"It's NOT the economy, stupid"

Finally, somebody else is saying it.

 

I am so sick of hearing men and their murderous impulses excused, left and right, because of "the economy."  Goddamn it, the men of this world slaughter the women of this world with impunity all the time, in all kinds of economies, at all levels of society, all over the world.  Domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, murder -- all the time.  And now their excuse is, "the economy made me do it"??

 

How come we don't see women hauling off and blowing away men?  How come we, who are constantly aggrieved, aren't taking it out on innocent people?  Aren't we suffering just as much from "the economy" as these guys?

 

These men are sad and pissed off?  Then they can kill themselves.  They don't have to murder their entire families -- or innocent people in schools, stores, tc. -- along with them.  I don't know which makes me more furious -- the excuses being doled out for these murderers, or for the war criminals of the Bush administration and the torture-lovers now defending them.

 

And if you feel so inclined, you can send Jean Marbella or her editors a fan letter, as I did.

Comments

[litbrit]

I'm sick of it too, and I'm sick for the families of these women and children who surely loved and trusted their fathers. Mostly, I'm sick at the thought of those women and children trembling in terror as they watched their husbands/fathers execute their family members, knowing they were next. Dear God.

Jean Marbella makes an excellent point: around the world, people suffer in horrible poverty--sometimes their whole lives, sometimes suddenly--that makes the conditions in which these men lived seem positively luxurious. Money woes, shame, fraud scandals, and even bankruptcy are transient states, terrible as they may be at the time; death, and the murder of one's family, are brutally, irreversibly final.

Obviously any commentary on their psychological states is going to be pure conjecture, but if I were asked for my opinion(!), I'd say these murderers were among the many men in our culture who suppress their violent urges and hatred of women because they must do so to pass in polite society. As I said in my letter to the editor, they are silos of negativity and testosterone, and when external pressures mount, they crack and explode, embodying what they've been inside all along.

[MissionPk]

"and seven shots rang out on a North Dakoty farm"

Long history. Never seen a female murderer depicted as a rational victim of the economy, though.

-Dave

[Sir Charles]

If it were simply the economy, then families would have been blown away at a frightening clip during the 1930s.

I can't begin to explain this kind of thing -- the ubiquitous presence of firearms in houses certainly doesn't help -- violent compulsions and powerful guns are a rather nasty combination. But again, that doesn't begin to explain it.

[has_te]

It's 'cause girls just don't do that sh*t.
They've got a full complement of healthy chromosomes
and don't have to deal with that nasty (but necessary? in hunter-gatherer days) stunted Y which makes or allows quasi-fully human beings to go (or be existentially) all manly and so often angry and violent*.
[Can't believe I just wrote that, but thunk it for a while...
Such a traitor to my own gender, I feel sorta sorry for us but offer NO excuse.]
*Amanda vigorously disagrees, sez it's a cop-out.

[ballgame]

I am so sick of hearing men and their murderous impulses excused, left and right, because of "the economy."

Can you please cite a few of the many instances of people excusing the actions of Christopher Wood and William Parente, Lisa? I don't see any instances cited in Marbella's column; she appears to be arguing with a strawman, AFAICT.

[ballgame]

FTR, Marbella does cite this news analysis which talks about how financial strain contributes to suicidal behavior. Overwhelmingly, it is men who kill themselves due to these financial burdens, and overwhelmingly (judging from the experts cited in the article), they kill only themselves. There are also 'family annihilators' (like Wood and Parente) mentioned, and though rare, they seem to be growing in number, a happenstance which is plausibly linked to the economy.

There is, however, a huge difference between explaining behavior and excusing it. It's hard to know exactly what their respective mental states were (Wood was apparently on anti-depressants), but assuming they were of legally sound mind, I doubt that anyone would be voting 'not guilty' had Wood or Parente killed their families and spared themselves.

[Lisa Simeone]

Coming up with psychobabbly or situational "explanations" is tantamount to coming up with excuses in my book.

If someone is "pushed over the edge" (god, how many times do I have to read that stupid phrase?) and able to slaughter his family, then he was a psychopath to begin with. The economy is not an explanation.

[big bad wolf]

lisa, was andrea yates a psychopath in your opinion?

[ballgame]

Um … so a new mother who smothers her baby was a psychopath to begin with, and post-partum depression is not an explanation? Or are only some folks granted the exculpatory dispensation of mental illness?

