UD and her theory of her country’s latest massacre will graciously step aside when investigators discover some simple, graspable motive on the part of the gunman. Until then, how about this.
This was a crime of boredom and intellect. A metaphysical crime mixing a sense of entitlement with a sense of having run out of amusements. This was a hobbyist murder.
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UD will be surprised if, like Leopold and Loeb, Stephen Paddock had any acquaintance with Nietzschean nihilism. Maybe he read Cormac McCarthy. That’s the mental landscape I’m sketching.
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His brother calls Paddock highly intelligent, successful, and rich – quite like the buddies who decided, in 1924, purely out of boredom, curiosity, grandiosity, and intellectual enjoyment of the complex technical and analytical steps it would take to carry out a perfect murder, to kill a local boy.
If it’s true that one of the cameras Paddock placed in his room was positioned for him to film himself (this hasn’t been confirmed), this would complete UD‘s picture of a narcissistic game-player (he was a compulsive high-stakes gambler) at the very end of his distracting, engrossing pastimes, a man who never grew up (two divorces, no children) and who decided to leave, at the end of his maddeningly empty life, the ultimate roomful of a bad boy’s toys.
Paddock died surrounded by more guns than he could possibly fire.
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Since what I’ve written reminds one of my readers of Don DeLillo, here he is:
This is World War III. It’s a fact. It’s everywhere. Innocent people are being slaughtered everywhere. It’s terrorism that is expanding … almost geometrically. What’s left? What happens next? We have our lone shooters, our individual terrorists. Where do they come from? What motivates them? I think in many cases the gun is the motive as well as the weapon itself. A gun makes it possible for an individual, a man—a young man, usually—to make sense of everything that’s happening to him, either in three dimensions or in his mind. It gives him a motive. It gives him a sense of direction. It’s a substitute for real life and it’s the way he will choose to end his life, as well as the life of innocent people, of course.
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UPDATE: Not quite the same, but an affiliated theory.
Stephen Paddock very well may have contemplated mass murder as a sensualist exercise.
Again, recall Leopold and Loeb: “They did it to see what it would feel like.”
October 4th, 2017 at 11:11AM
sounds more like DeLillo than the news.
October 4th, 2017 at 11:19AM
Sounds exactly like DeLillo.
October 4th, 2017 at 11:40AM
maybe he’ll give you a cut on the book, just finished reading Krauss’ Forest Dark which has some Don-D-ish tones/themes.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/rewiring-the-real/9780231160414
October 4th, 2017 at 11:55AM
Well, if he wins the Nobel Prize this time around (he’s a perennial candidate – he must find it very irritating to keep getting mentioned), I’ll ask him for a cut of the prize money.