By Dr Tom Ferraro syndicated to Blank Slate Media
All rights reserved
The American male has been compared to popcorn, ready to explode at any moment”)
On Nov. 4 the nation has endured yet another mass shooting, this time in a hot yoga studio in Florida.
This is fast on the heels of the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Former Sen. Michael Balboni was on television last week being asked to explain the rash of mass shootings that our culture is currently experiencing.
I ran into him at Healthtrax in Garden City and we chatted about why so many men feel so disenfranchised, angry, paranoid and prone to violence.
He described our current zeitgeist as being like kernels of popcorn that get heated up and then exploding unpredictably. Too bad for him, his job now is to run Redland Strategies, an emergency management firm and so he has more than a passing interest in these events.
As I thought more about our conversation I could see reasons we are in this mess. I think there are deep currents that can help us to see why paranoia and anger and anxiety are the moods of the day.
Truly great art predicts the future. As we witness the growth of mass shootings we need to go back to 1976 and think of the character Travis Bickle in the film “Taxi Driver.”
Bickel, played by Robert De Niro, was a lonely, depressed and isolated ex-marine who worked as a taxi driver in New York City and plotted to kill presidential candidate Charles Palantine.
“Taxi Driver” was released in 1976, starred Robert De Niro, Jodie Forster and Cybill Shepherd and was nominated for four Academy Awards. This film is regularly cited by critics as one of the greatest films of all time and director Scorsese describes it as a film about loneliness.
The Travis Bickle character is a prototype of so many of the shooters we have learned about since then.
Robert Boyer at University of Texas tower shooting, the Klebold and Harris shootings at Columbine High, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Robert Bowers at the Pittsburgh synagogue.
The psychological profile of the shooters are isolated, lonely, depressed men who become hopeless and channel all of their pent-up anger into a psychotic plan of attack.
Our society has changed and we’ve lost social structures like family, religion and town life. The middle classes have collapsed. Social structure has been replaced by social media, resulting in well-documented increases in anxiety, stress, anomie, isolation and paranoia.
Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle was an ex-Marine who felt unappreciated, unloved, alone and unknown. His only source of solace was watching porn movies and writing benign aphorisms in his diary.
As he grew more disgusted with what he saw around him in New York City he became more psychotic and violent.
The film was prescient and a predictor of the way the culture was becoming more and more disturbed. Today we have grown quite accustomed to these tales of explosive rage. And we all wonder what to do?
Let us take Michael Balboni’s metaphor seriously and explore what happens to a kernel of corn in order to get it to explode.
A popcorn kernel has a strong hull which contains within it a seed of starchy moist endosperm. When heated the moisture turns to steam, builds up pressure and explodes the hull where it becomes about 50 times its original size and cools down. This process can be described in human terms as follows:
1. The strong hull of the kernel is like the pseudo-masculine defense system of some American men which prevents them from expressing any true feelings. All these feelings build up and eventually becomes the fuel for their psychotic paranoid plans.
2. The heat applied to the corn comes from the microwave. The heat applied to the men comes from political rhetoric which inflames the senses and stokes the fires with anger, anxiety, paranoia and resentment.
3. When the kernel explodes it becomes 50 times as big and when the unknown and disenfranchised man explodes he becomes bigger then he once was and achieves his 15 minutes of fame.
If this metaphor can be generalized we can say some kind of service or system must be put in place so that all men are allowed and encouraged to express true feelings and be heard. Secondly, the inflammatory rhetoric has gone on too long and has become too hot.
The entire nation hungers for civility and a moderate tone in its leaders.
Thirdly, there probably should be a downplaying of the names of the perpetrators so that they will be forgotten and ignored and not allowed to achieve any measure of attention.
This is our world now and we’re all trying to understand it.
Humans are both individualistic and social. It does not take a genius to recognize that we have been consumed by radical individualism and narcissism and that the social aspects of life has been neglected with those that are left out or socially ostracized getting very angry. I think it is up to the politicians and social planners to try to come to grips with this so that the disenfranchised are in some way helped. And when we neglect this dimension of life we all pay the price.
Our nation is known for its rugged individualism but it appears that it’s time for the pendulum to swing back into a more social approach to life, a life which favors inclusion, civility and better ways for men to express their frustrations before they explode like kernels of popcorn.
