a game to play, a strategy for winning (to catch a thief). Even as I type this last sentence I feel a chill go up my spine. How horrific! How horrible to depersonalize the dead for the sake of the glorification of the killer! And, yes, it is glorification, even in the case of everyone hating a killer. Hitler, the world’s most successful and notorious mass murderer, is glorified everywhere. How many more movies about Hitler and his Nazis have their been compared to movies about Einstein, Jesus Christ, Moses, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Theresa, or any one else. No one can compare. If attention measures interest then Western society is more interested in Adolf Hitler than any other person who has ever lived. How is that not glorification? It’s certainly our obsession.
The very odd thing is that I am more alive, more a person, as a serial killer than a law enforcement officer is as a profiler. I live in the flesh; she lives in numbers and categories. As the president, even though my narrative to the public was imminently human, my killing was not. It was statistical and strategic. This is the real reason why I say I have upgraded from the President of the United States of America to becoming a serial killer. I’m alive while I’m killing now whereas before I was functioning as a computer, a machine, and my experience was technological rather than personal. There’s no joy in the data of killing, but there is in the feeling of a knife piercing flesh and the sound of the screams.
“An unexamined life is not worth living.” Were Socrates’ powers of imagination so great that he was able to experience living an unexamined life simultaneously while living an examined life? Without experiencing both, how could he have coherently made such a declaration. Blinded by his own ego, he made a declaration of what ought not to be rather than humbly declaring, “Having lived an examined life, I can say that it is worth living. I wouldn’t know the first thing about what it’s like to live an unexamined life, though. Perhaps it is not worth living although it may be worth living or even more worth living than an examined life. Turns out, I can’t declare much of anything about anything outside my own experience. Logic suggests otherwise, but then again logic is not experience, is it?”
It boils down to sensory experience versus numerical or categorical knowledge. I can know that you have died without creating your death, but where is fun in that? Comparatively pitiful. Every kill I create will be personal for me and those who are being killed. The shared moment of killing cannot be adequately experienced through quantification.
Meanwhile, an entire city has become sterile. Well, not the city itself, but the residents of the city. All of them. Which city, though? That is unknown. But then … how can there be a claim that all of the residents of a city became sterile? It’s just the way it is. This is the first step toward the obsolescence of causation.
Words are more powerful than numbers. As descriptors. If I ask how many people you have killed, you may say “13.” But if I ask you to tell me in numbers how you kill people and you say “42” then I won’t know shit about how they died because “42” does not provide a description of how people are killed.
But if you hack my bank account and remove the numbers from my savings account then I will say that numbers are more meaningful than words in this case. That partially explains why economic systems alienate everyone from their trading value, purchasing power, and what have you. If you can’t feel in the flesh what you have earned then you will always be disconnected from your physical, emotional, and intellectual efforts in relation to being able to obtain clothing, shelter, food, transportation, and so on. This is why I have said we are overdue to create a new form of economics. Neither capitalism nor communism is an answer in this regard. So-called “primitive” tribes had forms of trade that were physical, that existed in the world of flesh. That’s not feasible for masses of people, though, such as a 100 million people in a nation. But then, who is to say that nations of 100 million people are better than tribes that exist in the hundreds?
Well, someone was able to say so. Many someones. Better for who? Better for how many people? Better in what ways? If these questions could be answered then the development of a new economics could begin. The idea that such an economics could be defined at the outset of such an endeavor is absurd. No, it’s only by the end of such study and research that an economics would take shape and become knowable, understandable. Without telescopes, what would we have known about the stars and yet that never prevented people from telling stories to one another about what stars were or how they formed.
Starting with a pre-existing notion and rigidly adhering to it is dogma. Or doctrine. Or fundamentalism. The idea that human nature is inherently selfish or self-centered is an eighteenth and nineteenth century Western notion that persists today even though so much research and evidence suggests that anything that might be called a “human nature” is malleable based as much on cultural beliefs as anything else. To be told from birth that kindness and affection toward others is most valuable and to see it modeled in families and communities would lead to a powerful belief that human nature is kind and affectionate. You practice what you want to become and model what you want others to emulate. Seems so simple. It is simple. But it’s also a choice. Which means decision making is how “human nature” is created. If it was just genetics then no one could possibly be responsible for any action because no action could have resulted from a decision.
Okay, I’m beating a dead horse. But sometimes I like to beat dead horses. More often I like to beat live humans until they’re dead. I don’t know why that’s not a saying: “Oh, enough already, you’re beating a live human to death.” I’ll try to get that saying going in the next couple weeks. Maybe it will spread like wildfire online and everyone will be saying it by Christmas. Then we can have a countdown for how long that idiom can last before a person can be beaten to death for using it. Maybe 90 days after Christmas. So a daily countdown. Because people like numbers in their stories even if they don’t want the story to be about numbers.
