There’s a joke I sometimes tell, in 12-step meetings or in standup comedy routines, about how Jeffrey Dahmer was the first alcoholic that I ever identified with. In the joke I describe some of the circumstances of my so-called “rock bottom”, the lowest and last days of drinking, where I was doing nothing but selling plasma and spending the money on the cheapest alcohol I could find. I then talk about how one day at like 10am I was drunk and watching a YouTube documentary on serial killers (to lighten the mood and get out of my head) and I heard the announcer say “at this point in his life…Jeffrey Dahmer was doing nothing but selling plasma and spending the money on the cheapest alcohol he could find”.
Later, sober, I would find out that I had misremembered that factoid, that Jeffrey Dahmer was actually getting paid to collect plasma as a professional phlebotomist at the time, but the impact the imagined quote had on me was real enough. The possibility of having anything deep and serious in common with a serial killer was one of the things that pushed me to finally quit drinking for good.
The Jeffrey Dahmer documentary wasn’t the first piece of morbid media I consumed, nor was it the darkest. My head was a desperately dark place to be, and drinking was rapidly becoming less and less effective in getting me out of that dark place, so I was in dire need of more gripping stimulation to distract me. Morbid media was dark too, but it wasn’t my darkness, it was a darkness that was someone else’s problem.
The darkest morbid media that I consumed were real videos of people dying. The videos themselves were accidentally recorded - CCTVs capturing an accident, someone happening to have their phone camera recording during a disaster. There were videos around that were recorded intentionally, of course - slavic teens torturing a homeless person to death in the woods, Mexican drug cartels sending a message with a couple captives and a chainsaw. I knew that those videos were there, but I avoided them. The intentionality and cruelty were too much for me. I didn’t want to kill anyone and I didn’t want to die. I also hated violence against animals and got sickened by the titles alone of videos which depicted it. But the accidental, voyeuristic videos of human beings dying - watching a singer clutch his chest and slump over dead onstage, watching someone try and fail to climb through the windshield of a burning car, watching a high-speed accident send a chunk of metal flying into a passerby with their back turned half a block away - the rest I felt were fair game for me to stare at, and to wonder.
I wanted the darkness in my head to end, but I didn’t want to actually die myself. At least not permanently - drinking to the point of blacking out was kind of like death’s free trial. Watching other people die was another way of bringing the peculiar relief of oblivion closer to me without falling into it all the way.
Death itself is not an event in life - when I die I won’t be there for it, not the way that I’m there for a wedding or a graduation. I have no way of imagining what constitutes the experience, nor what lies beyond it. Watching other people die, though, gave me just a little bit of a hint - the same brain circuits that help us empathize with people and learn some of their skills just by observing them were in action as I watched people die, and I had vivid images in my mind of what it might be like to be there, living normally right up until the very instant they were violently ripped away.
I stopped watching those kinds of videos after I got sober, after a route out of the darkness presented itself to me and I chose to take it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with morbid curiosity in and of itself, but the back-to-back quantity of morbid videos I watched was definitely way too far. Watching videos where people unexpectedly die feels similar to watching videos where people’s pants accidentally fall down in public; it’s a moment where something intimate gets exposed and transformed without their consent into public spectacle.
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Public spectacle was the name of the game during the Trump Riots on January 6th, when a pro-Trump mob of thousands pushed their way into the Capitol building in Washington DC. Maskless and recording from their phones, they wanted people to know that they were there, that they were not weak, that they would not let anyone take power away from them, that they were there to claim the victory which was theirs alone to have.
On the day that it happened I was totally transfixed, watching livestreams and reading real-time tweets and poring over news stories and photos as they came in. Swept up in the momentum of agitation and curiosity, when a video that popped up that claimed to show the moment when a member of the mob was shot as she tried and failed to breach a barricade, I clicked on it because I wanted to see what happened.
