Crazy Is As Crazy Does

By Steve Hynd

I said I'd wait until I knew more before I wrote more about the Arizona shootings. Well, here it is.

MoJo's Nick Baumann does the best bit of actual reporting on the killer of six, Jared Lee Loughner, you'll read today, securing an interview with one of his best friends, Bryce Tierney. Tierney wasn't just an aquaintance for a few months like most others interviewed by the media, and gives a remarkable, detailled account of a young man who is deeply psychologically troubled. It's bad form to diagnose at such a distance and on secondhand evidence but reading Tierney's account I'm strongly reminded of an old friend of mine who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.

Tierney tells Mother Jones in an exclusive interview that Loughner held a years-long grudge against Giffords and had repeatedly derided her as a "fake." Loughner's animus toward Giffords intensified after he attended one of her campaign events and she did not, in his view, sufficiently answer a question he had posed, Tierney says. He also describes Loughner as being obsessed with "lucid dreaming"�that is, the idea that conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control�and says Loughner became "more interested in this world than our reality." Tierney adds, "I saw his dream journal once. That's the golden piece of evidence. You want to know what goes on in Jared Loughner's mind, there's a dream journal that will tell you everything."

...As Loughner and Tierney grew closer, Tierney got used to spending the first ten minutes or so of every day together arguing with Loughner's "nihilist" view of the world. "By the time he was 19 or 20, he was really fascinated with semantics and how the world is really nothing�illusion," Tierney says. Once, Tierney recalls, Loughner told him, "I'm pretty sure I've come to the conclusion that words mean nothing." Loughner would also tell Tierney and his friends that life "means nothing," and they'd reply, "If it means nothing, what you're saying means nothing." Other times, Tierney says, Loughner acted like any teen: "We'd go to concerts, play music, get into trouble."  

...Since hearing of the rampage, Tierney has been trying to figure out why Loughner did what he allegedly did. "More chaos, maybe," he says. "I think the reason he did it was mainly to just promote chaos. He wanted the media to freak out about this whole thing. He wanted exactly what's happening. He wants all of that." Tierney thinks that Loughner's mindset was like the Joker in the most recent Batman movie: "He fucks things up to fuck shit up, there's no rhyme or reason, he wants to watch the world burn. He probably wanted to take everyone out of their monotonous lives: 'Another Saturday, going to go get groceries'�to take people out of these norms that he thought society had trapped us in."

Note that Loughner's obsession with Rep. Giffords began at least as early as 2007, long before Sarah palin or the Tea Party - but note too that there's not a lot of difference between paranoid politics and the worst excesses of both Left and Right. My friend, back in the 80's, hated all government because they were "mind controlling" us and didn't pause to differentiate between liberal and conservative varieties of government. The question isn't whether Palin or the Tea Party infuenced this mentally ill individual - if they did it was as mere background noise to his own demons - although a pertinent question might be whether they are as mentally ill as he is, paranoid just because.

But the real debate should be about the kind of nation that lets its mentally ill wander around, getting worse and buying guns, instead of having a proper public mental health program in place to aid them.

Update: Adam Serwer:

On the policy side of equation, the only thing we should be discussing are reasonable limitations on the availability of weapons designed to kill other human beings, and whether or not mental health is being adequately addressed in this country. On the former, the Second Amendment can co-exist with, say, background checks and making concealed-carry licenses a privilege, not a right. On the latter, it is worth asking whether public funding of mental health care could reduce the possibility of acts of violence from occurring. If there's a chance that lives can be saved, shouldn't these policy options be on the table?

Let's definitely have both of those debates.