“I hate when others get more attention than me on the internet.”
So said Robert Crimo, the 21-year-old guy who shot and killed seven people while injuring 48 others at the 2022 Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
Crimo’s psychotic strategy to be a winner in today’s “attention economy” is hardly original. In “Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us,” (The Atlantic, June 2, 2022), Elliot Ackerman writes: There’s an “unmet desire on the part of many of these murderers to be at the center of a narrative, as opposed to on its periphery.”
“To be at the center of a narrative, as opposed to on its periphery.” It’s so simple, and it makes a twisted kind of sense. After all, who wants to be a supporting actor in a drama when you can grab the lead role (at gunpoint, if necessary). Pathological narrative narcissism, I call it, although the “pathological” has almost become mainstream. Consider the ways we talk reverentially about Story:
“Have a story-worthy week!” (The Moth’s old signoff)
“All of us are in some sort of theater that we create for ourselves.” - Werner Herzog
People are stories. Brands are stories. Court cases are stories. Narrative Is Everything.
Now, imagine hearing this drumbeat, year after year, but not being able to articulate a story of your own. If you haven’t inherited any master narratives from your family or community (e.g., the big, interactive stories shared by your local church, synagogue, or mosque), then you have no existing story in which you might play a part, so you’re floating. Unmoored and rudderless, you are vulnerable to whatever winds might blow.
The hectoring continues: “What’s your story? C’mon, pal. What is it? Tell us. But Don’t Be Boring!” I imagine this interrogation might provoke some existential panic. A fear that if your life doesn’t have a compelling dramatic arc, then it—and you—are a failure. Given these high existential stakes, some story, any story, even a criminal story, might seem preferable to no story at all.
And what’s one simple recipe for an Instant Story? Pick up a gun—and maybe a cause of some sort, if you’re into that kinda thing—and start shooting. Suddenly, all the randomness and angst and chaos of life vanishes. You are suddenly The Protagonist. The media arrives to “bear witness.” There are press conferences and feature stories, candlelight vigils and documentaries. A shooting star is born. And a life of quiet desperation is quiet no more.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” P.T. Barnum once said. Or as Oscar Wilde put it: “There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Exactly right, say the Robert Crimos of the world. One of them is probably sitting at home right now, alone in his mom’s basement, wondering: What’s my story? What is the narrative arc of my existence? If my life were a movie, would anyone watch it? Mulling it all over, he’s a bit discouraged. But then he remembers Highland Park and Columbine and Sandy Hook and Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life… and he looks at his AK-47… and he dreams. Have a story-worthy week.