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vctrmagazine · 8 years ago

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magnetic reality: setting the stage for mass murder in school

john-ivan palmer

Once a metaphysical mutation has arisen, it tends to move inexorably towards its logical conclusion. Heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, aesthetic judgments and social hierarchies. No human agency can halt its progress—nothing except another metaphysical mutation.

—Michel Houellebecq, Les particules élémentaires, 1998

Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) created a device called the baquet (tub, bucket) large enough for numerous people to sit around in a lavish studio. It was somewhat like a TV with rabbit ears, but the screen was inside your head. The rabbit ears were metal rods you touched so the “magnetic fluid” within the baquet, supposedly held in iron filings and “magnetized” water, could go into you like electricity.

Mesmer’s contraption was nothing new in the history of magnets and therapeutic mojo used by healers since antiquity. Cleopatra reportedly slept on an actual magnet as a skin treatment. But Mesmer’s magnetism, some invisible fluid captured by hocus pocus from empty space, went beyond its claimed power to heal whatever the ailment. It functioned as pastime, entertainment. If you touched one of the baquet’s rabbit ears you went bonkers, rolled on the floor, laughed, cried, kissed your brains good-bye. You were mesmerized. A fee was charged. It was quite the rage.

Those capable of analytical thought (Ben Franklin, to name one) dismissed Mesmer’s “animal magnetism” as nothing more than imagination. King Louis XVI, however, took it more seriously and formed a Royal Commission that concluded, “The spectacle of the crises [crazy responses] is…dangerous because of that imitation that Nature seems to have set as a law for us…In consequence, all public treatment at which the practice of magnetism is employed, can only have, in the long run, sinister effects.” He could not see what those long run, sinister effects would be, but did observe with concern magnetic imitators cropping up all over Paris to everyone’s great delight.

The modern version of Mesmer’s baquet is any object with a mesmerizing screen. Teenagers spend an average of nine hours a day in front of one and four thousand people a year die on the highway from having their attention taken away by its suggestive influence.

I used to demonstrate mesmerism as an educational program. School Assembly Service in Chicago booked me for thirty-six weeks at a time, traveling a thousand miles a week across ten Midwestern states performing two to four assemblies per day. I also worked through Dakota Assemblies, affiliated with North Dakota State University in Fargo, and appeared at a majority of all the high schools in the Dakotas as well as parts of Montana, Nebraska and Minnesota. This put me in more schools in a week, certainly in a month, than most teachers and administrators see in their entire career. A salesperson set up the routes a year in advance, scheduling me as well as folk singers, whistlers, jugglers and magicians who merged what they did with an educational “message,” however lame, to justify the cost, even though it was openly understood that the assembly was an excuse to get out of class for a little amusement. My program consisted of manipulating high school students into rowing imaginary boats and eating non-existent ice cream cones, talking Martian and meowing like cats. It was sold as “Mind in Action.”

There was something I didn’t realize at first because it happened so slowly. Over several years reactions to my program began to diminish. Demand itself declined from four hundred agency booked school appearances a year to fifty that I booked myself. Then half of that, and then half again. The same was true for the whistlers, jugglers and magicians along with their lame messages. School assembly agencies themselves went out of business one by one. With agencies gone, schools gave in to no-cost assemblies by military recruiters, religious proselytizers, or cops talking about drugs. A whole new administrative protocol emerged and principals receded into the background. They no longer wandered among their students like a shepherd tending their flock. They delegated assembly decisions to student committees loosely working under advisors. All pretense of educational message was gone and the committees were more likely to bring in local boy bands popular on Facebook.

The more television monitors I saw in halls and classrooms, the more computers I saw crowding out bookshelves in the library, the more channels available on TV, the more heads I saw looking down at gizmos in the palm, the less impressed they were by fantasy cats and Martians. I tried telling everyone to turn off their smartphones, thinking that would solve the problem of divided attention, but it was as impractical as telling everyone put away their shoes. I was competing against a whole new baquet.

In October of 2005 I arrived at the high school on Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. Because of widely publicized spree shootings at American schools, most notably Columbine, Red Lake took no chances and installed an airport-style weapons detector at the front door. Schools had been the busiest and most open public places in any community, but they became locked asylums. Two friendly security guards in street clothes were expecting me for my noon assembly. “It’s OK,” said one. “The machine isn’t turned on.” I was trustworthy enough to bypass the weapons detector. One of them escorted me to the gym to set up my sound system and arrange the chairs for volunteers.

