I was away at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting when news came through to Montreal that a United States soldier had opened fire on his fellows at Fort Hood in Texas. The initial media coverage was predictably scattered. Reports were coming in too fast to parse: the shooter was dead, the shooter wasn’t dead, we didn’t really know who it was, no–we know who it is.
It turns out that the man in custody for these shootings is a United States Army psychiatrist named Nadal Hasan. He is a Muslim. That’s about where the media coverage flew off the rails of discourse, crash landing in a smoking heap of polemic. Some bloggers have posited this indisputably tragic event in terms evocative of Armageddon. Other opinion pieces point out the thorny nature of the question posed by Hasan’s actions: namely, can we talk about one extremist’s beliefs without maligning an entire tradition?
I confess that I do not have an answer. I have known too many Muslims in my life to think that Maj. Hasan’s beliefs are normative. I want to assign him to a category analogous to Fred Phelps: a fringe figure who speaks for no-one but himself. Even this lets me too much off the hook. I need to think about a bigger issue raised by Maj. Hasan’s actions.
I want to know about the chickens coming home to roost. I want to know why the possibility of his being traumatized by exposure to war through his patients is not being explored any longer. This came up briefly in early news coverage. As soon as there was a simpler–dare I say reductionist–answer at hand, the complex and human picture was discarded. The news networks are no longer interested in interrogating the relationship between war and violence on one hand and the traumatized human psyche on the other. Now we just have a boogeyman to fear. Now we can just be thankful that he isn’t like “us”.
Isn’t he?
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