| SPINBUSTERS |
| Flowers for Robert |
| Part three of three |
| So go on ahead, motherland, play your games of scapegoating, dig your pits of denial. Towers implode, sunken by hubris and rot. Bullets quoth. �The American public has a unique tradition,� sayeth the dead, �it is called �fixing the blame.� Columbine sticks to mind. . . .� Thus, like Pinocchio -- or Frankenstein -- the creation gradually comes to awarness of its own role, its position. At some point, on some day, Flores figured out that he was set up -- a patsy. He realized the whuppin was not going to stop. And it was his dawning awareness of his assigned inferiority that pulled the trigger. Flores' "Communication" reads like a primer of disaffected and disempowered American masculinity. It�s a desperate voice, cognizant of the extremity of its own behavior. Flores: �I am rational. I am reality based to the here and now. I understand that I have committed homicide and that I have broken the laws of our society. I will save the taxpayer money and take care of the problem. . . .� And of course, we find this solution all to the good. Rid of the vermin! But will we find it so good next time? And the next, and the next? Are we willing to trade more dead bodies, some of them kids, in order to cling to a sick culture and its shameful � and self-destructive -- treatment of men? Flores, the Maryland sniper, the other �random killers� � this is not arbitrary violence. It's nice to think so, it relieves me of my responisbility. But there is nothing random here, including the victims. Over and over our killers drop hints along with bodies, compelled to warn us of our own complicity in their acts, coughing back the poisons we breathed upon them. Their deeds take on a preternatural cast, the bitter fruit of karma, long tours of the black clock. The "divine vengeance" protagonists of "Pulp Fiction," visited a millionfold upon the land. Flores is indeed responsible for his actions -- to a degree. But he forwards a convincing communique, blunt as a slug: if you want to be rid of monsters, best stop making them: �To the sociologist, it wasn�t the Maryland sniper. . . [T]o the psychiatrist, it�s not about unresolved childhood issues. It is not about anger because I don�t feel anything right now. To Ellen Goodman, it is not about gun control. . . [A] waiting period or owner registration would not have stopped me. . . [I]t is not about revenge, as I have always thought that revenge was a waste of time and energy. I guess what it is about is that it is a reckoning. A settling of accounts.� Dead men, they say, don�t tell tales. But Robert S. Flores did. Straight from the grave, with the prosecuting attorney of hell peering over his shoulder. And Robert�s tale is all the more chilling, because we know � in our hearts � that this monster speaks truth. We ought to know. We built him. |