FTR, I don't know if either Wood or Parrente were mentally ill in the legally exculpatory sense for these particular acts. (Although, slaughtering your family and then yourself strikes me as a bit of a red flag as far as having a sound mind is concerned; YMMV.) Assuming the absence of mental illness sufficiently dire to cripple their ability to determine right from wrong, though, they would clearly have deserved the sentences such heinous acts are assigned in our justice system had they not, in effect, meted out this punishment to themselves.

But I have to categorically disagree with your statement that "Coming up with psychobabbly or situational 'explanations' is tantamount to coming up with excuses in my book." That's a common sentiment, but it's fundamentally anti-progressive.

Perhaps this will be clearer if I put it in a different context: there is, frankly, little conceptual difference between what you're saying and the NRA's notion that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people.' Certainly any individual who commits a crime with a gun should be held fully accountable for what he or she did. As a society, however, it would be a gross error to ignore the situational aspects of gun violence overall as we attempt to come up with progressive approaches to eliminating this scourge. Should we ignore the 'situational' aspects of gun availability, poverty, racism, and drugs in assessing how to refashion our society in a more peaceful and just manner?

I'm going to take a wild guess here and assume your answer to that question is "no, I don't think we should ignore those factors." So perhaps what you really intend to say is, 'there are no relevant situational factors that would apply here.' If so, that strikes me as a presumption, and one that seems to be contradicted by the apparent correlation in the increase of these rare acts with the tanking of the economy. As I think most of us realize, many ostensibly middle class lives are actually built on an economic precipice, and I don't think we know exactly how dire were the circumstances of Wood and Parrente.

Understanding the complex pressures which ultimately transform a baby boy to an adult killer does not exempt that man from moral judgment. But developing that understanding is absolutely essential if progressives are going to be able to counter the recurrent rightwing scapegoating narrative that 'Those people do or experience bad things because they are intrinsically evil.'

[ballgame]

(Crossposted with bbw's far more succinct response.)

[litbrit]

If someone is "pushed over the edge" (god, how many times do I have to read that stupid phrase?) and able to slaughter his family, then he was a psychopath to begin with. The economy is not an explanation.

Absolutely.

Countless men and women have endured all manner of horrors in their lives, from being assaulted, raped, and otherwise brutalized, to witnessing loved ones die at the hands of officials and criminals--or killed by famine, fire, or pathogen--to having to become killers themselves, forced by random circumstance or occasioned by war to defend life with lethal force. (And those horrors are for starters.)

Those horrors, those countless human beings, across the world, throughout human history.

Not murdering their spouses and children, ever.

Meanwhile, the very few and mostly-male who are able to do that, to snuff out love and slaughter their own flesh and blood, are what modern science refers to as psychopaths:

Diagnostic criteria and PCL-R assessment

Psychopathy is most commonly assessed with the PCL-R, [44] which is a clinical rating scale with 20 items. Each of the items in the PCL-R is scored on a three-point (0, 1, 2) scale according to two factors. PCL-R Factor 2 is associated with reactive anger, anxiety, increased risk of suicide, criminality, and impulsive violence.

[ballgame]

If it were simply the economy, then families would have been blown away at a frightening clip during the 1930s.

Who says they weren't, Sir Charles? From the article litbrit just cited:

Grant Duwe, a Minnesota criminologist who has studied mass murders in the United States, … said familicides were most prevalent in rural areas during the Great Depression.

(FTR, I don't think anyone is saying these rare but horrible tragedies are due "simply" to the economy.)

litbrit, your initial point — that countless numbers of men and women are brutalized but don't "ever" subsequently murder their mates and/or children — is either false or a tautology. Countless numbers of men and women are brutalized and SOME (very small percentage) of those men and women subsequently murder their mates and/or children. The only way your statement could be true would be if you were basically saying, "Countless numbers of people are brutalized and don't ever murder their families, except for the ones that do" … in which case, I'm frankly not sure what your point is. That prior brutalization or hardship is not a free pass for subsequently murdering your family? No one is saying it is.

BTW, the article you cite with your "mostly male" phrase does not indicate that men are more likely to murder family members, only that they are more likely to murder their whole families (i.e. their spouses as well as their children). Mothers tend to just murder their children, according to the article. The article does not indicate whether men or women are more likely to murder family members in general.

The article you cite also does not support your contention that these men are psychopaths (at least as far as you seem to be defining the term):

In a study co-authored by Resnick, researchers who focused on 30 cases in Ohio found that most of the homicidal parents "were motivated by the desire to alleviate real or imagined suffering from their children," the study reported.

