The shooter was first dead and then he was alive and stable. There were three shooters and then there was one. The picture gradually clarified into the face of a Palestinian man who is a member of the Muslim faith whose family tried to dissuade him from going into the army. They had a bad feeling about it. ”They call us camel jockeys and sand niggers.”
But he went anyway and got through medical school and became a psychiatrist, and then he wanted out, because the deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan caused him a lot of cognitive dissonance. If he was the object of disrespect because he’s an Arab, and if he doesn’t want to cut himself off from his mythology as an Arab man … well, you get the idea. Joseph Campbell said that a culture, or civilization, can survive anything except the loss of its underlying myth. America can survive anything except Americans who can’t tolerate the loss of their previous underlying myth.
In America we make a deal with people. In exchange for the primacy of the myths they bring with them from their old world, we give them a new mythology, which can be found at the barber shop. You get your hair cut according to when you came in. Now men go to salons and have an appointment so the analogy doesn’t hold up so well, but the traditional barber shop was the secret church of the American dream, and it’s alive everywhere you take your number and wait your turn, same as everyone else. No cutting to the front of the line, even if you’re the archduke.
And all the time, we’re trying to keep this alive so that we have something real to trade for these other mythologies. Freedom is an abstract. To one person freedom means being armed with enough firepower to take out an aviary, while to another it means accepting a high level of violence and homicide in exchange for the support of the munitions manufacturers and their lobbyists. Sometimes they’re the same person, like Dick Cheney for example. But having the right of habeas corpus is real, and so is the right to eat lunch without becoming a two dimensional character in somebody else’s ideological nightmare.
Obviously this Palestinian psychiatrist was smart enough to get through medical school, and he was promoted to Major. It was expected that he had traded in the old country’s mythology for his American Dream of a place where there’s not much point in praying five times a day to a god with way too much time on his hands. ”I’m sorry, an omelet is made with potatoes, not tomatoes.” A god who’s got it all set in stone has an obvious propensity to turn everything into stone, and if you make spirit solid it isn’t spirit anymore.
If god becomes one of those old people who use the bank teller as a social life, business comes to a halt and things fall apart. In America we have potentially elevated the citizen to a level once accessible only to kings, where the man and the god are the same size, and can finally see eye to eye.
With that kind of relationship you can get some practical information, such as, “Never trust a religious psychiatrist,” and, “If an Arab really doesn’t want to go to fight Arabs, don’t send him, especially if he’s a psychiatrist. Didn’t anybody here read Catch 22?”