The Face We Give, the Face We Long For

"Hey, it's me again."

According to published reports, this was the way that Mark Anthony Conditt, the Austin bomber, began his final taped confession shortly before blowing himself up on Wednesday, March 21, 2018, as SWAT teams cornered him.

Conditt, police say, was the man responsible for killing two people and severely wounded four others in a series of bombings that terrorized the Texas capital for weeks.

Police say the motive for the bombings might never be fully understood, which makes the story instantly familiar. Media speculation variously blamed Conditt's homeschooling and Christianity, while others claimed he was a white supremacist, given the victims of his explosions. Austin Police Chief Brian Manley originally referred to Conditt as a "troubled young man," but later called him a domestic terrorist after controversy over his original remarks. Would the chief have been more quick to call him a terrorist if he hadn't been a young white man? critics asked.

Manley's original comments were in regard to Conditt's video confession, where police said he described in detail the bombs he built: “He does not at all mention anything about terrorism…but instead it is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point."

"Hey, it's me again." 

Conditt's acts, as described by police, seem to fit a distressing pattern in recent American violence - the motiveless massacre. In a New Yorker piece written by Ben Wallace-Wells, Conditt's acts are linked to other grotesque public killing spectacles within the last year where meaning is sought, seemingly in vain:


"Among the mass killings of the past six months, motives have been elusive. There has been no compelling official account of why Stephen Paddock killed fifty-eight people in Las Vegas, and there has been only slightly more clarity about why Nikolas Cruz went to his old high school on Valentine’s Day and killed seventeen. In both of those cases, what was first examined as a political act came to be understood as more private and inscrutable, and it seems that the shooters had inhabited a familiar political form of violence because it was familiar, not because it was political."

In Paddock's case, for example, police have surveillance footage showing how, over the course of several days last September, he made trips into the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino with luggage containing weapons and ammunition. By the end of a week of hopscotching between the hotel and his nearby home, Paddock would methodically open fire on the music festival across the street from his suite. When he wasn't preparing for his massacre, presumably, he was on the casino floor, trying his luck at a video poker machine. The image from cameras is striking - a man with only hours left to live, risking money in a game of chance. What does he hope to win? Why is he even there? 

Following these and other mass shootings, debates have erupted about how to prevent them: more money for mental health, giving law enforcement more ability to identify potential mass shooters, anti-bullying campaigns in schools, stricter gun laws. These debates eventually devolve into ideological battles, both in media and social media, between warring factions of right and left. This leads to each side putting forth its preferred cause for why seemingly normal people, and troubled people, go home to stockpiles of weapons and seemingly wait for the inevitable moment when they will be moved to create carnage. 

One solution proposed - do not identify the perpetrators. The idea behind this is to deny the shooter, bomber, etc., a measure of celebrity. I was reminded of this reading Umberto Eco's last book of essays, "Chronicles of a Liquid Society." In "God is my witness that I'm a fool..." Eco recounts a theory by the Spanish writer Javier Marias, that what is happening is the inevitable consequence of "the death of God" in society. 

At one time, Eco said, people were "persuaded that everything that they did had at least one Spectator, who knew their every thought and deed, who could sympathize with them or, if necessary, condemn them. They could be outcasts, good-for-nothings, losers scorned by their fellow men. They were people who would be forgotten as soon as they were dead, but who nourished the belief that there was at least One who knew all about them."

Eco goes on to recount how people would use this in conversation. "God knows I'm innocent," would say the criminal, or "God at least knows how much I've suffered," would be the cry of the one who felt abandoned by friends and family. In the place of God now is the eye of society, usually translated into the media presence. "Even bad press is good press," goes the wisdom, because at least someone is paying attention to you. That means that a person who makes it onto television stripping to his underwear for a cheap laugh has "made it." You hear millennials talk about people who are "Internet famous," which can encompass Snapchat users who are sought after as influence marketers, or the people who show up in Vine compilations, their faces recognizable for less than 10 seconds. 

Human beings have always sought recognition, through beauty, clothes, education, achievement, monuments, creation. And destruction. 

One is inevitably reminded of Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris, the Columbine shooters, who, according to Time Magazine, speculated on video about how their lives would be remembered after their deaths:

"They wanted movies made of their story, which they had carefully laced with "a lot of foreshadowing and dramatic irony," as Harris put it. There was that poem he wrote, imagining himself as a bullet. 'Directors will be fighting over this story,' Klebold said--and the boys chewed over which could be trusted with the script: Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino."

There's also the story of Vester Lee Flanagan II, also known as Bryce Williams, who shot his former TV colleagues Alison Parker and Adam Ward on live television on Aug. 26, 2015 in Roanoke, Va. Flanagan went to the trouble of recording the moment of the shooting and sharing it on Facebook and Twitter. One clearly sees the barrel of his 9mm Glock in the foreground of the picture, as Parker and Ward are totally engaged in an interview, and how Flanagan hesitates before pulling the trigger. He wanted the moment of the killing recorded live on his former television station, and indeed, Ward's falling camera caught the image of Flanagan right after the shots were fired. 

Flanagan left his own manifesto, a 23-page fax which says that he, a gay African-American, took inspiration from Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot nine black worshippers at a Charleston, S.C. church two months before. And from Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. And from Harris and Klebold. And so it goes. 

Society has a taste for this kind of story. FX recently concluded nine weeks of "The Assassination of Gianni Versace," a mini-series which spent more time on Versace's assassin, the spree-killer Andrew Cunanan, whose motives are still a mystery 20 years later. 

"They wanted to be famous," said FBI agent Mark Holstlaw of Harris and Klebold. "And they are. They're infamous."

Not everyone aspires to this category of notoriety, but our culture encourages the idea of finding your 15 minutes of fame. Eco's piece fleshes out the problems with performing for the eye of society. If you appear on television, you are recognized for your face - not the depth of ideas, the strength of character, the quality of virtue. And as the face changes, the level of acceptance changes. We get to watch ourselves on television, on our phones, on our screens, but what then? How far will we be willing to go to be remembered? And how long does that memory last? What constitutes a lasting memory? Even in the catalogue of murderers I just gave you, how many of you had to be reminded of the killers' names, and what they did, and when it happened? Even the carnage tends to blur over time.

The eye of society, like the eye of a camera, can be wounding. Where God promises not only recognition as one of His children, He also promises love. And that is love in spite of a very sure knowledge of every one of our imperfections, even the ones we are long oblivious to. 

The seductive idea that the creator of all reality can be simultaneously offering a personal relationship with all seven billion of His children at the same time strains the mind, but a being unable to do so wouldn't be worthy of worship.

In another piece, Eco asks what the point of Twitter is, as it is made of myriad warring perspectives, wisdom and idiocy shared at exactly the same volume. Perhaps it is to feel important, he writes. Not to be important, but to feel that way, at least to someone, at least for an instant. 

Perhaps the most compelling proof of the truth of Christianity is its Founder identifying the need the faith satisfies. "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28) The listener is given a task, to come, and a focusing destination, to Him. For the listener to react, he has to believe that he can find something in the Speaker's presence that is satisfying. With these words, Jesus summons all those who share a common feeling about humanity - the accumulating weight of existence, the futility of toil, the numbing quality of experience. He then promises rest. Mental, physical, spiritual. The most basic need other than sustenance, and the most elusive.

It would be impossible for someone, over two millennia, to make credible such an exhortation, unless He could deliver. And only someone watching would know that you needed it. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
Here's a review of the novel by Robbie Pink.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.  

Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 

Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here.