All Blather, All the Time
LABASH, MATT
All Blather, All the Time Cable TV outdoes itself in its "analysis" of the sniper story. BY MATT LABASH SOMERSET MAUGHAM once said, "There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is...
...Playing along, I ask if she can clue me in on any more of his personal habits...
...John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo are not the snipers...
...While we now know it might have been difficult for the sniper to get his 1990 Chevrolet Caprice wired for cable (he was supposedly living out of his car), Wolff, repelled by all the media coverage, managed to make the same point on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC...
...By the time I reach her, she has already heard the bad news that the suspected shooter is a black man in his 40s...
...He's about 5'11...
...Well, he doesn't...
...But that's easy for Somerset Maugham to say...
...Some of the speculative gaffes have been major, such as Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose's insisting that our children were "safe" at school just a few days before a 13-year-old was gunned down at his...
...New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy was so convinced the sniper was part of a foreign-born terrorist cell that he wrote, "If, when the shooter is caught, he is not a foreigner, I will bare my derriere in Macy's window...
...I have no idea...
...Likewise, New York magazine's media critic, Michael Wolff, who went on the air to bemoan the wall-to-wall-ness and look-at-me-ism of the sniper coverage, predicted the sniper was "rushing home to watch all of this on television...
...When host Miles O'Brien halted him, saying, "That sounds like a bit of speculation," Gordon informed him it was "clinical speculation...
...He never had to go on Connie Chung Tonight to play an expert on the Beltway Sniper...
...Writing "I am God," they said, as the sniper did on the tarot card, would be an "unforgivable sin in Islam...
...Islamic devotees committing unforgivable sins...
...I am taken aback by her answer...
...I see white, and I only see one...
...But during the sniper saga, she reached new lows, asking one guest if the sniper was "getting close to being caught," and another if the sniper was ready to "cease and desist...
...Likewise, after launching into a bizarre theory of how the killers were fans of a violent sniper video game, he suggested they were "loser-type people," "possibly 17-18-19-20-year-old kids that are not in the mainstream of other kids...
...All right," said O'Brien, "clinical speculation, then...
...Normal weight...
...Dietl is hardly alone in stepping out on a ledge...
...He wanted to be a "big-shot celebrity, . . . to feel powerful, but not necessarily by taking a life," Northeastern criminologist Jack Levin said of the man who took 10 lives...
...I don't know, Connie...
...In appearances too numerous to catalog, he somehow claimed to know that the sniper might have "a type of employment that doesn't require him . . . to be in an office" (it's called "unemployment...
...Then there's Jacqueline Stallone, mother of Sylvester Stallone, who is, as her promotional materials modestly put it, "America's most celebrated psychic and astrologer...
...For she utters six words that I haven't heard any "expert" speak since this whole business began...
...Maybe that's because the "kid" who's believed to be the shooter is actually 41 years old...
...I think I speak for the journalism world when I say no one wants to collect on that bet...
...When I reach her at her home, she seems to pick up the phone before the first ring...
...What does he eat...
...He couldn't be a Muslim fundamentalist because he would have never written "I am God," since his God would be Allah...
...That's an interesting term...
...But most of the claims have been small cheats...
...Bob Gordon of the Wilmington Institute Network of Trial Science told CNN that the man who managed to avoid some of the most comprehensive dragnets in local law enforcement history "wants to be caught because he has a death wish...
...Imagine that...
...His turnoffs include killing people on weekends (until he did...
...For three weeks straight, until John Allen Muhammad and his sidekick John Lee Mal-vo were arrested on October 24, we listened to an endless cacophony of speculation, fabrication, and wild conjecture...
...Though he says he detests profilers, former New York police detective and current publicity tapeworm Bo Dietl established, in his multitudinous print and broadcast appearances, that the sniper is a "damned psychopathic coward" who is "not a macho person...
...We know from police that the sniper wanted to be wired millions in cash...
...If there was one presence, however, that was more nauseatingly ubiquitous than all the others, it had to be former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt's...
...Oh, c'mon," she says...
...Take the oft-repeated, much-abused phrase "what the sniper wants...
...With her misfiring cylinders and stun-gun delivery, Connie Chung is usually responsible for the most painful hour of television even during more peaceful times...
...a wallpaper white male . . . who's getting back at society...
...I ask...
...In addition to somehow knowing that the sniper enjoys violent video games and hunting "to the point of addiction," profiler John Kelly told the Boston Herald that the sniper is a sensitive chap...
...And he likes blue...
...Even at this early stage, with the bare minimum known about the two suspects, it seems the "experts" were wrong in nearly every respect: There was no lone shooter who drove a white van and resembled some ticked-off Caucasian amalgam of Charles Manson and Drew Carey...
...Sort of an all-American collegiate looking guy...
...But with so many respectable criminology types playing psychic, it's hardly surprising that a few psychics have tried to play criminologist...
...I'll ask him when we carpool home in the white van," I was hoping the guest would reply...
...In lapel mikes and pancake makeup, they went at it like a roomful of drunks playing darts blindfolded—the crimi-nologists and journalists, the shrinks and psychological profilers, of whom those last have proven to be the phrenologists of the criminal science world...
...His turn-ons include "shooting melons and watching them explode...
...While we used to have to wait years for an imaginative artist to come around and novelize a true-crime scene (as in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood), chat-show regulars now do the same every night of the week...
...Likewise, the fine people of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, always good for laughs, wrongly insisted that the sniper couldn't be a Muslim...
...Part of this rampant speculation, clinical or otherwise, is prompted by television hosts, forced to fill endless air time with almost no facts being imparted by those who are actually in possession of them...
...Better looking than the guy next door, because most of them are ugly...
...I don't see black men involved at all," she says...
...I think he became highly insulted when the police said they got a garbled message and wanted him to call back," said Kelly...
...Van Zandt also appears to have gotten into the sniper's medicine cabinet, saying that killing is his "emotional heroin" and "psychological Viagra...
...He wants to be a cool, stealthy, feared person—but he's not," said Brent Turvey, author of Criminal Profiling, as if the sniper had worn nerdy corduroys when they'd gone out partying together...
...And how does Van Zandt know all this...
...Perhaps best known for causing a ruckus by crying out that broomsticks in the Harry Potter movie were being flown the wrong way, Carlyon confidently predicted that the sniper would stop killing after his 13th attack on Halloween, after which he'd commit suicide...
...Additionally, he is a "psychopath," but a "cool" and "calculating" one...
...Before the suspects were arrested, Kevin Carlyon, high priest of British White Witches, sent the FBI his "psychic profile" of the sniper...
...But for the most part, Chung and her ilk had to offer no such encouragement, since the endless parade of profilers were more than happy to offer suppositions as gospel...
...But she has some bad news of her own...
...Knowing that she is a live one (she boasts of practicing the ancient art of "rumpol-ogy" in which she tells your future by looking at a print of your fanny), I call to give her the business about botching her sniper prediction...
...BY MATT LABASH SOMERSET MAUGHAM once said, "There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain...
...Sadly, he was closer to being correct than many of the psychological profilers...
...Several days earlier, she told MSNBC.com's Jeannette Walls that the sniper would be a "light-haired person in his 20s or 30s...
...Prior to the arrest, columnist Michelle Malkin was nearly alone in raising a red flag on the white-guy theory, taking to task people like Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, who confidently assumed that the killer was "kind of Matt Labash is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But he wanted so much more, say the experts...
...using dramatic legerdemain, factual embroidery, even the killer's own unknowable interior monologues—whatever it takes—these analysts always appear to be 100 percent certain...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 8