FTR I am neither endorsing nor disagreeing with this view, only pointing out that it does not seem to square with what you're saying.

[Sir Charles]

ballgame,

I was being glib I'm afraid.

There have actually been a number of pretty grizzly mother-child slayings in this area over the last year or two. The women were pretty clearly out of their minds.

[big bad wolf]

then for you SC, are the men?

[Sir Charles]

Oh fuck yeah -- almost by definition. These aren't the acts of rational people.

I am just suspicious of the glib economic rationale as a kind of easy throwaway explanation for things that go on all too often -- the general madness of men (and women).

[Lisa Simeone]

'Those people do or experience bad things because they are intrinsically evil.'

I would never make such a claim.

Andrea Yates was clearly out of her flippin' mind, so I take your point there. Was she a pyschopath as a result of post-partum depression? Maybe. I'll have to chew on that one. I haven't seen anything to indicate she harbored a lifelong hatred of children the way some men harbor a lifelong misogyny.

I will say that her husband, in his many simpering interviews, also used to infuriate me. Why the f was she getting pregnant all the time, Rusty, when you said you knew that she was dangerously depressed? Haven't you people ever heard of birth control? Or is every child just a "gift from God"? If she was so depressed that she couldn't be trusted to be alone with a child, then she sure as hell couldn't be trusted to keep birthing more of them. She didn't get them by parthenogenesis.

As for Parente and Wood, they were cowards of the first order. That man from Freddie Mac who just killed himself, David Kellermann, didn't take his wife and 5-year-old daughter with him. I would say he was terribly, horribly depressed, of course; I wouldn't say he was a psychopath.

And in the latest news about Parente, his killings were premeditated, putting the lie to the "he just snapped" explanation. But hey, I guess he pumped some more money into the local economy:

Parente bought knife at Towson mall

Sometime after checking into the Sheraton hotel in Towson last week, William M. Parente went across the street to the Towson Town Center and bought the knife he used to kill himself.

Parente beat and asphyxiated the girls, Stephanie, 19, and Catherine, 11, and their mother, Betty, 58, police said.

It takes an awful lot of work to personally beat and asphyxiate another human being. Much easier and more distancing to simply pull a trigger. Another indication that Parente didn't simply "snap." Because I agree with your claim that having guns around does indeed make it more likely that someone will, in a blaze of fury, pick one up and use it, then regret it later. Parente didn't do that. He had plenty of time to think about what he was doing.

[nimh]

I must be reading different newspapers than some of you. In the past month or two alone, I've read several disturbing stories about women killing their children, sometimes then killing themselves, sometimes not. And yes, IIRC dire economic straits were sometimes mentioned in the articles describing them. (Somehow there were several cases in a row in Germany.)

So I don't know, the notion that there's something specifically or typically male about murdering your family - or worse, as has_te argues, that these family murdering stints are all just the results of a "stunted Y" which makes humans go "all manly and .. angry and violent" -- I don't know. I don't buy it.

If the difference is that the men use guns to kill their families and the women use other ways, well, I don't know what that would prove, other than that it's not smart to have guns freely available.

[litbrit]

Yes. Yates suffered from post-partum psychosis, a rare and serious mental illness that is often (but not always) co-morbid with schizophrenia:

In some women, a postpartum psychosis is the only psychotic episode they will ever experience, but, for others, it is just the first indication of a psychiatric disorder.

Yates heard voices that told her what to do; she had been treated, with some success, with a powerful antipsychotic (Haldol). The husband and preacher (and others--who knows?) took her off that drug; she was placed on a simple SSRI antidepressant (Effexor, in this case), even though this class of drug is usually contraindicated for people diagnosed with certain types of mental illness--bipolar mood disorder, variants of schizophrenia--because they can enhance agitation and suicidal/violent behavior.

In any event, yes, Andrea Yates killed her children, yes, she was mentally ill beforehand--in this case with an unclear combination of P.P. psychosis and schizophrenia--and yes, SHE WAS A WOMAN.

That wretchedly sick straw-woman has nothing to do with the murderer in this case, the underlying cause for his premeditated slaughter of his own family, or the pre-existing psychopathy strongly suggested in his and so many other cases, which are, as the numbers show again and again, almost always committed by fathers (men).

[nimh]

Oh, I see Ballgame already did a much more articulate and scrupulous deconstruction of the argument here.

