Fort Hood, PTSD, And Islam
I have nothing particularly profound or informative to say about what happened at Fort Hood yesterday, so I will simply direct you to this post by Spencer Ackerman, which pretty much encapsulates how I feel about the coverage of the story and is a powerful corrective to stuff like this.
There was a breathtakingly bizarre spectacle last night on Larry King Live, featuring some harebrained JAG, an incendiary Shoshana Johnson, and–and Dr. Phil–that drove this theme deep down the center of the fairway.
What, Liza Minnelli wasn't available?
Lord that Pajamas Media page was a fucking swamp of hate. How can you know that the shooter was a Muslim the minute you heard about the incident? What kind of rat-infested brain must you have to leap to that conclusion when, far as I know, there has never been a mass shooting in this country carried out by a Muslim?
No, but there were some planes?
Yes, but mass shooting = muslims! doesn't exactly compute does it? Mass shooting = crazed worker with a grudge usually does.
The comments after the post made me want to take my children to an island far, far away and become a coconut farmer.
Sadder still when I think that Phyllis Chessler was a respected feminist writer back in the day. Women and Madness was a very important book in its time.
It is irritating that the PTSD/psychiatric explanation is being pimped so hard. But it serves as a proxy for the fundamentalist Islam issue they are scared to acknowledge.
It is equally irritating that the media is tip-toeing around the fact that the alleged assailant was apparently a very strong Muslim (appearing in prayer garb on closed circuit camera the day before the event). Let me pose the question to you — if the issue were the alleged sexual assault of multiple minor girls and the alleged assailant was a fundamentalist Mormon, albeit whiter than snow, do you not think his faith would be the centerpiece of the story? And I'm not saying dude did it because of Islam, but I do think that dude's beliefs are a big part of the story. Or at least worth probing in the open so it doesn't become fodder for the birthers and tin-foil hatters to pervert and twist up.
Like the dude said, "To try and make his actions fit into your narrative is not only stupid, but transparent."
It's like making the correlation that hairdressing gives people AIDS.
Agreed. But there is no narrative right now other than some dude did something super messed up and killed a bunch of people. So the responsible thing to do is report the facts — all of them — and leave out the spinning, whether well-intentioned or not.
dollars to donuts Hasan liked him some man-ass. gayranteed (get it? ha!) also, i don't get my hair "dressed"…i get it CUT. by a man. who sleeps with women. and is AIDS free. FREEDOM!!
Reminds me of a classic from Sept. 2001…
http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html
People who make psych diagnoses based on news articles and tv segments are indeed idiots. People who make racist statements are indeed racists.
That understood, let's not deny the reality of secondary trauma and ptsd related violence.
Secondary trauma is a genuine phenomenon that occurs with counselors and psychologists who work with other people who have experienced primary trauma — victims of wife abusers, victims of rapists, and victims of war. This article discusses the phenomenon http://www.womanabuseprevention.com/html/trauma__post-traumatic_stress_.html
Counselors on the GI Rights Hotline — http://girightshotline.org 877-447-4487 assist people in the military to obtain their rights, including the right to obtain discharge and to have accurate information about the consequences of going AWOL and UA. These counselors often experience secondary trauma related to this work. No article on that; but I can speak from direct experience working on the Hotline.
There is also good reason to believe that PTSD may lead to violence, often against a wife or other woman and against oneself in the form of suicide. Here's an older article on this http://ptsdcombat.blogspot.com/2005/09/casualties-of-war-tracking-us-ptsd.html
It is literally criminal that there is inadequate care for people in the military who have ptsd, that people in the military with ptsd may be harassed and otherwise discouraged from obtaining treatment,and that this condition is often misdiagnosed — sometimes intentionally to avoid giving pensions to people with ptsd. The Military Law Task Force has an excellent article on this at http://www.nlgmltf.org/ under "Information for Militlary Servicemembers and Families.
He's also a psychiatrist. And everyone knows they're loony.
My first thought too! I knew he'd get slammed merely for his name (despite that he totally could have been a christian or an atheist or whatever) but in my experience the psychiatrists go into that field because they are fucking crazy.
correction: all doctors, in any field, are fucking crazy. full disclosure – I'm a psychiatrist who feels hurt by this stereotype, but have met very few "normal" MDs anywhere.
To Toadvine's point,
Let's take the word "muslim" out and just replace it with "religion."
We can openly blames: guns, PSTD, foreign policy, military training, solar flares, the media, video games, Marilyn Manson, hip-hop, "society" and any host of things.
