Superheroes, Mass Killings and How to Defang Violence
Drawing upon a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania (Australia) back in 1996, the author shares something that they figured out that we have not.
Will "Joker" inspire violence….it might, but here's the takeaway
The producers of the new movie “Joker” claim the film makes a profound statement about modern society. That’s BS. In fact, the movie believes in nothing. It panders to the main character’s petty resentments and cheers on his violent retribution.
Will Joker inspire violence….it might.
Here are two recommendations:
Keep the kids away from the theater (and the movie),
Take the time to read "Not Here” by Stephen Metcalf, a powerful Slate article published following the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado during a midnight showing of that other Joker movie, The Dark Knight Rises.
An Ah-ha Insight in Mass Shootings
In the article, Metcalfe doesn't blame the movie, exactly, but he does trace a connection between civil massacres and portraits of supervillains.
STAY WITH ME.
Drawing upon a mass shooting in Port Arthur, Tasmania (Australia) back in 1996, the author shares something that they figured out that we have not.
Metcalf writes:
The reaction to the Port Arthur tragedy went beyond legislation and into a serious attempt to understand the causes of the “civil massacre,” as it’s labeled in the literature, an effort that began more or less immediately. The Port Arthur perpetrator had been assigned a defense psychiatrist named Paul Mullen. When Mullen first interviewed the shooter, he was struck by his repeated queries about the death toll: He wanted to know if he had exceeded the body count of the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, which had occurred six weeks earlier.
Mullen had a suspicion about his client’s repellent one-upmanship, and his research confirmed it: that civil massacres were by their nature copycat crimes, “modeled,” as Mullen has since written, “on Rambo-like images and informed by knowledge, and occasionally study, of prior massacres.”
While it is true that civil massacres occurred throughout the 20th century, they were rare until the mid-1960s, when the phenomenon took a grimly familiar shape with the so-called “tower sniper.” The incident at the University of Texas, in which a former Marine held the Austin campus under siege from a bell tower, received massive media attention and was even turned into a well-known TV movie. It provided, according to Mullen, a kind of ritualized script (Mullen’s word) that civil massacres have followed ever since.
A young man stages a mass gun killing as a grand and redemptive act of vengeance on the world, an act so spectacular it draws the apparatus of instant notoriety —the news media—into action, thus lending the perpetrator an aura of power so sorely lacking in his ordinary life.
OK, asked Mullen, but who is this young man?
Piecing together a profile of the typical perpetrator, Mullen noted these were invariably young men with a high (if deluded) self-regard, who believed they had been grossly undervalued by the world —so much so, their lives had become one long psychic injury. They had often been bullied or neglected as children, had grown up into loners, and often had recently lost their last shred of emotional connection or support (job, girlfriend) with the world. But their dominant experience was one of persecution; their dominant affect, one of resentment.
Narcissism, persecution, resentment—even as I write it, I think check, check, check.
From a social-psychological point of view, young men are a thicket of false positives.
“Running Amok” A History Lesson
Who can pick from among the millions of alienated boys who will, triggered by loss, sow chaos? The preventative focus must come elsewhere; and to this end, Mullen, along with many other researchers, have looked to an unusual antecedent. The English phrase “running amok” is derived from the Malay concept of pengamok, or someone who commits an intensely violent and indiscriminate homicidal assault, often with a machete or a dagger, often in a crowded public space. Westerners have been fascinated by the pengamok since Captain Cook first visited the Malay archipelago and recorded its existence in his journal, in 1770. Since the amok was regarded as an extreme form of gila kena hantu (a kind of possession by evil spirits, or tiger spirits) or gila buatan orang (possession by witchcraft), it was treated with enormous tolerance—even, researchers claim, subtly sanctioned by the Malay tribes.
Historians of the amok now speculate it was a redemptive act of face saving, a way for a young male to massively compensate for a perceived loss of status. The analogy to the civil massacre is obvious. But here is where things get interesting: Incidents of amok began to decline as Malay tribes modernized and Westernized. By the mid-19th century, the amok was being described and treated as a mental illness. In effect, Western psychiatric medicine disenchanted and banalized the amok—and as a result, it lost its implicit sanction as a magnificent act signaling the presence of evil spirits. And here is where things get doubly interesting.
As one researcher has written: “Inexplicably, while the frequency of and interest in amok among primitive tribes were decreasing, similar occurrences of violence in industrial societies were increasing.” It is as if the pengamok were a virus that, even as it was being eradicated on the Malay island chain, leapt to the West: to Austin, to Dunblane, to Port Arthur, to Colombine, and beyond.