If the theory is that the incidence of men killing their families is the expression of how "some men harbor a lifelong misogyny", how do the women killing their families fit in? Is a man killing his wife as well as his children proving he was just doing it out of suppressed misogyny, whereas if a woman kills her children but not her husband, that's the proof that it must be something else? I don't know; there could be something to that; but it strikes me as a hugely overreaching conclusion.

Moreover, there's a confusion between two different arguments here, the way I see it. One is that no situational, societal context should be invoked in the explanation of crimes like these, because that is tantamount to excusing the crimes. The other is that actually, yes, these psychopathic or otherwise deranged acts can partly be explained by societal contexts; except it's not any kind of economic anguish that contributes to these crimes, it's enduring misogyny. One seems somewhat contradictory with the other.

Moreover, why can't both of those things be at play? Like: acute economic fear and anguish drives those men who are already misogynistically afflicted and who were also already teetering on the edge of insanity (at best) into ... etc. And you can safely add another dozen factors that would have to come into play before somebody commits this kind of cruel outrage.

[big bad wolf]

i did not ask the andrea yates question as a straw question. i asked it to clarify my understanding of what lisa was saying.

it can be characterized as a straw question only because we learned so much about andrea yates that most people would say that she insane, but not a psychopath. about these other killings we have no or very little information and yet we tend toward sweeping, essentialist judgments---male killer equals psychopath. but i see no reason why men cannot be simply insane too, or lose their tenuous hold on sanity, as perhaps yates did, by the insensitive or even the simply uniformed or self-interested actions of other people, male or female or, most likely both. it is the sweeping, essentialist, evidence-free, as opposed to anecdote-laden, nature of the men-are-psycopaths judgment that bothers me. (i recognize that men are more likely than women to be psycopaths, but the number of men that are is surpassingly small as a percentage that it is not useful, i think, even as a guess as to a particular murder.)

now none of this is to justify these extraordinary incidents (and they are extraordinary in such a large population), but just to suggest that we should hold off on making larger judgments or daily policies based on unusual events. as to the sadly more ordinary type of violence, we need to teach boys over and over and over again that it is wrong to hit---not noble to refrain from hitting, but absolutely and unqualifiedly wrong to hit. and we need to teach them not when they do something, but long before, as my dad taught me and his before him and many parents have. and we need to be hard on those men who do wrong, but we don't need to make sweeping generalizations or silly statements about which sex is superior or which is stunted.

and lisa i want to say these killing stories make me scream too. my half-kidding answer for years has been to plan a new kind of suicide hotline---one that helps the person see that offing themselves alone is a far better gesture. but so far my grant has been hard to write.

[Corvus9]

A little over a year ago someone did something just like this in my area. He was under investigation for fraud at work, and probably guilty, and then one morning he woke up and killed his wife and their four adopted children. Then he went out and tried to drown himself in the river. When that didn't work, he called 911, told them they needed to go to his address, and that he was sorry and loved his family very much, and then got out onto the interstate and drove as fast as he could off it into a steel pole. They ultimately had to identify him from his dental records. Everyone said there were no signs of marital discord, that they seemed like a happy marriage, and that they both loved their kids very much.

What seems to be the common thread in all these types of incidents is men who seem to have an almost fanatical devotion to the idea of themselves as Provider. They are the Man of the House. Such a response, and the mindset that breeds it, is rooted in a patriarchal conception of manhood. To the extent patriarchy is inherently misogynistic, this is a misogynistic response, but I think just labeling it so misses the point. Because they are not responding so much to the power aspect of their role, but to obligations of it. They run things, yes, but only because at the same time they are the Provider. If they fail to be the provider, they are no longer men, and don't deserve what men are entitled to. When something happens that could destroy their image of their role,they snap and destroy it first, like a painter taking a razor to a work that is does not meet their high standards. Yes, that's a very objectifying analogy, but that's the point. They see their families not so much as autonomous separate individuals, but as extensions of their own selves (at least at the times when they snap). In a way, these men have been brainwashed, to believe a view of how men should be that just isn't realistic. So you could file these types of incidents under "patriarchy hurts men too," although the fact that this still gets taken out on women and children counters against having too much sympathy.

Also, Psychopaths are people with a consistent inability to feel sympathy or empathy for any other creatures. People who suffer psychotic breakdowns, perhaps brought on by some other mental illnesses like clinical depression, postpartum depression, or schizophrenia, are not psychopaths. Psychopaths would kill their families and not feel remorse. Non-psychopaths would kill their families and then, realizing what they did, kill themselves. The Rake is a psychopath. These guys are more like the narrator of "Country Death Song."

