I wasn’t very shocked when the story broke yesterday of yet another shooting, this time against police officers and their families in Los Angeles. Such shootings, varying in scale, are common place in the country, and essentially a daily occurrence.
So it was with slight curiosity that I saw in Huffington Post an article referencing a “rambling manifesto” left by the suspect.
Probably a nutty rambling on the level of Mein Kampf or the Unabomber’s famous manifesto, I thought. After all, the term “manifesto” has an almost implicit characteristic of being incoherent and without insight.
Then I saw this tweet from Anderson Cooper:
The plot was thickening. What was he doing sending a parcel to Anderson Cooper, and it obviously wasn't some terroristic act, but a message he was sending via the press to the American people, perhaps?
Then came the full, uncensored version of Dorner’s writings, as released by Gawker. After seeing blirps, excerpts in the press reports of the manifesto, I had to read through the entire thing to figure out exactly what was going on.
It became quickly obvious as I combed through this literary work by Dorner that the adjectives used by the press, such as “insane” and “rambling” were totally off the mark. Instead, words like “articulate”, “justifiably angry”, and “calculated” came to mind.
He meticulously and effectively outlines and communicates his grievances, including an encyclopaedic delineation of numerous facts regarding his reports filed against the LAPD, as well as various life experiences he details as providing background for his extreme actions.
The various pop culture references aside, Dorner clearly was well-read, politically involved, and had been thoroughly ingrained in the career-central mindset until he was unjustly treated by the system when he tried to hold it accountable for alleged abuses.
This was clearly not the act of a mentally ill mad man, but a calculated act of rebellion against a corrupt bureaucracy and modern world view, symbolized by the Los Angeles Police Department.
The libel in the press has brought up memories of the McVeigh years. I was too young to follow events closely or with any true understanding, but in learning about the event after the fact, it was clear that press accounts had set the narrative on him very similarly to how they are doing the same to Dorner.
Gore Vidal once wrote of right-wing anti-government extremist Timothy McVeigh:
"From the beginning, it was ordained that McVeigh was to have no coherent motive for what he had done other than a Shakespearean motiveless malignity. Iago is now back in town, with a bomb, not a handkerchief."
Amazing how history repeats itself. And if McVeigh was America’s Iago, it would only be appropriate to label Moorish-skin-toned Christopher Dorner as the Othello in the story of modern America. A man who clearly had things going for him, who played the right game in his career until the corruption and manipulation in the system engulfed him with rage and violent ideation.
This was a man who had good intentions, but has made mistakes out of frustration, confusion, and downright manipulation by the powers that be. Like McVeigh had done back in the 1990's, Dorner is representing a side of the people that the press, politicians, judges and executive branch advisers could never truly capture. He represented the fifth branch of government: acts of violent revolution.
McVeigh symbolized the right-wing's growing discontent with federal government power overreach, and performed unthinkable acts of violence to send a message of discontent to the centralized authority figures. He was not a bumbling incoherent radical bent on destruction, but a political ideologue with a rational agenda and message to send to the nation and the world.
As Vidal wrote:
"The stoic serenity of McVeigh's last days certainly qualified him as a Henley-style hero. He did not complain about his fate; took responsibility for what he was thought to have done; did not beg for mercy as our always sadistic Media require. "
Similar words could be used to describe the tone of Dorner's exposition of the LAPD and modern corrupt bureaucracies that run the system. This man was not incoherently rambling in his diatribe against the modern American society, he was a man on a mission, with a goal to send a message that could not be ignored, as he was in the official channels he tried to use to clear his name from the LAPD's libel.
As McVeigh was America's Iago in the story framed by the press, and Dorner a modern Othello in the press, still both are villains in the tragedy of modern middle America, just as their parallel characteres were in Shakespeare's Othello. Because in the end, such unspeakable acts of violence are truly inexplicable and unjust, and nobody wins in the end.
But, given that, one can't help but read or watch Othello without having a bit more sympathy for Othello than for Iago.
At this time, Dorner is still at large, and perhaps more light will be shed on his actions. However, it’s important to know that, like McVeigh, Dorner is a product of his environment, of the system that has so clearly been abusive and irrational throughout his life.
Just as Gore Vidal sought to find "the meaning of Timothy McVeigh", so too should liberals and society in general seek to understand Christopher Dorner and his actions. To write him off as an irrational psychopath will do no justice to what produced the man and evolved him into who he became.
Hopefully, the political elites will heed the message Dorner is trying to send with his frustration over the selfish broken societal system in which we all find ourselves. It would just be a shame that such an unjustifiable act of violence would be the catalyst to force the system to engage in self-reflection and evolution.
It’s one of the dirty little secrets in American history that these misguided, but clearly calculated, acts of political violence serve as an ugly, yet effective (read: NOT ACCEPTABLE) way to bring attention to myriad ignored ills within our republic. Dorner's promulgation as posted on Facebook is only the beginning of our understanding of what he symbolizes for our modern American society.