News “Haq rented a one-bedroom apartment upstairs—furnished with nothing more than a leaky air mattress… He didn’t even have any pots or pans.”
I’m slow on the uptake this week—I only now got a chance to read Josh and Brendan’s excellent reporting on the personal life (and apartment, and temperment, and roommates) of the guy who shot up the Jewish Federation in Belltown a week ago today. There’s all kinds of vivid, startling stuff in this that none of the other papers reported. It completes the picture on a guy who could easily be dismissed as inhuman. He’s pretty freakin’ human. Read it.
Congrats. None of the other Seattle papers come close to your in-depth reporting.
In your writing he sounds like an Eastern Washington loser unable to make it in Seattle. The loner type, few friends, messy apartment, not close to his family. He most certainly is not like the condo-owners in our city neighborhoods.
In constructing this criminal identity we need details of the rooms where they lived, and their lives.
The ranks of the privleged have produced as many murderers as any other social class, and many of the privleged do nothing but lounge about and play video games. We must normalize the idle behavior of the privleged classes while using the commercial media for domination of the poor and unemployed through constructing deviant identities.
The forceful marginalization of deviant behavior by public discourse is the job of writers in commercial media. Besides selling cigarettes, you must project forms of covert power for the corporations and government.
The idea must be presented to the public that the unemployed, the cleaning people, those who deliver pizza to our condos, those whose sexual practices differ from ours are dangerous. These ideas, being considered undeniable "truths", define our particular way of seeing the world, and the particular way of life associated with our "truths" becomes normalized.
Our worlds problems today are not the oil corporations making a killing off war. That's not getting away with murder.
Instead we must fear those who are not working to pay off cars and condos, those who spend their time reading and thinking about the world. Pizza delivery and having time to read should be a crime.