There are several videos, stitched together and synchronized, showing what happened from multiple angles. A screaming crowd is pressing against a barricaded set of doors - through glass panels in the doors you can see lawmakers being ushered away by security, and the screaming crowd wants to get through the doors and get their hands on the lawmakers and figure it out from there. The crowd smashes the glass and a man on the other side of the door pulls out a gun - “he’s got a gun!” people shout, but nevertheless one woman decides to take the leap and climb through some of the shattered glass towards the lawmakers and the man with the gun, and the man with the gun shoots her exactly once and she falls backwards and lands on the floor and the crowd begins to panic. “Shots fired! We have an active shooter!” “Medic!” are some of the cries from the crowd, all confidence gone from their screams, the script completely broken, trapped in a situation that no video game or film had prepared them for. The woman lies on the ground at their feet, stunned and calmly dying, blood pooling on the floor and flowing from her nose and mouth, limply moving around a little before going completely slack as people try and fail to tend to her, eyes still half-open when all the cameras around her are finally pushed away.
I watched the video once and then sat in silence for a while. I hadn’t officially declared to myself that I’d stopped watching people die, it was something that had organically faded from my patterns of behavior as more productive and connected ways of feeling better presented themselves to me. Looking back on it I was glad that I had stopped. So what happened with this one?
The old motivation, to distract myself from my own darkness and get as close to death as possible without actually causing it, wasn’t there. What was there was a curiosity about everything else surrounding it. What did it feel like to be there, in the room where it happened? How did the energy in the room change when death made itself known?
I found that I was deeply curious about the others there, the people who had been swept up in a constellation of stories and images that had them believe that they could walk in and kick down the bad-guy’s door and that everything would be happily ever after. The people who thought that God was on their side in this holy war and that total victory was absolutely assured. They saw themselves as aligned with a cosmic order, an order where every single thing has an essence and a purpose that can be known and aligned with, where they themselves are instruments of God’s righteous and all-powerful will, a part of a “Sacred Landslide”, there to claim what was rightfully theirs all along. There were Q-Anon people there, people who see damning patterns of corruption and secret patterns of communication all over the place. And then the little rowboat of cosmic order they’d been paddling crashed against the rocks of death, leaving them all adrift in a meaningless sea, left with little to do except cling to each other and desperately pray that they could stay afloat.
I’ve been to three Trump rallies, one of them drunk and two of them sober. All were extraordinarily miserable experiences, me being one of the odd ones out not rising and falling with the moods of the crowd as they followed the flow of the famous guy on stage. There is a real pressure and energy that I experience when I’m a member of a crowd experiencing the same thing. It’s what makes movie theaters and live sports and 12-step meetings compelling - that energy can bring an intensity and focus to the experience that is impossible to conjure in private isolation.
The energy of a Trump rally, to me, is truly scary. It occurs to me as the energy of violent, glorious, divinely-ordained triumph, and being in the middle of it all I could think about was where it would end. January 6th showed one place where it could end. For the woman in the video, the energy of violent glorious triumph carried her all the way to the void. For the rest of the people in the room, suddenly in the presence of something greater than all that they had conjured, the spell of collective narrative energy was broken, at least for a moment. Maybe it came back, or maybe some of them suddenly realized that they had to reconsider what had gotten them there and where it could take them too.
Trump’s star is falling, in no small part because of what happened in that video. It took violent, chaotic, on-camera white death in the Capitol to make it happen. Since the insurrection Trump has made perfunctory calls for peace, but the best thing he could do to create peace and healing would be to formally concede his loss and tell his supporters to honor Biden as president. Doing so would pop that bubble of collective narrative momentum that sent so many people to smash the capitol and sent several people to their deaths.
I’m almost certain that won’t happen. As with almost everything else about him, it’s left to everyone else to clean up the mess he made. After the Capitol was cleared out, after the curfew was enforced, after quiet fell upon the halls where a screaming crowd had watched a woman bleed out and die at their feet, someone had to come out with a mop and bucket and wipe up the mess of gore and glass left on the tile. We may never know that person’s name. How did it feel for them to do that? What would Trump think about that person, if he would think about them at all?
All I can think about, leading up to the inauguration, is how much blood that person might have to clean up off the tile if the people who chose to sack the capitol choose once again to come back. I guess we’ll see.
You write beautifully, by the way!♥️
Thanks Max! I have been warning about a similar attack or worse for 4 years. And you are right, it might not be over. 😓