The Marksman & His Target

What must it be like to hold a high-powered rifle, look patiently through a scope, spot a child or middle-aged man at a fair remove, and pull the trigger? The killer ("sniper") is spared the sight of blood pouring out of a body, of a face grimacing in pain, the writhing of a soul during the last seconds of its life. No anguished cries to listen to, no groans of agony or pleas for help. It is the wide distance between two human bodies, the gulf that separates one from another (these phrases are operative in any definition of lovelessness, by the way), that defines the act -- and it is in such space, perhaps, that the deepest insights and clues can be found.

The television narrative is as predictable as it is banal. Somewhere "out there" lives a man "wholly other," a lunatic-monster bent on terrorizing neighborhoods, a menace to families and kids everywhere within a given vicinity. Leave it to a crush of "experts" -- FBI men, forensic psychologists, criminologists, sociologists -- to provide the reassuring line of demarcation between us (a happy, cozy, homogeneous family) and him (an aberrant madman). Leave it to them to rehearse the rational actor scenario, speculating about what "it is he really wants," or how or why he "is toying with the police and the media," or in what specific ways his behavior mirrors that of past murderers. A series of sinister acts provides the license for such indulgences, and the very men and women who grieve and speculate on the air are unwittingly part of the product that is sold to advertisers, who sell their wares to an anxious and concerned public, who tune in twice a day to follow the next move of the sniper, who (reportedly) tunes in himself to keep pace with the narrative.

A broader understanding almost requires a lunar leap from familiar reactions and snap judgments. It might begin with a question or two: "To what subset of behaviors might the very act of sniping be said to belong? To what degree has this murderer successfully adapted to his environment -- an environment commonly devoid of friendship and intimacy, informed by ever-sophisticated electronic media, fragmented and cut up in a thousand ways?"

Consider again the issue of space. The defining characteristic of a sniping is the measurable distance between shooter and victim; concealment, too, is the necessary condition of the act. The killing itself is clearly aberrant, but experientially, the space separating killer and killed, person from person, soul from soul, is not out of the ordinary. Spatial remoteness might even be said to be the norm today:

§ What is the difference in measurable space between the sniper and his victim and the television broadcast and its viewer?

§ What is the spatial difference between the person typing these words and the person reading them?

§ What's the spatial difference, in emotional meters, between the sniper and his victim and me and the next-door-neighbor-I-don't-know -- or me and the neighbor who is suspicious of me, or I of him?

§ How less remote is the young man looking up at a billboard of an erotic, sensuous, teasing model? Isn't the personal and emotional gulf between the young man and billboard image as great as that between sniper and victim?

§ One might easily imagine the sniper looking through the scope of his rifle and thinking, "That old bag doesn't mean a damn to me. Goodbye!" Absent the killing, what is the difference between this sentiment and that of everyday aloofness -- the kind, for instance, one gets by walking down a main street, past a neighbor, without so much as an exchange of pleasantries? Or the kind one gets in that great public space known as the mall, where everyone wants only your money or the product you have in the display window?

§ Is the emotional gulf between sniper and victim any more profound than that between a thousand direct-mail marketers and me? Direct-mail marketers: those who know only where I live, and based on my ZIP code, know that I might shop at Neiman Marcus or take a trip to the theater every now and again. But the actual person, his habits of mind, preferred reading list, moods and hobbies, obviously not.

Martin Buber distinguished between those relational patterns in which two selves carry on an authentic rapport and reveal to one another who they are (what he called I-Thou), and those in which the true self is hidden and the other person is merely an object of observation, seen or experienced from a safe distance (what he called I-It). One might say that the overhyped snipings are a Buberian I-It nightmare, in which one ghoulish, shadowy character ventures out of an impersonal, alien habitat, commits an unspeakable crime, and is pilloried by the habitat's upkeepers. The exasperation occasions a narrowing of that great gulf of space between members of the habitat, who suddenly become close family, brothers and sisters, united against that evil, alien 'Other.'

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