‘After the aircraft came to a standstill, “we were upside down hanging like bats,” [a passenger] said.’

***********************

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imag-
ination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try
to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables
one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s
mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the sur-
rounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound
signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by
one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not
very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave
as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know
what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I
am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those re-
sources are inadequate to the task.

***************************

Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” suggests that there are limitations to the simile.

Welp, the last of her kids that Tranyelle Harshman shot in the head (after which Harshman killed herself) has now, after suffering for a few days, died.

Tranyelle, notoriously mentally unbalanced, killed all four of them pointblank with a handy household gun that her family saw no reason to take out of the house despite her madness. “Though his wife had been undergoing treatment for her fragile mental state for several years, she hadn’t been able to move past it, [her husband] said.”

*********************

No, hubby up and took a temporary job in California, leaving Tranyelle alone in their rather isolated Wyoming house – just her, her insanity, four little kids, and a Glock.

A Glock? Whatever. Maybe she used an AK-47 and really blasted the babies’ brains out. Why haven’t the authorities identified the firearm?

*********************

Welp again: This is BIG news, and outlets all over the country have what to say about it, but virtually no one – and absolutely no one in gunny, astoundingly suicidal, Wyoming, has anything to say about a quadruple familicide made easy peasy with unlocked loaded guns fully available to a maniac.

Let us look at how our fellow Americans are rendering this event. “Olivia gained her angel wings yesterday,” announced the family at number four’s demise and OH MY. There are easy and hard ways to gain them, I guess, and God decided Olivia would do it the hard way, absorbing an agonizing slug from her own mother, and then laboring under a swollen bloody brain for days until her heart collapsed.

God wanted you for an angel. You, your sister, your other sister, and your other sister. And your mother?

***************************

It’s the Godswerve. A lunatic with a gun bloodies up the house and — cue angels.

Exactly like gun-fanatic madman Olin Johnson, who took one of his billion household firearms and blew his wife and himself away.

Immediately after the bloodbath, his Mormon community invited everyone to a celebration of his life, asking that they bring “goodies to share” and “warm memories.”

********************

Or think of Andrew Humiston, 15 year old massacrist – killed 5! family members and only missed a sixth because she played dead – who took one of his father’s conveniently located guns to kill everybody. What was God on about, letting Andrew stalk and slay one screaming pleading family member after another? Why did the rest of the Humiston family lovingly note, in everybody’s obit, that they are survived by their murderer?

**********************

All of these atrocity-reactions are best seen as bizarre subcultural self-comfortings, communities of people absolutely insistent on looking away from the carnage and swerving pronto to the angelic order. UD doesn’t begrudge them whatever all is forgiven God works in mysterious ways thing gets them through it; but how can the rest of us, how can a whole country bleeding from guns, play along? The focus has to be on the idiocy and negligence that put those death-dealers in the hands of maniacs.

***************************

Update: So many other examples.

“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life.”

… finds Under the Volcano books

in Mexico City! It’s one of UD‘s

favorite novels. My Lowry posts.

… on the one-year anniversary of his death.

[Photo: Alexander Nemenov]

“I think the Democrats’ brand is really bad, and I think this was an election based on culture,” [said Democratic Senator Mark Warner]. “And the Democrats’ … failure to connect on a cultural basis with a wide swath of Americans is hugely problematic… I think the majority of the party realizes that the ideological purity of some of the groups is a recipe for disaster and that candidly the attack on over-the-top wokeism was a valid attack.”

Finally, on one obscure Facebook comment thread, UD encounters one – and so far only one – statement of the obvious. (Background here.)

Okay, further down the thread, here’s another:

If he knew of her horrible ptsd and depression why was there a gun she could get to?

Hey – getting somewhere. Here are others:

Sad the hubby knew of her mental illnesses, yet she had access to a gun.

***************

Why a gun in the home?

***************

 [S]aying his wife battled PTSD, post-partum depression, and general depression. Yet access to a gun was allowed! Lord!

**************

Still, comments in all FB threads I’ve looked at are overwhelmingly

1. Let God have the burden.
2. Post-partum’s a bummer.

Heroes of mine, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, authors of the indispensable Retraction Watch, note that with RFK jr’s appointment, we are now officially drowning in junk.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t subscribe to the Atlantic, by the way – the magazine gives you three free paragraphs, and that’s all you need in order to get their despondency-making point.

Finally some states are prosecuting people for unlocked guns.

A not guilty plea was entered … on behalf of Tolbert, who also faces one count each of being a felon in possession of a firearm, being a felon in possession of ammunition, lying to a peace officer in a violent crime investigation and four counts of felony firearm.

That is, the law’s also a good way to suss out criminals.

LOL. The NYT’s coverage of Westminster has been informative, amusing, and, uh, fetching, to UD, who grew up with dogs (her mother bred, showed and even hunted with English cocker spaniels, and there were always puppies around when UD was a kid) and very much loves them. Here’s her webmistress – speaking of fetching – when young, holding one of Mitzi’s puppies.

But hey that ain’t no reason to put the guns away.

***************************

[The mother’s ex-husband] said he had been fighting for full custody [of their two children] after his divorce of about four years ago.

