By Meg Curtis
James Holmes doesn’t need a Joker suit to
scare us. Readers might expect a graduate student in neuroscience to understand
this apparent revelation. He ranks right up there with tornadoes and earthquakes
on a fear seismograph. He appeared set to head in one direction; then, like a
subatomic particle, he zigged when we expected him to zag, performing clustered
destruction.
A series of his projects, in hindsight,
seem to lead in the direction he took. Working backwards, these include a
statement on his University of Illinois application that our minds are “the primary
source of all things….” Think about that assertion. Is it true? Or was that
statement the creation of a sophisticated writer who knew exactly how to tap
his audience, hit them in their central nervous system, and win their approval?
If he knew just what to say, how do we
differentiate between James Holmes and successful authors, on the one side, and
conmen, on the other? If he did con the search committees of his chosen
graduate schools, how do we draw a line in the laboratory between researcher
and subject? Too many ifs begin to accumulate the minute we consider the
downward spiral of this aspiring scientist.
Most tellingly, however, we have to wonder
at what point did he become one of the most startling subjects of his own
research field? It’s supposedly easy to tell the difference when the subject is
hummingbirds, which Holmes had studied. It’s
easy, too, when research delves into the behavior of wolves, chimpanzees, or
rats, that animal with a built-in double entendre.
When did this rat become a RAT of the worst
kind, turning on his own species? When he expressed interest in the subjective
nature of experience, in statements reported by CNN in “Colorado shooting suspect’s
writings offer Insight as student, aspiring scientist”? When he worried his
psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton?
The turning from good to evil stands forth at
the font of both Theology and Psychology. It features especially in Shakespeare’s
Othello. It stars now in our news,
which perplexes readers like Genesis.
So long as his destructive timeline remains
unknown, we shudder a bit more at our neighbors. We wonder about their
capabilities when we turn the other cheek. Worst of all, we wonder about the
fragile nature of sanity itself and brotherhood and even cinema, which, until
young James went on his rampage, seemed clearer than they may now. Thus, much
of what we read about this boy named James concerns him little, but us a great
deal, for it is not his face we see at all.
It is the face of the Unknown, not an
abstract whatsoever, but a person with a biography which went off on an
unanticipated trajectory–exactly like the latest American experiment in Mach 6
space flight. He could have been, as Barrack Obama might have said, our
relative, our neighbor, our friend. But he wasn’t. He was our enemy, and we
didn’t even recognize him, not from his photos or essays or signature. For better or worse, that is true—and frightening from beginning to
end.