The Color of Killing: PC and the snipers

National Review, Nov 25, 2002 by Rob Long

If you plug the phrase "angry white male" into Google, you get about 247,000 results, which isn't really all that many when you consider how many white males get their phone service from Verizon.

The assorted profilers and pundits who so confidently fingered the Angry White Male during last month's sniper manhunt should be forgiven their bone stupidity. Here they were, all dressed up in their new camera-friendly clothes, brushing the green-room doughnut crumbs off their tie, when the host turns to them and puts on the serious-host face and asks, "Who are we looking for here?"

I mean, who knew? You're a profiler, right? So profile. There could be a book deal in this whole thing (Profiles in Madness or Is Your Neighbor an Angry Killer About to Explode?), so don't blow it. Play the odds. Who is it most likely to be? Which personality type is riddled with rage and crushed by feelings of impotence? Quick: How many Verizon customers are there?

And the media professionals -- your New York Times reporters and your network anchors -- can't really be blamed, either. They'll plug "Male comma Angry White" into any available "Who Did This Bad Thing?" box. Sprinkle gunplay on the top, stir in the fact that the guy is a pretty good shot to boot, heat and serve: We're looking, they said, for a crazy, furious, white gun nut from one of the red states.

And then the cops. During what must have been one of the largest manhunts in the nation's history, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were stopped at least three times for traffic-related violations. At least three times! I know, I know: They were looking for a white van and a white man. They were looking for a "regular guy," according to the profilers. "A guy who probably has a job and a house and a vaguely unsatisfactory sex life," they asserted confidently. (To which I tug nervously at my collar and ask in a squeaky voice, "Just how unsatisfactory are we talking about, here?")

But still. Didn't the officers notice something odd about the duo? Didn't they think it was strange that these two men were sleeping in their car? You mean to tell me that the boy, Lee Malvo, wasn't just a titch nervous, that his eyes didn't dart around? Didn't they notice anything? Didn't they hear the spooky music in the background?

Whoops. I guess I'm already watching the movie version. You can always tell who the bad guy is in movies, because whenever he appears -- and it's always a he -- they play weird, spooky, psycho-killer music. "That must be him," you whisper to your movie-going companion, "because, boy, that's some spooky music." "Shhhhh!" says the angry white person behind you, noting one more irritant in his already itchy life that he'll bring up with his friends in one of those gun-nut chat rooms.

In the movie version of the Washington sniper (Blood County or Caprice of Death), it'll be wall-to-wall spooky music, as Don Cheadle and some young actor drive around the streets of Toronto (much cheaper to film there than Baltimore, let me tell you) as Chief Moose (Denzel Washington) misses his kid's soccer game because, well, somebody's gotta kick some sniper ass, son, and you're looking at the guy who's gonna do it.

Unfortunately, though, that's not the movie that was playing for three weeks in the Baltimore-Washington-Springfield, Va. area. Despite the best efforts of the profilers and the media liberals who want everything to be about white men and guns, the reason the cops didn't hear the spooky music is that John Muhammad and Lee Malvo weren't that kind of killers. They weren't the Jeffrey Dahmer gonna-eat-my-boyfriend type or the David Berkowitz gonna-kill-some-slutty-teens type or any of the types that call for off-kilter camera angles and subjective dolly- tracking and a spooky musical underscore. They were the Timothy McVeigh type, and we all know what that means.

Poor Tim McVeigh didn't deserve creepy theme music. He wasn't scary, or spooky, or really much of anything. He was a not-so-bright kid who ate a steady diet of childish political nonsense about black helicopters and Jewish bankers and decided to commit an act of phenomenal evil because, well, because he could. Of course he had deep-seated psychological motivations -- doesn't everybody, for everything? -- but his primary motive was political. Evil, but political.

The result was that an entire ugly political movement -- the militias, the Ruby Ridgers -- collapsed along with the federal building in Oklahoma City.

And the Muhammad/Malvo case? Here we have a guy who converted to Islam, held strong anti-American views, praised the September 11th murders, claimed sympathy with al-Qaeda, spoke to acquaintances of his plans for violence, and ultimately made good on those plans in the company of an illegal alien. He even shot up a synagogue in Tacoma! Who says this guy doesn't fit a profile? He's the very picture of a profile. Just not the one the media and the professionals and the cops were using. They were looking for a crazy-crazy; they should have been looking for a political-crazy.