To define the civil massacre as the sequel to the amok will perturb some corners of the liberal mind. For even if we achieved an unlikely paradise, of media decorum and gun control, the central fact of the amok would remain untouched: its place within our own animistic worldview. We are, in short, still addicted to evil. It is our version of the gila kena hantu. While I agree with Anthony Lane, that no movie causes anyone to kill, let’s not pretend the Aurora filmgoers were attending a screening of The Sorrow and The Pity. They were watching a prime example of a genre known for the extreme nihilism of its villains; for their charismatic malevolence, and the creatively annihilative uses to which they put modern technology.
Superheroes are, after all, an invention of the late 1930s. They arose in America in part as a psychic response to European fascism. Superman appeared in 1938 and gained in popularity along with the war effort. We were fighting an awesome evil that nothing short of an awesome counterpower could defeat.
A revived attraction to superheroes may in part be a response to 9/11, but I think the clue to their peculiar resurgence lies elsewhere. The rise in popularity of the blockbuster comic book film runs concurrent to the end of the Cold War; they express a resulting crisis of identity. The nature of that crisis comes home when you think about the defining feature of the Batman franchise: The astonishing, supersaturated performances of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger as the Joker, counterpointed against the almost deliberately color-drained performances of Michael Keaton and Christian Bale as Batman. In the absence of a cogent notion of heroism, superhero movies nonetheless express something very real: a vestigial reservoir of awesomeness-longing—a need for the awesome villainy necessary to call forth a potentially awesome heroism.
American public figures persist in preferring a quasi-theological language of diabolism (both Romney and Obama called the Aurora shooter evil) as if the morally neutral language of psychiatric explanations somehow destigmatizes acts of violence, letting the perpetrator off the hook.
The very lesson of the amok is the opposite: It was only when any notion of the amok as a manifestation of evil was set aside that the amok became fully stigmatized, and Malay culture’s quiet sanction of the pengamok’s own view of himself, as a vessel of something retributive and grand, finally withered away.
Were we serious—truly serious—about making the civil massacre disappear, having it become, like the amok, nothing more than an antiquated curiosity, the history of the amok tells us precisely what to do: divest evil of its grandiosity or mythic resonance by completely banalizing it.
The takeaway: instead of calling these kids evil and completing their mythological journey, refer to them in the media as pathetic losers. That makes some sense.
The Day After “The Day”
Chaplain David Fair, President of ChaplainUSA, shares his memories of Ground Zero and the toll it has taken on all those who responded in the days following Sept 11.
Chaplain David Dave Fair, President of ChaplainUSA, shares his memories of Ground Zero and the toll it has taken on all those who responded in the days following Sept 11.
Chaplain David Fair
This is a difficult post to write. 18 years ago I was deployed to the site of the World Trade Center in NYC, following the 911 attack.
After my time there I thought I was ok. But I started having flu like symptoms. Couldn’t figure it out. I finally called a psychologist friend who worked with law enforcement officers. I asked her what was wrong with me.
Her reply was you were at Ground Zero. As simple as that.
Fellow Police Chaplains, I had been trained for all types of mass disasters. I taught crisis management. I had been deployed to various scenes dozens of times, yet this was 911.
If you have read by post on the actual deployment, then you know what I and hundreds of other endured.
But this was different. I had experienced Post Traumatic Stress (PTS). But I had never felt this way. It was 911.
My psychologist friend talked with me, and it came to the surface. What was causing most of my trauma was the fact I didn’t feel like I accomplished anything while at Ground Zero.
I had talked to dozens of survivors, family, friends and responders. Yet I still didn’t feel like I had done enough. My friend walked me through my story of my time in New York, and I began to see I did exactly what God had me there for. No more. No less.
Now let’s jump to yesterday 18th Anniversary of The World Trade Center 911 attack. This is the first time in 18 years I haven’t been asked to tell my story, somewhere. Are we starting to forget ? I’m not.
Yesterday was extremely hard for me. Depressed, anxious. Today isn’t much better. I’m sharing my heart so others can see that after 18 years it is still ok to grieve.
It is hard for me to get this personal. Hard for me to admit and share this.
Yesterday, I stayed mostly in bed. Covers pulled over my head. Depressed, anxious.
Didn’t feel like going anywhere so I didn’t and today is not a lot better. I’ve been working on the Police Chaplain Coffee Shop today, because I don’t want to let our members and my friends down.
A neat thing happened last night. Around 9:30, I received a text from an old friend. One I hadn’t heard from in a long time. Keoki is a Police Chaplain in Hawaii, he said “ Thinkin’ about you. Have a blessed Day, thank you for serving.”
Keoki is a past president of the International Conference of Police Chaplains. (ICPC) Thank you my friend.
This really lifted my spirits. Really helped. Often it is the little things that help.
God will get me through this. Just remember those who were at any attack scene from 911, experienced the 18th anniversary yesterday, and although people are affected by trauma many ways. Just a smile and kind word will help.
Or maybe a cup of coffee in the Police Chaplain Coffee Shop.
Thanks to all who deployed, thanks to all those behind who prayed. Keep it up.
