...Up at 3:00 a.m. Surfing the Web & Contemplating Many Decapitations in the News
Posted by Steven Wingate at 1/12/2008 8:35 PM and is filed under violence,Impending Social Disorder,Decapitation,American Culture,Alientation 
The hiker from Georgia, found dead this week in the woods: decapitated.
Another woman found last month in Florida: decapitated, possibly by the same man.
The Detroit man found dead in Detroit last November: decapitated, apparently by two teenagers seeking a thrill-kill.
Someone who can’t sleep at 3:00 a.m.—particularly someone who has always been described as having an “overactive imagination,” and one who seeks to make sense of a nonsensical world simply to feel more at ease with it, might ask the question: what does this say about us? Americans? The human species?
Maybe some astologer/alchemist/Freudian literary critic type can clarify this for me, but it seems that there’s got to be some symbology at work in the decapitation of another human being. It means something in life, the way it would mean something in literature or film. But I wonder if symbolism is even necessary. The separation of the head from the body doesn’t need to symbolize anything more than the separation of the head from the body in order to make sense in our present human culture.
Because there’s an awful lot of separation of the head from the body going on these days. Me, for instance, right now, stewing about decapitation and clicking little buttons on a computer keyboard when I could be doing tai chi and firming up the connection between my mind and my body. You, wherever you are and whenever you are, reading this instead of kissing the person you love, pulling the weeds, doing the laundry—whatever it is that I’m helping you to avoid doing.
It’s all over the place, this separation, and the nut jobs who are doing it in actual reality to other human bodies are simply our warning sign that the separation has reached a crisis point. The decapitators are lashing out, foisting upon others the grim sensation that they feel in their own beings. They are the canaries in the coal mine, unwittingly crying out that This has gone far enough.
If they could decapitate themselves, I bet they probably would. It would be the ultimate statement about what ails them, and us.
Us, I say. The world, the species, the Zeitgeist.
Another woman found last month in Florida: decapitated, possibly by the same man.
The Detroit man found dead in Detroit last November: decapitated, apparently by two teenagers seeking a thrill-kill.
Someone who can’t sleep at 3:00 a.m.—particularly someone who has always been described as having an “overactive imagination,” and one who seeks to make sense of a nonsensical world simply to feel more at ease with it, might ask the question: what does this say about us? Americans? The human species?
Maybe some astologer/alchemist/Freudian literary critic type can clarify this for me, but it seems that there’s got to be some symbology at work in the decapitation of another human being. It means something in life, the way it would mean something in literature or film. But I wonder if symbolism is even necessary. The separation of the head from the body doesn’t need to symbolize anything more than the separation of the head from the body in order to make sense in our present human culture.
Because there’s an awful lot of separation of the head from the body going on these days. Me, for instance, right now, stewing about decapitation and clicking little buttons on a computer keyboard when I could be doing tai chi and firming up the connection between my mind and my body. You, wherever you are and whenever you are, reading this instead of kissing the person you love, pulling the weeds, doing the laundry—whatever it is that I’m helping you to avoid doing.
It’s all over the place, this separation, and the nut jobs who are doing it in actual reality to other human bodies are simply our warning sign that the separation has reached a crisis point. The decapitators are lashing out, foisting upon others the grim sensation that they feel in their own beings. They are the canaries in the coal mine, unwittingly crying out that This has gone far enough.
If they could decapitate themselves, I bet they probably would. It would be the ultimate statement about what ails them, and us.
Us, I say. The world, the species, the Zeitgeist.
Comments