[Sir Charles]

Corvus,

That's an incredibly cogent analysis. That's why we need you around here.

And you've worked the songs beautifully into the mix -- the Rake goes on his merry way, while the Country Death Song protaganist hangs himself in shame.

[kathy a.]

this is an amazing discussion. i am really with BBW about holding off judgment when we do not know everything going on with a person. corvus9 has some great analysis, too. and sir charles.

it is ALWAYS too simple to take one factor and lay all the blame on that for mind-boggling acts of violence. always.

no, "the economy" never is an adequate answer -- even if those pressures contribute. and lisa -- i really hear you and agree that a culture of male dominance is in fact and truth a contributor. the vast majority of violent crimes are in fact committed by men, and i think we ought to spend more time not only figuring out why, but working on prevention.

i don't think "psychopathy" is the answer, either. for one thing, it is a "garbage" diagnosis that is applied to everyone who commits a crime, and it does nothing to sort out any contributors or causes. personally, i think that few if any humans are just born bad, born to kill. it's the why's and how's of how they got from there to here that we need to figure out. if someone is delusional or suicidally depressed, how does calling them psychopaths add anything of use?

i have 2 relevant [i think] personal anecdotes. the first is that the husband of one of our family physicians killed her, their two young sweet daughters, and then himself a couple of years ago. his notes said he was worried about finances. i do not know how to forgive him for this horrible, senseless act, and probably won't. nobody close to them saw this coming, even the ones who knew he was stressed; but i am sure none of them is overlooking danger signs now. i tend to be really pissed that he could get the gun so easily, just 2 blocks from the medical practice.

the other story is that the only person who ever tried to kill me was my own mother. she choked me to unconsciousness; i had bruises on my neck and arm for a long time. i escaped, but didn't go to the police because i did not think they would believe me. my mother was a deeply ill person, though she looked OK on the outside. there is a lot more, of course, but i'm really glad she did not have access to a gun that night.

[Corvus9]

I don't think it is accurate to say that psychopathy is a garbage diagnosis. I read an article on psychopaths a little while back. There actually have been case studies done on such people, people who don't seem to understand the concept of other people having feelings, a and it's been found to have a correlation with low function in certain parts of the brain. And like any mental disease, it's been influenced by environmental factors. Hence, some prefer the term sociopath, which suggest that society has warped them, while psychopath suggest there's something wrong with the soul. Psychopath is making a comeback, these days, because it's becoming more and more accepted that there is a biological or genetic component to the disease. And this is incredibly unnerving I think, for many people, because it's basically an argument that undermines the existence of moral agency. Admitting that someone did something abhorrent, not because they chose to, but because they didn't understand it was wrong, and maybe could be treated to know that it was wrong, really throws a kink in our conception of justice.

I am really sorry to hear about your mom and your physician, kathy.

[kathy a.]

thanks, corvus.

the breakdown of moral agency is maybe at the heart of a lot of these problems. and it is INCREDIBLY unnerving. everything is easier in black and white -- good or evil -- cold-hearted choice or a sudden raving insanity. actual people tend to be more complicated.

it's not like i have great answers. there actually are none, when violence happens. in so many instances, some desperate mix of things has gone wrong, and so often, none of the problems are really paid much attention until the worst has already occurred.

there has been work done on "resiliant children," ones who have disadvantages and go through trauma and turn out OK. i'd look it up if i was not so tired and distracted at the moment. but an important part of that research is "protective factors" that help them do well despite "risk factors." and another side to that same bunch of research is that risk factors for dysfunction don't just add up, they multiply.

i hate violence in all its forms. i hate that violence and stresses seem to replicate outward and by generations, unless some outside positive forces are applied. i wish that it was more possible for people feeling a lot of stress to seek help without hearing voices condemning them for failure. also, as stated before, i hate guns.

[Sir Charles]

kathy,

I'm so sorry to hear that. Family pathologies of one kind or another are much more common that we'd all like to think.

Guns are a particularly bad mix with this sort of thing because of their destructive power. A moment's impulse and a life is gone.

I am a big fan of the dialogue on the blog -- sometimes I think it is worth it just to throw something up even if it is not as well written or thought out as I would like because the ensuing discussion gives it far greater merit.

[big bad wolf]

"and after all this won't you give me a smile"

saturday night song of perfection:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5B797VQuDI