Why Facebook Needs to Hire a Few Hundred Chaplains
Testimony from those working to keep beheadings, bestiality and child sexual abuse images off Facebook indicates that the support provided isn’t enough
“There was literally nothing enjoyable about the job. You’d go into work at 9am every morning, turn on your computer and watch someone have their head cut off. Every day, every minute, that’s what you see. Heads being cut off.”
The life of a Facebook moderator
That’s how one man, who wished to remain anonymous, characterized his job as a content moderator at Facebook.
“We were underpaid and undervalued,” said the man, who earned roughly $15 per hour removing terrorist content from the social network after a two-week training course.
Pictures, videos, profiles and groups would be flagged either by users or algorithms to review, and his team would decide if they needed to be removed or escalated.
“Every day people would have to visit psychologists. Some couldn’t sleep or they had nightmares.”
Psychologists say that the emotional toll of looking at extreme imagery, whether violent terrorist acts or child sexual abuse, can be punishing.
Workers exposed to such content should have extensive resiliency training and access to counsellors, akin to the support that first-responders receive.
However, testimony from those working to keep beheadings, bestiality and child sexual abuse images off Facebook indicates that the support provided isn’t enough.
“The training and support was absolutely not sufficient,” said the analyst, who worked at a company contracted by Facebook to moderate content.
Facebook company spokeswoman said:
"Every day people would have to visit psychologists. Some couldn’t sleep or they had nightmares. We recognize that this work can often be difficult. That is why every person reviewing Facebook content is offered psychological support and wellness resources.”
Can more be done?
According to Rabbi Avram Mlotek, the answer is YES.
Rabbi Avram Mlotek
Rabbi, writer and co-founder of Base Hillel, Avram Mlotek is a longtime advocate of using chaplains in Silicon Valley
From Rabbi Avram Mlotek’s recent essay: Why it’s time for Silicon Valley start hiring chaplains:
I am a rabbi, so social media is not my primary operating system. Nevertheless — like billions of other people on Earth — I’m a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram user. Why shouldn’t a sermon reverberate across as many virtual channels as possible? Our globe is interconnected like never before because of such advances in technology, and that is something to be celebrated.
“ Our spiritual lives have suffered as technology use has expanded. We’ve forgotten how to pause, to look up from the screen, to see and be seen.”
Still, the obvious needs stating: Our spiritual lives have suffered as technology use has expanded. We’ve forgotten how to pause, to look up from the screen, to see and be seen. The ethics of the internet corrode as quickly as they develop.
The onus of responsibility for reevaluating the effects of technology should not lie solely upon users; the providers of this technology share this responsibility too. After all, we occupy this new virtual landscape together. This symbiotic relationship is paralleled in Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism: The mekabel, receiver, can only receive insomuch as the mashpia, provider, can readily give.
That’s why it’s time for Silicon Valley to start hiring chaplains.
Chaplains work on-site in hospitals, prisons and social service agencies providing spiritual care to all — nurses as well as patients, guards as well as prisoners, staff as well as clients. It’s not so farfetched. Technology companies host gyms, massage therapists, keynote speakers and meditation spaces to contribute to the wellbeing of their employees. Why not chaplains too?
We agree!
Quick Guide to De-escalation
Learn how personal space, body language, and listening skills can help effectively de-escalate the disruptive behavior.
Learn how personal space, body language, and listening skills can help effectively de-escalate the disruptive behavior.
Below is a terrific training guide from the National Black Nurses Association.
Also available for download: Quick Guide to Verbal De-escalation Tactics.
The Answer to Darkness
Rabbi Scheiner founded Palm Beach Synagogue in Palm Beach, Florida.
In an interview with Bob Jones, Rabbi Moshe offers his thoughts on seeing life as a bounty of blessing from God.
Join Us Twice a Week
Robert Kenneth Jones is an innovator in the treatment of addiction and childhood abuse. In a career spanning over four decades, his work helping people recover from childhood abuse and addiction has earned him the respect of his peers.
Working in partnership with Robert Kenneth Jones, ChaplainUSA is proud to present Robert Kenneth Jones Bi-Weekly Journal. Each entry reveals those gifts from God, sometimes hidden in plain sight, which nevertheless offer a true source of healing and inspiration.
Bob’s writing is an invitation to walk in gratitude. We hope you will join us each Sunday morning and Wednesday afternoon.
Too Much Darkness in the World?
Rabbi Moshe Scheiner offers a simple but challenging way out of the darkness of anger and hate in modern life.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rabbi Moshe Scheiner is the founding Rabbi of the Palm Beach Synagogue in Palm Beach, Florida.
Rabbi Moshe Scheiner offers a simple but challenging way out of the darkness of anger and hate in modern life. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Rabbi Moshe Scheiner is the founding Rabbi of the Palm Beach Synagogue in Palm Beach, Florida.