I saw on the wall a notice that read: HICKEYS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. Schools often had their own battle lines over one thing or another: wearing hats indoors, skirt length, printing on T-shirts. One school had a major issue over the π symbol written on walls and mirrors, referring to some incident “too complicated to explain.” Hickeys themselves were no surprise, but this was the first time I’d seen them as an overt issue. The sign went on to read: If you are seen with a hickey you will be sent to the office and it will be covered with makeup. If not, then you will be sent home. In an isolated place like the Red Lake Reservation, what else was there for teenagers to do but suck each other’s necks, especially with the thrilling knowledge that it was forbidden?

Rules against unconventional hairstyles had long since been abandoned in schools so I was used to every kind of coif, but nothing quite like the one on the hefty, alert-looking boy who passed me at the hickey sign. He had gelled his hair up on the back of his head into two horns. As one odd stranger to another we exchanged greetings and went our separate ways.

According to my personal show report, I began my demonstration at 12:01 and ended at 1:13 p.m. I wrote that the audience was unfocused at first, but once the subjects (eight males and six females) were put into a mesmeric state and given suggestions of fishing, surf boarding, and driving a monster bus, responses were adequate, but not as frenzied as past years.

Eighteen months later I saw the horn-haired boy’s face again. It was in the paper. He was identified as Jeff Weise (“Wees”). His grandfather was a police sergeant on the reservation. At 2:45 in the afternoon Weise, now sixteen, stole his grandfather’s police car and crashed it into the front of the school. At the weapons detector (whether it was turned on or not didn’t matter) he pulled out a semi-automatic pistol and shot to death one of the two friendly security guards. The other fled for his life. Weise proceeded to the left down the hall where I had first met him under the hickey sign, entered a classroom and murdered seven more people. Then he put the pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That ended whatever state of mind he was in.

He was not one of my subjects a year and a half earlier and I can only assume he was among the spectators. Whether he was in a “trance state” during his murder spree is a matter of speculation. Whether he was in what’s called “baseline consciousness” is equally speculative. Perhaps he was in a state similar to the one he was in during those many hours he spent alone in front of modernism’s baquet, playing violent videogames and composing bloody “flashtunes,” murder animations composed with easily-obtained software and posted on Newgrounds.com. A year and a half earlier when I was at his school, if he had walked all the way down the hall to the gymnasium where the entire student body sat in the bleachers, he would have encountered a greater concentration of potential victims. Instead of the dubious distinction of enacting the second largest high school shooting in American history (after Columbine) he could have launched himself into first place. He certainly would have upstaged me.

When such an anomalous performance occurs people want answers. Simple ones easy to understand. If we just do this. If we just do that. There is no lack of professional advice. “Cause” is the operative word. Psychologist David Walsh, leading proponent of “scripts” theory, proposes that certain behaviors are “wired” into brains. Note the indirect reference to the combination of suggestive influence and electro magnetism. Dr. George Realmuto, University of Minnesota child psychiatrist, is quoted on Public Radio as saying that certain people are genetically predisposed to school shootings. “I don’t think we have a mechanism for stopping them,” he adds. Clearly, a costly weapons detector did nothing to stop Jeff Weise. One can focus on such proximate factors as bullying and treating mental distress, factors in Weise’s case and in most other school shootings, and addressing those issues, however imperfectly, is about all that can reasonably done besides the lock-ups and buzz-ins. Beyond that that we’d have to turn the clock back to an age of a simpler, less lethal baquet. Dr. Edward Shorter, Faculty of Medicine at Toronto University, says, “It’s hard to imagine an Adam Lanza [Sandy Hook massacre, twenty-eight dead] existing a century ago, before this culture of violence and depravity [was] available at the click of a mouse or press of a button.”

In August and September of 2004 Jeff Weise was deeply immersed in his private baquet on Newgrounds.com, a forum for videogames, many violent, like “Minute of Rage” (“Try to survive one minute on [sic] the deadly arena”) and “Outsourced Hell” (“Manage your own little hell in this dark idle game”). He posted his own reviews of several games and amateur animations, and, curiously, gave the highest rating to a notably nonviolent, minimalist piece titled “Hidden in the Snow,” consisting of just one static image of three small, white, meteor-like streaks on a black background. It’s not known whether Weise saw this image as a symbol of his own disintegrated family (he was the only child of an alcoholic mother and suicidal father), but he did make this comment: “Jawohl… you've managed to captivate my simple, and often moronic, child-like, mind.” He added, “lacks three things: content, naked women, and guns...” The artist responded to Weise’s comment by writing, “wth [what the hell] does jawohl mean?” All he had to do was Google the word and find it means “yes” in German. Why the German? Why did Weise identify himself elsewhere in a chat room as “Todesengel,” German for “Angel of Death”? Because, as a Native American mesmerized by the Internet, he had come to idolize Hitler and was active on the website Nazi.org.

