Also known as “if you put it in a book no-one would believe it”.
Life throws this at us a lot, although the latest example is as tragic as it is horrible. I’m not going to throw links around for this because I don’t think either the person who triggered this sequence of events or those involved in bringing it to its current state deserve the recognition. Yes, for those in the USA, I’m talking about Christopher Dorner.
The whole thing played out rather like a tragic episode from one of any number of books – the lone antihero (note that I’m talking about role here. I think the man’s actions were inexcusable) against the full power of the Evil Corrupt State shows that power to be hollow and protestations from the state about law, order, and the welfare of its subjects to be mere window-dressing to distract from the real goal of maintaining power before dying in a battle he could never win. I could see the narrativium shaping events.
Of course, it’s not that simple. Dorner, far from being any kind of hero, was by his own words a bitter, twisted individual who nurtured grudges in a thoroughly unhealthy fashion. That doesn’t mean that the role he stepped into with his manifesto and murders doesn’t have any kind of resonance. It does – as witness the many people who were at some level wanting him to survive and win.
Except that he did win, in the narrative sense. By goading the southern California authorities into a panicked flap he exposed how rotten they are – sufficiently rotten that I suspect a significant number of the allegations in his manifesto have a strong basis in truth. The behavior of California law enforcement was not that of protectors seeking to arrest a criminal. It was the behavior of thugs out to eliminate a threat and to hell with anyone that got in the way – and that was the narrative Dorner wanted people seeing. Narrativium.
We’re built to see stories and to shape our world around stories. Stories are how we understand our existence – so ultimately we end up to some extent pushing our lives into stories.
Now that Dorner is dead, the narrative forces will go to work and instead of what should have happened – a court case that exposed all the ugliness and lies and flaws that lie under the narratives of all concerned – we get to watch the creation of legends in action. Make no mistake, there will be legends. Give it a few years and Dorner will be to some a folk hero who tried to force a crooked city to clean up its act. He might get co-opted into someone else’s cause.
Nauseating as the whole situation is, it’s something anyone with interest in the mechanics of stories should follow, just to see the way our need to fit things into stories shaped and continues to shape this particular tragedy. A thriller with this exact plot wouldn’t go anywhere because until a few days ago it would have been difficult to find people who’d believe that the police in a modern nation would shoot wildly at anything that vaguely kinda sorta looked like the person they were looking for. That’s what the forces of the Evil Empire do.
Now, with the shootings all over the news, it’s clear that they can and do act the same way the forces of the Evil Empire would – and the narrativium of human nature demands that there be a reason beyond human fear and incompetence. If one doesn’t exist our minds will find it (and frankly, I doubt that fear and incompetence is all there is. The thing is, I’m just one person. I could be wrong. But when millions of people insist that something must be a certain way, we tend to act in ways that cause that belief to become fact). It’s ingrained in our stories that only the forces of Evil shoot wildly and make no attempt to penalize the reckless behavior of incompetent or untrained individuals in their ranks. It’s ingrained that good cops show restraint and don’t shoot anything that moves, don’t set fire to buildings because there’s a wanted man inside, and don’t arrange for a criminal to die because he’s made accusations that could be very damaging if they were true. No-one would accept a story where the good cops did anything like that. But the bad cops… oh yes.
And so the narrativium shifts what we remember. Watch it happen, and learn. Narrativium isn’t just for stories.
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Narrativium at Work”
Now that Dorner is dead, the narrative forces will go to work and instead of what should have happened – a court case that exposed all the ugliness and lies and flaws that lie under the narratives of all concerned – we get to watch the creation of legends in action. Make no mistake, there will be legends. Give it a few years and Dorner will be to some a folk hero who tried to force a crooked city to clean up its act. He might get co-opted into someone else’s cause.
It’s California, and he killed either cops or those related to them; a trial would just mean that you’d have “Free Dorner!” protests outside in less than a week, and give the crazies an even bigger stump.
I can’t say I agree with your view of the cops’ behavior, though– it seemed to me to be in keeping with a population that has been unable to hire strictly for effective law enforcement since I was a kid, can’t fire idiots, and had a lot of people very scared that they’d be slaughtered by a crazy guy.
