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All men are equal in the sniper's sights
Americans are having to face up to some frightening home truths
Mark Lawson
Saturday October 26, 2002
The Guardian
America's idea of itself has often been expressed in the theory that anyone could become president. This has never been quite true - it's necessary to be rich and white - but, during the fortnight of the Washington snipers, the country finally became, in a horrible way, a pure democracy. In the nation's capital, it became possible for anyone to be assassinated. On FBI advice, every Joe Schmo in DC remained in the family residence and cancelled public engagements. It was just like being the Prez.
Now, with two prime suspects for the shootings in custody, citizens can resume their official duties. The cliche on the US news shows was that Washingtonians could breathe a sigh of relief, but, at the apparent solution of this bizarre case, there should also be some deep breaths of reflection. The lingering echoes of the sniper's shots contain four troubling sounds for the country and only one welcome piece of noise.
The good news first: America's police may, with these arrests, have reversed the Keystone Kops image they had gained. While any inquiry might reveal failures which raised the tally of those assassinated - the killers having trouble getting through to the cops on the phone and so on - the eventual breakthroughs would have satisfied any fictional detective in a fat paperback by James Patterson or Patricia Cornwell.
An FBI analyst concluded from a gloat-note left after one shooting that the sniper might be Jamaican (as John Lee Malvo proved to be), while another cop's apparent hunch that "Montgomery" might refer not only to the DC county featured in the killing spree but also to a town in Alabama appears to have identified the snipers. This is the stuff of true-crime bestsellers and police department medals. Given that an FBI field agent is known to have spotted Middle Eastern students at flying schools before September 11 - but his theory was ignored by superiors - it's clear that America's problem is not at the level of detection but of prevention.
Which is where the bad news begins. After September 11, President Bush created a reassuring concept, enshrined in a new government department: "homeland security". Terrible as the plane bombs were, constructive responses were possible: jet patrols above cities, improved airport security, driving instead of flying.
The two weeks of the DC sniper were a preview of a different kind of terror: unpredictable, unpreventable, rendering a whole population terrified and helpless. In the city where the director of homeland security has his office, his department's name was made useless. This is the terrorism of the future: bullets pinging through innocent air, poisons in the water supply, gas attacks. The arrests cannot make that vision of domestic defencelessness - and its future implications - go away.
Hopeful voices might interject that the two suspects do not seem to have been terrorists in the accepted sense: no links to an organisation have been proved. But the fact that they are reported to have expressed sympathy for America's enemies and that one is a convert to Islam touches on another of the country's deepest fears: the enemy within. American racists have in the past had to contend with the inconvenient fact that American serial killers are almost always white. In an increasingly paranoid nation, the sniper case will be used as ammunition by the bigots who host and phone radio talk shows.
Ah, ammunition. The third piece of bad news for America and its president is that those airwave ranters and others on the right will surely now at least have to discuss the fact that the sniper came out of a culture legislated to be a marksman's paradise.
To a British audience, the pictures this week of Charlton Heston brandishing a rifle above his head at a meeting of gun triumphalists - declaring that liberals would have to prise the piece from his cold, dead body - suggested that a country which tolerates so many ad hoc battalions of licensed snipers should not be surprised when one of them starts getting undesired targets in his cross-hairs. But to spot this obvious connection would cost President Bush re-election.
The final residue of the gunman is less a problem for the nation than an observation about it. After the World Trade Centre massacres, there was much talk of how terrorism aimed at skyscrapers had featured in numerous Hollywood films. Once again, on this occasion, the movie screen has proved to be a mirror: Phone Booth, a thriller about a city sniper, has been postponed, while Anthony Hopkins abandoned publicity for Red Dragon because of a small plot coincidence.
Beyond those script/life overlaps, the taunting phone calls to police, the letters pinned to tree trunks, the sniper's announcement that he was "God" are all precisely the behaviour of a Hollywood psychopath. My point about this is not censorious - blaming film-makers for copycat behaviour - but the extent to which so many Americans now behave as if they were in a film. Life is subconsciously scripted by Hollywood.
President Bush may feel satisfied that a distracting case is closed. It would have been hard to start a war while he and the citizens of the city he lives in were too frightened to go outside. But those gunshots in his neighbourhood held a message for the president. A politician who has always believed in guns and the armed forces should reflect on how and why a former soldier, John Allen Muhammad, seems to have turned his weapon and training against his own nation.
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