But, in this case, we can't bring up religion as one of the motivating factors that set off a depraved individual. And be honest, many of you would be doing if it had turned out he was a redneck fundamentalist.
What's really pissing me off about this is all the people saying, "Remember the victims in your prayers" and "Prayer" this and "Prayer" that.
Maybe we'd be better off with a little less praying in general.
Sometimes when an individual's mental illness begins to take over he/she will attach themselves to religion and become obsessed with it. I wonder how recent his religious involvement began.
Agree. Obsession rarely a good thing, except for maybe immediate gratification.
Calvin Klein begs to differ.
@Hired Goons-Are you available for parties and events. I need you to walk beside me and whisper good come-backs.
That's all I meant. Delusional/desperate people flock to religion; they also flock to drugs. If dude was a meth-head we could all talk about it without our "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" covert feelings of superiority and askance glances towards those who might assert that his drug habit provides a partial explanation for his madness. As it is, even here (and generally I think Awl commentators are remarkably open-minded) people are quick to mock anyone who asserts that religiosity might be a driver.
Nobody here is tiptoeing around anything. They were mocking Pajama Media which, let's face it, is the "News" organization that send Joe the Plumber to Israel as a war correspondent. Nobody is mocking poiting out religion as a driver for this event. They are mocking those who are cumming in the their pants with joy over this being perpetrated by a rag head, the kind who loved to repeat Hussein every time they said "Obama."
And what media are avoiding talking about the Islam issue? I've been watching al the 24/7 news channels and they're all over it. Shit, Shep Smith said that the guys name basically tells you why he did it before anyone had any details at all. NPR even mentions it as a "possible motivation." You have an Everyone's Blind to the Truth Except Me persecution complex.
No Abe. I don't. Because I have no idea what the truth is. But I read the Times this morning, and watched channels other than Fox, and found that the man's religious faith was barely mentioned.
Why is nobody talking about how this portion of Texas is FFFFUUUUUCCCKKKKEDD up. The connecting dots to me are Fort Hood, Killeen, Waco: all sites of some of America's worse shooting massacre-type activities in the last 20 years
Wouldn't that be a bit like "making the correlation that hairdressing gives people AIDS"? Are there a bunch of shooting massacres that happened all over the USA in the last 20 years? Of course, that doesn't explain why nobody is talking about it, since they are plenty busy talking about the other non-correlations…
Well. I'm kind of kidding about the association being meaningful. But it is still striking. Killeen and Hood are almost the same place with Waco very nearby. And two of the three events I mention are far beyond the average US shooting spree. Killeenw was the worst in history until V Tech. Like 28 people killed. Waco had, what, 65? Again, probably no meaningful connection but it certainly gives that little triangle of America a bad reputation.
Well, yeah, and upstate New York, and Colorado and Virginia Tech.
SPEAKING of which, Hasan went to Virginia Tech. Coincidence? Or is VT a breeding ground for EvilDewars?
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Or Idaho. Oklahoma City. Manhattan? Cleveland. Milwaukee. Newark and Camden?
In short, come off it.
It's clearly pointing out the trivia of the area and admits to no meaningful connection. So come off what exactly? What drives your particular need for having dialogue in only the most hostile terms?
He's from Waco.
My family is from Waco, actually.
You could see the Koresh compound burn my grandfather;s house. So you're half-right.
And Abe, I don't care to be hostile about it. But your statement, perhaps in jest, was a little bit of a stretch.
@abe & baboleen:
you know what else is near there? austin. and don't act like either of you dudes haven't given hand jobs to each other at The Backyard while the Indigo Girls played, or eaten tofu cooked in a variety of ways at the Whole Foods World Headquarters, or attended a Kathy Acker reading at BookPeople, or furiously texted your other gay friends after seeing Sandra Bullock and Jeff Tweedy in the same bar on the same night…because if you act like you haven't done any of these things then you're both not only sanctimonious fucks, but you're also liars.
Cintra, if you want to address the column you can just email me.
I get it Abe. Look dude, you gotta quit being so defensive. You're a good columnist with interesting perspectives and I enjoy 95% of your output tremendously. But, like all people, sometimes you take positions that are a little irksome and I give you my opinion on it. No harm, no foul.
Keep doing what you are — it's good stuff.
Guns don't kill people…
Muslims do!
Why can't we just blame men and be done with it? We're only a decade or two from removing the necessity of men from the reproduction equation, I think it's time to start considering whether men have outlived their usefulness.