He posted two flashtune animations on Newgrounds.com under one of his various pseudonyms, “Regret” (197 fans). The first was the thirty-second “Clown,” featuring a psychotic bozo trembling to a background of eerie death music by the goth band Evanescence. A male figure enters the frame and the clown grabs him. Cut to the clown’s big shoes on which splats a huge gush of blood.

“Target Practice” is another thirty-second flashtune by Regret with more complex animated movement. A male figure with no facial features except a horizontal bar across the eye area, appears carrying a bag. He coolly puffs a cigarette, removes an assault rifle from the bag and shoots four people, none of whom have faces either. One figure stands with hands behind its back as if a prisoner awaiting execution, another is simply a bystander, and another is sitting on a park bench. When the bullets hit, their heads explode in bursts of red. The shooter throws a hand grenade and blows up a police car before finishing off someone in, paradoxically, a Klan hood. Then he puts a pistol in his mouth and pulls the trigger in a final blood-burst of red. Something like that is more darkly stimulating in a primal way that a live person licking an imaginary ice cream cone. The similarities between “Target Practice” and Weise’s performance on March 21, 2005, are so obvious they hardly need pointing out. Beginning with the word “practice” in the title, it goes on from there. Similar flashtunes by others are just as violent, yet do not result in their creators committing mass shootings. But they still entrance and influence through the digital baquet. “Target Practice” is still posted on Newgrounds.com and registers over 500,000 views.

In their world of virtual unreality, the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, let the baquet’s mesmeric mania enter and take over their minds. With the imitative quality King Louis’s investigative Commission warned of, they influenced each other and a few pals to become a death cult known as the Trench Coat Mafia. When showtime came around, their staged performance, planned to coincide with Hitler’s birthday, left fifteen dead, including themselves, and twenty wounded, mostly among books in the school library. It was not from the interaction of their personal pathologies with books, but with the baquet.

Through the electro-mesmeric ether (electronic media) the power of suggestion traveled with the speed of thought into the mind of Jeff Weise in the Minnesota boonies. Spending more time at his computer than in the real world, his rational mind slid toward annihilation. Like Klebold and Harris before him he wore a long black trench coat. Like them he admired Hitler and planned his attack on the dictator’s birthday. During the Columbine massacre Harris asked one of his victims before shooting her, “Do you believe in God?” Weise parroted the same question before shooting one of his own victims.

Ironically, Benjamin Franklin, in Paris at the time and part of the Royal Commission, could not see the future power of his own discoveries in electricity to some day transmit mesmeric suggestions over great geographical distances. “Sensitive creatures,” as the Commission described them, in whom “reason has less empire over them,” combined with the discovery of Franklin’s electro-magnetic flow, set in motion the long line of interactive causation resulting in the Columbine and Red Lake massacres. A student in Tuusula, Finland murdered eight people at his own high school. Another Finnish shooter was alleged to have been in touch via the Internet with a teen planning a Columbine-style attack back in Pennsylvania. Evidence found in a chat room led to a similar plan at a school in Kaart, Germany. A plot in Göttingen was based on the anniversary of a school shooting in Emsdett, Germany. A similar plot was uncovered in Cologne. Five years prior, a school massacre in Erfurt was the largest mass killing at a German high school, exceeding even Columbine, with seventeen killed, including the shooter, who missed Hitler’s birthday by less than a week, landing instead on the birthday of William Shakespeare. Ironically, at the very moment Jeff Weise was shooting his classmates, a film on Shakespeare was being shown in a nearby classroom, which he overlooked because it was dark, and thought the room was empty. This grim juxtaposition of the pre-baquet (Shakespeare) with the post-baquet (Columbine) era is similar to another juxtaposition depicted in a photo in Beiler and Smucker’s Think No Evil, Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting (2009), where an Amish horse and buggy passes by a “media horde” of satellite dishes relaying the event.

Criminologist Frank Robertz is quoted in the Guardian: “The phenomenon of massacres by young people in schools…has only existed since Columbine.” What Robertz does not mention, probably because he is not a mesmerist, is that the seeds of Columbine began to germinate when the two magnetisms (animal and electro) merged to massively inflate the imitative, unstoppable power of suggestion warned about centuries earlier. If nothing could be done about it then, most certainly nothing can be done about it now.

John-Ivan Palmer's work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Nth Position, Wild River Review, Wisconsin Review, New Oregon Review, and Other Voices. The Drill Press published his novel, Motels of Burning Madness, and in 2009 and he received the Pushcart Prize for fiction.

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