Politics, madness merged in killer

WASHINGTON – When President John Kennedy visited Dallas in November 1963, he was greeted by a full-page newspaper ad accusing him of being a communist fellow traveler. To his wife he observed, Oh, you know, were headed into nut country today. The city, according to historian William Manchester, was a mecca for the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies.

In the hours following Kennedys assassination, aides assumed a right-wing radical was responsible. When Robert Kennedy informed Jacqueline about Lee Harvey Oswalds leftist background, she felt sick. He didnt even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights, she said. Its – it had to be some silly little communist. The Warren Commission found no direct connection between Kennedys assassination and the citys general atmosphere of hate.

It is a natural human desire to invest tragedy with meaning. Manchester, who chronicled JFKs final day, concluded, If you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of the scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesnt balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the presidents death with meaning.

The killings in Arizona deserve to have a meaning. The first assassination attempt on a female federal officeholder. The shooting of a respected federal judge. The murder of a girl born on a day known for death, Sept. 11, 2001. We want these lives and all the others to be balanced by something weightier than Jared Loughner.

The alleged Arizona killer shows signs of psychosis. But he also seems to have contributed to his own corruption by dabbling in moral nihilism, conspiracy theories and other drugs. In the absence of organic disease, it is possible for a man or woman to gradually destroy their character and conscience. The voice in Loughners head may have been his own.

There is a warning in the example of Loughner. His views are tinged with madness, but not unrecognizable. They are the distorted reflection of any ideology, of right or left, defined by resentment, conspiracy theories, illusions of persecution and hatred for the other. Loughner lives at the center of this blighted ideological landscape; others, from birthers to truthers, visit its outskirts. It is the place where madness and politics merge.

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