He holds a Masters degree of Talmudic studies and Jewish philosophy from the Rabbinical College of America. Rabbi Scheiner resides in Palm Beach with his Rebbetzin, Dinie and their six children.
From Bob Jones' interview with Rabbi Moshe Scheiner.
Their conversation continues online at https://chaplainusa.org/overcoming-fear
Texas Bravado & Facing Down Hurricane Harvey
Chaplain Andy Toopes discusses the Houston flood relief.
Crisis Doctor
ChaplainUSA Live with Adam Davis
ChaplainUSA Live March 9, 2017: Our Guest is Dr. Tim Faulk (aka The Crisis Doctor)
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25Chaplainusa, David Dierks and 23 others
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Chaplainusa · 15:26 is this a guy thing?
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· Commented on by Phillip LeConte · March 9 at 8:55pmManage
Chaplainusa · 10:55 Houston we have a problem
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· Commented on by Phillip LeConte · March 9 at 8:51pmManage
Chaplainusa · 17:29 Just a thought.....Symptoms of trauma must be dealt with. Trauma has a saying" "pay me now or pay me later". In other words Deal with the trauma now or you will deal with it later on.
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Chaplainusa · 28:03 Recommendations for small departments where they do not have liberty of taking a few minutes off to discuss trauma and no ride-a-longs?
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Chaplainusa · 37:28 Excellent information. Greatly enjoyed. Hope we do this again.
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David Jay · 24:28 Trust me Tm knows what he is talking about.. i am living proof of his results.
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Chaplainusa · 34:15 How do you help seniority understand the need for "skills" when they are resistant?
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Chaplainusa · 18:07 should we worry when a police officer appears to have no reaction to a crisis?
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· Commented on by Phillip LeConte · March 9 at 8:58pmManage
Don Rawlinson · 25:59 Do you employ role play in the training
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David Jay · 10:04 Did we lose Adam?
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Christopher Barberree · 4:47 Fine here
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Billy McGhee · 9:43 Tim...great video!
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Christopher Barberree · 4:09 Rtr
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Chaplainusa · 37:10 thank you!
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· Reply · Commented on by Phillip LeConte · March 9 at 9:17pmManage
Chaplainusa · 27:34http://thecrisisdoctor.com/Books_Papers.html
Developed By M Abdur Rokib Promy
THECRISISDOCTOR.COM
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Chaplainusa · 22:18 http://thecrisisdoctor.com/
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· Commented on by Phillip LeConte · March 9 at 9:02pmManage
Chaplainusa · 21:01 https://www.icisf.org/
International Critical Incident Stress…
ICISF.ORG
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Chaplainusa · 4:35 can hear fine here
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Chaplainusa · 3:46 http://thecrisisdoctor.com/
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Chaplainusa · 1:09 from central Texas
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Chaplainusa · 26:34 does pop culture make this problem worse
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Chaplainusa · 33:17 Dr Tim Faulk , we need more of you!
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Chaplainusa · 14:13 how common is sleep loss for police officers?
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Chaplainusa · 25:56thecrisisdoctor@gmail.com
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· Commented on by BeLive · March 9 at 9:06pmManage
Dale Henderson · 21:21 I was trained in the Beverley / Mitchell model... ICISF. Are there any others you would recommend?
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Chaplainusa · 3:47 Dr. Faulk's Survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XGP6XP7
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David M. Choate · 30:35 Ministry of Presence
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Karrie Okonsky · 33:00 How much interaction with fire/EMS do you have?
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Dale Henderson · 4:54 Think Doc... You're loud and clear
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Karrie Okonsky · 33:28 Thank you!!
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David M. Choate · 10:24 Code Adam
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David M. Choate · 37:38 Thank you
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Dale Henderson · 37:05 Great meeting!
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Dale Henderson · 29:59 All cops drink coffee!
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Dale Henderson · 20:19 Can you name some recommended models?
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Dale Henderson · 23:29 Follow up is key!
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Dale Henderson · 22:50 It's very good!
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Dale Henderson · 10:00 And Adam just froze!
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Christopher Barberree · 19:41 Marley
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Christopher Barberree · 4:00 Nice
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Adam Davis · 10:16 I'm here
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Dale Henderson · 4:01 Can barely hear the Doc!
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Christopher Barberree · 10:07 Lost adam
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Lindy Williamson · 0:40 I know that guy...love ya buddy
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Chaplain Mary Rae travelled to Sutherland Springs. Here's what she saw.
Report from Sutherland Springs, TexasA good friend to the Police Chaplain Project, Chaplain Mary Rae, travelled to Sutherland Springs, Texas this week to assist survivors from First Baptist Church shooting. Mary spoke with ChaplainUSA President Chaplain David Fair about the experience.
Posted by Chaplainusa on Saturday, November 11, 2017