Only the morally squeamish and those poor fools striving to uphold some long dead derivative of old world values and chivalry will have anything to gain from sifting through the corpses that lie in Derrick Bird’s wake in search of a motive.
The reality – and one which nearly all institutions will continue to deny, regardless of how many of us take up arms and start murdering our neighbours – is that this rampage was by no means a ‘sick fantasy played’ out in all its brutal physicality by a ‘bloodthirsty freak or lunatic’. The truth is quite the opposite and one which few people are ready to deny. And the more articles that newspapers churn out expressing their total bafflement at a solid motive for Bird’s killing spree, the more likely it is that the true root of the problem will be buried forever under heaps of the usual sensationalist trash.
The whole debacle is to a certain extent reminiscent of the Columbine and Virginia Tech killing sprees – with only one fundamental difference in that whereas Bird seemed to be a happy family man, the college killers were isolated, alienated, frustrated and voiceless. It probably draws people’s minds to the otherwise normal and happy middle aged men who ‘went postal’ during the 80s and walked from cubicle to cubicle, shooting everyone in sight. The grind and the filth and the misery of the life of an average Caucasian male became simply too much. But of course, it was really easy to bracket Seung-Hui Cho and the gang into the bracket of ‘kids brainwashed by Marilyn Manson,’ or ‘impressionable youth corrupted by television’ but that’s just not the case for Derek Bird.
Newspaper editors, and by proxy their readers, seem so fixated upon the importance of indentifying a cause and effect trend in a killer’s background that might point to a motive. This means branding violent video games, films or music as ‘triggers,’ the Ausloeser fuer Gewalt which apparently sparks off every rampage that ever takes place in an institution for young people. But could it be that for a surprisingly large proportion of the population, there is no visible trigger to sudden excesses of extreme violence?
Of course, it’s unlikely that ninety per cent of the population conceal murderous urges. And statistics can tells us (because we oh so adore the refuge of cold figures) that it’s highly unlikely that a rampage like this will occur again in England for a very, very long time. The search for Bird’s motive, then, may not be rising out of moral or legal grounds. If Bird had a motive, then it would of course distance him from the rest of the general population: ‘Sure, poor guy was abused as a child/lost his parents/ was bulled/ was a eunuch, that’s why he did it.’ This desire to distance oneself from the killer seems to be the motive for searching for a motive – people are two terrified to accept that Derrick Bird was a perfectly healthy human being. Just like them.
‘No!’ People will protest, ‘Bird was a monster!’ But the differences between ‘humans’ and monsters are rather superficial, and if normal citizens are able to gas millions of their co-workers, family friends and contemporaries, then the moral transgression towards personally taking out one’s frustration isn’t such a giant leap after all.
Nothing triggered the killing spree – maybe something in the minutiae of his lifestyle brought the killings themselves on – but the actual desire to violently vent his frustration on innocent, well-to-do people would have lain dormant in Bird’s mind for month, maybe years, growing bloated on his disdain for Man and all his grotesque, selfish, narcissistic habits. No one wants to accept that the same aggression just might have been festering in everybody else’s brains too – anybody could have turned out like Bird. It’s not a mathematical formula of cause and effect that defines someone’s desire to start murdering people. It’s a long, slow process of gradual alienation, frustration, loneliness and general feelings of anger that are expressed everyday but thousands of people on the internet, radio, on the TV – it’s the same discourse in a more saleable manifestation.
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