Haiti’s profound sorrow. Jared Loughner's world of illusion. - By Jack Shafer. As long as we're using Jared Lee Loughner's tastes in philosophy and literature to probe his psyche—and I'm not saying we shouldn't—let's scrutinize our own tastes, too.
I'm not suggesting a Mailerian equivalence between Loughner and the average man, so stop composing that irate e-mail to me right now. But Loughner's obsession with alternative realities, his idea that the universe is malleable and a function of an individual's will, is mirrored almost everywhere we look in pop culture. According to a Mother Jonespiece by Nick Baumann, Loughner believed in "lucid dreaming," namely that "conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control. " That may sound like the currency of the insane, but it's the stuff of our most popular entertainments.
Jared Lee Loughner's Nietzsche: Why the philosopher is misunderstood by angry young men. - By Matt Feeney. If we never discovered that Jared Lee Loughner honed his murderous outlook while sitting alone in his bedroom, reading Nietzsche and thinking about nihilism, that would have been real news.
Instead of real news, though, we've gotten a dreary iteration of a cultural cliché. The New York Times and other media are saying the addled and alienated young man arrested for trying to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords, and for the murders of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green and five other people, took himself to be a Nietzschean.
Of course he did. I suppose we could start plucking out incendiary quotations from Nietzsche's works and assess how much blame to lay on his head for Loughner's alleged crimes and the crimes of other young men with similar philosophical interests, but such a project would tend toward philistinism or obscurity. Fp344.
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