Scared idiots do things like fail to check if the blue pickup with a bed cover that came around the corner to the house they’re guarding, in the dark, with no lights, which is going back and forth over the road and SUDDENLY TURNED ON HIGH BEAMS!!!!!– actually has a 200+, 6’+ bald black guy in it, instead of two middle aged or old women delivering mail. (Who were also being idiots, though in an attempt to be thoughtful. I really, REALLY hate people not having their lights on when they’re driving at night.)
I do not believe that the cops decided, as a group, to set fire to the cabin; the idea of burning the #@$@ down instead of filing in to be slaughtered, or letting him pick a time to come out, is pretty obvious. That’s why tear gas was created. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dorner set the place on fire when he realized that they weren’t going to obligingly walk in to be killed, in hopes that he could copy the murderer from Christmas time. (Apparently the cops on scene think the same way I do, and so no targets went to put out the fire.)
Possibly difference being that I mostly listened to KFI and KIRO (one of our guys went down to work in LA a few years ago, and half of Seattle seems to have Skier’s Disease, so from beginning to end we got to hear a lot about it.)
About the best thing I can hope for is some of the absolute idiots who are paid to be cops having their weapons taken away. I’m still upset that the squirrel cops get to pack without some decent protections– for us!
Also, Dorner’s mom is one classy lady.
When some vultures showed up for a statement, she actually had one that focused on how badly they felt for the families of those who were hurt, and how their family in no way, shape or form supported the murderous SOB. Poor lady– raises a cop and Naval Aviator, ends up with a murderous suicide. 😦
I sympathize with her. It must be hard to live with the knowledge that your kid chose to be a murderous bastard.
On the flip side, when there’s tape of the law enforcement calling for the cabin to be set on fire, and the lionizing has already started, the narrative that gets remembered a few years from now will make him a hero of sorts.
What’s happened appears to be the confluence of a smallish corrupt cadre (which is inevitable in any police force if not actively weeded out) and the idiots you mentioned behaving like idiots. The effect looks like a grand conspiracy – and that is how people will remember it because we’re all better equipped to handle “conspiracy” than “a bunch of people who aren’t very bright doing what they think is the best thing to do”. It’s how our minds work
Watching this has been fascinating from a writer’s perspective, as well as all the more typical reactions that go with someone who didn’t just choose to go after people he thought had wronged him but chose to harm innocents linked to the people he thought had wronged him.
The narrative you’re pointing out only works if one already buys into the “Cops aren’t human” idea– in either direction. I guess it helps if their entire notion about proper procedure comes from TV, too… I can’t un-know what “suspicious behavior” in a vehicle is, so I can’t be sure.
Those who want a “Big bad evil police” story would make it out of nothing. Just like so many other stories. The world must fit into approved stories… and nevermind that the guy was obviously trying to fit into those stories, and what he actually did went against them, and that the Dark Evil Mob group he tried to claim was against him would have done things like kill a bunch of big, black, bald guys in blue pickups instead of jumping the gun on obvious misinterpretations. (I can’t remember the whole story with the second guy who was shot at by cops, other that it was also early morning, he stopped and talked to a cop, there were shots in the area before the cops fired and he accelerated abruptly when he was pulling away.)
Would’ve been much better if they’d given a public list of the places where they were going to be guarding targets, so people could be aware of the added need for caution.
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On the upside, for those searching for their silver? His attempt to shoe-horn in gun control with every other “hey, look at me!!!!” story chunk in the “manifesto” is sinking like a lead sieve. He was in not one, but two of the groups that would be armed in the case of disarming the rest of the population– about the best example you can think of for why such a thing is a Really Bad Idea.
Oh I’m not saying the narrative is accurate – it’s not. It’s people shoehorning things into their notion of how things should work – a notion that for a lot of people is informed mostly by TV and movies.
Mostly pissed at the way too many folks don’t notice the Fridge Logic of their “hero” hunting down a girl who was planning her wedding because her dad had to help him. Other than taking a homicidal maniac at his word, none of it fits— I don’t watch TV much these days, did the “cops gone bad are the worst possible villain” trope go away?
I point to the “cops aren’t human” (they’re either perfect or an evil blob) bit because I’m seeing that on the libertarian side– because some cops, while in fear of their lives and those of their families, fired foolishly. It always ends with “….and that’s why we should do what I’ve always been saying we should do and you don’t want to.”
Frankly some of Dorner’s allegations are pretty specific and need to be publicly investigated – and if true, the culprits punished. That doesn’t excuse what he did, or even come close to excusing it.
When did people stop being able to see that someone can be an SOB and still be correct about some things or that an organization can have serious corruption and still contain a lot of decent honest people?
