Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

(A Sunday Night Special Gene Pool)

Hello. I believe we’re at that point once again: A preposterous public fascination with yet another intriguing, physically attractive criminal, and the inane fallout that almost inevitably follows it.

This headline was in Dazed: The Internet Has Fallen In Love With An Assassin

This headline was in Rolling Stone: Internet Takes Lack of Sympathy Further, Thirsts Over Suspect in Health Insurance CEO Shooting

Agence-France Press: “[Many people have] fixated on the killer's looks, dubbing him the "hot assassin" or comparing him to movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Timothee Chalamet.”

In Saturday’s Gene Pool Gene Poll, 63 of 780 respondents said they were personally angry at being ignored by bureaucracies, and are “aboard” with the justice meted out in the killing.

And so forth.

Watch the news in the next few days: If the killer continues to somehow elude a national police dragnet, becoming in the public mind a swashbuckling mastermind social avenger, I believe we will be seeing the birth of another modern criminal Folk Hero.

Really? He’s probably an asshole, you know. Most of them have been.

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The phenomenon, of course, is not new. The most recent incarnation was Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers whose pressure-cooker bombs killed two people and maimed many others at the 2013 Boston Marathon. Dzhokhar was the sullen 19-year-old fuck-finger-flinging idiot whom teenyboppers longed and lusted for because of his looks. He wound up with his dreamy face on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

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Remember Ted Bundy, America’s bad-boy serial killer heartthrob? After his execution, a woman who’d worked beside him for years revealed he was uber-creepy, a superficially handsome man who could not look a woman in the eyes, or competently talk to one, and who had gnawed his fingernails down to their bloody quicks.

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How about the suave and dapper John Dillinger, that guy with the urbane David Niven mustache, a derring-do folk hero? He was thought of as a modern-day Robin Hood because he stole from banks during the Depression, a time when the public mistrusted banks — and because, like the CEO killer, he was an escape artist. He broke out of jail three times. In fact, Dillinger was a savage murderer who, in the course of his robberies in the Midwest, unnecessarily killed ten men and injured seven others. Like Robin Hood, he had robbed from the rich. Unlike Robin Hood, he gave to himself.

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Billy the Kid was also a Robin Hood, at least in American fantasyland.

In reality, he was a remorseless murderer who is said to have killed 21 men before he himself was killed at the age of 21.

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Jesse James, Billy’s his contemporary, killed only 20. In legend, even in his own time, he was seen as a hero of the downtrodden, demanding economic justice for the poor. In reality, he was a criminal who joined the regional insurgencies of bitter ex-Confederates after the Civil War. The money he stole from the merchants he killed went into his own pockets.

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In the Sondheim stage play Assassins, the prototype bad-guy turned popular hero was America’s first presidential murderer, John Wilkes Booth. Handsome and famous and erudite, and spectacularly successful at his killing job, Booth is deified by the other assassins in what is a theatrical microcosm of the sympathy the real Booth got throughout the South. Booth was a fulminating bigot whose principal motive was to eliminate Lincoln to eliminate the possibility that Black people would ever achieve anything approaching social equality with Whites — something Lincoln had publicly promised.

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And finally, Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old Serbian nationalist whose murder of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, set off World War I, at the time the deadliest and most ruinous war in human history. The soulful-eyed Princip was a political zealot and was lionized, and is still lionized, in the Balkan states. His crimes were not selfish or self-enriching, but they were profoundly world-altering, and not in a good way. From his prison cell, as Europe was engulfed in fire and smoke and 90,000 men were choking to death on poison gas, he said he regretted nothing, then shrugged that the war was probably inevitable anyway.

There is a statue of him today in Belgrade. He looks very handsome.

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So now we have the still unidentified killer of the CEO of an insurance company infamous for its sometimes deadly stinginess in denying claims of its policyholders. This comes at a time of widespread mistrust of authorities who seem to rule our lives with cruel impunity and highhandedness.

On the one hand, this assassin seems to have struck a blow for little people who have been screwed by Big Insurance. On the other hand, he may well have been a hired gun who did this to make no point, just money for himself. Back on that first hand, he seems to have some mischievous panache, both for leaving a message to be found in shell casings, and for abandoning his backpack which he had filled — no doubt as a taunt to authorities on his trail — with Monopoly money. But going back to that second hand, he definitely sneaked up on a guy and coolly shot him in the back, the stereotypical mark of a coward.

The Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Please send in your thoughts and questions and observations here. I will respond to them on Tuesday.