I just filed this to the gdn, and I am afraid that they will think the end, which is the whole point, is too strong. So I post it here anyway, below the fold, for tidyness, and also so my mother won’t read it.
Kevin Underwood, aged 26, had dead end jobs in the dead end town of Purcell, Oklahoma. You could read all about his empty life in the two blogs he kept up for several years but hardly anyone cared to until last week when he killed Jamie Rose Bolin, his neighbours’ ten-year-old daughter. According to the local police chief , he planned to later rape her corpse, then eat some of it and dismember what was left. Police found the body in his bathtub, and barbeque skewers and meat tenderiser all prepared.
It is one of those crimes that makes you feel dirty to be a human being. He had worked for a fast food restaurant for seven years, and, later as a shelf-stocker. People in both places remembered him as boring but not otherwise remarkable. He seemed to have had no special friends or enemies. But he left a life online. His blogs are shocking because they are so profoundly ordinary. He seems completely indistinguishable from thousands or millions of other nerds online. He talks about films:
“I had been planning on working on the web page today, since I was off work, but I didn’t. Instead I’ve been watching movies for the last five hours. I bought the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers DVD today, even though I had been saying I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to buy it, I was going to wait until November and buy the 4-disc special edition. But I guess I’ll end up buying both versions, just like I did wth the first movie, even though I didn’t like this movie that much. I hated it when I saw it in the theater. I only saw it once I hated it so much, and I almost walked out before it ended. It was nothing like the book.”
He worries that masturbation is no fun any more.
“Here’s a cool remark that was on a web page: ‘Remember, pornography is Satan’s way of showing love-lorn losers what they’re missing.’ That’s so true. Maybe if I’d quit looking at porn so much, maybe I wouldn’t be so fucking horny. Maybe if I’d finally go out and get some damn Zoloft, or whatever the hell it is, I could actually go out and get laid.”
But he never did find the magic anti-depressant. He hated himself a lot of the time:
“Here’s a cool link, to a site about someone who’s almost as big a loser as I am. The Star Wars Kid You’ve probably heard about the Star Wars Kid, almost everyone has, though I hadn’t until recently. If you haven’t, here’s the back story. Some fat 15 year old geek was using the school’s video camera for something, and then, in his spare time, he also taped a video of him twirling around with a stick, pretending he was in a light saber duel … Anyway, click the link and laugh at the fat kid’s embarrassment.”
He kept a wishlist on Amazon, which has now disappeared, but is reported to have contained “The Vagina Monologues”; he read Manga comics; he sold things on eBay, where he bought items for an online game called “Kindom of Loathing”, most recently “Hell Ramen, and and an “Insanely Spicy Bean burrito.” He read Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.
His list of interesting sites was absolutely mainstream nerd: a handful denouncing scientology, some cartoonists’ sites, a few denunciations of fundamentalism, Jack T. Chick’s fundamentalist cartoon strips, Slashdot.
In all this, there is no clue whatever to the crime he would commit. There is a sense in which we know almost everything about him. It is almost certainly true that you can find out far more about his personality from poking around the Internet than his co-workers ever bothered to do. But the more you find, the more it is not there. There is nothing particularly violent or horrible in the stories that he links to on his blogs, or in the things he writes, or asks to buy. There is certainly nothing horrible by the standards of the Internet — only yesterday, someone sent me a link to an animated cartoon of a kitten being fed through a mincing machine as if this were a perfectly normal and funny joke.
On myspace.com, a giant dating site, a huge and hideous comment thread has grown over his entry: “your so God damn gay! fucking molesting a 10 year old little girl!” writes “uhh.i.hate.myself”
A cornfed blonde calling herself Kimberlycious writes: “You are one sick mo-fo. Obviously your medication isn’t working you friggin gay mo-fo.”
And these people, however shocked and angry, seem no more real than he is. Looking through all the trails that Kevin Underwood left online, an awful fact becomes clear. Almost everything he did there to express himself was simply a record of the things he liked to buy or watch. Even his depression was understood in terms of the pills that he did or didn’t take. It is only in the light of his abominable crime that we can see how strange an inhuman is our assumption that our personalities are expressed by what we consume, for we look at the cannibal blogger’s life and he seems like a perfectly ordinary consumer.
Might not the late Mr. Underwood argue, with Feuerbach, that we simply are what we eat? (Excuse my cynical glibness.)
In any case, there are Google newsgroups now for this unconventional kink. Check out this unusual classified.
To continue the rather vile metaphor – what else is taste? Is it healthier to judge someone’s personality by what they choose not to consume – or is that the same thing reflected? The only alternative I can see — it is the better, but not by much — is to assume that personalities are expressed by what we create and do, but in the case of Kevin he created and did what all kids his age do: online diarizing of what he was actually thinking, or perhaps what he wanted people to think he was thinking. There have been some evil bastards who have created sublime art: how are they best judged?
The kitten in the mincer – I refer m’learneds back to my previous Tom and Jerry reference. I don’t offhand know how many times Tom went through a mincer to be turned into fat dreadlocks of ground kitty (and what would you think of me if I did?), but if it’s not in double digits I’ll eat my, er, cat. It could be that the dehumanising postmodernistic state of our godless times can indeed be traced back to the satanic influences of Bugs Bunny and Popeye – after all, how many souls have been lost to the insidious homosexual propaganda of Spongebob Squarepants? – or it could be that broken minds are best seen as distorting mirrors of our own fears, and not to be taken as belweathers of how we’re all going to pot.
Scirocco: thanks. That was illuminating.
Rupert, I agree that few cartoons on the internet could match the brain-bending vileness of “e-commas” but there is something disturbing about the kitten things. Everyone always brings up Tom and Jerry in this context but there is a difference. Perhaps it’s the animation. T&J are so sprightly and light-hearted, and they recover almost at once from whatever dreadful things happen to them. They can no more be hurt than a Wodehouse character can fall into depression.
Interesting to note the edits in the “version that made it to print”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1756276,00.html
I avoid such moments of interest by never reading the printed version, on principle.
How did ‘The Vagina Monologues’ (in your version) turn into ‘The Mark Steyn Monologues’ (in the Guardian’s online version)?
Ah; I was hoping no one would notice. The Guardian has some pretty ferocious spam filters, which for some reason seem to screw with my copy when I am writing about these things. I had problem with one about a ghastly net forum, too. So if they don’t get through, I rewrite them with euphemisms in square brackets for all the words that might excite a bayesian filter. so [self-pleasuring] for masturbation, and so on.
The sub got all of them except [Mark Steyn], which I had thought was perfectly obvious.
This could make for a classic apology, of course.
LOL. A lot.
May I write to the readers’ Ian? May I? Please?
I see that the slip has been spotted “elsewhere”:http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2006/04/we_are_all_pote.html
Oli, of course you can write to the readers’ editor if you want to. It would appear that other people are already doing so, though from a pro-Steyn perspective.
Andrew, I’m not sure how you can blame cannibalism on the consumer society. The Polynesians were cannibals but they had no Tesco. The Aztecs ate the hearts of their enemies, but they had no Gap. As a rule of thumb, the more credit cards a society has, the less likely it is to eat you.
All the best and you owe me a pint.
Nick
But, Nick, why does everyone claim I blame it on the consumer society? I really didn’t. If the consumer society were to blame for cannibals, they would be sodding everywhere. What I said, and will continue to say is that identifying people as consumers misses out all the really interesting things about them, such as whether they are in fact prone to killling and eating small girls.
Anyway, it’s very nice to see you here.