Not so much “SOB” as “the bad guy”– anti-heroes are pretty much SOBs by definition, and wrong in their approach, no? But they’re excused because they’re the hero.
And there’s always Vimes from Terry Pratchett for an example of Lawful Good that isn’t nice.
Incidentally, they publicly re-opened investigation in on the specific claim that got him fired the day after the first murder. Unlikely to get a different result, since he didn’t file the claim that his trainer had assaulted someone for over a week, did so after she’d reprimanded him, several other eyewitnesses gave reports consistent with the trainer’s, and the supposed assault victim had no injuries that would be consistent with the vicious assault claimed…. but they did re-open it. (I don’t know about any of the other claims; that’s the only one that Suits had info on as of Saturday night’s Dark Secret Place. I suspect he’ll be on the same subject this weekend, unless he gets a good interview about the NorK nukes.)
Do you mean when did ad hominem get removed from the list of logical fallacies? Actually, well practiced logical fallacies? I’m pretty sure it is still in the top ten or so…
On the flip side, when there’s tape of the law enforcement calling for the cabin to be set on fire, and the lionizing has already started, the narrative that gets remembered a few years from now will make him a hero of sorts.
Two additional points: the “lionizing” started shortly after he hunted down a girl because her father defended him, and if he did actually shoot himself, and did so by shooting himself in the head, we can add that he was brain-washed by listening to KFI. It’s justifiable: he listed a couple of their hosts on his “manifesto”– the full 22 page one– and Bryan Suits kept telling him how to most effectively kill himself. (For the same reason the cops were suggesting setting the place on fire, most likely. Bryan has a little girl, too, and has been blamed by losers when his standing up for them didn’t magically get them out of trouble.)
“because until a few days ago it would have been difficult to find people who’d believe that the police in a modern nation would shoot wildly at anything that vaguely kinda sorta looked like the person they were looking for.”
I beg to disagree, it is very easy to believe. Where I grew up the cops did this exact thing, without the national coverage. There quarry was a young man just out of his teens, originally arrested for burglary, he repeatedly escaped jail, would show up at all the local parties, and made a laughingstock of the local law enforcement. My parents ran into a roadblock in the woods, and the cops held them at gunpoint, all were armed with either shotguns or semiauto rifles with banana clips ducttaped together (you know the kind Obama doesn’t want us to have). They shot up at least one vehicle in those roadblocks, and repeatedly said that they didn’t intend to take him alive. The news of course reported that he was to be considered armed and dangerous, while all those that knew him (he went to school with my moms younger brother) knew that he was not at all dangerous, and considered it all a lark. Sure enough, the next time they caught him they shot him over 50 times in the back while he was running away. They CLAIMED he put his hand in his pocket, and they thought he was reaching for a gun.
For more national news covered examples you can go with Randy Weaver and the Ruby Ridge fiasco (where snipers at relatively close range for a sniper, managed to shoot anybody who showed themselves, except the actual intended target) or the off-duty police officer who shot the nursery owner in Spokane a couple years ago, AFTER the nursery owner called 911, the off-duty cop arrived on the scene and shot the first person he seen, who turned out to be the caller, on his own property, not the intruder.
I bow to your superior experience. Obviously my upbringing was far more sheltered than I realized. This is not a good thing.
When I started reading, I thought you were going to talk about the South African “Blade Runner” shooting his girlfriend just hours after she posted to Twitter something along the lines of, “What are you going to do for your Valentine tomorrow?” In the sense of, she was going to surprise her boyfriend and ended up getting shot for it.
Sorry I’m being vague. I read about it last night/early this morning and my brain sort of “wtf’d” itself to sleep.
The “wtf” to sleep thing seems to be getting more common lately.
“Dorner, far from being any kind of hero, was by his own words a bitter, twisted individual who nurtured grudges in a thoroughly unhealthy fashion. That doesn’t mean that the role he stepped into with his manifesto and murders doesn’t have any kind of resonance. It does – as witness the many people who were at some level wanting him to survive and win.”
To my mind, if your story features an “antihero” who doesn’t answer in most meaningful respects to this description or one very like it, you’re probably operating under a badly (and maybe dangerously) mistaken notion of what “antihero” means.
An antihero is supposed to _remind_ us that “the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, nor necessarily even my ally, but may nevertheless be temporarily useful in my cause”.