Pity he didn’t get it. Did the mother’s current husband inform him of her severe mental health issues?

***************************

It’s strange to me, but maybe I’m strange… in American terms. It’s strange to me, as I monitor responses to this hideous event (via various forms of social media), that no one has remarked in any way on this madwoman’s access to guns.

I mean, start with this: Two of the children would have had at least a fighting chance if the murderer had access only to knives or rope, or had to drown them… The two babies of course had no chance at all, no matter the method; but the 7 and 9 year olds might have had time to fight back or to flee if the method had been anything other than an instantaneous and crushingly lethal bullet. We don’t yet know what kind of gun she used, but there are plenty of weapons that would just wipe out the lives of these children in milliseconds, with one shot. Bang bang get the bigger ones first (one of them is currently clinging to life), and then it’s merely a matter of infants in their beds.

The murderer’s husband was apparently out of town, and though he knew his wife to be severely mentally ill, with generalized clinical depression plus post-partum depression…

Ecoute: Can it really be that the only thing Americans have to say about this event is God rest all of their souls? I mean, that sentiment, in different forms, is pretty much it as far as commentary goes. Quite a few people write variations on I know God has a plan, but at the moment it’s extremely hard to figure out what. No one even says Suicidal/homicidal psychotics shouldn’t be around guns. They don’t even venture that far.

Think of Naomi Judd’s suicide. She had longstanding, flagrant, self-destructive, mental illness. Am I really the only person who thinks it’s shocking that she had a loaded gun in her bedroom? Why is it strange to wonder why a 15 year old mass murderer had access to the gun that enabled him to execute five members of his family?

The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer [was] The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.

The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.

Whenever UD reads about the efforts of this or that university administrator to blow the school’s money on personal indulgences, she remembers the golden age of Diamandopoulos/Silber/Kramer, and it all seems so small. I mean yeah the current chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities has apparently blown the money he got from hardworking parents on bogus moving expenses, double-paid housing allowances, school credit card abuse, $1,000 per ride chauffeured trips, und so weiter. But does all of that even begin to form the Russian imperial picture of the guys sipping five hundred dollar cognac? Babe, you know they left some of that cognac on the table, or hurled it at their server, just to say HAHAFUCKYOUFUCKEVERYBODY.

I’m not getting that intensity of vibe from Terrence Cheng, though the limo rides are impressive. But even they lack the FUCKTHEWORLD psychosis of his predecessors, one of whom was so spectacularly filthy that he got a whole book written about him.

… the UM faculty pages, and that’s because the school is as slow at 404ing as it is responding to fraudulent research. Professor Lestat… er, Lesne, has resigned in disgrace after heading up multiple dirty Alzheimer’s studies. It’s all the rage.

LOL. We all enjoy watching a tool who used to tool around in a $300,000 Ferrari fall totally and publicly to pieces. It’s interesting and even feels sort of instructive to watch the self-decimation of a compulsive liar/gambler/asshole etc etc etc.

Better too when he splats, with cartoon loudness, from a great height (Supreme Court arguments! Akin Gump!).

********************

But where is Alan Dershowitz, Guardian Angel of the Gruesome, in all of this? Shouldn’t he be rushing to the defense of the great and good Tom Goldstein, down the street neighbor (okay he lives a couple of miles away) of none other than Les UDs? “The Justice Department harassment of this man is nothing more than envy of success.” UD predicts that’s the next thing that happens to this uber-greedy, tax-evading, income-hiding, fake-jobs-creator-for-his-bedmates, little shit. Alan Dershowitz to the rescue.

********************

But no. He’s going to represent himself.

Which can be risky (see 3:57)

A heady mix of martinis, machine guns, and masses of paying underage partiers (no guest list – you simply respond to flyers advertising it all over town) just exploded — whodathunkit? — into mortal combat! A sixteen year old is dead, and a bunch of other kids are injured, and somebody filmed the fun, with tons of people racing and screaming down the driveway into the night.

Here’s the house, in case you also want to pack a bunch of armed strangers into a random unguarded location and get them drunk.

As with the late-night lounge massacres UD tracks on this blog, the megamansion massacres have become routine; but just as no one wants to shut down the lounges, so no one seems interested in messing with the bullet-spewing big houses.

Maybe the extremely wealthy neighbors of mansions like this one? Does it bother them a tad?

UD also wonders about the people who build insanely massive houses like this one. Did they intend for some rich person to buy it, and when that didn’t happen they decided to rent it out to swarms of teenage shooters? Me don’t get it.

The gang used to be a recognized JMU fraternity, but its lethality/perversity was too much even for a southern frat school, so JMU took away its recognition. Right away, under a different name, and now free from school rules, the frat reconstituted itself and kept up the killing.

It killed two members, and one would-be member, in a car crash, and the parents of the dead boys are suing the gang and each of its members.

JMU should have taken action against the reconstituted gang as soon as it learned of it. As twisted as it is for a university to have to police and surveil itself in this way, if you’re going to let frats go wild on your campus, as JMU notoriously has, you have an obligation to understand that eventually one or more of these groups is going to go very seriously rogue, and that before multiple students of yours are drugged unconscious, dumped in a car, and driven into a tree, you need to rid your campus of the killers.