So I finally started listening to @yourewrongabout's series on the DC snipers and the first episode is a *masterpiece* of structure. (Thread)
I hadn't gotten around to listening to the DC snipers episodes because it was a series, and I didn't really remember anything about the DC snipers beyond that they'd shot a bunch of people in DC.
The episode starts off by asking why, when the DC snipers:
A) killed a lot of people
B) left behind Tarot cards and engaged in the sort of cryptic, active back-and-forth with police that serial killer stories LOVE
C) were really damn good at being unpredictable...
...why haven't a million books been written about them? Why isn't there a TV show? Why haven't they inspired a bunch of crime fiction?
Like, they did the "brilliant and malevolent serial killer" thing par excellence?
Why isn't the whole true crime industry ALL OVER THEM?
And the easy answer to go to there is that it's because they were Black, and don't fit the mold of the White Male Genius serial killer.
That's probably a big part of it. Another big part of it is probably that the case was presented as terrorism rather than serial killing.
The easy answer to go to there is that John Allen Muhammad was Muslim, so again, he fits our pop culture narrative better as a terrorist.
So the podcast spends some time exploring this, and honestly, that issue by itself is FASCINATING and would have been a must-listen all by itself.
But then they pivot and spend most of the rest of the episode talking about John Allen Muhammad from the perspective of his wife, Mildred, based on her memoir.
And that seems like a strange pivot at first. What follows is a slow, increasingly horrifying ramp-up of domestic abuse. And, in some ways, the worst kind, because it's not physical so she doesn't fit the mold of a "battered woman" and no one believes her.
And at this point in the podcast, you're probably thinking, like me, that the point of focusing on the slow, creeping horror of how he treated his wife is supposed to primarily serve as foreshadowing for him being a serial killer.
Two side notes:
1) Mildred Mohammad is possibly the most empathetic person who's ever lived. When she finds out he was cheating on her, her first instinct is to put herself in the shoes of the Other Woman, and to have compassion for her.
(This leads to that thing you always WANT women who've both been deceived by a cheating man to do, but almost never happens in real life: they team up.)
When John tells her he wants a divorce, her primary concern is making sure he'll be okay without her.
And when she ends up in a women's shelter, with women who don't believe her because she hasn't suffered the "right" kind of abuse...
...her response is to become an advocate for them.
As Sarah and Mike note in the podcast, if humans were sensible, we'd build statues to people like Mildred Mohammad, not generals.
Side Note 2) You're Wrong About consistently makes me feel compassion for everyone involved in whatever they're talking about. It's one of Sarah and Mike's great gifts.
John Allen Mohammad is the exception to that.
I was primed to feel sympathy for him because I was sure that, look, he's Black and Muslim, he probably experienced enough prejudice that he just *cracked.*
Mildred's compassion and empathy for him in her memoir notwithstanding, after learning how he treated her, I wanted him dead.
And this leads into why the structure was so brilliant:
The twist, in the last 10 minutes of a very long episode, is that this is a domestic abuse case.
He appears to have been killing random people to disguise that he was trying to kill Mildred (and people who helped her get away from him, like their accountant). His first words when he was arrested were "It's Mildred's fault."
And it's astonishing to me how much of the reporting on this case treats his domestic abuse as simply incidental to, or foreshadowing of, his killing spree when it was actually the *reason for it.*
(Oh, also: the reason that this got tried as terrorism, a framing which is probably a factor in why it's not talked about as serial killing, is because that way they could get the death penalty.)
But yeah, well done, You're Wrong About. That was a perfect hook at the beginning, and a gut-punch of a twist at the end. I'm eagerly awaiting having time to listen to the rest of the series.
Anyway, profoundly worth your time.
ALL the domestic abuse content warnings, obvi.
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my parents have been pretty responsible about COVID for Boomers living in what was a red state before this election, but my sister tracks their phones just to be safe because a lot of their friends aren't taking it seriously and I really have to admire her commitment
and I know if I were either her or my parents I'd be exhausted (her from trying to make sure they stay safe, because they have a hard time saying no to their friends) and them from basically being spied on
but from half a continent away it's hilarious
like, understand, my sister is in a different city from them
so, SCENE: my mom sitting in the car at the Starbucks drivethru
I actually agree that he was a competent fascist. My fear is that having fired up the extremists, he’ll make way for a Reagan-esque figure, who will do all the same stuff but sound Nice And Polite enough to win over moderates, who’ll denounce the Proud Boys without doing anything
And no, that sort of figure might not have the same pull over Trumpists that Trump did, but they’ve already come into being. They don’t need someone to empower or encourage them from the White House any more: they just need someone who won’t try to stop them.
And again: the old guard Republican Party leadership’s issue with Trump wasn’t that he was too fascist for them—they want all the same things. It was his lack of loyalty to them and his saying the quiet parts out loud.
Yup. Time to review why you can't let fascists have even an inch, why we have to make it ACTUALLY socially unacceptable to be a Nazi. theestablishment.co/why-punching-n…
Beware "those who see Nazis as perfect foils for their ideological posturing rather than very real genocidal extremists with a long and bloody track record," because they're going to wring their hands at the idea of shunning these people.
Fascism's not one political ideology among many. It is "specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else."
like, weird, *I* thought it was the constant treatment of fascism as a legitimate point of view and giving fascists time on the news and doing fawning profiles of them and otherwise normalizing their participation in society that gave us Trumpism
like this both-sides-ism is coming from someone who claims to be a civil rights attorney